by Robert Pobi
Jake shrugged, his signature move now. “It’s a long shot. Christ, it’s more than a long shot, it’s a winning-the-Powerball-two-weeks-in-a-row kind of shot.”
Frank wrenched the wheel and the truck spun to the right, kicking up water and great gulps of wet lawn. “This kid retarded?”
Jake shook his head. Frank was old school—real old school—and didn’t have the disadvantage of political correctness to shut down his thought process. “No, Frank. She’s autistic. And she’s got a form of savantism.” Jake had a strong understanding of psychology. He read academic papers, sat in on classes at George Washington University under an auditing waiver, and had picked the brains of hundreds of psychiatrists and psychologists over the years. He could have taught a second-year psychology course at college.
“What’s that?”
Jake half resented, half appreciated having his thoughts drawn away from Kay and Jeremy and he decided to thank Frank with dialogue instead of silence. “Don’t you watch TV?”
Frank shook his head and snickered derisively. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“It’s a hypertalent. Half of savants are autistic, the other fifty percent have some form of neural abnormality. They can do things no one can figure out.”
“Example?”
“Eidetic memory is common. Some can add numbers together faster than a computer—a column of three dozen six-digit numbers instantly. Many have a thing with dates. My birthday, for exam—” His chest tightened up and he just stopped. Stopped talking. Stopped thinking. Stopped trying to be part of the world. Because he realized that he actually had no idea what his real birthday was.
He thought about the father who wasn’t his father, strapped into a hospital bed ten miles from here, and about the clues left behind like Brothers Grimm breadcrumbs—clues that so far pointed to a faceless killer: the bloody portrait on the hospital-room wall; the carpet optical illusion; and the eyeless studies climbing out of the walls of the studio. He thought about the mother who hadn’t been his mother, and how she ended her time on the planet in an abandoned lot down the highway, stripped of her skin and robbed of her future. He thought about his uncle Frank, who wasn’t his uncle at all. And he realized he was connected to these people not because he shared their genes but because he shared their tragedy. “—um, you tell certain savants a date—ten years ago or a century and a half—they’ll tell you what weekday it was, what the weather was like, and what time the sun rose. They’re never wrong.”
Frank whistled. “Idiot savants. Read something a long time ago, can’t tell you the date, and certainly don’t know what day of the week it was.”
“They’re called savants now. Idiot is not politically correct. Neither is retard, moron, and anything else that can be misconstrued as derogatory.” Wow, Frank really was old school.
Frank shook his head disgustedly. “Fucking politically correct assholes. They’re changing Huckleberry Finn because of these small-minded people. You know who else did shit like this? The Nazis!” Almost on cue, the headlights caught a BMW X6 half submerged in water and jammed up against a tree, abandoned. “Goddamned Nazi pansy mobile! Buy American!” he hollered, and slapped the wheel of the Humvee. “Where was I? Oh, yeah—everybody’s so goddamned worried about offending the wrong goddamned people all the time. Sorry, the world isn’t fair. Some people will be made fun of. I don’t care if they’re fat or stupid or from Latvia, someone’s going to call them a name. You don’t see me lobbying to stop old-man jokes, do you? Fucking country has gone to shit. Everyone wants to be more equal than the next guy.” Frank was talking loud—not quite yelling, but close—to be heard above the engine and the wind and the rain. “What does this girl do?” he asked.
Jake was grateful that Frank was keeping his mind off the places it wanted to go. Tortured, dark, foul places. “She puts pictures together. I’m hoping that she can see something in the photo stream of—” he paused, weighed the next word—“Jacob’s paintings. I’m probably wasting time I don’t have.”
Frank shook his head. “But he’s already left paintings of this guy.”
Jake thought about the faceless men on the studio walls. The hospital portrait rendered in his own blood. Jacob wanted his son to see those so he would get used to looking. Then the carpet mosaic—a portrait with a blank face constructed of pieces—fragments—like the Chuck Close. Like those canvas puzzle fragments. “He left faceless portraits, Frank. Those were to get me started. The portrait of the killer—if that’s what this is—is for my eyes only. I don’t think he trusted anyone else with this.” It was starting to look like his father had sent him away on purpose. “This is something he wants me to figure out.”
