He stood in the entryway for a long moment, feeling awkward and intrusive. Suzette had said the girl was autistic and he struggled to remember what that meant. Wasn’t Forrest Gump autistic? He wondered. Or maybe it was Rainman. Isn’t it the same thing as being retarded?
“Uh, hi,” he said at last.
Nothing.
“I’m Andrew.”
Still nothing.
He walked around the side of the couch, trying to see what Alice was writing. It looked like a running series of numbers, although the penmanship was terrible, the crooked, wobbly chicken-scratch of a palsy-ridden old man. “What are you working on?”
She glanced up long enough for him to recognize her, the doe-eyed child he’d met in the lobby the night before. Then she looked down again, her pencil resuming its fervent movement. “I’m calculating the square root of pi.”
He didn’t know which surprised him more—what she was doing or that she’d actually spoken aloud to tell him about it. She spoke clearly and articulately, nothing like the movie characters who’d come to his mind.
“But. . . there is no square root of pi,” he said after a moment. The tip of her pencil fell still, but she didn’t look up. “It’s an irrational number,” Andrew said. “The decimal value goes on and on forever without repeating.”
“I know that.” Her pencil began moving again. “I just want to make sure.”
Had he known what pi was at her age? Had he known more than how to add or subtract? Suzette had told him Alice’s father was a molecular biologist and geneticist. World-renowned, she’d told him. Apparently the fruit hadn’t fallen far from the tree in Alice’s case.
“Breakfast is ready,” Suzette called from the kitchen.
“She’s fixated on numbers,” Suzette said at the dining room table. “It’s typical for her condition, becoming preoccupied with certain things. She’s off the charts in terms of intelligence, but she sometimes lapses into her own little world. She gets obsessed easily, like the thing with numbers.”
Alice had sat down wordlessly at the table and started on her breakfast, a bowl of Cheerio’s. Andrew watched, curious, as she carefully strained each spoonful of cereal of any hint of milk before eating. Occasionally she’d pause, poke her fingertip into her spoon and knock a Cheerio or two out, as if she’d found them defective somehow.
“She only eats five pieces at a time,” Suzette explained.
“Sometimes extras float into the spoon,” Alice further clarified, flicking a wayward Cheerio back into her bowl. Once she’d finished this bite, she’d apparently had enough. Without another word, she pushed her chair back, scooped up her notebook and walked away.
“She has daily rituals and routines, sort of like an obsessive-compulsive would.” Suzette rose from her seat and began gathering up the dishes, even though her own breakfast remained relatively untouched. “She has a hard time showing her feelings in appropriate ways, so please don’t take it personally if she seems rude. She’s like that with everybody. It’s my understanding she’s better now than she used to be. There was a time, I guess, when she wouldn’t talk to anyone at all, much less strangers. But she didn’t seem to mind talking to you.” Dropping him a wink, she smiled. “She must like you.”
While Suzette tidied after breakfast, Andrew stepped out onto the deck off the living room. The morning air was crisp and cool against his bare arms, and his breath frosted in a light haze, framing his face. Below, he could see the lingering wisps of fog creeping in and among the trees, retreating from the landscaped courtyard. In the distance, beyond the trees, he could see the undulating silhouettes of the Appalachian foothills.
He’d clipped his iPhone to the waistband of his sweatpants and pulled it out now, wondering if the reception would be better on the deck than it had been in the lobby downstairs. A couple of impotent attempts at dialing Ted McGillis’ number proved it was not, with that tedious beep-beep-beep signaling he remained out of network.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“Hey!” The voice from behind him fell almost as heavily as the hand against his arm, which clamped down hard and spun him smartly about, catching him by surprise. He caught a blur movement out of the corner of his eye, and then a sucker punch caught him high on the cheek, snapping his head toward his opposite shoulder, sending him staggering into the deck railing then crashing to his knees. His phone tumbled from his fingers, falling toward the boxwood shrubs and lava rock landscaping beds below.
“Edward!” Suzette cried out from inside the apartment.
“Who are you?” the man who’d punched him demanded, and Andrew gritted his teeth, biting back a cry as he felt the man’s fingers coil in his hair, wrenching his head back. He found himself blinking up at an older man, tall and somewhat stocky, his brows knitted, his mouth twisted in a frown. “How the hell did you get in my apartment?”
“Edward, stop it,” Suzette exclaimed, rushing out onto the deck.
“Get Prendick up here now,” the man said at her. “Go call for—”
Andrew sprang from his crouched posture, plowing his knuckles into the older man’s gut. Whoofing for breath, the man turned him loose and staggered backwards. Andrew scrambled to his feet, fists still clenched, squaring off.
“Stop it,” Suzette cried, darting between them, hands outstretched. “Both of you.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Andrew exclaimed to her. “He hit me!”
“This is Edward Moore,” she told him, wide-eyed, pleading, and why should that name have been familiar to him, he wondered? “Doctor Moore,” she amended, and he relaxed his fists, opening his hands.
Shit.
“This is his facility,” Suzette told him. “His lab. His apartment.”
Moore glared at him, still choked and flushed, his palm pressed to his gut. Alice had come to stand in the doorway now, curious by the commotion, her dark eyes round and darting between her father and Andrew.
Shit, Andrew thought again.
“Let’s start at the beginning, Mister Braddock,” Major Prendick said.
Although they hadn’t cuffed him, his soldiers hadn’t exactly been gentle as they’d escorted Andrew from Moore’s apartment. One of them, Corporal O’Malley, had caught him by the wrist and wrenched his arm behind his back, pinning it at an unnatural and painful angle. They were about equal in height, but O’Malley outweighed Andrew by a good ten pounds at least of nothing but muscle. Although not feeble by any stretch of the imagination, Andrew had nonetheless gone along without protest, harboring no illusions. O’Malley could have, if so inclined, kicked his ass. In a big, hard, stomping, painful sort of way.
O’Malley had maintained his light yet painful grip on Andrew’s arm until they’d reached a small office on the building’s first floor. Here, Andrew had been made to sit in an uncomfortable metal chair in the middle of the otherwise empty room, left alone for at least twenty minutes behind what had turned out to be a locked door.
O’Malley had returned to stand guard at the threshold. To Andrew’s surprise, this time he was accompanied by Specialist Santoro, the young woman who’d rescued Andrew the night before. Slim and petite, she struck a peculiar, somewhat comical contrast to the larger, brawnier O’Malley as they flanked the doorway together at rigid, unwavering attention while Prendick, upon his entrance, proceeded to trace a wide, slow circumference around Andrew. Keeping his hands clasped against the small of his back, his expression neutral, his voice friendly enough, Prendick would glance up and meet Andrew’s gaze each time he’d pass.