Chapter 22

WITH ITS EXPOSED DAMP dirt floor surrounded by fieldstone foundation walls, the basement felt more like a cave than the foundation for an old farmhouse. A single overhead light bulb sprayed a dull beam on the gray-brown dirt. The smell of old raw onions and mold permeated the moist air. Caroline led me across the length of the open floor to a large closet-like room that had been built out of plywood, its walls covered over with clear plastic over Styrofoam boards. Protruding from out of the side of the room was a long section of rubbery ductwork that snaked itself all the way up to an opening at the top of the foundation wall.

This was a room built inside a room—a space independent from the house that contained it and that maintained its own atmospheric ventilation system. As an artist, I wasn’t ignorant of such specialty rooms. Lots of artists and art collectors had them built inside their homes and galleries in order to better preserve their precious treasures. Because after all, art never decreases in value, no matter what.

When Caroline opened the door to the room, I could immediately see that she possessed quite the collection. The brightly lit space was stacked full with original art pieces. Every bit of wall space in a room I estimated to be twelve by twelve feet was covered with paintings, sketches, and black and white drawings, the largest of which was a full-sized self portrait of Franny himself. The artist was dressed in his usual uniform of baggy jeans, Converse high-tops and a fire-engine red T-shirt. In the painting, his face was noticeably younger, but just as round, just as smooth and chubby. His hair was thicker but mussed up. Thin arms hung down straight at his side, almost like a toy soldier standing at attention.

The expression on his face was nothing less than stunning. The piercing gray eyes cut holes in my chest. The image seemed so real to me, so life-like and vivid, I half expected him to open up his mouth and speak.

Caroline must have taken notice of my amazement.

“Francis painted that ten years ago,” she explained, breaking me out of my spell. “Some of these paintings he did as early as three years old.”

That’s when she reached out, took hold of my hand and led me to a small, post-card-sized pastel drawing of a hobby horse. Its execution was as detailed and photographically rendered as a Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell, but as distorted, distant and disturbing as a Van Gogh.

“He was three?” Had I heard her right the first time?

“Three,” she said. “It was an exciting time for us. Because we knew then for certain that Franny was no idiot. He was gifted.”

“The G word,” I said. “I don’t use it often. Never at the art center. Except for one very special artist.”

Caroline pursed her lips, nodded.

“Tell me something, Rebecca, how much do you know about Savant Syndrome? Autistic Savant Syndrome in particular?”

I shook my head, breathed in the room’s strong scent of paint, turpentine and alcohol. “Other than what I’ve learned from my direct contact with Franny over the years, not a whole lot.”

Crossing her arms, Caroline focused her eyes not on me, but on the eclectic pieces of art that covered the wall behind me.

“In layman’s terms,” she went on, “autistic savants are born with miss-wired neurons. In a few scattered cases, this miss-wiring affords them extraordinary gifts.” She raised her hands as if to say, Just take a good look around at all these gifts.

“Not long before Francis painted that hobby horse, we were told that he would never be cured. Francis would never be mainstreamed and would for the duration of his life require constant care.”

I looked over her shoulder at Franny’s face, looked into eyes that seemed to lock on mine from wherever I stood inside the small square-shaped room.

“Not the most optimistic of outlooks.”

“Until he started painting,” she said. “That’s when everything changed.”

“But how exactly?”

“Maybe he can’t communicate with us the way we want him to. Maybe he can’t stand loud noises or closed in spaces. Maybe he can’t look us straight in the eyes. But one day he picks up a pencil and paper, he starts to draw like an artist ten times his age. My husband and I were floored, to say the least.”

“We showed his drawings and sketches to his doctors at the Parson’s Center in Albany. They in turn found them remarkable and immediately labeled Francis a savant, which was a new word for the time. Francis possessed an unusual gift. This wasn’t the era of PET scans where doctors are able to see computer pictures of someone’s brain. But they did subject Francis to a grueling series of diagnostic tests. At the end, it was determined that because of his autism, Francis was able to use far more of his creative mind than normal people like you and me could ever hope for.”

“Francis hadn’t been burdened with a handicap,” I said, “he’d been given a rare gift.”

“Nowadays we know that savants tap into areas of the mind that function sort of like super computers. The computers process a massive amount of data from the senses and in turn create their own unique working model of the world.”

“Thus the world class artwork.”

I thought about my own childhood, how Molly and I had become fully aware of a boy named Francis who lived on a nearby farm. A boy who was older than us, but a boy who some of the other kids at school referred to as a ‘freak’, even if I thought of him as Boo Radley. I hated to admit it, but there had been more than one occasion when Molly, myself, and some of our friends had snuck onto the Scaramuzzi property to get a quick look at Francis, only to be frightened away by a dog or by Mr. S himself. Standing in the basement of their home all these years later, I suddenly felt very ashamed of myself.

Still, one question loomed large in my mind.

“Caroline,” I said, “if Franny possesses the ability to tap into portions of his brain you and I can’t even touch, is it possible he might possess a sixth sense? A kind of ESP?”

She looked at me with wide unblinking dark eyes. “You mean, can Francis predict the future?”

I shook my head. “Not the future necessarily,” I clarified. “But would it be possible for him to simply sense an event that is to come?”

She cocked her head and pursed her lips. “I believe it’s possible. Francis has more abilities than even I am aware of, so if he is giving you signs of something—if that’s one of the reasons you have come here, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” She paused for a beat. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Miss Rebecca? Something specific?”

I thought about Whalen; about his having been released from prison; his living somewhere in Albany County. I thought about all the ways of telling her about it. But I knew I couldn’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Instead I looked at my watch as if to shift my attention to something else.

“I should be getting back to the studio. Thank you so much for your time.”

She gave me an open-eyed look before turning for the door. The look froze me. My eyes locked on her smooth face, her long gray hair, her deep eyes—eyes that read me more than looked at me. Her closed mouth expression spoke to me better than words. It told me she knew I was hiding something. Caroline had spent the better part of a lifetime trying to communicate with a genius son who had virtually no communicative skills other than his painting. Certainly Caroline knew better than most how to read a face. I guess it would have been stupid for me to believe I could fool her.

Call it politeness or sensitivity or both, but she chose not to push me.

“You’re welcome here anytime,” she whispered after a pause. “I miss you; your sister; your mother and father. Even though you lived a few miles away from us, it felt good to have such sweet neighbors.”

There they were again: the forks of guilt stabbing at the insides of my stomach.

“We weren’t always great kids,” I confessed.

She laughed, set a hand on my shoulder.

“You mean all those times you tried to get a sneak peak at Boo Radley?”

I felt of wash of pure humiliation pour down my back. At the same time, I thought about the ratty novel that to this day sat on my nightstand; all those sketched faces inside its once blank margins.

“Well allow me to let you in on something, young lady. We used to get such a kick out of scaring you kids. Francis especially enjoyed it. It was the only time you’d hear him laugh.” For the first time since I arrived, I sensed her holding back a tear. “In a real way, you were his only friends.”

I turned for the door. But before I stepped out, something caught my eye. A small black and white sketch I hadn’t noticed when I walked in. The sketch was of Molly and me, back when we were about twelve years old, around the time of the assaults.

My God, Franny was drawing us back then.

“You and your sister,” Caroline said. “Beautiful girls, beautiful painting. Francis must have been about twenty-one or two when he did this.”

I swallowed, because now it was me who was holding back a tear.

“Come on,” Caroline said, turning off the light. “Francis is waiting for you at the school of art.”