Shadow Image (7 page)

The place was cheery enough, but still too familiar. Flat-leafed indoor plants flourished beneath the Plexiglas skylights. The lobby furniture was an inviting blend of deep cushions and soothing colors. Along the left wall, a thousand brass rectangles remembered each of the hospital's $10,000 contributors. Above them, maybe a hundred larger silver rectangles acknowledged the $25,000 donors. A dozen gold-on-walnut Million-Dollar-Plus Club plaques hung above those, and surely at least one generation of Underhills was among them. Topping that shameless philanthropic pyramid was an oil portrait of the Pope.

He recognized the front-desk receptionist, a dignified woman of maybe sixty. He remembered her mostly because of the forelock of silver on her head of otherwise impossibly black hair. Melissa, being a malevolent thirteen at the time Molly was here, nicknamed the woman “The Bride,” with Frankenstein understood. As the months wore on and Molly showed no signs of recovering from the damage done by the drunk who hit her head-on, they'd all begun using the nickname. The receptionist seemed just as aggressively professional and humorless as he remembered.

Christensen kept moving. The elevator door opened onto the fourteenth floor with an upbeat
ping!
An unfamiliar face was peering into a computer monitor in the nurse's station—thank goodness for small favors. The man, maybe thirty-five, wearing scrubs and the arrogance of a surgeon, didn't even look up as Christensen approached the counter.

“Room 1436?” Christensen asked.

He noticed the man's hospital badge, which identified him as an R.N. The nurse glanced away from the monitor only long enough to locate a box of disposable anti-infection masks on a nearby shelf. He pushed one of the plastic-wrapped masks across the counter, then returned to the screen. “Wear that. Doctors don't want her sick on top of everything else.”

Christensen nodded. “The room?”

“To the left. You're family, right?”

“No.”

The nurse looked up, apparently annoyed, and considered Christensen over the rims of his painfully hip eyeglasses. “What, then?”

“I work with Mrs. Underhill at the Harmony Center. I do Alzheimer's research there.”

After a long moment, the nurse shrugged. “End of the hall.”

The fourteenth-floor corridor was windowless and artificially bright, and Christensen unwrapped the mask as he weaved his way between carts filled with the remains of the morning meal. About halfway down, he stopped to drop the mask's plastic wrapper into the trash receptacle on a cleaning cart. The door to Room 1416 opened suddenly, and a sturdy woman wearing the light-blue uniform of the hospital's cleaning staff strode out with a load of damp, wadded white towels. Her forearms looked like oak logs. Christensen remembered her from a hundred linen changes five years ago, even if he couldn't recall her name. He remembered, too, her habit of talking to Molly as she worked, asking her how she was feeling, what she thought about the day's fine weather, trying to overcome the devastation of his comatose wife's brain and make her feel somehow still a part of life. Christensen often wondered if the woman hated him for doing what he did.

“Morning,” she said. Her smile was polite and weary, not one of recognition, as she dumped the towels into the waiting hamper and trundled it and the cleaning cart on down the hall.

Christensen turned the other way and covered his nose and mouth with the mask, snugging the elastic band around the back of his head and adjusting the fit so it didn't pull at his beard. Anonymity felt safer. He had no illusions about this visit, even if Brenna did. Floss Underhill was deep into the second stage of Alzheimer's, the cruelest stage, a few years from terminal with just enough left of the person who once was to define the differences between then and now.

In Floss's case, Christensen knew she sometimes didn't recognize family members and close friends. Since he started monitoring Maura Pearson's art class two months earlier, he'd also seen her repeat the same speech to Maura at the start of each class. After two years meeting five times a week in the same room, Floss still introduced herself as a new student before taking her seat. The chances of her connecting with a coherent memory about what had happened two days earlier were probably about the same as the chances of a sudden electoral upset of her only son—nil. Brenna was right about one thing, though. He
was
curious. How capable would a second-stage Alzheimer's patient be of attempting suicide? Or if something else happened on that gazebo deck, how much of that trauma might she remember? Even a casual conversation might give him a clue. At worst, he figured he could wish her a speedy recovery, introduce himself to a family member or two and explain his research at Harmony. If they were curious, he'd explain more.