60
Judging by the lighted windows on the block, one in ten residents had opted to stay, probably figuring that if the hurricane got bad, and a storm surge rose up, they’d be safe this far inland. Everyone had been talking about how lucky they were that the storm had made landfall at low tide. Of course, no one thought that they were only nineteen feet above sea level and a good surge would scrub the town from Long Island. Or that the tide was destined to rise again.
Frank pulled the truck into the driveway of a small two-story postwar bungalow that was not dissimilar to Rachael Macready’s. They ran for the door, Frank zipped up in the oilskin jacket, Jake wrapped in one of Hauser’s rain ponchos. Mrs. Mitchell opened the door before they were up the steps and ushered them inside with the standard small talk that a change in weather generates. When they were inside she pulled the screen door shut, then the white-painted main door with the diamond window centered in it.
Jake could see her playing in the living room. Sobel had given Hauser her mother’s name and number and the sheriff had called ahead asking her mother’s permission for Jake to speak to her. Her name was Emily Mitchell. She was twelve.
Jake knew that there was no way to guarantee any sort of result. Maybe she was behind a linguistic wall that he wouldn’t be able to penetrate. Maybe he’d just burn up more time. But he didn’t have much in the way of options and even less in leads.
Jesus, he thought. Listen to me. Grasping at straws. If it hadn’t been so goddamned sad, he’d have laughed at it.
Mrs. Mitchell was bundled in an old cable-knit sweater that had splotches of paint on one arm and a patch on the other. Jake guessed that it was her version of a security blanket. “Mrs. Mitchell, thank you for this.” Jake pulled the hood off of the poncho. “This is important.”
Frank receded into a corner of the small entryway. “M’am,” he said stiffly.
Jake pulled out his badge and held it up. She dismissed it after a cursory glance—it was amazing how many people did that. “I talked to you at Dr. Sobel’s office this morning, I wasn’t sure you’d remember…”
On the table inside the entry were a kerosene lantern, a box of candles, and two flashlights that looked like Cold War relics. Jake wondered if she had tested them or simply pulled them out of whatever junk drawer they had been relegated to. Beside the hurricane essentials was another crappy novel, this one featuring a velvet-clad pirate in the midst of foreplay with a buxom countess whose expression belied lust more than rape.
“I remember you,” she said slowly, and something about the way she spoke told him a lot wasn’t being said. “I never thought you were an FBI agent, though.” She smiled awkwardly.
“I get that a lot.” But not as much as he had since he had come back to Montauk, he realized. “This is Frank.” Jake knew that the woman had to be a little skittery at having two strange men in her house during a hurricane asking her daughter questions as part of a murder investigation—regardless of what Hauser had said over the phone.
“Come in,” she said.
Jake pulled off his boots and Frank sat down on a small bench near the door to undo his old lace-ups. Mrs. Mitchell disappeared into the kitchen and he saw that the layout was identical to Rachael Macready’s house. “I made some coffee,” Mrs. Mitchell offered from the othe
r room.
“That would be great.”
She came back with two steaming mugs just as Frank finished taking off his boots and Jake—the eternal student of human behavior—was surprised how flexible the old man was.
“Mrs. Mitchell—like Sheriff Hauser said on the phone, you don’t have to help me. Your daughter’s not a witness or anything like that. I am not even sure that she can help. I am here because I have nowhere else to go and, to be honest, I’m probably wasting your time as well as my own.” He was able to say it with conviction because it was the truth. “You’ve heard about the people who were killed in Montauk?”
She stiffened, and a little of the coordination seemed to leave her. “Everyone has.”
“I think the same man who killed those people also took my family.” He thought about Kay standing on her tiptoes so she could kiss him, about the way her hair smelled of papaya. And he thought about Jeremy and MoonPies. “My wife and three-year-old son.”
