Shadow Image (8 page)

“Hey,” Floss protested.

Underhill studied the watercolor image on his wife's drawing pad, then took the pad, too. He closed it, but that he kept. He tossed it onto the bed, away from Christensen, who wondered if, because of his mask, he'd been mistaken for a hospital staffer. He caught Underhill's eyes searching his chest for a name tag.

“Actually, the art work is very therapeutic,” he said. “It'll help with her fine motor skills, and some people think it's a way for her to connect with some of her lost memories.”

Christensen couldn't interpret Underhill's impassive face, so he continued. “And you probably know about the nicotine studies, how even one cigarette can improve communication between the neurons and the hippocampus. That's the learning and memory part of the brain.” Still no reaction. Christensen, nervous, rushed to fill the silence. “So, actually, in terms of recall, she may be one of the few people who actually
should
smoke. No one's quite sure why it works that way, just that it does. So—”

“Let me be very clear about this,” Underhill interrupted. His voice was stern but not hostile, a teacher talking to a misguided student. “From now on, please see to it that our family's wishes are followed. No paints. No cigars.”

“But the cigars might—”

Underhill turned away, busying himself with the remains of his wife's last meal. Christensen surrendered. He still had his anonymity, at least. If he left now, there'd be no awkward explanation of why a marginally involved memory researcher from the Harmony Center was in the private hospital suite of a woman he barely knew.

“Sorry for the oversight,” he said.

Vincent Underhill nodded his absolution. “Now if you'll excuse us, I'd like to spend some time alone with my wife.”

“You're not a doctor, then?” Floss said to her husband. “I'm confused.”

Christensen found the hall a welcome relief. A different nurse, a woman, was at the nurse's station, but she was on the phone. He set the paint set and brush on the counter without a word or even a wave, and headed for the elevator. He didn't take off the mask until he got to the parking-lot exit, and then only because the nervous attendant put his hands in the air.

Even if you were in the vicinity, Harmony wasn't the kind of place you visited without a reason. You came only if Alzheimer's had flared somewhere in your family. In the two months he'd spent doing research there, Christensen had begun regarding the center as the pleasant but inevitable terminus of a thousand slow-motion tragedies.

He nosed the Explorer up the serpentine drive, rapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel. A nervous habit. He'd willed himself to stop twice already, but he started again each time he thought about Vincent Underhill. What was
that
about? He tried again to think of reasons why the man would object to his wife's painting, or to having an occasional cigar that could only goose her faulty synapses and improve her memory function, but Underhill's genteel hostility had him curious. He knew the family was sensitive to the plight of Alzheimer's victims—its generous support of Harmony and deep involvement in Floss's care demonstrated that. Maybe since Christensen was relatively new at Harmony, he didn't yet have a good grasp of the family dynamics of Alzheimer's. Or maybe, while monitoring Maura Pearson's art classes, he'd just overlooked the Underhill family's resistance to certain activities.

Still.

He'd been assigned a temporary spot in the staff parking lot about as far from the entrance as was possible, and he wheeled the Explorer into it at full speed. The front tires bounced off the concrete wheel-stop. He turned off the engine and drew a deep breath. After five more, he opened the driver's-side door for the long walk. By the time the automated lobby door swished open, he'd decided his first stop was going to be Pearson's office. She'd dealt with the Underhills for at least two years. She could help him understand what had happened back there.

“Got a minute?” he said, poking his head around the edge of her open door.

The art therapist was hunched over her desk in an office that reminded him of a landfill. She looked a lot like Janet Reno after Waco—large and ungainly, desperately preoccupied, a woman who, unlike the Clinton administration's attorney general, was seemingly anchored to the planet by the ridiculously overstyled Air Jordan basketball shoes she insisted on wearing with the laces undone. At the moment, she was peering through her black horn-rimmed glasses at the palm of her hand, where something brown was squirming.

“Take the shade off my desk lamp and hold it over him,” she said, nodding toward the wriggling brown thing. “Quick.”

Christensen pushed his way into the small office, set his briefcase on one of the chairs, and did as he was told. “That's a mouse,” he said, peering into her palm.

“
Gerbillus perpallidus,”
Pearson said. “Hand me those fingernail clippers.”

The creature was on its back. She was holding it in place with her right thumb, which was wedged firmly against the underside of the gerbil's chin. Its long tail whipped madly at her wrist as its bony feet scrabbled for leverage.

Christensen was nearly dumbstruck, and not just because he hated mice. “Gerbil manicure?” he managed.

Pearson looked up and snorted, the kind of laugh that would embarrass most people. “Yeah, right,” she said, and snorted again. “See those?”

