“I wanted a Cohiba,” Floss said.
Paige rolled her eyes. “You can’t smoke in here, Mrs. Underhill. This is tea. We’ll go outside in a little while so you—”
“Paige, please.” Christensen forced a smile, tried to tune the tension from his voice. “Could you excuse us for just a few more minutes?”
The aide picked up her paperback from the table with a crisp sweep of her hand and pointed to a spot several tables away. “I’ll be over there, I guess.” Paige sat facing them, watching over the top of her book.
When Christensen turned back to Floss, she was preoccupied with her tea. The tear still hung from her chin, but whatever emotion had triggered it was gone. “Something goes in this,” she said.
“Sugar?”
She shook her head.
“Milk? Lemon?”
She shook her head again, agitated this time, frustrated, struggling to recall something as simple as how she took her tea.
“Honey?” he said.
“That!” she said. A small victory.
Christensen knew he had to get her back on track before she lost the memory thread. “Mrs. Underhill, we were talking about the night they took away your horse, Gray, how someone came with a trailer and loaded him up and took him off somewhere. And you were saying how you went down to find the stable manager, Warren Doti, and he was gone, too.”
She stared at him for a moment, then looked again at the steaming mug on the table. “You gonna get me some honey?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Just as soon as we finish talking about what happened to your horse.”
Floss Underhill leaned forward in her wheelchair, studying him with an intense curiosity he couldn’t decipher. He could tell from her eyes that she wasn’t struggling like she was before, wasn’t trying to understand anything beyond the moment. She was taking him in like a stranger on the street, and when she said, “What horse?” he knew he’d lost a rare opportunity, maybe forever.
Chapter 31
From Vincent Underhill’s study window, Brenna watched two no-nonsense black Suburbans and three nondescript black sedans, all bristling with antennas, move up the estate’s driveway like a parade of black beetles. Ford Underhill’s campaign entourage was in full pre-election rut. The drivers wheeled in formation into parking spots outside the house, but to her surprise only two people climbed out—the candidate himself, and Phil Raskin, the family’s damp and abrasive political advisor whom she’d met at that first meeting with the Underhills. As they walked together, the two men apparently continued a private conversation that had begun inside the Suburban.
“Mr. Ford’s here now.”
Brenna flinched at the unfamiliar voice. Lottie, Vincent and Floss Underhill’s ancient maid, stood at the study door, hands clasped behind the back of her crisp uniform. On her previous visits, Lottie had been a silent, servile creature. This was the first time Brenna had heard her speak.
“He’d be in soon as he could. Him and Mr. Vincent gonna have a meeting.”
“That’s fine. Thank you.”
The maid offered a slight bow and backed out the doorway, then crossed the house’s foyer, headed toward the kitchen. At the same time, Brenna heard the front door open. The men’s voices trailed off into silence and their footsteps retreated down a hallway toward the opposite end of the house.
Brenna turned back to the window. All five vehicles idled in the driveway, doors closed, tinted windows all the way up, every cell phone, fax, and radio inside no doubt alive with election-day frenzy. Or maybe it was different at this level, where the outcome was never in doubt. Maybe the aides and advisors inside the juggernaut’s mobile headquarters were looking beyond the formality of the election, coolly planning the inauguration, building a staff, cutting deals.
Brenna checked her watch—nearly one, an hour later than the appointment Ford had demanded. A billable hour, but still. She’d spent the time worrying. Lottie had ushered her into the study without fanfare, like a job applicant. The house was still, and she couldn’t tell if Vincent Underhill was even home. With Floss and her aide apparently at Harmony this time of day, she had the feeling she and Lottie were the only creatures about. But in a house this size, one could never be sure.
Brenna noticed the canvases as she backed away from the window, maybe a dozen or more in varying sizes upright on the floor and leaning against the study’s paneled wall in a far corner of the room. They were facing the wall, with only the back of the outermost canvas visible. Unlike the others, that canvas was framed.
She crossed the room, wondering if the paintings might be Floss’s. Other than Jim’s descriptions and the one reproduced in the Once-Lost Images calendar, she’d never actually seen the coded images he was so sure betrayed the Underhill family’s dark secrets. She could taste the adrenaline as she recognized the frame on the outermost canvas. It was the same as those on the paintings she’d seen at the Sofa Factory exhibit. Leaning forward, she saw a hand-lettered identifier, the number 14, affixed to the frame’s bottom edge—the exhibit’s missing painting. Brenna looked over her shoulder to make sure she was alone.
Even upside-down, she recognized the image from the calendar: the dark sky, the fading yellow sun scored by the interlocking letters of the ranch brand, the gray winged horse at the center of it all. Brenna flipped to the second canvas, a smaller one. It was a variation on the theme. The differences were hard to spot, mostly just gradations in color, but the image was the same. Same with the third canvas. And the fourth, fifth, and sixth, all the way to the final painting. Floss was fixated, no question. And the family obviously had corralled the images. The framed one, she knew, they’d pulled from public display.
