The Devil's Cauldron by Michael Wallace

an aide said. “Nothing to look at. Some of the residents are low functioning. You’ll have to get used to it.”
    “Riverwood had wheelchair people too,” he said. “That’s in Vermont. It’s the Green Mountain State.”
    “Okay. Go sit down.”
    He kept staring. There was something about these seven or eight residents that reminded him of something.
    “I mean it,” the woman said. “Go sit down and eat your chocolate crispies.”
    “Cocoa Puffs,” Eric corrected. “Chocolate crispies are fake and yucky. They turn to mush in the milk.”
    His eyes drifted around the circle and then he saw her, a pretty blond lady.
    Oh!
    She looked like her picture, just like Wes showed him. Eric stirred himself to motion. When he walked by, her eyes followed. He felt a funny sort of feeling. Like she was a puppy and he wanted to pick her up and hug her and pet her. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her she was going to be okay. In fact, he was muttering it to himself.
    “You’re okay. I’m here to help. My name is Eric and I’m from Vermont.”
    He realized what he was doing and angrily told himself to cool it. He sat down and crunched his cereal in silence, thinking furiously, but not doing a good job at it. In a minute, the cereal was gone.
    Remember, he told himself as he went back to the counter, this time for a bowl of Captain Crunch. Sherlock Holmes.  
    Investigate, watch and observe. Elementary. For a moment he forgot he wasn’t very smart.
    He stood at the cereal counter so long that the aide from his team came to find him. “Come on Eric, you’ve had enough cereal. That’s your fourth bowl already.”
    “But only my second bowl of Captain Crunch!”
    The man reached out a hand to take away the bowl, but Eric wouldn’t let go. “No! Two bowls of Cocoa Puffs and two of Captain Crunch!” People turned to look at him.
    Then he remembered, Sherlock Holmes! “Oh, yeah. I had enough.” He gave up the bowl and looked at the lady again as he walked back. He had to get to her with Wes’s phone. Too many people here. What would Sherlock do?
    Careful, careful, just like he promised Wes and Becca. He must wait until they stopped watching him all the time before he found the lady. Eric could play by the rules, he could show he was what they called RELIABLE. That’s what they always wanted. Like back at the group home. If you weren’t reliable, they came into the bathroom and watched while you took a shower, to make sure you were using soap. If you weren’t reliable, they took away your privileges.
    So Eric was reliable. And soon they let him walk around the grounds of Foggy Hill. He looked for the pretty lady.
    #
    He found her on the second day, sitting with the other residents of her team in the butterfly garden. Some of them watched the butterflies, while others closed their eyes or squinted away from the sun. An aide sat on a bench a few feet away with an open magazine on her lap, but her eyes were closed. Asleep.
    The butterfly garden was pretty. There were lots of flowers and bushes and stuff, and a net above his head like a giant tent you could see through. That way the butterflies wouldn’t fly away. Hundreds, zillions of them fluttered around, making him look this way and that. The prettiest were as big as his hand and blue. Shiny like metal. Eric wished he had a butterfly book so someone could tell him what they were called.
    The pretty lady spotted him and turned her eyes in his direction. She didn’t say anything.
    “Hi, pretty lady,” he said. “My name is Eric. What’s your name?”
    She kept watching him, but didn’t move and didn’t answer. This confused him, but then he remembered what Wes told him. Oh yeah, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t talk. That’s why they had to help her.
    “You look like a Disney princess,” he said. “What’s your favorite? I like all of them. Some have dark hair. There’s one Chinese lady—I like her. She fights the Huns and pretends she’s a boy.