The door to Room 1436 was slightly ajar, dead-center at the end of the hall, different from most of the other halls in Mount Mercy. Most of the hallways ended with a cramped row of three doors, each leading into a separate double room. Here, a single door led into what he assumed was a three-room suite reserved, no doubt, for the hospital's big donors and wait-listed transplant patients with Saudi bloodlines.

The corridor was oddly quiet. He'd seen patients in most of the rooms he passed, heard the tinny murmur of their remote-controlled overhead televisions, so he knew the bed count was high. But it was quiet. His light knock on Floss Underhill's door sounded like a battering ram. He knocked again more softly when no one answered.

“Warren?”

He knew the voice, knew it was hers, but it still created sudden and unshakable images for him: A three-pack-a-day frog. A shovel edge slicing into gravel. Janis Joplin fresh from sleep.

“Get in here, you cussed old bastard,” she said.

“Uh, no,” Christensen said as he eased open the door. “Mrs. Underhill, I'm Jim Christensen from the Harmony Research Center. We've met in Maura Pearson's art classes.”

She was silhouetted against the harsh glare from the room's wide window, seated in a wheelchair. He could tell she was turned toward him, but everything else about her was blown out by the morning sun streaming through the window. “You're not Warren,” she croaked.

He stepped a few feet farther into the room, which was more hotel than hospital. The furniture wasn't the grim, uncomfortable institutional stuff found everywhere else at Mount Mercy. It was real wood and fabric. The bed was fairly standard, but made with nice linens and a thick down comforter. Needlepoint throw pillows and handmade quilts gave it the look of an elderly aunt's bedroom, though on his second look Christensen noticed the words “Mount Mercy” spelled out in stitches across one of the pillows. Floss was alone, which flustered him.

“I heard about your injuries, Mrs. Underhill. I wanted to come by and say hello,” Christensen said. “Is that all right?”

As he edged closer, Floss sharpened into view. She was wearing a royal-blue robe, plush, with the lived-in quality of something personal. Her reading glasses were low on her nose, but even so he could see that the skin below her eyes was the color of a plum, probably the result of a concussion. A patchwork of scratches scarred the left side of her face, and her left arm was in a heavy cast from her wrist to her shoulder. She rested it on the arm of the motorized wheelchair. There was an indefinable strength to her. A drawing pad lay on a tray affixed to the chair's arms. On the small table to her right, just beside the right hand in which she held a pencil-thick paintbrush, was a bowl of inky blue water and an open Disney-character watercolor paint set just like the set Annie had. Her hand didn't waver as it moved from the pad to the paint and back again.

She studied him. “You're not Warren,” she repeated.

“No, ma'am, I'm not.”

Floss Underhill turned back to the pad on her tray, seemed to notice it for the first time. Its surface was washed with patches of dark color, but his eyes were still adjusting and he couldn't make out the images. Her gaze shifted to the paintbrush. She leaned forward and plunged it into the bowl of water, then swirled the tip into a pale yellow. Her brush tip found the pad, and the images came clearer as she worked a splash of yellow into what looked like a fading sun in a deep blue and threatening sky. The rest was a landscape of dark hills, typical of many Alzheimer's patients, but everything was blurred by the imprecision of watercolors. The one bright image at the center of the 2-by-3-foot pad was that of an indistinct dapple-gray horse, riderless, with wings.

“Pegasus,” he said.

Her hand stopped moving, but only for a moment, then she daubed her brush tip back into the water bowl. She dipped it then into the purple. “Gray,” she said.

Christensen waited, hoping his reverent communion might build trust. A full minute of silence passed. “You paint very well, Mrs. Underhill,” he prompted. “Can you tell me about this picture?”

“These paints won't stay where I put 'em,” she said. “Run all over the damned page.” Her hand moved toward her sun without so much as a tremor. She sat forward in her wheelchair and put her right elbow on the wheelchair's arm. Across the bleached sun, she sketched a pattern that left a pale trail of diluted purple. The resulting image looked like a melted hood ornament.

“Are those letters in the circle, or numbers?” he asked.