She pointed her left index finger at the rodent's yellow front teeth, which jutted over her thumbnail like two half-inch strands of uncooked spaghetti. “If you don't clip 'em, they get so long the poor things can't eat.”

“Maura,” he said, “it's God's plan. They shouldn't exist in the first place. He's just correcting a mistake.”

The oral surgery took only a second, reducing the length of the gerbil's teeth by half. Pearson returned her patient to a mound of cedar chips at the bottom of an aquarium on her bookshelf, then rummaged through her desk's lap drawer. She found a packaged antiseptic wipe, tore it open, and rubbed it between her hands.

“Pet-store food isn't rough enough to wear them down, and chew blocks upset his stomach,” she said. “This works fine. You coming to the opening?”

A conversation with Pearson could be as hard to follow as a conversation with one of her demented art students. “The opening?” he said.

She looked exasperated. “The Once-Lost Images exhibit? The Sofa Factory?”

“I'm sorry. Of course. That's
this
week?”

“The calendars just came back from the printer,” she said. “Want one?”

Pearson clomped over to a box on her windowsill and pulled a glossy hanging calendar from inside. Its cover read “Once-Lost Images: The Visual Imagery of Alzheimer's Patients”—the latest fundraising premium for the Three Rivers Alzheimer's Association. The calendars were to be sold at the first public exhibit of art produced in Pearson's class at Harmony.

She offered one across her desk. “You've probably seen some of these pieces, but the calendar turned out great.”

Christensen fanned the pages. He recognized some of the paintings, but he was struck again by their power. Coupled with the artist's chosen title and description, the images offered eloquent testimony to remembered moments and forgotten feelings. He looked at the painting on the calendar cover: five flowers around a woman's crude self-portrait, with one dark flower off in the upper left corner of the canvas. The artist, now dead, was a mother of five who lost a sixth child at birth. She'd titled the piece
My Beautiful Garden.

“It's so damned easy to forget the feelings that are still inside them,” Christensen said. “All those memories. All that emotion. That's the beauty of what you do, Maura. The art's like a taproot into all that stuff. You give them a way to express some really profound stuff that their brain just won't let them understand. It gives them a voice.”

Pearson looked away, typically uncomfortable with his compliment.

“Assume you heard about Floss Underhill,” he said, looking for a place to sit. He settled finally on the arm of a chair stacked with boxes of modeling clay.

“Poor thing,” Pearson said, “but she's a tough old bird. I'd be surprised if she's out a full week. There's a card going around. You should sign it.”

“Where is it?”

“I'll have it for the class to sign later. Do it then.”

Christensen eyed the gerbil, whose recovery seemed complete and instantaneous. How high were the sides of that aquarium? Could gerbils jump?

“Actually, I stopped to say hello to her at Mount Mercy on my way here this morning,” he said. “You'll be happy to know she was painting when I got there.”

“Phillip came through, then.”

“Phillip?”

“Doctor friend. I asked him to take her some watercolors, just in case she had something to say. So she got them?”

“Well,” he said, “she
had
them.”

Pearson peered over the top of her glasses.

Christensen shrugged. “Her husband didn't want her to have any paints. Pretty strange scene, really. The guv—ex-guv I should say, not the future guv—got pretty huffy about it.”

“So what, then? He took the paints away?”

He nodded. “He asked me to get rid of them. Thought I was a hospital staffer. Are there problems there I'm not aware of?”

Pearson shook her head. “They pulled her out of the class a couple days ago. With the weather turning nicer, Vincent said he wanted her spending more time in the rehab garden. But they've really supported the program. He's probably just upset about everything. Any idea what she was painting?”

“She was a big equestrienne, right? I mean, years ago.”

Pearson nodded.

“There was a horse, like Pegasus, gray with wings. Looked like it had a dark marking on its nose, shaped like a mushroom. The background was one of those weird landscapes they're always doing. A sun with squiggles or letters or something on it. Nothing too decipherable.”

“It's always horses with Floss,” Pearson said. She picked up one of the calendars and flipped to April, then set it in front of him. “A variation on the theme.”

Christensen read the title and credit:
Some Crazy Story about Gray,
by Florence.

“It's not exactly the same, but almost,” he said. “Same horse. I think Gray is its name. Same sun thing. Florence is Floss's given name?”

“Nobody calls her that, but yeah.” Pearson pulled the calendar back and studied the picture again. “She's done maybe half a dozen like that. She rode jumpers when she was younger. Probably explains the wings.”

“Plausible,” he said. “She said ‘Gray could fly' when she talked about the one at Mount Mercy.”

“The sun thing looks almost like a little rebus puzzle, doesn't it? With the interlocking letters, the M and the R?”

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.