Mrs. Mitchell said, “I’m sorry,” barely above a whisper.
“I think I have an image of him but it’s in pieces.”
She held out the mugs. “Like a puzzle?”
“Yes.”
Frank took a sip of his coffee and said, “You’re an angel.”
She led them into the living room. “She either pays attention or she doesn’t. There are no in-betweens. Yelling doesn’t help. Shaking her doesn’t help. Slapping her doesn’t help. It can be frustrating. If she moves something, or touches something, don’t interfere, even if it’s yours—it makes her mad and you don’t want her to get mad.” She looked Jake over with an expression he hadn’t seen in a long time. “You have things to do, so you best be started.”
The living room was identical to the Macready victim’s, including the placement of the furniture. The only difference was a small bookcase crammed with candy-colored paperbacks with saccharine titles on their spines, denoting more romantic embraces between oversexed people with good hair and trust funds.
Emily was on the floor, putting a puzzle together. She had upended the box on the carpet and had flipped all the pieces over so they were upside down and all she had to work with now was a fragmented cardboard pallet of like shapes. She worked fast, snapping pieces home with the precision of an assembly-line robot. The scene looked like a film played in reverse.
“Emily,” Mrs. Mitchell said softly. “This man wants to show you something. It’s a puzzle. A picture puzzle.”
Emily kept locking the colorless cardboard shapes into place and the puzzle was growing rapidly. If she had heard her mother, Jake had seen no sign of it.
“She does these all the time. Won’t do a puzzle twice. I’ve tried to fool her by putting a puzzle she’s already done into a new box and laying it out upside down for her and she knows instantly. Just slaps it aside.” She brushed the hair out of Emily’s eyes and readjusted a big yellow barrette. “Don’t you, sweetheart.” She leaned over and kissed her daughter on the head. The girl hadn’t reacted to the introduction, the caress, or the kiss. She just kept firing the pieces of the puzzle home with the same blank expression Jake had seen on her face in Sobel’s office that morning. Back when he still had a family.
Mrs. Mitchell nodded at Jake and he put his laptop down on the floor in front of the girl. He opened it up.
The image frozen in the video frame was him, holding up one of his father’s weird little paintings. He looked half asleep in one of those typical poses taken between the ending of one movement and the beginning of another, like an alternative version of himself. Jake hit play on the trackpad and the miniature himself-but-not-himself version put the canvas in his hands down, picked up another. Then put it down and picked up another. And another. Again. And again.
Emily paid no attention to the computer. Her eyes were locked on the puzzle in front of her, her hands mechanically assembling the pieces as if each were invisibly numbered and she was wearing special glasses. Frank watched from a chair near the window, sipping his coffee and observing the girl with focused attention.
A few seconds in, Jake realized that he hadn’t started the film at the beginning. He reached over and hit the rewind button and the picture ratcheted back.
And that’s when Emily froze, a single brown puzzle piece held above its place in the big picture she was assembling.
Jake looked at Mrs. Mitchell. She shrugged.
Emily dropped the puzzle piece. Reached out. Put her finger down on the trackpad, and swung it across the black frame. The video began sliding by at high speed.
“No, Emily, that’s—” and Mrs. Mitchell grabbed his arm as he reached for the child. Jake froze.
The girl was watching the screen with rapt attention as the video sped by at sixty times its recorded speed.
Emily’s eyelids fluttered as the sped-up version of Jake went through the process of holding one painting up after another—in an endless loop. Her eyes didn’t seem to be looking at the screen, but beyond it, and Jake wondered if she was seeing anything in the random shapes that were snapping by too fast for him to catch. Every now and then he would get a glimpse of a canvas, an image that flashed by slowly enough for his brain to register its shape, but by the time he saw it, it was gone.
Emily sat photo-still as she watched the video, her only movement being that slight twitch in her eyelids. The wind and rain bombarded the house and the images of the canvases flicked by in jagged splashes of color against Jake’s almost unmoving form in the frame.
