Shadow Image

by Martin J. Smith

  Christensen tugged the calendar back across the desk. The printed version was much clearer than the one she’d done at the hospital. “You’ve spent more time with Floss than I have. How much help would she be in helping us understand things like that?”

  “Late second stage. Hard to tell.” Pearson swept the gerbil tooth trimmings into her wastebasket. “I just give them the paints and make sure they stay on task. Figuring out why they paint what they do, that’s your job.”

  “Until they pulled her, Floss was pretty regular in class, right?”

  “Used to come every day with Selena, her home-care nurse. You’ve seen Selena at the back of the room, haven’t you?”

  Christensen conjured a face he’d seen waiting patiently on the fringes of the art class: a dark young woman, lips like sofa cushions, eyes like coals, usually hidden behind one of the tabloids at the back of the art room. She came with Floss, left with Floss. In his two months there he’d never heard her speak. “She’s the Hispanic-looking woman?”

  “Right. The Hopper picks them up in the morning and takes them home in the afternoon,” Pearson said. “The family has always wanted Floss treated just like everybody else. No special privileges.”

  “Good PR.”

  “It wasn’t just that, though. Vincent told me he’d have burned out a long time ago without those breaks in the middle of the day. Take a lesson, though. Just last week, Floss was insisting that Art Rooney Sr. drove her back and forth every day.”

  “The old Steelers owner? He’s about a hundred and fifty years old, isn’t he?”

  “Actually, he’s dead,” Pearson said.

  “Oh. Sorry. Sports aren’t my thing. So what’s your point?”

  “Trust Floss’s explanation of what she paints—her explanation of anything, for that matter—at your peril,” she said. “She feels it, but she can’t articulate it. You’ll definitely need the family to help understand what an image like this might mean.”

  Christensen eased himself off the arm of the chair and walked to Pearson’s window. In the parking lot below, he spotted the cherry-red titanus that was her beloved 1956 Buick Special. Among the assembled Chevys, Fords, Chryslers, and the occasional Toyota, it stood out like a rhinoceros at high tea. Just the thought of Pearson behind its oversized wheel made him smile. When he turned back, Pearson was pulling off one of her sneakers. She tugged her athletic sock tight and slid the shoe back on, unlaced as always.

  “You’re sure there aren’t some problems there, Maura? I mean, this was sort of a don’t-mess-with-me conversation with Vincent Underhill, delivered, of course, in the mannerly style of the well-bred. Just ‘No paints. No cigars.’ Period. End of discussion. I tried to tell him about the nicotine research, but he just stuffed me.”

  “I saw him Thursday and everything seemed fine.” She opened one of her desk drawers and pulled out a photocopy of a newspaper article. “I think I even showed him the Press preview story on the show. He seemed delighted.”

  The photocopied newspaper story announcing the opening of the Once-Lost Images exhibit was headlined “Memories in the Making.” Two images accompanied the article, both reprinted in the paper’s grainy black-and-white. One was the calendar cover, My Beautiful Garden. The other was Some Crazy Story about Gray. Christensen nodded toward the article. “How’d they pick the pictures?”

  Pearson shrugged. “I sent slides of all twelve from the calendar and left the choice up to them. I think the writer really liked Floss’s. Personally, I don’t think it’s one of the best. But he went on and on about it in the story, how it hints at the complicated world inside their heads. Of course, he’s got no idea who Florence is.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “First names only. Always.”

  “But people here know. It’s no big secret who painted the pictures, is it?”

  Pearson shook her head. “Not here, I guess. But the writer didn’t call. Can’t imagine he’d know it was Floss. That’s why we went with first names only for the public showing.”

  “But if someone wanted to find out who painted a particular one, it wouldn’t be that hard, right?” he said.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jimbo. You’re missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  Pearson spread her hands wide. “It’s the images and the stories they tell that are important. As long as we explain the context, why would the name of the artist matter?”

  He thought for a moment. “No idea,” he conceded.

  The copy of the Press story was still on the corner of Pearson’s desk. In the same motion, Christensen picked it up and looked at his wristwatch. “Aren’t you late for class?” he said.

  Pearson looked at her own watch and sprang to her feet. She was past him without a word, the faint smell of cedar chips in her wake. “You coming?” she called from down the hall.

  “Be right down,” he shouted. He glanced at the paper in his hand, noticing the publication date in the top left corner of the page. Christensen looked closer. Thursday, April 26. Two days before Floss went into the ravine.

  Chapter 12

  Taylor had fallen asleep with his head jammed in the space between the bedpost and the wall, his legs splayed and uncovered. Christensen extracted, covered, and kissed him, then went to check on Annie. She was buried deep in her comforter with the shredded remains of one of Molly’s silk nightgowns clutched to her chest, much as she had slept for the past five years.

  Christensen stepped into the hall, leaned against the doorjamb, and closed his eyes. Dinner was grilled cheese and Campbell’s Chicken Noodle. Homework had been postponed. Baths had been marginally effective. After some tactical back-scratching, both kids nodded off on the couch while watching a Discovery Channel special on walruses. By any measure, he should be exhausted. But he wasn’t.

