“In all honesty, Bec, I’m not sure we can do anything other than watch our backs.”
“My back, you mean.”
“Your back, yes. It’s not like we can go to the police with our concerns. You never reported anything to them. They would just think you’re some crazy lady trying to get attention.”
He was right. I never reported a thing. Why would the police care about it thirty years after the fact? Especially when I had no real proof that Whalen had approached me in the past few days. No real proof that is, other than in my dreams, my imagination.
“I find it hard to believe that after spending thirty years in a max security joint like Green Haven, Whalen would risk his parole by harassing you, or anybody else for that matter.”
“Do you really believe that, Michael?”
He cocked his head, squinted his eyes.
“It feels good to believe it,” he sighed.
My stomach was cramping up again.
Michael shook his head.
“Franny’s paintings,” he said after a time. “The dream paintings.” He was looking not at me but at the opposite wall.
“Yeah,” I said. “Where you going with this?”
“In my opinion something or someone other than Whalen has you spooked.”
“Franny,” I correctly deduced.
Nodding, Michael exclaimed, “Humans have five senses: hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell. Franny has already painted you a piece he calls ‘See’ and another he calls ‘Listen.’ It’s not unreasonable to assume that over the course of the next three days he’s going to gift you three more paintings.”
I caught my reflection in the body-length dressing mirror that stood on the opposite side of the room. Even to me my face looked pale, my eyes painted with worry.
Three more days; three more paintings.
One thing was for certain, if the paintings were Franny’s idea of a joke, it wasn’t very funny. But this was no joke because although Franny possessed a keen sense of humor, I felt that he was incapable of doing anything cruel to anyone or anything. Which in the end meant one thing and one thing only.
“My hunch was correct,” I said. “Franny is trying to communicate with me through his art.”
“He’s warning you, giving you a heads up.”
“And to be in tune with the five senses is to be aware of everything happening around you. That includes imminent danger, right?”
“That would be the idea.” Shrugging his shoulders; smiling. “Let’s see if he brings you another ten-thousand dollar gift tomorrow.”
Three more days; three more paintings; three more senses; three more warnings.
“You think Franny knows Whalen’s out of jail?”
“You might ask him, or his mother anyway. Or maybe he just senses that Whalen is out of jail.”
“I wasn’t aware that he even knew of Whalen.”
“It’s quite possible he knew about him, considering all three of you lived within a few miles from one another.”
This situation was getting more bizarre and disturbing the more educated I became; the more Michael speculated. I decided not to think about it for a while. If that was at all possible. I simply needed to get away from it.
“Can I make you something to eat, Michael?” I said after a beat.
Michael approached me, reached out to me with his hands, gently set them onto my shoulders. He didn’t have to say a word for me to know what was happening.
“Date?” I surmised.
“Sort of,” he said, as if it were possible to have a sort of date.
“Same love interest I presume?”
“Giving it a second round,” he said. “But I certainly would not call it love. Not by a long shot.” He pursed his lips. “I’ve known real love only once in my life and this is not it.”
I felt my eyebrows rise up at attention at the remark.
Leaving the bedroom, he grabbed his jacket and beret. When he came back in, he said, “Maybe I’d better cancel. I can stay… on the couch.”
I shook my head.
“It’s not nice to cancel out on a girl,” I said. “You just can’t do that.”
He stared down at the beret and the worn black leather jacket gripped in his hands.
“I’ll check in on you later?”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Now that I know where I stand.”
He nodded, shifted his gaze back down to his hands. For a moment, I thought he might start to cry.
He started for the back door. I followed him. When we came to the door, he turned back to me.
“I’m not feeling very good now,” he revealed. “I’ve never seen you so full of worry. I never knew about your past; never knew what you had to hold inside. I look at you, but I don’t know you.”
“Maybe you’ve never really seen me before,” I said trying to work up a grin. “Go now. Don’t keep Cinderella waiting.”
But he just looked at me quizzically as he opened the door.
“Promise me you’ll lock this when I leave.”
As my ex walked off into the darkness of the October evening, I closed the door behind him, dead-bolted it secure. Turning to face my empty apartment, I burst into tears.
Chapter 20
For a change it had been a night without dreams, a night without voices, a night without texts. But then it had also been a night of sleeplessness. Or, when I did manage to sleep at all, I would wake up minutes later with a start, as if to sleep even for a minute was to let my guard down. My mind and my body were speaking to me, telling me I had to start getting to the bottom of the reasons behind Franny’s paintings. It meant that instead of going straight to work, I would go see Franny’s mother, speak to her face to face.
I called Robyn from the car just as I was crossing the Hudson River via the South Troy Bridge. I told her I’d be in sometime later that morning after I took care of some personal business. She told me “No sweat.” That she owed me for all those nights I closed up alone.
“Take the freaking day, Bec,” she insisted.
I told her I wouldn’t know what to freaking do with myself.
