“Bring any matches this time?” Floss said. “Some man downstairs gave me a fresh Cohiba and I’m gonna smoke it.”
“I’m Jim Christensen, Mrs. Underhill. You remember me from Mount Mercy, then?”
The younger woman sat forward in her deck chair. “I’m Paige,” she said, extending a hand toward Christensen. As she did, she turned toward her charge. “Don’t be a troublemaker, now, Mrs. Underhill. If I let you smoke it, I’ll be in deep doo.” Paige turned back to Christensen. “She’s not allowed to smoke,” she repeated.
“Balls!” Floss shook her head. “You people.”
On her sketch pad was a pencil drawing, another winged horse in the same galloping pose, larger in this picture than in the two other images he’d seen. Floss obviously had had some instruction on form drawing. Even at this stage, the horse’s proportions seemed correct and her shading brought out the defining muscles of the animal’s body. She’d added a misshapen dark patch on the horse’s forehead, right between its eyes, a lopsided mushroom.
“I’m working with Maura Pearson, Paige,” Christensen said.
Paige’s face crinkled. “Who?”
“Maura Pearson, the art therapist.”
The young woman finally nodded, pulling a folded day schedule from between the pages of her paperback. She unfolded the bookmark. “They told me Mrs. Underhill’s not in the art class anymore.”
“You’re new, aren’t you?” he said. “I was expecting Selena.”
“I remember her,” Floss volunteered. “She always had matches. Whatever happened to that girl?”
Christensen, too, wondered what had happened to Selena, especially since the Underhills were stonewalling Brenna’s attempts to talk to Selena’s husband, the gardener.
“I started yesterday, over at the house,” Paige said, “but this is my first day here. We’ve become fast friends, haven’t we Mrs. Underhill?”
“You’re not Selena,” Floss said, as though noticing Paige for the first time.
Christensen scouted the dining deck, finally motioning toward a table about thirty feet away. “Paige, would you mind giving me a few minutes alone with Mrs. Underhill? She’s part of a study I’m working on, and we have some catching up to do.” He waited as the aide’s eyes moved between him and the old woman, then added, “Because she’s been out for a few days.”
Paige glanced at her Swatch. “She’s got exercise at eleven in the multipurpose room. How long would you be?”
“We’ll wrap it up before then,” he said. “Promise.”
“Don’t like exercise,” Floss said.
Christensen waited until Paige sat down at the distant table and opened her paperback again, then turned back to Floss. She couldn’t possibly have stared at him any harder. “How’s the arm, Mrs. Underhill?” he asked.
“Which?” she said.
He pointed to the cast on her left one. “Any pain?”
She studied the cast. “This arm looks broken. You a doctor?”
“No, ma’am, a psychologist. I study memory. How’d you break it?”
She pulled a loose strand of white hair away from her face and tucked it behind one ear. “You know how,” she said.
“You fell,” he said, trying to keep the answer vague.
Floss nodded. “Told Warren he was skittish before my ride. He’s always skittish, spooks at his shadow most days, but those seven-footers with the potted daisies confused him. Went right over his head when the balky son-of-a-gun stopped short on me.”
“A horse? You broke your arm in a horse show?”
“Potted daisies spooked him. Every time. Right over the top, and wham! I heard it crack. And let me tell you, it’s a problem when you get to be my age.”
Christensen took advantage of the opening she left him. “How old are you, anyway?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Thirty-five next March, if it was any of your business, which it isn’t,” she said. “Who are you again?”
This wasn’t uncommon. Floss’s years as a competitive rider may have been the most exciting and fulfilling period of her life, and memories of times like that are among the most durable. Her brain went looking for a way to explain her broken arm and found a logical scenario, maybe even a real memory of an injury she’d suffered thirty or forty years ago. But if he had any chance of recovering memories of her fall the previous Saturday or its link to some dark family secret, he needed to anchor her, somehow, in the present, and then work backward, like a mountaineer rappelling into the recent past.
“Everybody at Harmony missed you this week, I hear. Maura Pearson says art class has been pretty dull without you.”
Floss looked down at her sketch pad, then around the dining deck, saying nothing. He began to talk, referring first to Maura, Emma, Arthur, and some of her former art classmates at Harmony. He told her about the new carpet in the activity room. He asked her if she’d worked at the potting benches in the outdoor rehab garden, whether she’d tried the wheelchair-accessible swimming pool. From there, he moved on to a litany of current events in sports, weather, national politics, sounding at times like an overeager cocktail-party host anxious to stimulate conversation. He mentioned Ford’s run for governor twice, her husband’s name three times, told her what he knew about where and how she lived. She listened patiently, with an intensity that told Christensen his efforts were having the desired effect. “And I understand you have quite a rose garden,” he said.
She nodded, smiling. “Out back. Blooming now, too. So sweet-smelling it’ll knock you back.”
“So you’ve seen the gardens since you got back from Mount Mercy?”
Floss closed her eyes. “Vincent took me out there yesterday. Rolled me right along the path.” She kept them shut tight, as if the memory might somehow leak out and be gone forever.
“He’s glad to have you home, I bet. So you just walked around, or were you going somewhere?”
