The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (16 page)

“It’s not fine, and you know it.” She collected my sugar bowl and resumed her seat beside Trudy. They had the same stylish pixie haircut, Mama’s in her appalling shade of yellow, Trudy’s in a more sedate brown. Although Trudy looked much younger, in reality she was, like me, fighting the gray one bottle of dye at a time. Mama had long since given over the battle and gone, if not punk, then at least neo-grandma.

My father, who already had his cup but hadn’t bothered to sit down, patted my shoulder. “I think what it boils down to is this. You’ve never made a quick decision in your life. You analyze and think things through. Marguerite’s always been our impulsive daughter.”

“I don’t think Margie has done a single impulsive thing since she and Dag eloped.” In fact, I had been one of the few attendants at her courthouse ceremony some twenty-two years ago. She had taken her own relative lack of a proper wedding as license to fully plan Lance’s and mine this past June. Good thing, too, or it probably wouldn’t have happened.

Still, I understood my father’s point. I was briefly engaged to Lance’s brother. After that ghastly relationship ended, I moved on reluctantly to dating Lance. Then, Lance and I were a couple for some time before we got an apartment, let alone a house together. It was hard to believe we would soon be putting it on the market. Even when Natasha went home, we would never have room in our old place again. Now, not two full months after a wedding ten years in the making, we were becoming parents. It
was
a lot to process.

“Noel, can you give us a hand down here?” Lance called from the basement, where we had stored the things we weren’t yet ready to unpack. He and Darnell were down looking for our table leaf. In its current arrangement, the table barely seated four. It would be crowded with seven today, even when we added the extra two feet. Starting tomorrow, we would be seating five regularly. The leaf wouldn’t be coming out anytime soon after we got it in.

“What do you need?” I was already halfway down the stairs.

“This thing is completely buried.”

I joined my husband and realized Darnell wasn’t helping him at all but was, in fact, standing in another empty room of the basement murmuring on his cell. By the time tonight was over, our office would be there, and we would have taken down the bunk bed and transformed it into twin beds, one in Lance’s and one in my former office. Part of me hoped to get Art’s job purely because it
was
nice to have my own space.

I cocked my head and shot a wordless glance between my husband and our agent friend. And Darnell was a friend. Trudy, too, as frustrated as I might be with them right now. They had volunteered undercover at our sanctuary for a long time, and we considered them more than acquaintances.

The table leaf was not buried at all. It was leaning neatly against the wall. Before I could ask what was going on, Lance said, “Trudy and Darnell want to tell us something, and since your folks are here, they’d like to tell them too. Only . . .”

“Only we can’t pass wind without getting official clearance.” Darnell joined us. “Yeah, it’s okay. Let’s move this thing.”

“Does this have something to do with Natasha? Because the less my mother knows about her, the better.” Mama already pitied and babied Tasha entirely too much. The girl would never get any peace from my parents if they knew the full extent of what she had been through.

Darnell shook his head. “It’s your kids,” he said. “We’ve been waiting to find out they would be coming here before we moved forward.”

“With what?” I was surprised by the edge in my voice and the accompanying protective clutch in my chest.

“It won’t make sense out of context.” Since neither Lance nor I had picked up the leaf, Darnell hoisted it himself. As we mounted the stairs behind him, Mama’s voice drifted down to me. “. . . and I realized I was rejecting my own grandchildren!”

“Mama, it’s
fine.
” I collected her cup and the sugar bowl so the leaf could be put in.

“It’s not fine,” Mama continued. Daddy set his mug on the counter and crawled under the table to open the hinges for the leaf. “We’re both so sorry, loves. Here you are bringing me people still young enough to appreciate my sewing, and I’m acting like your sister did when she found out Rachel is a lesbian!” Everyone except Marguerite had welcomed her oldest daughter’s coming out. Margie still acted like it might be a bad dream she would wake from.

“If it’s the sewing that brought you around, I’m all in favor.” Lance joined my father, and they each pushed a different rusty hinge, both of which remained indifferent to their efforts.

