Shadow Image by Martin J Smith

Taylor walked down the aisle of his classroom, he seemed almost calm. He rearranged the clump of red hair on top of his head and took an empty seat at a cluster of four small desks. He folded his hands on the desktop and seemed to wait patiently for class to begin. Christensen didn’t fully appreciate the depth of his anxiety until, trying to get a good-bye hug, he had to pry the boy’s locked fingers apart.
    â€œI’ll be okay,” Taylor said. His lower lip trembled. “I’ve got rocks.”
    â€œOf 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.
    â€œDo you think any of the teachers or grown-ups here would let you get hurt?”
    Taylor shook his head.
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œKennedy & 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.
    â€œIt’s Jim, Liis. Brenna around?”
    â€œHey,” she said, dropping her professional voice. “How’d day one go for the little skipper?”
    â€œI think he’s okay. Little rough and I just wanted to fill Brenna in. Is she swamped?”
    â€œWho knows?” she said. “I just screen her calls, remember? Haven’t seen her since she came in.”
    â€œAre
you
busy?”
    â€œLike 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