She turned slightly toward him, grimacing from the effort. Despite the injuries, despite her years, Floss Underhill was a beautiful woman. Her white hair was pulled into a tight French twist, and he wondered briefly if that or cosmetic surgery might explain the girlish smoothness around her clear blue eyes.

“You're Spencer Crean's boy, Parker,” she said. “Take off that mask.”

“They told me not to, Mrs. Underhill. Sorry.”

“You grew a beard, I can tell. For the life of me I can't see why. They just look like hell, beards. Women don't like 'em.” Her face suddenly was full of mischief. “You know why, don't you?”

Christensen shook his head. She reached out with her right hand, hooked a finger in his shirt pocket and pulled him closer. He caught a whiff of good tobacco.

“They scratch our thighs,” she said.

He pulled away, a startled reflex. She winked, then laughed out loud, a deep throaty thing that was part Bette Davis, part Harley-Davidson. She dipped her brush in the purple again and retraced the lines she had sketched earlier across the face of the sun. The shapes were letters, two apparently, but blended in a way that they shared an upright leg.

“Your parents still have that mare, Sophie, the chestnut with the one white foreleg?” she said. “God, she was something. Took Warren a month just to get her to take a bit.”

“No, I'm Jim Christensen, Mrs. Underhill, from the Harmony Center. We met in Maura Pearson's art class. I came by to visit you here at Mount Mercy.”

“She nearly broke Warren, that one did. Cranky old fart deserved it, too. I don't care if he is the best goddamned trainer on earth. If I had a dime for every time I caught him cheating at gin rummy—” Her voice trailed off.

“You'd be rich?” he prompted.

“I am rich.”

Christensen laughed. “No, ma'am, you were talking about someone named Warren.”

She thought about that. “Know how to tell if a man's a good stable manager?” she said suddenly. “Take a comb, see. Show up at the stables without calling, middle of the day maybe. Don't let him know you're coming. Then try to run that comb through your horse's tail. It's real simple: The comb snags, you need a new stable manager. The good ones use conditioner. Every day.”

“Warren was a good one?”

“The man knew horses like I don't know what.” Another wink. “Women, too.”

“Really?” Christensen stifled a smile. This was a side of Floss Underhill he never expected to see, or even imagined.

“Really.”

She turned back to her drawing pad, fixing her eyes for a long time on the winged horse at its center. “Warren took Gray away,” she said. “Still can't figure it. He wasn't even out that day.”

Christensen reached an index finger toward the center of the drawing pad. “Gray, that's the horse with the wings?”

“Gray could fly,” she said. “Me, too.”

Christensen caught another whiff of tobacco. The smell seemed especially intense here, in a hospital room where smoking was presumably not allowed. “Mrs. Underhill, have you been smoking?”

She worked her hand into a pocket of her robe and pulled out something dark and foul. The remains of a cigar as thick as his thumb. As quickly as she pulled it out, though, she thrust it back in. “Macanudo Jamaica,” she said. “Almost Cuban, but don't tell that man.”

“What man?”

She pointed her paintbrush over Christensen's left shoulder.
“That
man,” she said. “Old bastard won't let me smoke.”

Christensen whirled around, startled to see that they were not alone. Vincent Underhill filled the room's doorway, his face instantly recognizable even thirty years after he left public office. The hair was whiter, the jawline less chiseled than before, but the former governor was an indelible part of Christensen's memory, though not, apparently, a part of his demented wife's. Flustered, Christensen stood up and extended a hand. He pulled it back when it went unshaken.

“We told you people no paints,” Underhill said.

Christensen still felt a need to introduce himself. “I'm—”

“We were very clear on that, as well as on the cigars.” The former governor was fully in the room now. He turned away from Christensen for the moment and patted his wife's good arm. “Good morning, Miss Florence. Sleep well?”

Floss seemed to appraise him. “I slept fine. You a doctor?”

Vincent Underhill offered a tight smile, gave his wife's arm a little squeeze. With his other hand, he gently plucked the paintbrush from her. He snapped the metal lid of the paint set closed and handed the box and the brush to Christensen.