“Yes! And common sense. Have you seen this week’s column?”

In truth, I had not. I usually scooped up the
Free Press
straight off the step to see what new advice Mama had to dispense, and which absurd questions she’d been mailed. But this week I had been so busy the newspaper sat neglected on the counter, where it had been moved in an effort to clear the overcrowded table to make room for everyone.

“You should,” Dad grunted from under the table. “Do you have anything to lubricate these?”

“Garage,” Lance said.

Both men came out from under the table, but neither left. Everyone seemed to be waiting for me to pick up the newspaper. It was out of its wrapper, and I realized belatedly Lance had read the column already, and Mama had known I had not when she asked. Instead of its usual polite square, “What’s Next Nora” was the headline story.
Slow news week?

Dear Readers
,

I have plenty of questions that want for answering, but all of them will have to wait. For once, I need
your
advice. I’ve gone and tripped on my own tongue, and I don’t know how to put it back in my mouth, so to speak. Recently, my middle-aged daughter and her husband told me they were adopting two children from the foster care system.

I should have been overjoyed! I’ve spent a great deal of time
not
harping on this particular child to give me grandbabies. Instead of cheering for such a wonderful revelation, I reacted as if the news they had brought me was
bad.

There isn’t any excuse for my behavior. I’ve been dreaming imaginary children for some time now, yet when they turned real, I reacted from a combination of gut fear and unreasonable prejudice. It was a full two days before my daughter’s words sank in. She was bringing me
grandchildren.

My other daughter has children as well, but only two of them aren’t already teens. Here are little people, a pair of six-year-old twins, giving me back something I thought had almost passed forever. How could I not want them?

Yet that was exactly how I behaved. If my daughter had come to me pregnant, I’d have whooped and started planning the shower. But since she was adopting older children with special needs, I asked if she was out of her mind. Was it because these twins were six and not newborn? Because both children have autism? Was I asking such things because the children are biracial? Was I so prejudiced?

I don’t know why it took me so long to wrap my mind around that concept, but once I did, I felt like I’d swallowed a brick! I’ve broken my daughter’s heart, readers, and I need to know how to mend it. I’ve said words I want to swallow back. Please, help me make amends. Send your words to the usual address, but put the word “ADVICE” on the envelope.

Yours, Nora

By the time I finished, I had blown my nose at least three times on the tissue Lance provided. He was rereading over my shoulder with an arm around my waist. I didn’t cry, but it was largely because we had an audience. “Mama, has Margie been after you?”

“Yes. Her and my own conscience.”

“And don’t forget your Nana,” my father added.

Nana had been delighted by our news, and as she and Mama squabbled almost constantly anyway, I could imagine the sorts of things she would have said. “Then I guess I owe you an apology, too,” I said, “since I’m the one who accidentally sicced them both on you.”

“We deserved it,” said Daddy. “We both feel dreadful. We want to make it up to you.”

“You already have,” said Lance. “And I do
not
mean those cars.”

Daddy gave Lance a half-smile. “Let’s go get your oil. Your friends have something to tell us, and while you were reading they asked your mama and I to stay and hear.”

Once the table was enlarged, Trudy said, “This is classified information. It’s not for public consumption. But it’s the kind of thing no parent should go without knowing.”

“We already know the dad is serving life.”

“Not that. We’re reasonably certain of their paternity, but this doesn’t have anything to do with him. As far as I know, he’s only ever evidenced any interest in a couple of his children, though he has several. This has to do with the incident in late July. Sit.”

“The Dumpster,” said Natasha.

Trudy nodded. “In spite of what Natalie Forrester has convinced herself, she did
not
forget William at the pizza parlor.”

“What?”

“We believe William was lost only moments before she noticed he was missing.”

“Did he wander? Impossible! It’s a
long
way from her house to the Marine. When Sara walked here, she had worked it out by map.”

Trudy gave a wordless shake of the head. “He has wandered before, yes,” she said. “And far. But Noel, he was taken. Natasha found him under the Dumpster because he got away.”

