“Quiet hands.” Sophie again restrained Ray-Ray’s flapping and put his hands on the table in front of him. “Quiet hands, Ray-Ray.”
He kept them still with obvious effort.
Zachary studied Ray-Ray’s hand positions. One hand was cradled in the other, where Sophie had put them. Not clasped or side-by-side, but one supporting the other. Both were curved slightly, but Zachary could see the vague semblance of the sign Tirza had been making. There was no chopping gesture, he just held them in position as he had been told to, but Zachary could still see the subtle sign Ray-Ray was making.
Stop.
Sophie ran him through the exercises relentlessly. As Zachary had been told, Ray-Ray and the other children were in many hours of therapy every day. It was a full-time job for them. Sophie made her demands and Ray-Ray did the best he could to give her the proper responses, to smile, to frown, to repeat words and gestures that were mostly meaningless to him. He could do nothing to protest this treatment. It was where the professionals wanted him to be. Where his mother wanted him to be.
All he could do was hold that one sign in his hands, his therapist oblivious to the silent plea.
Stop.
Zachary asked whether he could speak to Tirza when she got back from her therapy session. The woman at the nursing station in her unit considered the request.
“You can’t talk to her in her room without supervision. You can talk to her in one of the meeting rooms, where you can be observed and surveillance cameras record everything.”
“Sure, that would be fine,” Zachary agreed. He would even accede to direct supervision. If Tirza were his daughter, he wouldn’t have wanted any men talking to her alone.
Tirza was obviously anxious when they put her in the meeting room where Zachary waited for her. She looked around, ducking her head in and out of the open door, rocking and fluttering her fingers in front of her eyes.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong, Tirza?” Zachary asked. “What are you afraid of?”
Tirza looked out the door again. Despite the fact that he was a stranger to her, a man she hadn’t worked with before, presumably like the men she had been victimized by, she didn’t seem worried by him, but by the people who were outside the meeting room in her unit. People she should have been familiar and comfortable with.
Tirza paced around the small meeting room. Zachary could relate to her need to keep moving.
“Quentin,” Tirza said abruptly.
Zachary looked at her. “Quentin? Did you know Quentin, Tirza?”
They were housed in the same unit. The residents didn’t seem to socialize with each other much—it wasn’t in their nature, according to Dr. Abato—but that didn’t mean that Quentin and Tirza didn’t know each other. If Quentin was friends with Ray-Ray because they had therapy sessions one after the other, he might certainly have known Tirza as well.
Tirza made the hooked-together fingers that Zachary recognized as the sign for friend.
“Quentin was your friend?”
Tirza made some huffing noises, nodding her head. She ran light fingers over her cornrows. Zachary did his best to read her body language, every movement that might have meaning.
“Do you know what happened to Quentin?”
Tirza voiced several loud cries. She put her fingers up to her eyes, her mouth open and her features pointing down in an anguished frown. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, and she made the friend sign again, fingers tightly locked to each other.
“I’m sorry your friend died,” Zachary said. “You must be really sad about that, and then everything that has happened to you… that’s pretty scary.”
Scary was a word that he would use in talking to a six-year-old. Zachary mentally scolded himself for talking to her like a child instead of a young woman who was nearly an adult.
“Do you know why Quentin died, Tirza?”
She moaned and approached Zachary. She took him by the arm and tugged, obviously expecting him to go with her. Zachary followed, though he was not sure about going anywhere with Tirza. She was vulnerable, and he didn’t want anyone thinking that he was taking advantage.
Tirza led him past the nursing station, where the woman who had put him into the meeting room watched them stroll down the hallway together, her eyebrow raised. It was, Zachary hoped, obvious to any onlooker that it was Tirza leading him, and not the other way around.
Tirza led him to one of the individual cells. Zachary didn’t think it was her room. That had been at the other end of the loop. The one that Tirza had taken him to was empty. No personal effects. Not that any of the rooms had had very much in them by way of personal touches.
But Zachary had an idea that it was Quentin’s room. He had approached it from the other direction when he had been there with Dr. Abato. Tirza looked around the room, flapping her hands.
“This was Quentin’s room, wasn’t it?”
She made a sound Zachary took as acknowledgment.
“Do you know how Quentin died?”
She moaned and flapped. Zachary was frustrated by not being able to communicate with her. So close to having some answers, and so far away. Would she be able to tell him if her mother were there to help interpret her sounds and gestures? Would she be able to give a detailed account if she were allowed her computer at Summit, as she had given her mother following her kidnapping? Had they intentionally deprived her of her voice? Dr. Abato said it was to force residents to use verbal communication, but what if it were the opposite? To deny them any communication at all? By keeping them from using their preferred methods of communication, they kept residents from talking about what went on at Summit. From describing what was happening to them during therapy or after lights out.
But there were still students who had good speech at Summit. Students like Trina, the girl with the malfunctioning ESD. She had been able to tell him about the procedures at Summit, about what she feared. It didn’t make any difference; still, nobody listened to her or to Zachary about it. Was there a tipping point? A point at which if there were enough voices, the public and the courts would start to listen? Did Summit keep it below that tipping point by silencing as many voices as they could?
