Shadow Image

by Martin J. Smith

  Brenna smiled, flustered by his unexpected intensity. She looked across the house’s grand foyer and through the French doors. Everyone else was gone. She recognized the silhouette of Lottie the maid in the overcast light as she gathered the iced-tea glasses onto a tray. “The others left?”

  Vincent turned around, as if he were double-checking. “Ford and Phil needed to get going. Leigh wasn’t feeling well, so she went on back to their house. Look, I’m sorry about earlier.”

  Staggers brushed past them and into the house. With each step, his shoes made the squishing sound of sodden leather. Then, as if he’d forgotten something, he headed back out into the spring shower.

  “Perfectly understandable. It’s a difficult time. Mind talking about it for a few minutes now?”

  The former governor led her down a short hall and into a sumptuous paneled study. A fire was lit in the stone fireplace, which stood between two windows overlooking the driveway and front entrance. Brenna wasn’t cold or wet, but the pull of the flames was irresistible. Vincent Underhill was staring out one of the floor-length windows, his back to her, when he began to speak.

  “There are terms we use sometimes, ‘we’ being families affected by Alzheimer’s,” he said, his eyes fixed on something outside. “You either ‘know,’ or you ‘can’t know.’ Which are you, Ms. Kennedy?”

  A cherry log crackled and hissed behind her. “My grandmother on my father’s side, but I was little, and it was before it had a name, I think. So which am I?”

  He turned and looked at her, but didn’t answer. “I’m going to tell you something that might seem callous. But I’m going to tell you anyway, because I want you to understand. Last night, Ms. Kennedy, with my wife out of the house for the first night in six years, I slept like a baby.”

  Was he waiting for her reaction? “I understand from your son—”

  “It’s not like I didn’t have things to think about. My God, trying to make sense of what happened yesterday, trying to understand what I could have done differently, I should have been wide-eyed from the moment I got back from the hospital at eleven. But I wasn’t. I slept. Straight through. First night in years when I wasn’t up five or six times with her. She’d launch these projects, just vital nonsense that couldn’t wait, day or night. It’s like her brain’s on a timer that clicks on at random times. One night, maybe two years ago, she got out of the house before I woke up. She was sitting in the Benz, naked, trying to find the ignition. Said she was heading for Heinz Hall, late for the symphony.”

  He crossed the room and leaned against the mantel at the opposite end of the fireplace. “Scared the hell out of me. After that, I never slept too deeply.”

  “That’s understandable,” Brenna said.

  “No, it’s not,” he said, smiling. “You can’t know.”

  Their eyes locked. Another pop and hiss from a fireplace log. “Point taken,” she said. “So tell me something I can understand. What was she like? Before, I mean.”

  Vincent Underhill’s face transformed. Suddenly, he laughed—deep, genuine, affectionate. He seemed to search for a word. “Unique,” he said.

  Brenna took advantage of his sudden mood shift. “Help me get to know her a little. Let’s try this: If Floss Underhill were one of the seven dwarfs, which one would she be?”

  He thought a moment, then laughed again. “Is there a Cranky?”

  “There’s a Grumpy.”

  Vincent Underhill shook his head. “No, that’s different. Cranky is more like it. Didn’t give a good goddamn, pardon my French, what anybody thought.”

  “She smoked cigars, didn’t she? I remember that from somewhere.”

  “Yes! Everybody remembers that. Fortune magazine sent a reporter and photographer out to the house about thirty years ago. We must have talked for two days about things going on around the state, economic development stuff. And what do you think made it into the lead? What do you think everyone remembers about that story? My wife firing up a Macanudo in front of the photographer! We’d managed to keep her little vice a secret for so long, not that she gives a damn, of course.”

  “She still smokes them?”

  Underhill’s smile dimmed. “We can’t let her have matches.”

  “Of course,” Brenna said. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to imagine her on the social circuit around here.”

  “Oh, Christ, don’t get me started,” Underhill said, his mood buoyed again. “She was an absolute scourge. Had no patience, none whatsoever, for those women—‘the ladies who lunch,’ she called them. Not that they didn’t fall into line when she told them to, when she needed money or volunteers for one cause or another. But she was much more comfortable in filthy horse clothes than in anything Bob Mackie ever made for her.”

  “I knew I liked her,” Brenna said. “So that I-gotta-be-me thing wasn’t all just charming political image-making?”

  “Floss?” He laughed out loud. “Is a tornado concerned about its image, Ms. Kennedy? No. It’s all about energy and unpredictability and free will.”

  “Tornadoes are dangerous, though,” she said.

  “Not if you get out of their way, or know how to duck and cover at the right time,” he said with a wink. “I’ll say this: made for a damned interesting marriage.”

  The flames were too warm, so Brenna edged away from the fireplace toward one of the long windows. It overlooked the estate’s carport, where Alton Staggers was down on one knee in the rain beside her Legend, peering underneath as if he’d dropped something.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Underhill motioned her toward a massive wing chair.

  She shook her head. “No, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to hear your version of what happened yesterday. Would that be all right?”

