Dead of Night df-12

by Randy Wayne White

  “Jobe had a tough time learning to talk. He didn’t like being around people, and he was obsessed with orderliness. He… well, here’s an example. He always counted his Cheerios, and separated M amp;M’s by color. His toys had to be arranged exactly the way he wanted. If anything screwed up our daily routine, he’d run around flapping his hands and crying. He wasn’t a brat. Emotionally, he was just incapable of handling disorder.

  “Things in the external world-noise, certain smells, harsh light-it affects autistics differently. Seeing the color orange, for example-neon orange?-it made Jobe wince. Hearing several people speaking at the same time drove him nuts. He loved the sound of trains, though; the rhythm-but only from a certain distance. Amtrak goes through Kissimmee, the perfect distance, and one of the reasons he chose Night’s Landing. That, plus it’s close to Disney World.”

  “He did environmental work for Disney?”

  “Some. But that’s not what I meant. Jobe was uncomfortable in public places. Disney World was the exception. You’ve been, of course.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Really? Well, my brother had a love-hate relationship with the place. Disney is the most orderly place on earth. Every venue is predictable and tidy. No surprises, no clutter. Jobe liked that. On the other hand, he hated what the theme park industry has done to Central Florida.”

  Even so, she said, her brother went often, always by himself.

  “Otherwise, autistics tend to retreat into their own internal world. A place where they can fixate in peace. With Jobe, it was water and numbers. He was hooked on both. Did you try to call him on the phone?”

  “Yeah. His message was strange-leave your four-digit birthday, zeros included. Like it had something to do with astrology. I didn’t expect that.”

  “No, not astrology. My brother couldn’t remember names-they were words. But he never forgot a birth date. That’s how he cataloged people. Phone numbers weren’t good enough. Phone numbers change. That would have been upsetting He even referred to family members by number. Our father was ‘10-7.’ October seventh. Our mother was ‘3-2.’ March second. He called me ‘6-6-4,’ because I was born a few minutes before him on June sixth. See how it works?”

  I started to say, “I thought autism was a form of mental…” but caught myself.

  Frieda patted my knee. “You were about to say ‘retardation.’ It’s okay. Most people think autistics are also retarded. About half are. IQs less than seventy. But some of those are savants. They don’t have the intellectual capacity to use a calculator, but they can look at a pile of toothpicks and tell you the exact number. Remember the film, Rain Man? That’s Jobe.

  “Aspies are like alien beings who aren’t programmed to understand normal social behavior. They can’t decode body language, or sense the feelings of others. Even motives. Especially motives. If I told my brother that I wanted him to rob a bank as part of an experiment, he wouldn’t see it as sinister. It was an experiment, so that would make it okay.”

  She added, “It makes them vulnerable. Early on, they learn to understand that they’re easy targets for cons and practical jokes. So Jobe preferred his own little world. No one was allowed in. Not even me, his twin. I learned never, ever, to push, because it doesn’t pay to piss off an Aspie.”

  In my mind, I could hear the man’s voice crying over and over, I can’t, as if apologizing for being unable to cooperate.

  Frieda said, “When we were kids, the doctors didn’t bother testing him-this was thirty years ago, remember. He didn’t talk, wouldn’t interact, so he was labeled retarded. Autism wasn’t recognized as a neurological disorder until we were middle school age.”’

  But when Jobe was five, she told me, he stopped at a table where his mother was doing a complicated jigsaw puzzle. He studied it for a few minutes, then began to lock pieces together. Never paused, not one misjudgment. In twenty minutes, he’d finished a puzzle that would have taken an adult a week.

  “Our mom was so darn happy; running around, laughing. Her so-called mentally retarded son had just demonstrated that he was actually very gifted.”

  Further testing proved that the boy had an extraordinary gift for mathematics. He could multiply long columns of numbers instantly and factor cube roots in seconds. Jobe’s family was elated.

  The elation, Frieda said, didn’t last.