“Quentin was your friend,” Zachary said, starting again at the beginning, hoping he could gain some momentum.
Tirza touched Zachary’s arm.
“And he died in this room. After Damien took you away from the school.”
She flapped hard and stood on tip-toe.
“Did Damien hurt Quentin?”
She looked at him sideways, one hand again resting on his arm. Was that yes? Did she even understand he was trying to ask her a question?
“Is Damien here, Tirza?”
Tirza looked at the open doorway.
Was the man who had taken her away out there? Was it someone employed by Summit? Maybe a therapist that worked at both the school and Summit? Or who had followed Tirza to school? Had he gone there to snatch her, since there were too many cameras or witnesses at Summit?
He decided to approach it from the opposite direction. “Was Quentin sad? Did he kill himself?”
Tirza started to scratch herself. Not just the light scratching of itchy or dry skin, but digging her nails in as she raked them down her arms, as if she intended to peel layers of skin right off. Zachary reacted instinctively, grabbing her hands and trying to hold them still.
“No, no Tirza. Don’t do that. It’s okay. It’s alright. Please, calm down.”
She struggled to free herself. Zachary was not a big man. Stunted by early malnutrition and meds, never eating enough to put himself into a healthy weight category. He was taller than she was, but only just, and her struggles were frantic and powerful. He’d been warned that the autistic residents could be strong and not deterred by pain in the same way as he was. Tirza was like a writhing snake in his grasp. He was afraid of hurting her, but she didn’t protect herself or hold back from hurting him. Zachary let go, worried that trying to control her would on
ly escalate her behavior. He went to the doorway to call for help.
“Can I get someone here? Please?”
One of the supervisors glided down the hall toward him, unhurried. She wasn’t an old woman, but older than all of the fresh-faced aides and therapists, her face lined with experience. She took in the situation in a glance.
“And this one without an ESD,” she muttered.
“Can you do something?”
“Tirza!” The woman moved into the room, crowded with three people in it. “Tirza, you stop!” She clapped her hands, the noise surprisingly loud in the small room, echoing off the walls. She grabbed Tirza’s hands and pulled them away from each other. “Stop!” She let go of one and slapped Tirza on the thigh, not as loud as the clap, but still hard enough to make Zachary wince. “Stop. Show me your hands. Show me quiet hands!”
Tirza was bullied into folding her hands together, compliant, her self-injurious scratching stilled. Impressive, but it also made Zachary squirm.
“What is she doing in here?” the woman asked. “This isn’t her room. And who are you?”
“Zachary Goldman. I’m investigating Quentin Thatcher’s death.”
“Oh, yes. So I’ve heard.” Her lips pressed together. “So you know this was Quentin’s room. Tirza doesn’t belong in here.”
“Tirza said she and Quentin were friends.”
“Yes, I imagine she did.”
“Did they spend a lot of time together? Did they talk to each other?”
“They were closer to each other the last few weeks. Quentin acting possessive about her. Hormones; they can cause strange behavior in these kids.”
“They weren’t… uh, boyfriend/girlfriend…?”
“Certainly not. He might have been sweet on her, but there was no hanky-panky going on here.”
Zachary laughed, embarrassed. Hanky-panky? At least she had answered his question.
“But Tirza… I thought she wasn’t in residential until after her kidnapping. How did they know each other?”
“She went home most nights. But she has a room here, because sometimes her mom couldn’t pick her up right after therapy, or she wasn’t able to watch her in the evening and needed Tirza to be somewhere supervised for the night. She paid full residential rates, even though Tirza was not here most nights.”
Zachary nodded. “Ah. I see. So she saw Quentin when they were both done with therapy, if she came back here to wait for her mother or stayed overnight.”
“Yes.” The woman cast a glance at Tirza, standing between them, looking down at Zachary’s feet. Her hands were still in the proper position. But she had bloody scratches down her arms. “I’d better have someone clean her up. You’ll be going, then?”
Chapter Twenty-One
T
he woman who had helped get Tirza under control took her out to the nursing station to get someone to escort her to the medical offices. Zachary saw Clarissa, the aide who had helped Quentin out, talking to another staffer, getting some child’s schedule amended. She saw Zachary and Tirza come out of Quentin’s room. At first, she frowned, looking confused. She saw Tirza’s injured arms and her face softened into an expression of compassion.
Clarissa finished getting the schedule sorted out and then approached Zachary. She introduced herself as if they had never met before, a charade that Zachary assumed was intended for the woman helping Tirza.
“Is there anything I can help with?” she offered, looking back and forth between them.
“Well, if you don’t have anywhere you need to be in the next few minutes, you could take Tirza to medical.”
Clarissa looked at Tirza’s face, but didn’t get any eye contact. “Sure, of course,” she agreed pleasantly. “I can help Tirza.”
She put her hand under Tirza’s elbow to escort her down the hall. Tirza moaned and pulled away from her, taking Zachary’s arm in both of her hands.
“Oh, looks like Tirza has a little crush on you,” Clarissa laughed. “Why don’t you come along so that she’ll cooperate? It’s so much more complicated dealing with the residents without ESDs.”