“Excuse me?”

“Let me show you a video and tell you what we think. William can’t tell us. He’s tried, but the more stress he feels, the fewer words he says.” Darnell plugged a flash drive into Trudy’s ever-present tablet. He and Trudy remained behind the machine, and the rest of us scooted our chairs around to squint at the monitor like preschoolers at story time.

First, they showed us footage from the Marine on the day Will vanished. Trudy pointed him out for us, and we tracked his progress in a cobbled-together video including data from two or three cameras. He started in the dining room, rocking with his hands over his ears. Then he wandered into the kitchen while Natalie paid for her pizza. He returned about the time she jerked her head around and noticed the absence in the first place.

The footage shifted to the kitchen at the point in time when he entered it. Something startled him and he ran out the back door, where he could be seen dashing up the open ramp of a delivery truck. An employee emerged carrying him a few seconds later. Then he either set Will down or the boy wiggled loose and darted back through the kitchen. Tony Gibson came out of his office and followed Will as far as the door to the dining room. Then he shook his head and walked away.

The scene changed again, and split into two images. Trudy walked us through what we were watching. “Point one.” Trudy used a small laser to indicate the screen. “This is the synchronized security footage in back of the Marine for the period between when William went missing and when Natasha found him. Mr. Gibson has two cameras because he’s had a couple of breakins. You can’t see the Dumpster because it’s on the other side of the delivery truck. What you
can
see here is the approach to both sides of the building.” She fast-forwarded through several hours of film in a few minutes. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Nothing,” said Mama. “Not going so fast.”

I tended to agree with her. “It looks like they finished unloading the truck and wheeled a few cases around the side of the building before shutting it down. Then Mrs. Gibson took a couple of bags of trash out the back door before the place closed for the night, then nothing until we blip by in the primate-mobile. So if he’d been under there, Mrs. Gibson would have noticed, you think?”

“Yes, point one,” Trudy agreed. “She might have. But she didn’t, and he might have been there but keeping quiet. Point two. The cameras are situated with one aimed at either corner of the building. Mr. Gibson wants his truck parked there when it’s not in use to force would-be thieves to approach those cameras close enough that they can be identified. What
don’t
you see?”

“Anything,” Mama reiterated.

“Exactly.” This clearly had significance for Darnell.

“If Natalie had forgotten him and he had gone straight around back, we would, at some point, see him here.” Trudy pointed to one corner of the building, “Or here,” she indicated the other. “But we don’t.”

“And if she had forgotten him, and he wandered away from the Marine and then returned from the back, so the cameras couldn’t pick him up, there’s a high probability someone would have noticed. It’s a largely residential area, and Natalie was there near enough to rush hour that the people coming back from work in Columbus would have likely noticed him alone.

“Even if they thought he was a neighborhood child out playing without a parent,
someone
would have marked him. The way he walks, with that rocking gait, is distinctive. It draws the eye. But nobody recalls seeing him.”

“But he didn’t teleport under there,” said Lance.

“No,” Darnell agreed. “And so we can’t convince Natalie she didn’t forget him. She’s sure he walked around out of camera view or the neighbors didn’t notice him. But here’s point three.” He reached back into his briefcase and pulled out a watch without any hands.

“What’s that?”

Darnell handed it to me. “You can handle it. It’s not evidence. It’s a tracking device from a group called Project Lifesaver. William has one like it. It contains a radio tracking device that should allow us to find him instantly. As soon as Natalie reported him missing, the locals tracked the device. It was in a sewer grate near the Forresters’ house.”

“But doesn’t that suggest he took it off and walked back to the Marine?”

“It’s hard to get off. He’s capable of doing it. And he
could
walk there. But he
loves
his bracelet. That lifeline saved him at least once, in Columbus, when he had wandered several miles in an incredibly short period then. Natalie is certainly convinced he slipped out of it, or maybe one of the other kids wrestled it off him and threw it out her open back window on the way out to the pizza parlor. The twins drive her oldest foster children nuts, and the big kids torment them in return sometimes.