Simple Genius

Chapter 49

Horatio Barnes shook hands with Viggie as Alicia Chadwick nervously watched. They were in the small parlor at the B&B where Horatio was staying.

Before Horatio could say anything Viggie sprang up and settled herself in front of the small upright piano situated in one corner of the room. She began to play. Horatio rose and joined her on the bench. As she played away, he said, “Mind if I jump in?”

She shook her head and he waited a moment, studying her rhythm and then began playing smoothly. They performed a duet for about five minutes and then Viggie abruptly stopped. “I’m done.” She plopped back in the chair while Horatio resumed his seat across from her, studying her carefully.

“You’re an excellent pianist,” Horatio said. “And I hear you’re quite the whiz at math too.”

“Numbers are fun,” Viggie said. “I like them because if you add the same numbers up you always get the same answers. There aren’t many things that do that.”

“Meaning life is too unpredictable? Yes, I’d agree with that. So numbers feel very safe to you?”

Viggie nodded absently and looked around the room.

Horatio continued to study her while she did so. Body cues were often as important as verbal communication in his field. He asked a few preliminary questions about her life at Babbage Town. Horatio had intended to tread carefully around the subject of Monk Turing, but Viggie’s next words exploded that strategy.

“Monk is dead. Did you know that?” Viggie asked him. She plunged on before he could answer. “He was my father.”

“I know, I heard. I’m very sorry. I’m sure you loved him very much.”

Viggie nodded, picked up an apple from a bowl on the table next to her and began eating it.

“And how about your mother?”

Viggie stopped chewing. “I don’t have a mother.”

“Everyone has a mother. Do you mean she’s dead?”

Viggie shrugged. “I mean I don’t have a mother. Monk would’ve told me.”

Horatio glanced at Alicia, who looked pained by this exchange. She shook her head helplessly at him.

“So you remember nothing about her?”

“About who?”

“Your mother.”

“You’re not listening. I don’t have a mother.”

“Okay, what did you like to do with your father? He was good at numbers too, right? Did you play games with numbers, maybe?” Viggie swallowed a bite of apple and nodded. “All the time. He said I was smarter than he was. And he knew about quantum physics. Do you know about that?”

“My IQ is not where it needs to be to understand that particular field.”

“I understood it. I understand lots of things people don’t think I do.”

Horatio glanced over at Alicia, who nodded at him encouragingly.

“So people don’t think you understand things?”

“I’m a kid. A kid, a kid, a kid,” she said in a singsong voice. “At least that’s what they think.”

“I bet Monk didn’t think that way about you, did he?”

“Monk treated me special.”

“How did he do that?”

“He trusted me.”

“That’s very impressive, an adult trusting someone your age. I bet that made you feel really good.” She shrugged noncommittally. “Do you remember the last time you saw Monk?” She shrugged again. “With a head like yours I bet if you try you’ll be able to do it easily.”

“I like remembering numbers better than anything. Numbers never change. A one is always a one and a ten is always a ten.”

“But numbers do change, don’t they? If you multiply them together, for example? Or add or subtract or divide them. And ten can be ten or ten thousand. And one can be one or one hundred. Right?”

Now Viggie focused squarely on him. “Right,” she said automatically.

“Or is it wrong?” Horatio queried.

“It’s wrong,” Viggie said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” She took another bite of her apple.

Horatio sat back. Quite a mynah bird. “You like number puzzles? There was one I learned in college. Would you like to play it? It’s sort of hard.”

Viggie put the apple down and said eagerly, “Not for me it won’t be.”

He said, “Suppose I’m a grandfather and I have a grandson who’s about as many days old as my son is weeks old and my grandson is as many months old as I am in years. My son, grandson and I together are 140 years old. How old am I in years?”

Horatio glanced at Alicia, who was working out the problem on a piece of paper she’d pulled from her purse. When he looked back at Viggie he said, “Would you like some paper and a pencil?”

“What for?”

“To work out the problem.”

“I’ve already worked it out. You’re eighty-four years old, but you don’t look it.”

A minute later Alicia looked up. On her piece of paper was a series of calculations with the number “84” written at the end. She smiled at Horatio and shook her head in a weary fashion. “I’m so clearly not in her league.”

Horatio looked back at Viggie, who sat there expectantly.

“Did you see all the numbers in your head?” he asked and she nodded before resuming her apple eating.