  “Ford didn’t tell you?”

  “He did. I just had a couple questions.”

  Underhill sat down on a couch across from the wing chair. Brenna stayed standing.

  “What were you doing when you realized your wife had wandered away?”

  Underhill folded his hands, his index fingers forming a spire beneath his nose. “I’d told Selena—she’s our home nurse—to take a couple of hours off. She’d been watching Floss most of the day while I made some fundraising calls for Ford.” He closed his eyes. “At about three, Floss decided to paint. She has this paint set she’s always fooling around with. So I set it up for her in the study, and I sat down to read.”

  “So you were both in the study? For how long?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  “Then at some, point she left?”

  He nodded. “At some point, yes. The paints were still there when I—”

  “Was it still light outside when she left?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure it was.”

  “Because Ford said she apparently was at the gazebo at about four.” Brenna leaned on the back of the wing chair.

  “I believe that’s correct.”

  “So, sometime between three and four, she got up and left. Did she say where she was going?”

  “I don’t remember, Ms. Kennedy. You’re on our side, right?”

  Brenna wouldn’t, couldn’t back down. “The district attorney isn’t, and he’s going to want these same answers. Please bear with me. Did she seem upset, or distraught?”

  Underhill stood up suddenly. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “Because—”

  “Ms. Kennedy,” he said, drawing a deep breath, “I fell asleep. On the couch, when I was supposed to be watching her. The next thing I know, there’s a goddamned medevac operation going on out by our gazebo. She got hurt on my watch. It’s my fault, and I’m trying to deal with that, and I trust you’ll never repeat this conversati
on to anyone outside this family. I think you know how a mistake like that would be twisted into a mortal sin by a man like Dagnolo. Does that clear everything up for you, Ms. Kennedy? Now do you understand?”

  Bewildered by the change in tone, her voice suddenly caught in her throat, Brenna nodded. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Do you understand?”

  She nodded again.

  “No,” he said, still edgy. “No. That’s the thing. You can’t know.”

  Chapter 7

  Light poured into the dark bedroom as their bathroom door swung open. Brenna stood for a moment in its frame as she brushed her hair, a dancer’s silhouette in a thin T-shirt. It was nearly midnight before she got the toilet in the other bathroom reconnected, but she didn’t want to come to bed without a shower. He’d waited patiently while she dried her hair.

  “The stain’s where again?” she said.

  “The office. Toward the back, not right below the kids’ bathroom, though.”

  She flipped off the bathroom light and slid between the sheets. “That doesn’t mean anything. Water can follow a crossbeam or duct and wind up pooling in a space three rooms away. I’d check it tomorrow, but I’ve got to work early.”

  “Earlier than usual?” He pulled her to him. She reached across his bare chest and set the alarm for five-thirty, then rolled back onto her side of the bed.

  “It’s going to be like this for a while. What’ll we do?”

  “I can handle things. The sabbatical leaves me pretty flexible.” Her shampoo smelled like watermelon.

  “So you can drop them at school and pick them up?” she said. “You sure? We can get some help.”

  “Don’t sweat it.” He tried again. She jumped up, crossed the room to her briefcase and, in the pale glow of a bright moon outside their window, scribbled something in her Day Runner. The omens weren’t good. The ebb and flow of their lovemaking was determined almost entirely by the level of her anxiety about work. “There’ll be times when I’m busy, too. It’ll even out. What are you so worried about?”

  Brenna stopped writing and looked out the window. Two blocks south, the Walnut Street bars were alive with reckless youth. On clear nights, the sound carried. Tonight, they both listened to a silence broken only by a motorcycle easing down the narrow channel between cars parked along Howe.

  “I want this to work,” she said. “Us.” She pointed to the hall that led to the bedrooms where Annie and Taylor were sleeping. “Them.”

  Her first marriage had collapsed because of her zealous work habits, unable to survive the forward thrust of her ambition in the first years after her mother died. Still, the answer surprised him.

  “Nice try,” he said. “It’s this Underhill thing, isn’t it?”

  “That, too.”

  He patted the bed. She put her Day Runner back in the briefcase, glided across the room and slid in beside him. He could see her more clearly now that his eyes had adjusted to the moonlight. “After all you’ve told me about Sherman Mercer, Bren, you’re actually taking his investigation seriously?”

  She pulled her knees to her chest and put her chin on her forearms. “The name of an old friend of yours came up today: J. D. Dagnolo.”

  “Mr. Congeniality?”

  “Him,” she said. “Someone wondered if maybe the D.A.’s office was pulling the strings on this. There’s no love lost between Dagnolo and the Underhills right now.”

  Christensen shrank back in mock alarm. “You mean our district attorney is political?”

  Brenna didn’t react, not even with an exasperated roll of those perfect green eyes.

  “What?” he said.

  “I don’t know if Dagnolo’s behind it or not. It wouldn’t surprise me. I think the guy’d do pretty much anything to chop the Underhills.”

  “They really stuffed him when Ford got into the governor’s race, huh?”