There was a pattern here, she conceded, not only in the art, but in the family’s determined effort to keep Floss’s paintings private. But her job was not to unearth the truth of what happened on that gazebo deck, she reminded herself. That job, the burden of proof, fell to Mercer’s investigators and to J. D. Dagnolo. Her role was to make sure her client’s rights were protected during the investigation and, if it ever went that far, prosecution. Why couldn’t Jim understand that?
Somewhere in the house, a heavy door closed. Brenna stepped away from the paintings, startled. Back at the study window, she faced the door and assumed as casual a posture as was possible for someone whose heart was beating like a hummingbird’s. Only then did she notice, in the upper corner of the study, at the juncture of two dark-paneled walls, the glowing red eye of a miniature security camera.
Ford Underhill entered without breaking stride. He nodded a greeting and closed the door behind him. When he turned back toward her, his face seemed grim, almost ashen, startling for a man in the full flush of political power.
“Thank you for coming, Ms. Kennedy,” he said. “As I’m sure you understand, I don’t have much time.”
“Of course.”
“Did my father explain to you why I wanted to talk?” He gestured for her to sit, and he took the wing chair directly across from her, making no effort at all to look relaxed.
“Only that you’re concerned about where the media are getting information about the INS problem.”
He waved her off, a gesture of frustration and power. The man clearly was here to talk, not listen. “You can’t imagine what it’s like out there, Ms. Kennedy. Same goddamn reporters following me into every little burg and hamlet, asking the same goddamned questions at every stop. I’m in New Castle yesterday to announce plans for a downtown redevelopment project, and they’re asking me how long this Chembergo fellow worked for my parents, for Chrissakes, whether I knew he was illegal. Like it was any of their goddamned business in the first place. Like it has anything whatsoever to do with public policy in this state. I want to know where that crap’s coming from.”
“My recollection—”
“Somebody’s leaking it, and I’m guessing Dagnolo.”
Brenna wouldn’t be bullied. “Not necessarily,” she said. “Mr. Chembergo’s name and statement are in the police reports about your mother’s fall. They’re public record. Any reporter with any enterprise at all could take that name and run a routine INS check. It’s possible someone did, and if they did, they hit pay dirt. My recollection is that Myron Levin broke it first.”
“Pain in my ass, that guy,” Underhill said. “I can’t figure his agenda, but he’s poking around in stuff he’s got no business poking around in. Know anything about him?”
Brenna thought of Levin’s warning to keep away from the Underhill case, from the “impending shitstorm.” He was onto something bigger than the standard pre-election muckraking, but what? “No,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“He’s good. A good reporter, I mean.” It was a mechanical response. Even as they spoke, she was replaying her conversations with Levin. Suddenly, from somewhere deep and nearly forgotten, Levin’s words bobbed up like a submerged mine: “A little skeleton in the family closet.” Brenna felt a chill. Levin was acting on the same hunch as Jim. Both saw Floss Underhill’s fall as part of a bigger picture linked somehow to Chip Underhill’s death. Working independently, both men were seeing the same troubling patterns.
“When you say Levin has been poking around—” Brenna hesitated, feeling as if she were about to step off a ledge, knowing that if she did there would be no turning back. “Mr. Underhill, do you have any reason to believe Myron Levin is investigating the circumstances surrounding your son’s death?”
Brenna knew she’d hit a nerve. Underhill flinched. The corners of his eyes drooped and his cheeks seemed to sag, a cartoonist’s version of a stunned reaction. She half-expected his jaw to drop to the floor with a clang. From there, his expression blurred into something closer to panic. It wasn’t the look of a man overcome with the raw emotion of a painful memory; more the look of cornered prey.
“I—” Underhill’s eyes shifted. For a politician, a dead giveaway. The man was rattled.
Underhill abruptly stood and crossed the room, a reaction without purpose. Brenna waited for an answer as Underhill adjusted the pen set on his father’s desk, straightened the telephone, aligned the paper in the stationery tray. When he turned back, his face was no less affected.
“We’re speaking now in confidence, Ms. Kennedy, is that correct?”
She nodded.
“And what we say here comes under the veil of attorney-client privilege, does it not?”
Brenna swallowed hard. “Of course.”
Underhill returned to his chair. His eyes roamed the room, settling on everything before finally meeting hers. He summoned a weak smile and seemed about to speak when a tear at the corner of one eye dropped onto his cheek. Its irregular trail made Brenna realize that Underhill was wearing telegenic makeup that exaggerated everything on his handsome, overlarge face.
Brenna tried to reassure him. “I need to know what’s happening, Mr. Underhill. I can’t competently represent you or your family unless I understand what’s going on.”
He nodded. “My son—” he began. “Chip didn’t die in a horseback-riding accident.”
A wave broke over Brenna, a jolt of cold followed by a sudden lurch in her stomach. She had the unnerving sensation of falling. She thought first of Taylor, her son. She thought of Annie and Jim, especially Jim.
Underhill brushed away the tear. His eyes finally settled on hers and didn’t waver, and she suspected that what he was about to say might be the truth. “It was an accident, though, Ms. Kennedy, a terrible, terrible accident. You’re going to have to trust me on that.” Underhill looked down, watching his fingers trace the fabric pattern on the arm of his chair. “Do you trust me?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I need that, as much as I need your assurance that this conversation will remain between us.”