As he watched the girl, Jake forgot the mug of coffee cradled in his hands. Frank drank his absentmindedly and his attention was divided between the girl and the storm tearing through the neighborhood outside. The sea was funneling down the street in a two-foot-thick surge. A big wheeled garbage can somersaulted down the middle of the saltwater river, lid flapping like the jaw of a basking shark straining for plankton.
Emily watched the blue-glow screen, enrapt. By the second minute, she was whistling through her nose, a rhythmic hiss that was almost musical.
The video came to an end and Emily gasped. Without pausing, she drew her finger back across the touchpad, and the video began to crawl backward. The jerky, puppetlike movements that Jake’s alternate self had just danced through began to run in reverse, and it had the same unreal quality to it as Emily’s upside-down puzzle making.
The girl was humming now, a thick, deep-throated buzz like a power transformer heating up. Jake understood how ignorant thirteenth-century peasants could see autistics as being possessed; their world was so distant, so impenetrable, that there was no way to equate it with the nuts and bolts of the average mind. He watched her stare at the video—even if you ignored that almost complete upside down puzzle on the floor—and realized there was no way to label this girl as average. Not even in the abstract. Which said something.
The video ended.
Emily’s eyes stayed locked beyond the screen, her eyes focused on the pixilated universe inside the laptop.
“Did you see anything, Emily?” Jake asked, trying to keep the edge of hope—or was that hysteria?—out of his voice. Without her, they were at a dead end.
Dead.
End.
Skinned.
The little girl stared ahead, unmoving.
“Sweetie?” Mrs. Mitchell asked. “Did you see anything? Was there anything there?”
No movement.
Jake felt the adrenaline of expectation fizzle into the dull ache of despair. He began to stand.
Emily clicked to life.
She stood up and her expression changed from blank disregard to intense concentration. She stomped out of the room and Jake continued to rise but Mrs. Mitchell put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head. “She’s on a mission now. Maybe it has something to do with you, maybe she’s just off to stack the soaps in the bathroom, but she’s going to do something.”
Frank had stopped sipping his coffee and waited for the girl to return, absorbed by the whole weird process. Jake sat stone
-still on the sofa beside Mrs. Mitchell, waiting for—what?
Off in another room there was the sound of a drawer being emptied, of utensils being gone through, then it stopped. More heavy footsteps as the girl moved to another part of the house. A door opened. Closed.
Emily came back into the living room carrying a beach ball under one arm and a pair of scissors and a few felt markers in her hand. She walked over to the stereo, snapped the power on, and pressed play on the CD player. The high-octane music of Johnny Puleo and the Harmonica Rascals came on in full volume.
Mrs. Mitchell leaned over and spoke into Jake’s ear. “She loves that CD. It’s all I’m allowed to play.” Something in her tone suggested that she wasn’t all that fond of the music.
Jake watched the girl, mesmerized.
Emily sat down on the floor and locked the beach ball between her legs. She turned it over like a gemologist looking for a flaw, and when she found whatever she was looking for, stabbed the scissors into the thick rubber surface. The ball sighed, then let its life out in a long protracted fart.
Then the little girl with the expressionless face went to work with her scissors and magic markers.
61
It took Emily Mitchell eleven minutes to finish her scissor surgery on the beach ball as Johnny Puleo and his Harmonica Gang belted out musical mayhem as accompaniment. She worked quickly, without time for reflection, her fingers deftly manipulating the skin of the ball like an Old World tailor going at a pattern. To most people it would have looked like there was no thought or deliberation behind her actions—just raw industry. Jake recognized the innate ability of someone born with a gift and for one of the few times in his life he understood why the people he worked with couldn’t understand how he did something—it was a simple lack of language.
Emily slashed at the rubber with her scissors, turning the wrinkled skin this way and that as she made precise cuts in the material. When she was done, her thick black bangs were plastered to her forehead with sweat and the bright yellow barrette that secured them hung lopsided by her temple.