  Because of his behavioral problems, his tantrums and refusal to interact with people, doctors decided that if the boy wasn’t mentally retarded, then he must be mentally ill. At age six, Jobe was diagnosed as schizophrenic and social-phobic, with a severe anxiety disorder.

  I’d turned my skiff into the island’s channel, slowing for the boat basin ahead, as Frieda added, “It was considered a dangerous combination. Particularly dangerous for me, his sister. I needed to be protected, they said. Jobe had never hurt me, but the potential was there. So doctors insisted that my parents have him institutionalized. He spent the next four years in an asylum, being medicated and treated just like the rest of the crazies.”

  But, when she was eleven, Frieda said, their father read a news item about Asperger’s. He contacted one of the country’s few experts and had his son reevaluated.

  Frieda leaned her shoulder against mine, squeezed my arm tight, pained by guilt. I shifted the engine into neutral and let the boat drift, giving her time to finish.

  “Doc, I don’t know how he endured that place. I was terrified the few times I visited. The screaming, crying, people in straitjackets sitting around muttering. It even smelled of something dark… chaotic. There’s that word again. We’d sent my brother into the thing that terrified him most. Chaos.

  “Jobe told me there was only one place to hide. The asylum had a wading pool. There couldn’t have been more than six inches of water in the thing. But it was deep enough to cover Jobe’s ears if he lay on his back. He spent hours there lying in water, eyes closed. It was his only refuge.”

  “Water,” I said, sharing the significance.

  “Yes. That’s why, last night on the phone, when you described him as having a look of peace on his face, like he’d been set free-it meant so much. My dear, sweet, misunderstood twin had suffered…”

  She couldn’t finish. I turned so she could bury her face in my chest again.

  Inside the late Jobe Applebee’s home, sheriff’s detective Jimmy Heller said, as if finding it difficult to believe, “The deceased was your twin. But you’ve never seen the upstairs?”

  Her eyes dry, and more businesslike now, Frieda replied, “Nope. My brother was a private person. Geniuses can be idiosyncratic.”

  I stood beside her at the stairs, admiring how she normalized her brother’s behavior by elevating it.

  When we’d arrived, there were two detectives, not one. The second detective was the one with the digital camera and recorder. But he’d been called away, leaving us alone with Heller. So this meeting was more informal. Heller was a squat little man, plaid sport jacket, Bronx accent, smelled of cigars. He had the look of racetracks and bookies, not inland Florida. It caused the man’s questions to have a prying quality.

  The question about the upstairs wasn’t out of order. An iron gate had been installed on hinges at the third step, locked with a padlock. We couldn’t find a key, so we’d have to climb over to search the rest of the house.

  The detective pointed at the gate now. “Did you find this unusual? How many people you know got a lock on their stairs?”

  “My brother despised conflict. The downstairs was available to visitors. The upstairs, though, was his. The gate was his way of not having to explain.”

  Heller said, “Mind if we go up, have a look?” Said it in a way that let us know he didn’t need permission.

  Frieda was taking off her suit jacket. “It seems like an intrusion. Even with… even with him gone. But I guess we have to.”

  Yes, we had to.

  We’d spent an hour going through the downstairs. As we did, the detective told us that the boat used by the duo I
’d described as Russian had been found abandoned in the south part of the lake near a road called Pleasant Hill Boulevard.

  It’d been stolen, and was being checked for fingerprints.

  Heller added, “If we didn’t find any useful prints here-after the mess they made?-I doubt if they were dumb enough to leave them on a hot boat.”

  They’d torn the house apart. Files ransacked, cabinets and bookshelves overturned. They’d smashed the hard drive to Applebee’s desktop computer, then poured some kind of syrup into it.

  They’d been looking for something.

  In Jobe’s office, next to the study, Frieda compared the various power cords, kicked around the rubble, before deciding his laptop computer was missing.

  “It was a Mac,” she told us. “A PowerBook. Silver.”

  The Russians hadn’t been carrying a laptop when they ran.

  Heller said, “His computer’s missing. That could be important. I don’t suppose you know how he backed up his information?”

