Randy White - Dead of Night

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.”

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.