Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

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       CHAPTER 11

      CARSON LIVED ON A tree-lined street in a house nondescript except for a gingerbread veranda that wrapped three sides.

      She parked at the curb because the garage was packed with her parents’ belongings, which she never found time to sort through.

      On her way to the kitchen door, she paused under an oak draped with Spanish moss. Her work hardened her, wound her tight. Arnie, her brother, needed a gentle sister. Sometimes she couldn’t decompress during the walk from car to house; she required a moment to herself.

      Here in the humid night and the fragrance of jasmine, she found that she couldn’t shift into domestic gear. Her nerves were twisted as tight as dreadlocks, and her mind raced. As never before, the scent of jasmine reminded her of the smell of blood.

      The recent killings had been so gruesome and had occurred in such rapid succession that she could not put them aside during her personal time. Under normal circumstances, she was seventy percent cop, thirty percent woman and sister; these days, she was all cop, twenty-four/seven.

      When Carson entered the kitchen, Vicky Chou had just loaded the dishwasher and switched it on. “Well, I screwed up.”

      “Don’t tell me you put laundry in the dishwasher.”

      “Worse. With his brisket of beef, I gave him carrots and peas.”

      “Oh, never orange and green on the same plate, Vicky.”

      Vicky sighed. “He’s got more rules about food than kosher and vegan combined.”

      On a cop’s salary, Carson could not have afforded a live-in caregiver to look after her autistic brother. Vicky took the job in return for room and board – and out of gratitude.

      When Vicky’s sister, Liane, had been indicted with her boyfriend and two others for conspiracy to commit murder, she seemed helplessly snared in a web of evidence. She’d been innocent. In the process of sending the other three to prison, Carson had cleared Liane.

      As a successful medical transcriptionist, Vicky worked flexible hours at home, transcribing micro-cassettes for physicians. If Arnie had been a more demanding autistic, Vicky might not have been able to keep up with her work, but the boy was mostly quiescent.

      Widowed at forty, now forty-five, Vicky was an Asian beauty, smart and sweet and lonely. She wouldn’t grieve forever. Someday when she least expected it, a man would come into her life, and the current arrangement would end.

      Carson dealt with that possibility the only way that her busy life allowed: She ignored it.

      “Other than green and orange together, how was he today?” Carson asked.

      “Fixated on the castle. Sometimes it seems to calm him, but at other times …” Vicky frowned. “What is he so afraid of?”

      “I don’t know. I guess … life.”

      BY REMOVING A WALL and combining two of the upstairs bedrooms, Carson had given Arnie the largest room in the house. This seemed only fair because his condition stole from him the rest of the world.

      His bed and nightstand were shoved into a corner. A TV occupied a wheeled metal stand. Sometimes he watched cartoons on DVD, the same ones over and over.

      The remainder of the room had been devoted to the castle.

      Four low sturdy tables formed a twelve-by-eight-foot platform. Upon the tables stood an architectural wonder in Lego blocks.

      Few boys of twelve would have been able to create a model castle without a plan, but Arnie had put together a masterpiece: walls and wards, barbicon and bastions, ramparts and parapets, turreted towers, the barracks, the chapel, the armory, the castle keep with elaborate bulwark and battlements.

      He’d been obsessed with the model for weeks, constructing it in an intense silence. Repeatedly he tore down finished sections only to remodel and improve them.

      Most of the time he was on his feet while adding to the castle – an access hole in the table arrangement allowed him to build from within the project as well as from every side – but sometimes, like now, he worked while sitting on a wheeled stool. Carson rolled a second stool to the table and sat to watch.

      He was a dark-haired, blue-eyed boy whose looks alone would have ensured him a favored place in the world if he’d not been autistic.

      At times like this, when his concentration on a task was total, Arnie would not tolerate anyone being too near to him. If Carson drew closer than four or five feet, he would grow agitated.

      When enthralled by a project, he might pass days in silence except for wordless reactions to any attempt to interrupt his work or to invade his personal space.

      More than eighteen years separated Carson from Arnie. He’d been born the year that she moved out of her parents’ house. Even if he’d been spared from autism, they would not have been as close as many brothers and sisters, for they would have shared so few experiences.

      Following the death of their parents four years ago, Carson gained custody of her brother. He had been with her ever since.

      For reasons that she could not fully articulate, Carson had come to love this gentle, withdrawn child. She didn’t think she could have loved him more if he had been her son rather than her brother.

      She hoped that someday there would be a breakthrough either in the treatment of autism in general or in Arnie’s particular case. But she knew her hope had little chance of being fulfilled.

      Now she pondered the most recent changes he had made to the outer curtain wall of the castle compound. He had fortified it with regularly spaced buttresses that doubled as steep flights of stairs by which defenders could reach the walkways behind the battlements.

      Recently Arnie had seemed to be more fearful than usual. Carson could not shake the feeling that he sensed some trouble coming and that he was urgently determined to prepare for it. He could not build a real castle, so he took refuge in this fantasy of a fortress home.