Annie Sellers had also been autistic, and well-known for her rages. He had watched, through the narrow observation window of his detention cell, as several members of the Bonnie Brown security staff had tried to bring her under control. She was slim and small, but even three guards together could barely hold onto her to get her into a cell.
Zachary blinked, trying to focus on the case at hand. Annie was in the distant past. He couldn’t do anything for her. No one could.
“How long had Quentin been at Summit?”
“Two years. They turned him around completely. He was not the same child.”
“And you hadn’t noticed any changes in behavior recently. Anything at all.”
Mira bit her lip. She was a strawberry-blonde with a pixie cut. She kind of reminded Zachary of a forty-year-old Julie Andrews. The same shape to her face. But there were fine lines that told the tale of a hard life. There was no sign of a man in the house. Raising three boys as a single mother was not an easy job, especially when one of them had behavioral issues. Summit was a good two hours’ drive from Mira’s house, which meant that she wasn’t visiting him daily.
“He’d been agitated the last few times I went to see him,” Mira said finally. “They said it was probably just hormones, and they were increasing his therapy sessions to address it.”
Zachary scratched a note to himself in his notepad. “What do you mean by agitated?”
“More… anxious… more… behaviors…”
“Describe to me what that looked like. What exactly was he doing?”
“Picking at his skin… flapping… He was voicing and didn’t want to sit down to visit with me. He wanted to walk around to visit, but they said… his therapist said he needed to work on sitting quietly to visit. When they forced him to sit down, he started banging his head or got angry, and they had to take him out and cut our visit short.”
Zachary wrote down each of the behaviors. “He didn’t usually do those things?”
“No, he’d been pretty good at Summit, they could usually suppress them.”
“Is there something that triggers them? When he lived at home, did he do them all the time, or just sometimes?”
Mira ran her fingers through her hair. There were bags under her eyes, camouflaged with makeup. She looked exhausted. She probably wasn’t sleeping.
“Yes, when he was frustrated about something… Before he died, I felt like he wanted to tell me something. But it’s difficult for him. If I’d been able to walk around with him, talk with him some more, I might have been able to figure out what it was. But they said he had to go back to his room.”
“So he could talk…?”
“He was mostly nonverbal. He had a few words. He would take my hand to show me something or ask me to do something for him. But Summit said I needed to force him to use speech.” Mira sighed heavily. “They said that if I ignored his nonverbal communication… he would use words more…”
“Oh.” Zachary nodded. “Then he could, if he had to?”
Mira frowned and tugged at a lock of hair. “Well… it was hard for him. They said that if he could speak some of the time, then he could speak all of the time, if he just worked at it. When he was at home, we would use pictures, gestures, whatever we could.” She wrapped the lock around her finger. “It wasn’t like he was just being willful or lazy when he wouldn’t speak. That’s what Dr. Abato says, but I always thought… Quentin was doing the best he could, and that we should let him use PECS or signs or whatever he needed to communicate…”
“That makes sense,” Zachary agreed, giving her a nod of encouragement.
“They said that I was just babying him. Keeping him from progressing. They said if he was ever going to get out of Summit, maybe on a work program or something, he would have to be able to speak. To get along in the real world and be treated like everyone else, he needed to be able to speak.”
“And it was working? You said that his behavior had improved at Summit. Did that include his speech?”
Mira picked up one of the photos from the table and stared at it, her eyes shiny with tears.
“Scripted speech,” she offered finally. “They were very proud of how well he was doing with scripted speech.”
“What’s that?”
“I would come to visit him, and he would say, ‘Hi, Mom.’ And I would say hi to him. He would ask me how I was doing, and I would tell him and ask him how he was. He would say, ‘fine’ or ‘happy’ or ‘well.’ But that was it… if I asked him what he had been doing, or who his friends were, or anything like that, he would fall apart. He would cry and mope and shake his head at everything I said. Then when it was time go, and I would say goodbye and hug him, he would pick up the script again. He’s say, ‘Bye, Mom. Love you. See you next time.’ They’d taught him how to say hello and goodbye…” Mira’s voice cracked. “But they had just trained him to say the words. He still couldn’t have a conversation. He still didn’t have a script for what came between hello and goodbye.”
“Maybe that would have come.”
“Maybe… but conversations are complicated. I don’t know how many different scripts he could have learned. There are so many different pathways a conversation could have followed.”
Zachary looked at the yellow envelope at Mira’s elbow that she had not yet opened. She was assiduously ignoring it.
“Do you want to take a break?”
Mira looked relieved. She let out her breath. “Yes. How about some tea? Can I get you a drink?”
“Tea would be great,” Zachary agreed. He was not a tea-drinker, but it was a soothing ritual for those who did. It would help Mira to calm down and move forward again.
She got up from the table and moved around the kitchen, putting the kettle on and rattling the cups and saucers and other bits. She opened the kitchen window a crack, letting in a breath of fresh, cool air.
“How long have you known Isabella?” Zachary asked her.
Isabella, The Happy Artist, beloved local TV personality, had connected the two of them. Zachary had been the one to investigate her son Declan’s death, and in spite of the hell she’d been through as a result, she seemed to be grateful to Zachary.
“I’ve known Isabella a long time. Since we were both in school. We weren’t really close friends. But I watched her when she started painting on TV. Quentin loved to watch her show. I knew Isabella had used a private investigator, so I called her…”
Zachary nodded.
Mira set their cups on the table and filled them. Zachary stirred his, not really interested in drinking it.
“I can look at those when I get home,” he said, nodding to the unopened envelope. “There’s no reason you have to look at them again.”
Mira hesitated, considering his offer, then shook her head. “No. I can do this.”
She took a couple of determined gulps of piping hot tea, and picked it up.
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His Hands Were Quiet, Book 2 of Zachary Goldman Mysteries by P.D. Workman is available now!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For as long as P.D. Workman can remember, the blank page has held an incredible allure. After a number of false starts, she finally wrote her first complete novel at the age of twelve. It was full of fantastic ideas. It was the spring board for many stories over the next few years. Then, forty-some novels later, P.D. Workman finally decided to start publishing. Lots more are on the way!
P.D. Workman is a devout wife and a mother of one, born and raised in Alberta, Canada. She is a homeschooler and an Executive Assistant. She has a passion for art and nature, creative cooking for special diets, and running. She loves to read, to listen to audio books, and to share books out loud with her family. She is a technology geek with a love for all kinds of gadgets and tools to make her writing and work easier and more fun. In person, she is far less well-spoken than on the written page and tends to be shy and reserved with all but those closest to her.
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Please visit P.D. Work
man at pdworkman.com to see what else she is working on, to join her mailing list, and to link to her social networks.
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