Shadow Image Read Free Page B

desk’s bottom left drawer. He sealed the box of photographs and uncapped the marker, writing MELISSA/ANNIE MISC on the side before taking it to the attic.

Chapter 3
    Fox Chapel was changing. Two generations ago, it was the kind of place where Brenna’s mother had always imagined herself living, a leafy, private oasis that Pittsburgh’s landed gentry called home. Before developers carved it up into buildable lots and mansions sprouted like mushrooms, it sheltered some of western Pennsylvania’s grandest estates. She remembered her mother scouring each monthly issue of
Architectural Digest
for spreads or back-of-the-book ads featuring one of the original Fox Chapel homes. The magazine didn’t come here to photograph faux rustic ranch houses or angular contemporaries. It came for the heavy woods and rich tapestries and unapologetic excess of people who got their money the really old-fashioned way—through inheritance.
    She steered into the cool embrace of two-lane Fox Chapel Road, which bisected the community like an oaken green tunnel. The pavement was still dry despite the drizzling rain. From the main road, small side lanes led past some of the world’s most carefully barbered real estate. Her mother had deserved this. Maybe it was just a surviving daughter’s guilt; maybe it was the inevitable result of their bond at the end after three cruel years of finally getting to know each other. But if there was a God who kept track of dignified, stoic suffering—and God knows Claire Kennedy suffered as the cancer devoured her—surely her mother would have in the afterlife one of the original Fox Chapel estates that had eluded her in life. Brenna scanned the newer Tudor fantasies flashing past the Legend’s side windows until the ringing cell phone punctured the moment.
    â€œMe again,” her partner boomed. Road noise was never a problem with Terry Flaherty. “I did an online search and made a call to get more background. You want it now?”
    Brenna glanced at her watch. “I’m probably three minutes away, so give me the short version. I also just got off the phone with Ernie Cohnfelder at the
Press.
He owes me some favors, so he read me headlines from the clip file and said he’d photocopy everything they had in the paper’s library. The library finally went electronic three years ago, so everything later is on a database. But it’s a start.”
    â€œAnything useful?”
    â€œAt this stage everything’s useful, Terry. The more recent stuff was from the society pages, mostly fundraising stuff for various charities. Through the late eighties it was the airport and Mount Mercy Hospital projects. In the early eighties it was Downtown redevelopment stuff. Everything before that is thirty-year-old coverage out of Harrisburg, and there’s a ton of that, most of it positive, Ernie said. He said Vincent is tight with the whole Koberlein family, especially the cranky one who first bought the paper. Leo, I think.”
    Almost too late, Brenna spotted the sign for Silver Spur Road. She braked hard and turned the wheel, barely missing the abutment of an old stone bridge. As if she needed more adrenaline.
    â€œAnything on Ford in what you’ve got, Ter?”
    â€œEverything on Ford. The guy’s got a publicity machine like you wouldn’t believe, and I wasn’t about to wade into that. Mostly just election-year crap. Some personal stuff.”
    â€œI’d almost forgot he lost a son, a three-year-old. Ernie said there was a horseback-riding accident about three years ago. The story’s in the database, not the clips, but he remembered it.”
    â€œJesus, Brenna, how could you forget? It’s the whole subtext of that goofy Underhill campaign slogan: ‘Tolerant, true, tested and ready.’ ”
    She imagined Flaherty, a wickedly cynical Irishman, rolling his eyes. “That’s how you tell the real pros in