  Disks, minidrives, floppies. There were none among the wreckage.

  “No, he never backed up anything. His memory was so good”-Frieda tapped the side of her head-“he kept everything up here.”

  Heller said, “Which maybe could make it more valuable. Depending-see what I’m saying?” He looked around the room, as if the computer might materialize. “Where you suppose it disappeared to?”

  The woman told him, “Maybe somewhere else in the house.”

  10

  Detective Heller climbed over the stair railing. Frieda began to follow, but I touched my hand to her shoulder.

  I wanted to go next.

  I didn’t know what we’d find, and I wanted to be in a position to shield the lady if something nasty was waiting up there.

  What we found, though, was the opposite of nasty. It was a lesson about the strange little man whom I was beginning to admire.

  Florida was up there. The delicate peninsular oddity that European discoverers called the “Flowered Land.” It was the state as if seen from a space capsule, reproduced as a diorama. Maybe the same intricate, three-dimensional model that Tomlinson had seen at that save-the-planet rally.

  My pal was right. An exceptional work.

  “How beautiful,” Frieda whispered, all three of us staring. “So this is what he did up here all alone.”

  I said, “This kind of precision… meticulous. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Thank God, they didn’t do too much damage.”

  The Russians had been here. Cabinets were opened, contents scattered. Dust streaks showed they’d moved the diorama, maybe to look under it. Not easily done. The thing was huge. Dominated the upstairs.

  Jobe had knocked out all but load-bearing walls. The room was raw-beamed, high-ceilinged, open as a warehouse. It was a big space that echoed. Later, I would pace it: approximately twenty-five yards by twenty yards. The diorama took up most of it.

  He’d painted the floor a vivid, Gulf Stream blue to represent water. Then he’d constructed a scaled-to-size likeness of the state, shore to shore, from the Panhandle to Key West, all in interlocking sections. I paced this, too: seventy feet long, not counting the scimitar chain that represented the Florida Keys. At the middle, near the Lake Okeechobee area, the model was a little over twenty-five feet wide.

  This was a museum-quality replica work built of wood, wire, paint, clay, natural stone, sand, and earth.

  Peninsular Florida is about four hundred miles long and a hundred fifty miles wide. I did the rough calculations in my head. Approximately two inches equaled one mile. It gave Applebee room to include unexpected surface features.

  At first glance, the detail was remarkable. It got better. There was a pan-sized magnifying glass mounted on a nearby trolley. I switched on the light, lowered the convex lens, then stared awhile before giving a low, soft whistle. “You need to look through this.”

  Tomlinson was right. This was art. The magnifying glass changed the aspect from a satellite view to what you might see flying over in a Cessna. What seemed to be beaded mosaics were actually micro-sized communities, bricked downtowns, shopping centers. Cars were half the size of a rice grain, yet so exacting that Applebee must have used surgical instruments. Diminutive wire trees-cypress, mangroves, gumbo-limbos, and oaks-the river systems, sinkholes, lakes, pine uplands, cities, military bases, train lines, baseball stadiums, and strands of royal palms were meticulous. This might have been a miniature world, populated by a miniature race.

  Some landmarks were larger than scale. Near Orlando, he’d built a tourism icon disproportionately big: the Disney World castle, spires, and flags in place. Had Frieda not explained her brother’s love-hate feelings, it would’ve seemed absurd.

  The castle dominated the region-maybe a symbol of perfect order in the little man’s orderly and private world.

  Or maybe a symbol of something he detested.

  The model could have been created only by someone with a hydrologist’s eye for the interlinking of water. The man knew the fragility of a biota that was floored with porous limestone, dependent on moving water.

  Kneeling, I said to Frieda, “Look underneath. It has layers, like a wedding cake. Everything built on tracks, so it can be viewed in sections. There’s a pump system, too.”

  Heller helped me slide away a portion of the top. The region’s substrata lay exposed.