She didn’t answer, her eyes still closed, motionless except for the strand of hair that worked its way from behind her ear again and danced across her face in the light breeze.
“There’s a big gazebo or something out back, isn’t there?” he pressed. “Were you going there?”
Nothing.
“Do you go there a lot?”
Silence.
“When was the last time you were there?”
Her eyes sprang opened like window shades. She looked at him a few long moments, then down at her sketch pad, then squinted out into the rolling green hills. She picked up the pencil she’d been using to sketch and resumed work on the horse. Only now her lines were bold and thick, the knuckles on her hand white as she pressed graphite to paper, her hand moving like an excited seismograph in what seemed like a classic anxiety reaction. Which meant nothing. Something difficult and painful had happened to her there. That much he knew. She did, too. The question remained: What? But she obviously wasn’t ready to go there again.
“Who takes care of all those roses?” he asked, backtracking to safer ground. But he had an idea, a little experiment: If she reacted so strongly to the place where she was hurt, how might she react to the names of the people he knew were on the Fox Chapel property the day she fell? “You don’t do it all, do you?”
Floss shook her head, lips tight against her teeth, eyes focused on the pad.
“You have a gardener, don’t you? Selena’s husband. Enrique’s very good, I hear.”
She nodded. “He’s gone now.”
“With Selena?”
“Gone somewhere.” Her answers were clipped and stiff, her pencil strokes leaving angry black scars on the faint outline of the horse. “I want to smoke.”
Christensen tried to relax her with an easy smile. “Vincent doesn’t like your ci
gars, does he?” he said, trying another name.
“Didn’t used to mind. Now he does.”
“Your son, Ford. Does he mind?”
She shrugged.
“How about Leigh, his wife?”
Floss’s pencil point disintegrated with a splintering snap. Her right hand slowed and finally stopped moving, as if coasting to a stop. When it did stop, she held the pencil up in front of her face and tried to blow the dangling wood shards from the tip. “I need a new one,” she said.
“I can get you one, Mrs. Underhill. There’s plenty in the art room.”
She handed him the shattered pencil. “Go now.”
“You don’t want to talk anymore?”
“No.”
Christensen looked around. Paige was deep into her paperback, apparently content and unconcerned in the morning sun. The closest occupied table was even farther away from them than Paige. He sipped from his lukewarm coffee, then reached into his briefcase.
“I’ll get you a new pencil, Mrs. Underhill.” He handed her a Once-Lost Images calendar, open to April, knowing there was a good chance Floss wouldn’t recognize Some Crazy Story about Gray as her own work. “Maura wanted to make sure you got one of these. You’re famous.”
The old woman studied the image. As she did, her shoulders seemed to relax. Her face, if not serene, lost its tightness. She wasn’t smiling, but at least she wasn’t grimacing anymore. “I had a gelding like this once, a three-year-old, just like this one,” she said, tapping the horse’s image. “A jumper like you never saw.” She stared some more. “Broke my heart when Warren took him off, I’ll tell you. The good ones are funny that way. Haunt your life like shadows, then they’re gone.”
Christensen waited, resisting the urge to prompt, wondering where the memory might lead her. Mentioning the horse’s age—the same age as her grandchild who died after being thrown and kicked by a gray horse—struck Christensen as significant. Maybe she’d never worked her way through the grief surrounding that death. Maybe it was easier for her to grieve the loss of the horse than the death of the child.
“He was three years old?” he asked.
She nodded.
“And he’s gone now?”
Floss shut her eyes again, tight this time. A tear squeezed onto her cheek.
“I can tell you miss him a lot,” he said.
She nodded, brushing the tear away with her good hand. She sighed deeply, her eyes still shut in the bright morning sun. “Miss ’em all.”
Chapter 16
The western Pennsylvania countryside sliding past the Special’s passenger-side window was spring green and thrilling. Route 30 crisscrossed the Turnpike in a lazy helix all the way across the state, but along here, Jeannette and Greensburg, the turnpike veered south. Route 30 was the fastest way to Latrobe.
Not that Christensen and Pearson were in any hurry. With no real plans until the afternoon class at two, they’d decided on a lark to play hooky. Pearson wanted to know more about his research. The Special’s gas tank was full. They’d looked at one another over bran muffins and cups of Harmony’s cafeteria coffee and mouthed the words at the same instant: “Road trip.”
Christensen was curious about Muddyross Ranch, of course, but his curiosity now was as personal as it was academic. He had a perspective from outside the Underhills’ inner circle that Brenna couldn’t, and what he’d seen in recent days—felt, actually—was tinged with paranoia. It wasn’t just the weirdness—the dark phone call from Myron Levin, the unexplained absence of the gardener and his wife, the late-night footprints on the front porch—but the nagging sense that Floss Underhill was trying her best to communicate. Exactly what, he couldn’t say. But the same scrambled thoughts were surfacing again and again. The Underhills’ attitude toward Brenna, the calculation of her hiring, bothered him as well. Brenna’s pitbull reputation notwithstanding, the Underhills had unlimited resources. Why would they recruit a defense attorney they’d never met? The Underhills were savvy people, and savvy people have a reason for everything they do. Plus, in Brenna’s business, information is power. The Underhills were withholding information. Why?