  He creaked down the stairs and into the office, which remained a maze of moving cartons and upended furniture. The considerable chore of unpacking what they’d moved was falling to him, since Brenna was so seldom home, and he wanted to make at least some progress before bed. The nearest carton was labeled DEN BOOKSHELVES. He split the packing tape with the letter opener he found in his top right desk drawer. The top item in the box was a picture frame turned facedown. He turned it over and came face-to-face with his father.

  Molly had taken the picture one Thanksgiving early in their courtship, but it so perfectly captured the damaged spirit of the man that it had, for Christensen, become a defining image. Edward James Christensen was sitting in his reading chair, a half-full tumbler of Johnnie Walker on the chair’s sturdy arm, his nose in a Sidney Sheldon potboiler. At the moment Molly opened her camera’s shutter, he recalled, his parents’ house was alive with holiday clamor. Half a dozen young cousins kept the decibel level high, competing with the dull roar from a dozen grown-ups watching a televised college bowl game. But the image of his father, the damaged mathematics teacher alone there in that rear den, so typical of his life at home, was a portrait of a functioning alcoholic retreating into himself, to a place where his wife and children were never able to follow.

  Christensen folded the frame’s rear prop and set the picture on his desk. His father was an angular man in the same way as Christensen, but the years and liquor had softened his face. His salt-and-pepper hair was swept back and anchored by Vitalis in the same reliable way his only son used Paul Mitchell Sculpting Lotion. To this day, Christensen wore the same rimless spectacles his father had preferred in the years before his death. That his parents’ marriage had survived his father’s emotional retreat was remarkable. That they’d raised two children, Jim and his older sister, was testimony to his mother’s will. If their father had found any joy in that, neither Christensen nor his sister could say. He was that much a mystery to his children.

  The phot
ograph was buried for years in a family memento file. When Christensen had run across it three years earlier, as he struggled with Melissa’s rage in the wake of Molly’s death, he’d framed the print to remind himself how damaging an emotionally detached parent can be.

  “Where you gonna put him?”

  Christensen spun around, more reaction than movement. Brenna was standing at the office door. How long had she been watching?

  “Jesus.” His heart was pumping pure adrenaline. “When did you get home?”

  Brenna laid her suit jacket over the arm of a chair. She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around his waist. She smelled the same as when she left that morning. “Just now. So where does Dad go? Back on the corner of your desk?”

  “Always,” he said. “Long day for you, huh?”

  “Long and strange, and I’m in a deep hole on the Mother-of-the-Year title.”

  “Taylor’s fine, but he does want to see you. He’s not over the first-day jitters yet.”

  “He’s awake?” Brenna pulled away and started for the door.

  “Finally crashed about thirty minutes ago,” he said. “He tried to stay up, but he was one tired soldier. Spent the whole day tight as a drum, compliments of Annie and her new-kid horror stories.”

  Brenna let the words settle, then dabbed at the corner of her eye with her finger. “Well, shit,” she said.

  “I talked to her about it.”

  “No, no, not that. I just needed to be with him today and I wasn’t.”

  Christensen pulled her back to him. “But I was, Bren. It’s okay.”

  She rubbed away a tear that had curled from the outside of one eye. Her attention had shifted over his shoulder, up toward the ceiling. He turned and looked, too. “Does that look like it’s bulging?” she said.

  “Where?”

  She pointed to the spot above his desk where he’d noticed the stain the day before. “That whole section looks like it’s bowed out a little. Is that a stain?”

  “I told you about it yesterday, the stain I mean. I checked and I think it’s old.”

  “But does it look bowed to you?”

  “Hard to tell because it’s so white.” Christensen looked again. “No.”

  Brenna kicked off her shoes. In her stocking feet, she was a foot shorter than him. He kissed the top of her head.

  “I tried to call you all afternoon. Liisa said she didn’t want to interrupt, so I didn’t push it.”

  “It was pretty nuts.”

  “I wanted to tell you about the hospital.”

  Brenna seemed to lose her focus for a moment. “I completely forgot you were going,” she said. “Right after we talked this morning, I … geez. So what happened?”

  Christensen looked at his watch, then nodded toward the kitchen. “Want some tea?”

  The microwave clock read 11:34. Brenna poured the dregs of her decaf Constant Comment into the sink, rinsed her cup, and opened the dishwasher door. She closed it with the cup still in her right hand, his panicked Post-it note from that morning in her left.

  “Kachunk?”

  “That was the sound,” he said. “It started, then it just stopped. Just one more thing we’ll probably have to replace.”

  Brenna spun the dial to normal cycle. The machine was dead, although everything else in the kitchen was working. “It’s on its own circuit. You checked the breaker, right?”

  He felt himself suddenly exposed, as if he’d forgotten to check his car’s gas tank before replacing its engine. “Of course,” he lied.

  “Really?”

  She had him. He shook his head.

  “It’s the circuit, Einstein. I’ll check it before we go to bed. You’re pathetic, you know.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms, cradling her breasts beneath the white silk of her blouse. “So what’s your best guess about why Vincent doesn’t want her to have paints or cigars?”