Brenna glanced up at the camera’s glowing red eye. “You have it, but right now you need to tell me what I need to know.”
Underhill drew a ragged breath. “I don’t come to this disclosure without considerable pain, as I’m sure you can guess. You’re a parent. You understand how devastating the loss of a child can be. But the loss of a child by—” Another breath. “An accident, Ms. Kennedy, a flash of anger, a moment of rage, and that was it. Children are so … fragile.”
Brenna wanted, needed, answers. And she had dozens of questions. But when she opened her mouth, what came out was, “Oh God.” She covered her mouth with her hand.
“One reads about these things happening, but until they happen in your own family, they’re unimaginable,” he said. “Horrifying. Repulsive. But they do happen.”
“What—” she said, still struggling for words. “How?”
Underhill’s face was tough to read. Brenna saw genuine distress in his eyes, but his voice was calmer now. Had he ever told this story before, or was she the first to hear it? Underhill’s grim face flickered. He offered a sad smile, but his face changed quickly into something uncertain.
“I’m not looking for sympathy, Ms. Kennedy. Not offering excuses. Nothing like that. Believe me, there was damned little of that after it happened.”
Brenna couldn’t hold back. “After what happened?”
Underhill looked away. “This is very difficult for me.”
“I’m sorry, but you’ve left too much unsaid. What happened?”
“It did happen here, at this house. We’d brought Chip over to see his grandparents, just to spend the day.” Underhill pinched the bridge of his nose for a long moment, then, collected, folded his hands in his lap. “Mother wasn’t wandering the way she does now, see. My father wasn’t nearly as overwhelmed as he is these days, trying to keep up with her. She was fraying around the edges, of course. We’d known something was wrong for a few years. Fact is, with Alzheimer’s, you’re never really sure until the autopsy. But she was more together back then. Definitely. So it was just a rare Sunday with nothing special planned, all of us here.”
Brenna nodded.
Underhill studied her. “A hectic time for all of us, three years ago. The airport project, that was Dad’s main thing. Mother was still doing some charity work then, still active with the Oaks Classic. Leigh was starting early fundraising for this campaign. We all just had so much going on at the time.”
Underhill stood up suddenly and went to the liquor cart, just as she’d seen his father do when he’d told her about the riding accident—a story she’d found so convincing. The crystal decanter rattled against the rim of his glass as Underhill poured two fingers of brandy. He tossed it back like a man steeling himself for a challenge he could no longer avoid.
“You know about three-year-olds, Ms. Kennedy. You’ve been there, haven’t you, trying to get something done, a simple little thing—read a report, make a call, whatever—and you can’t because you can’t even get a few goddamned minutes to think? You know what someone so demanding can do to somebody who’s got a lot on their mind, don’t you?”
Brenna closed her eyes, trying to make sense of Underhill’s narrative. Suddenly, an image: her own hand sweeping across her mother’s gaunt face, a regrettable impulse to control something that was out of control. She remembered the explosive rage that had come from nowhere the night her mother spilled her water cup for the third time, the stunned silence that followed, her mother already so weak that her sunken eyes weren’t even able to tear. What had fueled her anger that night? She’d been terrified enough that it might happen with Taylor that she sometimes trusted Jim with her son more than she trusted herself.
“Who hit him?” she blurted.
Underhill shook his head. “No one
hit him, Ms. Kennedy. Nothing so primal. With a child that size, just shaking—” Another deep breath, then he stood up. “I think you get the idea. That was it, all it took. One moment, one mistake, an instant when reason was lost to impulse, and within minutes our son was dead and nothing would ever be the same again.”
Brenna wanted to say something, but what? She felt as if a bee were caught in her throat. “I—” she managed before covering her mouth with both hands, trying to hide the horror she was sure had registered on her face. “Who?”
Underhill stared, his eyes sincere, pleading. “Does it even matter now? Please.”
“The riding accident,” she said. “The story your father told me—”
Underhill nodded. “Something we told the paramedics, a small lie at first, we thought, just to give us time to think. It happened so fast, and so much was at stake. You have to understand, we were in shock, absolute shock.”
She watched him until she couldn’t stand the silence. “That’s not a small lie.”
“No. But my father … See, it happened so fast. We knew Chip was dead, knew it right away. It was like flipping off a light switch and hearing the bulb pop and knowing it’ll never light again. There was nothing we could do. Nothing. Please believe me when I say saving his life would have taken precedence over everything else, everything, if that had been possible. But by the time … It wasn’t.”
“But if it had just happened—”
“Don’t go there, Ms. Kennedy. Please. Your second-guessing would serve no purpose.”
Brenna moved on, but sure she’d hit on something important. “Your father. You started to say something about your father.”
Underhill looked away with a tight smile. “The most practical of men, isn’t he? At that point, for him, the issue became damage control. I think you know how a mistake like that could be twisted by our enemies.”
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