The sun already was heating up the immense car’s interior. Christensen reached for the knobby art deco handle of the window crank. “Mind?”
From deep in her vinyl-covered driver’s seat, Pearson reached forward and patted the pristine metal dashboard. “Before A/C,” she said, somehow reading his mind.
He flexed, ready for a struggle, but turning the crank was like cutting warm butter. Forty years old, and the car made his five-year-old Explorer seem leprous by comparison. “So how long did you spend restoring this beast?” he asked over the dull roar of rushing air.
“What do you mean, restoring?” Pearson said. “You take care of your car, it’ll take care of you.”
Christensen scanned the interior. “Wait. You’re the original owner?”
Pearson shook her head. “Mom was. We shared it for years until she passed.”
What little he knew of Pearson’s life outside Harmony he’d gathered on the day he gave her a lift to work while the Special was in the shop. Everything fit perfectly with her nutty great-aunt image. She’d lived alone since her mother died two years ago, assuming you didn’t count the menagerie with which she now shared their house—a burgeoning population of gerbils, a three-legged cat, an ancient Rhodesian Ridgeback with some sort of gland problem, and a grounded crow whose broken wing she’d splinted to no avail. It lived in her fireplace but had free run of the house. On Pearson’s extensive menu of eccentricities, her weak spot for irredeemable creatures, including the Special, was by far her most charming.
Christensen rolled the window halfway up to cut down on the wind, then pulled a folded piece of poster paper from the briefcase at his feet. Laid open on his lap, it looked like one of Annie’s preschool drawings—a pink bull’s-eye at the center surrounded by a manic, scratchy swirl of Magic Marker colors. “What did you call this again?”
“Mandala.”
“Like Nelson?”
Pearson nodded. “Different spelling. Means ‘magic circle’ or ‘center’ in Sanskrit.” Pearson adjusted the car’s massive rearview mirror. “You know all about that Jungian crap, right? This is part of that. From time to time we give each artist a piece of paper that’s blank except for a circle in the middle. Then we give them paints and markers and watch to see what they do with the circle.”
Christensen pointed to the paper in his lap. “And the ‘Jungian crap’ says this would be a snapshot of Floss Underhill’s subconscious, right?”
“As of two weeks ago. I had her do one down in the dayroom. It’s just a way to see where their head’s at. Don’t try to make too much of it. I don’t. Just thought you’d like to see.”
Christensen looked again at the circle. “Help me here, Maura. Where was her head on this one?”
Pearson leaned over and poked a finger at the pink bull’s-eye. “Dead center,” she said. “Strong sense of self. That’s been consistent in every mandala she’s done going back two years. The essential Floss is still in there somewhere, still knows who she is. But you don’t need a mandala to figure that out.”
“And the squiggles?”
Pearson shrugged. “Something’s got her upset. Same with the colors. Bright ones like that usually suggest agitation of some kind, but it could be anything.”
Muddyross Ranch promised nothing more concrete, he knew, but it seemed too important to overlook as he inventoried Floss’s mind and memories. He and Pearson had gone through all of Floss’s available artwork at the center and found variations of the riding club’s logo etched somewhere in at least half of them. The place obviously meant something to her, but what? Maybe it was something simple, like her involvement with th
e Oaks Classic, or maybe it was just her favorite place to ride. But he had a lot of questions, and the family wasn’t exactly approachable. Maybe someone at Muddyross could shed some light on Floss’s fascination with the place.
“Has Floss ever talked about men when you were around?” Christensen said.
“To me?” Pearson shook her head. “What men?”
“In general. Not her husband or her son or anything, just, you know, men. Or bring up names you didn’t recognize?”
Pearson shook her head again. After a half minute of silence, she said, “Well?”
“Just the way she talked when I visited her at Mount Mercy. Just kind of, I don’t know, free-spirited maybe?”
Pearson turned toward him, eyeing the road only as needed. “Spill it. This sounds good.”
“It’s not. I just mean, in general, Alzheimer’s patients aren’t usually aware if they’re saying things that might embarrass their family or friends. We all have warning systems that tell us, you know, not to talk to strangers about our sex lives, that kind of thing. Late second-stagers like Floss have usually lost those warning systems.”
“This is sounding better and better.”
Christensen refolded the poster paper and put it back in his briefcase. “Clinically speaking, of course. Maura, help me out here. You’ve been around a lot more of them, and a lot longer, than I have.”
Pearson sighed. “Depends on the person. It’s the ones who never talked before Alzheimer’s who seem to talk the most toward the later stages. It’s like their minds open up and the secrets just spill out. But I don’t get the impression Floss Underhill was ever one to hold back.”
“Does it ever cause problems, with hurt feelings, that sort of thing?”
“When it does, it’s the spouses, usually. Sometimes it’s real personal stuff.”
“Ever with the Underhills?”
Pearson shook her head. “They’re a pretty unflappable bunch.” She sighed again, deeply and with great purpose. “You’re really not gonna tell me what she said, are you?”
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