CHAPTER 6
Aboveground phone lines and power cables were tucked away at the rear of the building. No jarring reminder of modern times marred its historical character. Even the wavy distortions in the window glass of Jane’s Cafe were true to the period. Near this window, the mother and son were seated at a table laid with a wine-red cloth and sparkling white napkins.
Charming.
However, when Charles entered the cafe, he found himself back in the correct era. A giant coffee machine gurgled in time to the music of soft rock. A gleaming metal and glass counter lined the back wall. Deep stainless-steel wells were filled with an amazing variety of salads, breads and cold cuts to be loaded on trays and paid for at the electronic cash register. All the white napkins were paper, and all the red tablecloths were washable, late twentieth-century plastic.
He collected a broad array of sandwich makings, condiments and salad greens on his tray. After paying for it, he settled down at the table next to Darlene and Ira Wooley. The woman was speaking to her son in a soothing mother voice, but the young man wasn’t listening. He was absorbed in constructing a tower of food on top of a slab of rye bread.
In a soft-spoken, one-sided argument, Darlene pointed to the items that would set off Ira’s allergies, and then she pulled out the offending layers. The boy stared at the mutilated sandwich for a moment, and Charles braced himself for the screaming fit common to autism. But Ira was very calm as he quietly disassembled the sandwich and began again with a new slice of bread from his mother’s tray. He worked deftly, despite bandaged hands and the splints on two fingers. Charles determined that there was nothing wrong with any of the motor skills, as Ira laid a precise line of sardines across a bed of mustard-slathered bread.
Darlene Wooley was looking at Charles with the suspicion common to overprotective mothers.
“Forgive me for staring,” said Charles. “Sandwiches are my hobby.”
Ira looked up for a moment as Charles spread mustard on pumpernickel and then embellished it with stripes of red from a pointed squeeze bottle of catsup.
Ira reached into his mother’s salad bowl and carefully picked out the carrot sticks and arranged them in a Crosshatch over his sardines.
Charles made a perfect circle of croutons on his stripes of catsup. Ira noted this and added a squared slice of ham on top of his carrots. Charles laid down two slices of bright yellow cheese, one layered askew over the other to form an eight-point star. Ira countered with a dollop of cream cheese spread over the ham in the rough smear of a triangle.
Though Darlene Wooley seemed very tired, she was smiling at the pair of them as they engaged in this conversation of sandwiches.
Charles stacked his ingredients faster and higher. Ira took up the challenge, finishing his own design first and crowning it with a slice of white bread.
Charles applauded the winner, and Ira’s laughing mother joined in, taking unreasonable delight in the moment. It must be an oasis in her day. He noted her bitten nails, the red veins of her eyes and the vertical worry line etched between her eyebrows. All the telling signs of life with an autistic child.
Well, her son’s mind was certainly alive. Wheels were turning, and quickly. Charles wondered if Ira was articulate. Many autistic people were not. They were as diverse as snowflake patterns in their behaviors; few generalizations would hold for all.
Ira was again absorbed in his food, and never looked up when his mother exchanged names with Charles and introduced her son. Ira’s eyes were looking elsewhere, not fixed on any point in the immediate universe.
When Charles had explained his interest in autism, he learned that eating lunch in the cafe was part of Ira’s behavior therapy, and he approved. This daily exercise would account for the lack of stress, despite the babble of conversation, the comings and goings, and the company of strangers.
“There’s no local program for autism, so four mornings a week, Ira goes to a state school for the mentally retarded.”
“Well, it’s miles better than no therapy at all,” said Charles. And it was common practice. A sympathetic doctor would alter the diagnosis of autism to that of retardation in order to utilize whatever program was available. “I imagine they use many of the same methods, learning skills through repetitive tasks?”
“Yes, and they do make a special effort with Ira. I tried to get him into a private program in New Orleans,” said Darlene. “But he couldn’t pass the screening test.”
Finally, the conversation turned to Charles’s business with the sheriff. “Augusta Trebec believes the young woman in custody might be Cass Shelley’s daughter. As the executrix – ”
“Well, who else could that girl be, Mr. Butler?”
When she became comfortable with calling him Charles, she recounted Mallory’s arrival in Dayborn on the day of the murder. “She stepped out of a cab in front of the bed and breakfast.”
Darlene had been sitting on the front porch, talking to her friend and neighbor, Betty Hale. “The girl was the very image of her mother. You couldn’t forget a face like that, even without the reminder of Cass’s angel in the cemetery.”
Babe Laurie had also seen Mallory, and reeled like a drunk, his eyes grown to the size of saucers. “So Babe sat there on the edge of the fountain while the girl was checking into Betty’s. Then his brother Malcolm came for him in the car. But Babe wouldn’t leave the square, and they got to arguing.”
Her son had slipped away and gone home to his house next door. “And then I hear Ira at the piano, and he’s playing this same little handful of notes, over and over. It drove Babe wild. He stormed into my house, with his brother right behind him. Well, I could not believe they had done that – just barged into my house. I was up from my chair and heading that way when the music stopped. And then my boy was screaming. The Lauries came out the door as I was going in. I found Ira at the piano with his hands smashed and blood running over the piano keys.”
Charles glanced at Ira to see how he was reacting to Darlene’s replay of a traumatic day. The boy seemed not to hear them. Charles surmised that Ira was shutting out the noise, not perceiving it as meaningful. His primary thoughts would probably be a cascade of images, not words. The perception of spoken words would require the concentration and effort of discerning a second language. Food was more alluring to Ira just now, but he might be responsive to music, another language more natural to him than the spoken word.
In the spirit of an ongoing examination, he turned to Ira. “Could you hum the tune you were playing on the piano?”
It was his mother who answered, “He won’t hold normal conversations with people anymore. He used to talk a lot when he was a little boy. But now he just repeats things. It’s called echolalia. That’s why he can’t pass the screening test for the program in New Orleans.”
Well, that was reasonable. An advanced program would make a prerequisite of communication skills. Though the echolalia sometimes passed for response to conversation, a kind of shortcut. “Perhaps you could remember the notes?”
“Oh, no,” she said, throwing up her hands in mock helplessness. “I got a tin ear. My boy has all the musical talent in the family. If you sit him down at the piano, he’ll play, but he won’t do requests. Just plays what he wants. And sometimes he’ll sing for you – if he wants to. He has the most beautiful voice you ever heard.” She looked down at her hands and their ruined fingernails. “You think that’s just a mother talking.”
“No, not at all. The sheriff spoke very highly of Ira’s talent.”
She smiled with some embarrassment and hid her hands under the table. “Sometimes, if the windows are open, every living thing in the square stops to listen to my boy when he sings. They just stand there, so still and quiet you’d think they were all in church. And I have seen people cry when Ira’s song is over.”