  “No idea.” Christensen leaned back in his creaky kitchen chair, grateful for the change of subject.

  “And you can’t see her ever remembering what happened on the deck?”

  “It’s just not that simple, Bren. Her memory’s like Swiss cheese to begin with. Getting her to remember something specific, even something traumatic, it’s a crapshoot. I’d need hours and hours to work with her over weeks or months, with no guarantee that anything she remembered would be accurate.”

  She smiled. “What good are you?”

  “Afraid you’re on your own on this one,” he said.

  Brenna twisted a strand of her hair in one hand and studied it a long time.

  “What?” he said.

  She dropped her hair, but her eyes roamed the kitchen. “Myron.”

  “The TV guy?”

  Brenna nodded. “He’s a cagey son of a bitch, but he’s good, too.”

  Christensen’s face must have given away his confusion.

  “I called him back this morning, just to see what he wanted. Off the record. I’ve dealt with him before. Pretty straight shooter. Jim, he’s up to something on this case.”

  “He interviewed the witness, right?”

  She turned around, swabbed a pool of chicken noodle soup from the tile counter with a dishrag, then turned back. “That, too. Says Chembergo told him more than he told the deputies, and he says the guy didn’t sound like somebody with an ax to grind. ‘Scared shitless,’ was the way he put it, actually. Beyond that, Myron said he’s been kicking over the rocks in Ford Underhill’s background for more than six months.”

  Christensen shrugged. “Standard pre-election stuff, Bren. Levin probably had to get in line behind the Republican National Committee.”

  “No, that’s not—” She searched for words. “The thing is, I’ve done Myron some favors along the way, on other cases. He owes me.”

  “So?”

  “He said he just wanted me to know why he’s so interested in Floss’s accident. Jim, he says he’s close to breaking something pretty big about the Underhills. ‘Little skeleton in the family closet,’ is what he said.”

  Christensen sat forward again in his chair. “Cue the eerie music.”

  “He wouldn’t talk about it.” Brenna waited. “What he did say was pretty weird, though.” Another pause. “Really out of left field.”

  “I’m still with you,” he said.

  “Stays between us?”

  He nodded.

  “Myron’s saying there’s gonna be a shitstorm, and I might want to think twice about taking this on. He says what happened to Floss this week might have been somebody trying to keep her quiet.”

  Christensen shook his head. “That’s pretty far out in left … He’s a TV reporter, for God’s sake. They don’t report anything unless it involves smashed cars or picket signs.”

  “Myron’s different. And he’s not a Chicken Little kind of guy, at least off-camera.”

  “So you’re taking him seriously?”

  “There’s only one way he gets any points for telling me that, Jim, and that’s if he’s right. He knows he’d be screwing up a decent relationship by just blowing smoke.”

  Brenna opened her arms to him as he crossed the kitchen. When he held her close, she sighed. “So what do you think?”

  “Your call, counselor,” he said. “When’s all this supposed to happen? Before the election?”

  She nodded.

  “I think that’s your answer. Somebody on the other side probably got this guy Myron’s ear. To him, it’s Watergate. But I’d bet a nickel it’s nothing that’ll seem the least bit relevant the day after the election.”

  Brenna ran a hand around his belt and patted the back of hi
s jeans. “Any mail?”

  “On the counter. So it’s okay to load the dishwasher?” He was pouring an extra measure of Cascade into the soap dispenser when Brenna tapped him on the shoulder.

  “What’s this?” She was holding the Once-Lost Images calendar he’d set on the counter with the day’s stack of catalogs, home-equity loan offers, and credit-card bills.

  Christensen took the calendar from her and fanned its pages, stopping at April. “Maura organized a gallery showing of some of the art produced by the patients in her Harmony classes. It’s a fund-raiser for the Three Rivers Alzheimer’s Association. They’re selling calendars and auctioning off the pictures.”

  He handed the calendar back, open to Floss Underhill’s painting. She read the title and artist’s name. “Florence?”

  “Floss.”

  Brenna studied the image. “They’re horse people, that’s for sure.” If she found any significance beyond that in the painting, it didn’t register on her face. “When’s the opening?”

  “Later this week, down at the Sofa Factory. I think I need to go.”

  Brenna flipped half a dozen pages of the calendar, reading the captions beneath each image. “This really is interesting stuff.”

  “There’s so much we don’t know,” he said.

  She leveled the same curious gaze at him. “Will Maura be at the opening?”

  He nodded.

  “Why don’t we all go?” she said. “I’ve got to meet this woman. And after the past two days, we should all be ready for a family outing.”

  “With the kids?”

  “Why not? It’s on the north side, the Mexican Wars area, right? We can hit that little barbecue place beforehand.”

  Christensen smiled. For the first time since he’d started his research at Harmony, Brenna finally seemed to share his fascination with Alzheimer’s art, or at least with the eccentric Maura Pearson. “Deal,” he said, looking again at the microwave clock. “I’m going to bed.”

  He turned toward the stairs. Brenna turned toward the back door. She flipped on the backyard floodlight, unlocked the deadbolt, and stepped outside in her stocking feet.