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  “I’ll be okay,” Taylor said. His lower lip trembled. “I’ve got rocks.”

  “Of course you will. What’s with that, anyway?”

  Taylor’s eyes shifted nervously to the classroom’s cupboard. “You think I could bring my pack up here? What if it happens and my rocks are all back there?”

  Christensen tried to read the boy’s eyes. They registered real fear. “What if what happens?”

  Taylor leaned close and whispered. “Third-graders. What if they attack?”

  Annie.

  Christensen bit his lip as soon as he realized, imagining his daughter’s lurid description of the violence new students must face from the entrenched Westminster-Stanton elementary-school marauders. “Do you really think that will happen, Mr. T? Or do you think Annie might have been trying to scare you?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Do you think any of the teachers or grown-ups here would let you get hurt?”

  Taylor shook his head.

  “You’ll be fine, I promise.”

  Outside, Christensen spotted a break in the parking-lot snarl and made his move. The Explorer squeaked between a Volvo wagon and a Dodge Caravan into daylight, its dashboard clock reading 8:04. He’d have a session with Annie when they got home, but he already had other things on his mind. He snatched the car phone from its holder and poked the programmed number for Brenna’s office.

  “Kennedy & Flaherty. How may I direct your call?” The receptionist, Liisa, spoke with a dignified air that betrayed nothing about her multiple tattoos or her years as a Liberty Avenue hooker. When Brenna was a public defender, she represented the then-teenager a half-dozen times, and knew she wanted a fresh start. All Liisa needed was a job, and she was the first one Brenna called when she and Flaherty opened their practice.

  “It’s Jim, Liis. Brenna around?”

  “Hey,” she said, dropping her professional voice. “How’d day one go for the little skipper?”

  “I think he’s okay. Little rough and I just wanted to fill Brenna in. Is she swamped?”

  “Who knows?” she said. “I just screen her calls, remember? Haven’t seen her since she came in.”

  “Are you busy?”

  “Like a one-armed paperhanger.”

  He steered onto Fifth Avenue, headed toward the Allegheny River and the Harmony Brain Research Center. “Tell her it’s important, okay?”

  The morning’s odd phone call replayed in his head as he waited at the Negley light. In Levin’s voice he’d heard a troubling mix of anxiety and concern, in addition to the smarmy I-know-something-you-don’t tone that had come across on TV. Christensen paid close attention to people like that. He remembered, too, the newspaper and magazine clippings and printouts that Brenna and Flaherty had found while doing background research on the Underhills. She’d picked up the fat Nexis printout at her office after meeting the Underhills in Fox Chapel, and he’d scanned it while she worked on the bathroom.

  Flaherty had searched only by the family name, not by Allecorp, the name of the family’s main development company, so the computer had ignored much of the Underhill-related Renaissance development during the 1970s and 1980s. Still, the printout was as thick as a phone book. Practically everything the family did made news. He’d found references to a nasty probate dispute among grandfather Andrew Underhill’s siblings in the mid-1950s, to the family’s embarrassed attempt to explain a drunken indiscretion by young Ford as a Princeton senior, to a single, brief account of the accidental horseback-riding death three years earlier of Ford’s only child—an unblinking chronicle of life in the fishbowl of wealth and celebrity. Only a few of the stories were negative. He could have gorged himself on tales of philanthropy. The last quarter-inch of the chronological printout was nothing but stories about the Underhills’ heroic role at Harmony.

  Brenna picked up suddenly. “So how’d he do?”

  The driver behind him leaned on the horn. The Explorer lurched as he stomped the gas. “Stiff upper lip. I think Annie told him some horror story about what happens to new kids, so he started in a hole. I’ll talk to her.”

  “But he was okay when you left?”

  “Fine. He was pretty excited, actually, after seeing you on TV.”

  “You saw that?” she said. “Myron’s such a jerk. He knows I’ll talk to him if I can, but the visuals aren’t as good unless it looks like he stalked me.”

  Christensen shifted the phone to his other ear and moved with the morning traffic. “So the sheriff’s people are still nosing around?”

  “It’s weird. Nobody Downtown’s talking.”

  Christensen pulled a folded Post-it from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. “Somebody is. Levin called you at home right after the live report.”