He gave her two large numbers and asked her to multiply them together. She did so in a matter of seconds. He gave her a division problem, which she solved almost instantly. Then he quizzed her with a square root exercise. Viggie answered them all within seconds and then looked bored as Horatio jotted some notes down on a piece of paper.

“I have another problem for you to think about,” he said.

She sat up straight though she still seemed bored.

Not a mynah bird. A well-trained dog, aren’t you, Viggie? “Suppose you had a best friend that you did everything with. Now suppose this best friend moved away and you’d never see her again. How would you feel?”

Viggie blinked once and then again. She started blinking so hard that her face scrunched up with the effort. Horatio felt like he was watching a computer whose circuit board was overheating.

“How would you feel, Viggie?” he asked again.

“There aren’t any numbers in the problem,” she said in a puzzled tone.

“I know, but not all questions have to do with numbers. Would you be happy, sad, ambivalent?”

“What’s ambivalent mean?”

“You don’t really care one way or another.”

“Yes,” she said automatically.

“Or how about sad?”

“Sad, I’d be sad.”

“But not happy?”

Viggie glanced over at Alicia. “There aren’t any numbers in the problem.”

“I know, Viggie, just do the best you can.”

Viggie shrugged and resumed eating her apple.

Horatio wrote some other notes down. “Have you been thinking about the last time you saw your father?”

“Why wouldn’t I be happy?” she asked suddenly.

“You wouldn’t be happy because your friend went away. You do fun things with your friends. So if your best friend went away you couldn’t do fun things anymore,” Horatio explained. “Like I’m sure you did fun things with your father before he went away. You’re sad that your father went away, right? No more fun things with him?”

“Monk went away.”

“That’s right. Were you doing something fun with him the last time you saw him.”

“Lots of fun.”

“What was it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, it’s a secret? Secrets are fun. Did you have lots of secrets with Monk?”

Viggie lowered her voice and edged closer to him. “It was all secret.”

“And you can’t tell anybody else, right?”

“Right.”

“But you could if you wanted to.”

“Right, if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to? I bet you do.”

For the first time she showed hesitation with a prompting like that. “I’d have to tell it in a secret way.”

“You mean like in a code? I’m afraid I’m not very good at codes.”

“Monk loved codes. He loved secret codes. It made him bloody. He told me so.”

Horatio glanced questioningly over at Alicia, who looked equally confused.

Horatio said, “It made him bloody, Viggie? What do you mean by that?”

She smiled and said, “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m asking you, what did Monk mean when he said codes made him bloody?”

“That’s right, that’s what he said, codes made him bloody. Codes and blood, that’s what he said.”

Horatio sat back. “Did Monk get bloody the last time he saw you?”

“Yes,” she said happily.

“So he told you a secret?” She nodded again. “Can you tell us what it is?”

Her smile faded and she slowly shook her head.

“Why not? Was it a super-secret?”

Alicia said gently, “Viggie, if you know something it’s very important that you tell us.”

“I don’t think I like him,” Viggie answered, pointing to Horatio. “I have to go now.” She got up and walked out of the room.

Horatio glanced over at Alicia, who seemed to have been holding her breath. “I told you she’d be a hard nut to crack. Did you learn anything useful?”

He said, “I know her better than I did an hour ago. That’s something.”

“Well, the next time you meet her she could be someone else entirely.”

After Alicia left with Viggie, Horatio called Sean and filled him in on the session.

“So is Viggie autistic?” Sean asked.

“Autistism is a broad term,” Horatio replied. “But even so, I don’t think she is.”

“What then?”

“I think in certain ways she’s so much smarter than the rest of us, that she can’t relate. In other ways she’s not very intelligent, or mature, I should say. It might be a perception problem. Our perception problem. We expect her emotional abilities to match her intellect, but she’s still a little girl. And I got some strange vibes from her about her father.”

“Like what?”

“Monk apparently treated her like an adult, at least sometimes. But other times he treated her, well, like a… device.”

“A device?”

“I know I’m not making much sense. I wished I knew something about her mother. Viggie apparently doesn’t believe that she even had one.”

“So where does this all leave us?” Sean asked.

“Not much further, I’m afraid.”

“Well, at least our results are consistent. Meaning nil.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to swing at a pitch and see if I can get on base.”