  “He figured the job was his, and it probably was. I know he’s a snake, you know he’s a snake, but his rep statewide is pretty good—Mr. Fearless Crime Buster. And, what the hell, the questions Mercer’s guys are asking aren’t altogether unreasonable.”

  Christensen sat up and turned to face her. This was a twist.

  “You’re not going to ruin my image of the Underhills now, are you?” he said. “I know they’ve had their minor scandals. Hell, the family lives in a fishbowl. But I’ve always liked their priorities. Forget all the Renaissance stuff, the commercial stuff. Jesus, they practically underwrote Harmony’s whole adult day-care facility. I can almost overlook the fact that they’re obscenely rich.”

  “And if I really want to pursue the city council seat, a kind word from them would pretty much do it for me in the Seventh Ward,” she said. “It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “—not cut and dried, that’s all.”

  “How much can you say?”

  She bit her lower lip. “A hypothetical, okay? Let’s say there was some physical evidence that might support an eyewitness’s story. Nothing conclusive, but something that might intrigue the cops, something that makes the witness’s story seem at least plausible. If there was a struggle or something on the gazebo deck, even a short one, and this witness was standing at the greenhouses, I’m sure he could have heard it.”

  “That’s the hypothetical gazebo and greenhouse?” he said.

  “You know I can’t talk about a specific case.”

  He kissed her. “Love that.”

  “Okay, so there’s a big storage room underneath the gazebo. It’s pretty loud even when you walk across the floor. Stomp your feet and it sounds like a bass drum. The witness hears the sounds and comes out to look, sees somebody, a man, leaving the gazebo.”

  Christensen nodded. “Logical. But a little thin, theory-wise, don’t you think?”

  “By itself, sure.”

  “Then?”

  “The deck has a railing, about waist-high. Right where she jumped, or fell, it’s broken. Not like somebody stood on top and jumped outward. It’s splintered around one of the bolts on the back, like something heavy fell against it from the deck side. The splintering looks pretty recent.”

  “Lot of assumptions there,” he said. “Somebody moving heavy furniture or equipment around anytime in the last few weeks could have bumped against it. They use the gazebo for parties and fund-raisers and stuff, right?”

  “That’d be easy enough to check,” she said.

  “And you said the railing’s waist-high. What if Floss stumbled against it and fell over? It was raining, probably slippery.”

  Far-fetched, he knew, but no more than any other scenario she’d brought up.

  Brenna made a face. “All I’m saying is there’s enough that the investigators probably had to follow up. Sherm’s up for election, too. Funny things happen during elections. What if the media got hold of a tape of the groundskeeper’s 911 call? If he said something about a struggle on the phone, it’d look pretty bad if Sherm’s people didn’t at least ask questions.”

  “Cover-your-ass time.”

  “Maybe,” Brenna said.

  “And Dagnolo would drag himself over a hundred yards of broken glass for a chance to take them down, right? So he’s probably pushing like hell.”

  “Believe me, Sherm’s squirming. The Underhills are a force of nature around here, politically. There’s just no upside for him in this, so you’d think the whole thing would be over with by now. But it isn’t.”

  Christensen leaned close and kissed both of her knees, a reminder of his less conversational interests.

  “No upside at all,” she said.

  He gave up. “Finish what you said earlier about Vincent, the thing about the paints.�
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  “He says she wanted to paint, so he set it up for her,” she said. “Then he fell asleep. That’s when she wandered off.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I think so. I mean, it’s one thing when the body deteriorates, Jim, but at least my mother stayed in bed. He says Floss gets up five or six times a night and wanders around. He gets up with her to make sure she doesn’t get hurt. How long can a person handle that?”

  Her eyes shifted to the window, to the moon. “I can read people’s eyes. I think the guy’s an open wound—” Her voice trailed off. “Sorry. It’s just the way he talked about it, it hit close to home.”

  Christensen didn’t know her when she was nursing her mother, knew only the scars left by the experience. He’d heard her sob in her sleep and wake in a funk; watched her fall apart the day Taylor threw up in the backseat of her beloved Saab. She’d had the car detailed the same day, and traded it for the Legend by the end of the week. Something about the smell, an overreaction hard-wired straight into her guilt. Brenna wasn’t a weak woman, far from it. But nursing her mother that final year had drained and devastated her with its isolating treadmill of bed changes, laundry, bathing, feeding, medication, and doctor visits. Twice since then, in cases that made statewide headlines, she’d passionately defended caregivers who were accused of assault. She’d won both times.

  Christensen tried to think of the last time he saw Floss Underhill, just three days ago. “I told you Floss is one of the fourteen people in Maura Pearson’s art class, right? The one I’m observing at Harmony.”

  Brenna nodded.

  “Any idea what she was painting?”

  She shook her head. “Why?”

  “You just never know with Alzheimer’s, that’s all. That’s what I’m finding with this representational art study. Sometimes the images that surface in their work are incredibly telling.”

  Brenna sat up, pulled off her T-shirt and crossed her legs. Naked, they sat facing each other in the center of their bed like two yogis, holding hands. Her eyes strayed down.