  “He called the house, too? It’s a brand-new number. Myron’s such a pain in the ass.” Brenna waited.

  “Said he’d interviewed—” Reading from the Post-it now. “Enrique Chembergo.”

  The line was silent, but only for a moment. “The gardener,” Brenna said. “Shit. He talked to Myron?”

  “That’s the guy who heard something or saw something when Floss fell, right?”

  “Hell. He and his wife both work for the Underhills. She does home-care stuff with Floss, actually. Both from Central America somewhere. I read his statement to the cops. Seems pretty sure what he saw. I’m sure Myron’ll make the most of that. He say anything else?”

  “He wants to talk to you ASAP. Said this guy knows what happened, but not why, and that he had information you might need.”

  No response.

  “Bren? He’s just blowing smoke, right?”

  “Maybe. Hard to say. I’ve known Myron a long time.”

  “Then call him, okay?” he said. “I’d feel better.”

  “How’s your schedule today?”

  “Open,” he said. “Just doing some screening out at Harmony, still trying to find case-study candidates. I want to be back by three to get the kids.”

  “You can let them go to Kids’ Korner after school, you know. No need to pick them up until six.”

  “Just for today. I’ll feel better.”

  “Where are you now?” Brenna said. Her voice had changed.

  He looked around. A state police headquarters flashed past on his left. “Washington Boulevard. Almost to Allegheny River Boulevard.”

  “Still on this side of the river?”

  He slowed as he approached the intersection. Directly in front of him, across the busy boulevard, the Allegheny River ran high and muddy. He watched a battered tug churn its way east.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re not that far from Mount Mercy, that’s all. It’d sure be nice to know if Floss remembers anything about what happened. You could be there in ten minutes.”

  “Bren—”

  “She has some megasuite on the fourteenth floor, which is no big surprise. You knew the family built the new wing, right?”

  He knew, just as he knew every corridor of Mount Mercy Hospital, every ICU nurse on every shift, every sad-eyed priest who roamed its halls dispensing platitudes like aspirin. Today was Monday. If nothing had changed during the past five years, the Mount Mercy cafeteria dinner special would be a gelatinous Swiss steak. Tomorrow: Overcooked lemon chicken. He’d tried them all during the tortured months that he and the girls waited through Molly’s coma, never wanted to walk back into the place again, wasn’t even sure they’d let him in again after he’d barred the ICU door, disconnected Molly’s respirator, and let his wife die with the dignity her doctors seemed so intent on denying her. The last time he’d left there, he was in handcuffs.

  “Right?” Brenna said.

  “Huh?�
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  “The Underhills helped build the new wing.”

  “Two wings, actually. Look, Bren, it’s not like I know the woman well enough to just drop by. Other people at Harmony are much more involved with her.” He waited. “I mean, don’t you think that would look odd?”

  “You know you want to talk to her, Jim. You have as much right as anybody else out there. You’re a researcher, for God’s sake. You have every reason to ask questions. And I need your help.”

  He was curious, and not just in an academic sense. Levin’s cryptic message was troubling enough, but it was the reporter’s tone, that unexpected undercurrent of sincerity and concern, that stuck with him. Still, the idea of returning to Mount Mercy…

  “Floss’ll probably be back at Harmony in a few days,” he said. “I can wait.”

  “I’m not sure I can, Jim. There’s so many people I need to talk to today just to get a handle on this thing. And from what it sounds like, with the Alzheimer’s and everything, I’d need you along to help me interpret what she says anyway. Come on, baby, do it for science.”

  “Bren?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’d be my first time back there.”

  “I know. You’ll be fine.”

  “Bren—” he protested again, but she was right. It was as good a time as any to face it down. He eased the Explorer to the inside lane and slowed down, looking around for cops. This was going to be a risky U-turn.

  Chapter 10

  The automatic doors opened with a familiar hiss, welcoming Christensen back to a place he’d been trying to forget for five years. He didn’t stop walking. Better not to until he’d crossed the psychological threshold of Mount Mercy’s ground-floor entrance, but even as he cleared that point he wondered if the place and the grim chapter it represented in his life might stop him midstride in a flood of fresh grief. In the lobby reception area, he forced himself to look up.

  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.