Shadow Image by Martin J Smith Page A

got to the parking-lot exit, and then only because the nervous attendant put his hands in the air.

Chapter 11
    The Harmony Brain Research Center was an unappreciated marvel of futuristic architecture hidden like some roosting alien craft in the hills of O’Hara township, just northeast of the city. In miles, it wasn’t far from their new house in Shadyside, but it was, as Pittsburgh natives said, “across the river.” In this case, it was just on the north side of the Allegheny River, removed from the cities and townships crowded into the irregular wedge of land between the Allegheny to the north and the Monongahela River to the south. But in parochial Pittsburgh, the phrase “across the river” was much more than a geographic truism. It suggested some far-off and exotic destination, someplace other than where you belonged.
    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.
    â€œGot 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.
    â€œTake 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.
    â€œ
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