  Florida sits on a skeleton of prehistoric sea creatures and corals, karsts topography. It’s a honeycomb of caves, underground rivers, and permeable limestone. The diorama showed sections of the state’s three main aquifers. The depths were labeled incrementally from one hundred feet to three thousand feet.

  I’d read about the complicated interlinks; here they were easily seen. Every water source served as a conduit to another. Drop a gallon of red dye into a sinkhole near Cross Creek, or Gainesville, and a red bloom might reappear days later, and several hundred miles away, in some inland lake near Miami. Or Florida Bay off Key Largo. Or Marathon-the dye jettisoned from the inner earth by subterranean current.

  Applebee’s creation was a three-dimensional schematic. Plastic tubing replaced rock corridors. Aquifers were walled with Plexiglas. He’d elevated everything off the floor to hide the complicated pump system beneath.

  I found the switch, and the pumps were soon making a pleasant, burbling hum as water circulated throughout the model, re-creating flow patterns below and above the ground, including the slow, pan-flat drainage of water from lakes of the Kissimmee Chain into the Everglades.

  That caused me to think of exotic parasites.

  “How long you think it’d take a man to build something like this? A couple years?” Heller was impressed, but his tone was also saying, A nut case, man. A kook.

  Frieda said, “My brother? When he got into something-a project, an experiment-nothing else existed. He’d stay up forty-eight hours working nonstop. Seventy-two hours-whatever it took. But even for him, lots and lots of hours.”

  I said, “This needs to be preserved. Maybe Gainesville, the Florida Museum of Natural History. They have good people there.”

  The woman was nodding. “Or the Smithsonian.”

  She was standing in what would have been the Gulf of Mexico, at the Florida Panhandle, near Tallahassee. I realized that I, too, had drifted automatically toward my home. I was standing above Sanibel and Captiva islands, still using the magnifying glass, charmed by the micro-sized docks of Dinkin’s Marina, and the pinhead-sized stilt house that represented my home.

  Like certain salmonidae, humans tend to gravitate to the place of their origin.

  Applebee hadn’t included all the marinas in Florida-impossible-but he’d included my little island, larger than scale.

  I was touched. I remembered Frieda saying that he’d read my papers. He was a fan. It could have been the sort of flattery that we all indulge in from time to time. But the man had included my home in his intricate vision of Florida, so maybe it was true.

 
The woman stooped, touched her finger to a watery area southwest of Tallahassee. “Unbelievable. Doc, you’ve been to Apalachicola?”

  “My favorite oysters.”

  She was staring at the tip of her finger, then held it out to me. “Miniature oyster bars. Real shell flakes. He probably had to use a surgical microscope.”

  I told her, “That’s what I was thinking.”

  We both glanced around. No microscopes. No lab, no tools. No work station, either.

  “The house has a third floor and an attic,” she said.

  Detective Heller said, “Mind if we take a look?”

  Jobe’s workshop and lab were up there, and the Russians had made another mess. Piles of wreckage, everything scattered. There were broken microscopes, files, computer discs, plus vials, test tubes, cabinets, and aquaria all smashed or ransacked. Same with shelves that had been filled with power tools, jeweler’s tools, chemicals, and hundreds of bottles of hobbyist oil paint, glue, books, manuals-all left torn, broken, or leaking on the floor.

  The little man had been working on a second diorama. It was Central Florida, from Orlando to the lower fringe of the Everglades. The Disney Castle was waist-high, a couple of yards wide. A theme park complex was built around it, including lakes, islands, restaurants, buses, parking lots, and miniature paddle wheel boats.

  The Russians had been rougher on this model. They’d busted open the castle, all of the larger buildings. The destruction seemed more of a violation because, through the broken roofs, we could see that the interiors were as detailed as the exteriors. Each and every room was painted, appointed, furnished.

  “This guy-your brother-he really got into this stuff.”

  The detective’s tone said again-a kook-but also that it was kind of cool.

  “I’ve got a bunch of nieces and nephews, so I’ve been to Disney World more times than I wanted. The inside of these buildings, your brother has them nailed perfect. Like he shrunk them down itty-bitty.”