Ten minutes later I entered into what Michael would no doubt refer to as ‘Indian Country’. This was the rural farm-scape of Brunswick Hills and beyond that, the foothills that eventually turned into the blue mountains of Massachusetts. I cruised U.S. Rural Route 2 that paralleled the winding path of the Postenkill, a stream as wide and deep in parts as a river. It always ran fast and frothy white in early October from the September rains that soaked the region. Trooper Dan taught us to fish for trout in the stream back when we were twin pups. While I never caught much of anything (the only thing I hated more than touching a live fish was a worm), Molly never made it home without a fish or two in her creel (she loved the feel of live fish and worms). Thinking back on it, her fishing prowess made my Dad proud, especially in light of my, ah, girlish apprehension. For years I’ve sometimes wondered if Molly might have been the boy Dad never had.
After a while I made it through the small town of Postenkill with its two or three antique shops, general store and one-bay firehouse. From there I continued along Route 2 until I came to Garfield Road where I hooked a sharp right at the Civil War cemetery.
It had been a long time since I’d made a trek back to this country and I felt the years piling up in my stomach like so many bricks. Ten bricks to be exact-one for every year I’d been away. Ten years that coincided with Molly’s death. It’s not that I made a conscious decision never to return. It’s just that there was nothing left for me here. Nothing other than the shell of a house that had been handed down to me by my parents upon their deaths along with the land that went with it, including a major chunk of Mount Desolation.
I hadn’t been entirely neglectful.
I paid the taxes on the property, even paid a local carpenter to keep the house up and to mow the field grass. But since Molly passed on, I hadn’t been able to get myself to return to the old homestead, as
if some invisible force-field was holding me back-the never too distant memory of a monster who once lurked inside the deep woods. Not even Michael, my former husband, had laid eyes on the place.
So why then, after all this time, had I come back to the Brunswick Hills?
Frances Scaramuzzi and his mother had been my neighbors; which in this unspoiled country meant that our respective spreads were located a good three miles from one another. Out of sight but not out of mind.
The sun was shining bright as I pulled into the driveway of Franny’s two-story white clapboard farmhouse. I cut the engine on the Cabriolet, got out. Immediately I was struck by the smell of the land, of the century old trees that surrounded me, their leaves golden and shedding in the fall breeze.
Just like my parents’ place, the Scaramuzzi farm no longer supported any livestock or animals. But the barn and the fields beyond it were still there. The fields of tall grass seemed to go on forever until they touched the foothills just a mile eastward.
Walking over the gravel drive I made my way up onto the wood porch, reached my hand out for the doorbell. But before I could press it, I heard a car pulling up behind me onto the gravel drive.
Caroline. Franny’s mom.
She drove a blue Chevy pickup that had to be ten years older than me and that still looked to be in tip-top shape. Stenciled on both the driver and passenger side doors were the words ‘Scaramuzzi Farms’ on behalf of the vegetable-slash-art stand that Mrs. Scaramuzzi used to set up on the front lawn from spring to late fall. The art part of the enterprise came about when Franny started selling his original oil paintings alongside the ears of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers and summer squash, plus homemade apple and blueberry pies.
Now that he could regularly command five figures or more for his work, Franny no longer had to hawk it out of a three-sided shack on the front lawn. It also meant his mother no longer had to make ends meet by selling homegrown vegetables and baked goods.
Planting a smile, albeit a nervous one, on my face, I watched the small but still athletic woman exit the truck, slam the door closed with a vigor that betrayed her seventy-plus years. As she made her way up the drive she began to take more shape and I was able to make out her smiling, smooth face, her brown eyes and friendly mouth.
She was wearing a red bandanna over long but thick salt and pepper hair. In each of her earlobes she sported dangling silver earrings. She wore an eggshell-colored turtleneck over a pair of well worn Levis and for shoes, a pair of green Crocs over gray wool socks.
She stopped upon reaching the porch steps.
“Something’s wrong with this scenario young lady,” she smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be critiquing my Francis right about now?”
I laughed because, well, yes I was supposed to be critiquing him. In theory anyway.
“Come on, Mrs. S,” I said, “you know as well as I do that Franny critiques us.”
Laughing, she turned away, as if the comment made her blush, even though it had been directed at her son.
“’Sides,” I said, “Robyn has been begging me to get some one on one face-time with our most gifted artist-in-residence.”
“Don’t forget famous,” Mrs. S said.
I raised my eyebrows while she made the stairs, walked on past me, and opened the unlocked door.
“Just yesterday,” she went on speaking as we entered the house, “I got a call from New York. An associate producer from MSNBC, grew up in this area.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, moving into the semi-dark, musty smelling living room.
“I kid you not. Woman by the name of…” She peered upwards as if her memory escaped her. And apparently it had. “Oh I forget her name. But she had a nice voice and she was all excited about Franny, his art. She’s putting together a primetime special report on autistic savants. Musical savants, mathematical, literary. Franny would cover the visual arts aspect.”
She headed through the living room and into the kitchen at the end of it. When I entered behind her, I watched her take a tea kettle from off the gas stove and begin filling it with water from the tap.
“So don’t leave me in the dark, Mrs. S. Did you accept?”