Zachary suspected that Clarissa wanted to talk to him without the risk of the other staff overhearing, so he agreed readily. Not that he would have refused anyway; he would much rather walk to the medical wing with Tirza than have to watch her being encouraged to comply.
“Sure. Lead the way. Come on Tirza, I’ll walk with you. You probably know the way all by yourself, don’t you?”
Clarissa took a couple of steps. Zachary gave Tirza a little tug on the arm. Tirza resisted at first, but she didn’t fight him like she had when he’d tried to stop her from scratching herself. It was just an initial balk, then she matched pace with him.
“Find out anything new?” Clarissa asked in a lowered voice.
“I don’t know… not really. A lot of dead ends, mostly. I found out that Tirza and Quentin were friends. But Tirza can’t tell me anything about his death.”
“No. She wouldn’t have been here when it happened. I don’t know if she has any idea what happened to him. Just that he stopped coming one day.”
Zachary looked at Tirza’s face, blank, apparently oblivious to their conversation. But he’d learned from the others that he couldn’t assume that the appearance of not attending meant anything. She could be listening to every word.
“I think she knows more than that. She took me to his room. She got upset when I was talking about him… I think she wants to tell me something, but I don’t know what it is.” He shrugged. “Maybe just that she misses him.”
“Probably. I don’t think there’s anything else she would be able to tell you. It’s too bad she’s regressed so much after the… runaway incident. She really was doing remarkably well. She could carry on a conversation… a little awkward, maybe, some starts and stops, but she was far more verbal than she is now.”
“Runaway?” Zachary repeated. “Do you think she ran away, rather than being kidnapped?”
Clarissa gave a short laugh and shook her head. “I know her mom would like to believe that she was kidnapped by some mysterious person. But that’s just wishful thinking. She doesn’t want to admit that Tirza ran away, then got in deeper than she anticipated. Got scared and discovered that she didn’t have the skills to make it on her own after all. She was back within forty-eight hours. I don’t think any kidnapper would have just let her go. With the danger that she could identify them…?” She flashed him a smile.
“Maybe he didn’t think she could. Maybe he figured she wasn’t any danger to him.”
“Kidnappers don’t just let kids go.”
“They do if there is too much heat. If they think there are too many people looking for them. If they let her go, everything quiets down and goes back to normal. If they… do something more permanent, people are outraged. They don’t give up on finding out what happened to her.”
Clarissa shook her head doubtfully. “There may be a few cases where that has happened… but I doubt if it happens very often.”
“Maybe she escaped from wherever they were holding her.”
“Or maybe she wasn’t being held anywhere, by anyone, and just wandered aimlessly until someone found her and called the police. Don’t read too much into it. The mother… believes what she wants to believe. She gives the police a big song and dance with all of these details she says she got from Tirza. But look at her,” Clarissa made a little motion to the girl. “Have you been able to get more than a word or two out of her? She didn’t tell her mother all of those details. Her mother is making it up, trying to convince herself that Tirza wasn’t a runaway.”
Tirza’s grip was tightening on Zachary’s arm. He looked at her but couldn’t see any change in her expression. He patted her hand briefly, hoping to comfort her.
“Here we are,” Clarissa said with a smile.
They walked into the medical wing and a doctor or nurse in a lab coat approached. An older man, considerably taller than Zachary, with a good build.<
br />
“Tirza has some scratches that require treatment,” Clarissa told him.
He looked at Clarissa’s arms and nodded. “We’ll get those cleaned up. Come over here and sit down, Tirza.”
Tirza didn’t respond immediately, but Zachary guided her over to a chair and she sat down. Zachary looked around as the doctor treated Tirza, taking the opportunity to see part of the institution that he hadn’t had access to previously. He couldn’t see a lot; most of the medical wing appeared to be a network of examination or treatment rooms behind the doctor.
“Were you here Monday when a girl was brought in for burns from a malfunctioning ESD?” Zachary asked.
“Trina?” asked the doctor. “Yes, I was here.”
“Does that happen very often?”
“There are occasional malfunctions. But no, I wouldn’t say often.”
“What about other burns from the ESDs being used too much.”
The doctor looked up at Zachary and raised his brows. “No, of course not.”
“No burns, no marks from the shocks?”
“Skin shocks are entirely safe.”
Zachary switched direction. “Were you on duty when Quentin’s body was discovered? Were you called to attend at the scene?”
The doctor looked back down at Tirza’s scratches, cleaning them with antiseptic wipes. Tirza didn’t flinch at the sting. She just sat there, staring up and to the right.
The doctor sighed. “I was on duty when Quentin’s body was discovered, but I stayed here while Dr. Weiler went to attend to the scene.”
“What did he tell you about it?”
“If you’re the private detective I keep hearing about, then you’ve already seen the police and coroner’s report. You know more than we do. All Dr. Weiler did was go have a look, confirm that there was nothing that could be done for Quentin, and call the police.”
“Was the blanket wrapped around his neck when Dr. Weiler got there? Or did he remove it?”
“He wouldn’t have removed it. He wouldn’t compromise the scene like that. The unit supervisor had already removed the blanket and altered the scene.”
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