The Meridians(53)

Surprisingly, however, not a one of them so much as blinked. Instead, one of the ladies - Gil's wife, a woman named Brenda who was equal in size and heart to her husband - looked her straight in the eye and said without hesitation, "Autism or Asperger's?"

Lynette was shocked, and Brenda laughed, a great, deep belly laugh that started at her toes and climbed up her legs and through her body until when it finally emerged it was so loud and joyous that it sounded like she was laughing at the funniest joke ever heard. It was such a loud laugh that Lynette would have worried that she was being made fun of if she couldn't see that the woman clearly had nothing but good feelings in her heart.

"Girl, you're in Mormon country now. We raise lots of kids and if we're not related to someone with a developmental disability, we've probably watched someone with one in one of our congregations. We have a young boy with Asperger's in our ward - that's what we call the congregations, we call them wards - and a little girl with autism. I know, I know," she continued without so much as pausing for breath, "girls with autism are rare, but we have one, the most darling little girl named Emma Kathleen Johnson, you'll meet her sooner or later I'm sure, she and her family just live about five houses down, you'll be right at home here, don't you worry..." and Brenda prattled on and on and on and spoke so fast and in such a friendly manner that Lynette barely noticed it when the woman moved her vast girth into Kevin's room, knocked quietly on the door and went in.

Lynette started to tell her not to bother, but before she could Brenda was kneeling in front of Kevin, not looking directly at him - a sure sign that she had, in fact, had experience dealing with autistic children - but rather talking to the side of him, as though his invisible twin stood right next to him. "Kevin, honey," she said, "I'm Auntie Brenda, and I know you probably don't much want to chat with me, but I'm your friend, and anything you need I'll be sure to help you with, okay?" And then, instead of engulfing Kevin in a huge, grandmotherly hug the way Lynette expected the woman to do, she had merely stood and left, again seeming to know intuitively that Kevin would not take well to the tactile sensation of a Brenda-sized embrace.

It was one of the best interactions that Lynette had ever experienced between her son and a stranger. It was so effective in fact, that Kevin actually came out of his room not five minutes later, sat down with his computer, and began typing as though the Welcoming Committee were not present at all.

Lynette was a bit worried when she heard the word "Mormon," thinking that perhaps these women had all come over in some kind of effort to convert her on her first day in Meridian, but aside from Brenda's first mention of it - and the fact that four of the six members of the Welcoming Committee nodded in assent when Brenda said that they were in Mormon country - no one else mentioned anything church related or tried to entice her to be baptized. No, that wasn't quite true. They did ask what Lynette's religion was, but when she told them they didn't pronounce hellfire and brimstone as her fate, but instead just told her where the nearest churches were of that denomination, and that was the last of it.

Gil and Brenda quickly became nearly constant figures around her house...along with their eight children. At first she thought that would overwhelm Kevin, but he seemed to enjoy the sense of rambunctious fun that the kids - who ranged in age from fourteen to three - brought with them whenever they came to visit. Lynette took to keeping a store of Oreos in stock for when "the horde," as Brenda jokingly called her brood, descended on her house.

"What about the man who called your husbands?" asked Lynette shyly during one of the rare breaks in Brenda's machine-gun quick conversational pattern.

"What, Brad?" asked one of the women, Jonelle, who was cut of the same cloth as Brenda and was clearly Brad's wife. "He farts too much and he cusses when he thinks I'm not listening, but other than that he's okay."

"No, you silly nit," said Brenda with a roll of her eyes. "She's talking about...Scott."

There was a pause in the conversation then, as though everyone was gathering their thoughts to tell her something important.

"He's quite something," Jonelle finally managed. "Quite something."

"Does he live on this street?" asked Lynette.

"No, dearie," said Brenda, patting her hand as though delivering bad news. "He lives a good three or four miles away."

"Then what was he doing driving around at one a.m. last night?" asked Lynette, feeling once again the familiar cold grip of fear in her belly. She had no need to escape from a supernatural fiend into the clutches of a natural one who was no less dangerous, and the fact that Scott was wandering around in the middle of the night did not speak well for his normalcy.

The women of the group again fell silent before Brenda, clearly their de facto leader, spoke again. "Probably just out wandering, poor dear."

"Wandering?" said Lynette.

"No one knows -" began Jonelle, speaking almost in a ghost-around-the-campfire voice.

"Oh, hush," Brenda said, cutting off her sister-in-law. "We know full well about him. Just not the details, that's all." She focused her gaze back on Lynette, and said, "He lost his family some years back. No one quite knows how, but -"

"We do too know how," said another one of the women. "They were killed. Katie looked it up on the internet."