“I haven’t called back,” she admitted solemnly. “To be honest, I have not made up my mind about it.”
“It could mean fame and fortune for Franny,” I said, stating the obvious. “A spot on MSNBC in the primetime would catapult him into the limelight.”
“Which is exactly what worries me, Rebecca.” She sighed as she joined me at the large harvest table. “It’s just that Franny has never been beyond the farm. Oh, he goes to Albany of course. To the Albany Art Center. But I just can’t imagine how he might handle going on national television in New York City. I…” She let the thought trail off while shaking her head, staring down at the table-top.
Her gestures, her ambivalence: they made me wonder who was more scared of Franny’s moving on. This lovely widow or Franny himself.
There was a long pause. Long enough for it to become a little uncomfortable. When the tea kettle whistle blew, it nearly frightened me out of my chair. Mrs. Scaramuzzi got up.
“Enough television talk,” she ordered. “Obviously you’ve made a prodigal return to your homeland to meet with me up close and personal. So let’s get to it.”
Grabbing hold of the tea kettle she set it onto an unlit burner.
“But before we get started,” she went on, “I’d like it if you’d call me, Caroline. Mrs. Scaramuzzi was my husband’s mother.”
I laughed.
“Caroline,” I said, trying it on for size. “Caroline is fine.”
I got up from the table to help her with the tea. While Caroline set out mugs with good old fashioned Salada tea bags in them, I picked up the kettle and began pouring in the hot water.
“Go sit, Caroline,” I insisted. “I’ll get this.”
“A guest in my own home,” she said, sitting back down at the table. “Feels kind of sweet.”
“How do you take your tea?” I asked, while replacing the kettle onto the stove.
“Naked,” she said. “Like my men.”
The ice broken, we both had a good laugh while I carried the mugs back over to the table.
Chapter 21
The spacious kitchen was something out of Town amp; Country Magazine . The farmhouse that contained it had to be over a century old. Most of the stainless steel appliances were new, no doubt the spoils of Franny’s hard work and talent. You couldn’t look at a single wall and not spot at least a reminder of the success the autistic savant had become in the many years I’d known of him, and the seven years I’d truly come to know him.
Even inside the kitchen, the walls and shelves were ripe with framed sketches, limited prints, original canvases of every type, style and theme. From crazy eye-dancing abstracts to serene landscapes, to black-and-white self-portraits to pencil sketch studies of his mother engaged in various tasks like cooking, clothes pinning laundry on the outside line, or working in the vegetable garden.
The one image that provoked skin-deep chills was a simple drawing of Caroline. She was standing alone at the edge of the gravel drive, long hair blowing back across her face by a storm-driven wind produced by blue-black clouds visible on the horizon. It was a scene that evoked Wyeth, but that hit me deep inside since its true-life subject was sitting directly in front of me.
We sat with our steaming mugs of tea.
I attempted to sip mine. But it was still too hot.
Caroline smiled graciously.
“So what’s on your mind, young lady?”
I guess when you’ve gone beyond 70 in years lived, 42 seems almost adolescent.
“Are you aware that over the past two days Franny’s given me two of his paintings?”
I looked for a sign of surprise on her face. An upturned brow, a flushing of the cheeks. I got neither as she calmly sipped her tea.
“I’m aware that Franny has been working feveris
hly. I see that he brings his paintings along with him to the art center. But I didn’t know he was painting them for you, Rebecca.” She peered down at her tea, then up at me again. “Why do you think he would do something like that?”
“That’s what I came here to find out. So far this week he’s been at the studio everyday, all day. Today will make the third day in a row. A record for him. And from what you’re telling me, he has another new painting with him today.”
My stomach did a little flip when I said it. I couldn’t imagine what kind of image I would have to confront when I made my return to the studio later that morning. What word might I see buried inside it? Which one of the three out of five senses left?
“If Francis wants to give you his paintings,” Caroline said after a time, “then that’s his business. I have no problem with it.”
“Oh don’t get me wrong, I love Franny and I’m honored to be gifted his work. To be frank, I’ve learned from his style.”
Caroline shook her head, pursed her lips.
“Then what’s the problem?”
I took another sip of my still too hot tea.
“Has Franny been acting a little strange lately?” I nervously asked.
Caroline broke out in laughter.
“He’s autistic, Rebecca.” She giggled. “He’s always acting strangely.”
I was more than a little taken aback at her response. And I think she knew it. Because she started laughing even harder, from deep inside the raspy lungs of a former smoker.
“It’s a joke,” she said, eyes wide. “Get it? Strange? Autistic? When you stand in my shoes, young lady, you don’t expect normalcy from a boy like Francis. You expect something new and weird and quite wonderful with each new day.”
I couldn’t help but take notice of her referring to a man pushing fifty as a boy. But then Franny was a boy. He would never grow old despite his body.
“Listen Rebecca,” she said, “I can tell something’s got you upset, so perhaps I should explain a little about Francis’s condition. It might shed some light, help you to understand why he does the things he does-why he paints the way he does.”
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