The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (2 page)

Tasha’s phone stopped buzzing as Lance lifted a stack of plates and set them on the counter. “I hate all this waste,” he complained, unwrapping the dishes and putting them in the cabinet above the sink. “Will you be able to reach these if I put them on the lowest shelf, Noel?”

“Try not to think about the waste.” I sliced open a box, revealing our stemware, then walked to the sink and stretched my arms into the cabinet. Since I top out at five feet, most kitchen shelves have to be accessed with a step stool. Day-today items are best stored in easy reach. “As long as the plates are in front, I should be okay.”

The phone buzzed again. Lance groaned. Natasha’s grand-parents, Gert and Stan, had only recently adopted her, and now they were both hospitalized for the long term. Since she had come to live with us, our fifteen-year-old foster daughter had blossomed socially. So much so that we found it necessary to place limits on everything from the Internet, to outings with friends, to the aforementioned cell.

We had also been forced to adapt our views of what it meant to be a teen, which had heretofore been shaped by our contact with my sister’s children. Natasha was nothing like the college-bound Rachel or Rachel’s fifteen-year-old sister, Brenda. For that matter, I doubted Tasha would have much resembled ten-year-old Poppy at the same age. Perhaps when she was eight. Maybe when she was my nephew Bryce’s age, she had seemed like a child. But right now, she was more like a badly confused adult in an underage body.

In fact, Natasha was a large part of the reason for this move. Lance and I used to pride ourselves on our economical lives in our small house, but that home had what Natasha called “one
bedroom
and one
room with a bed.
” It was all we could afford while trying to run the financially strapped Midwest Primate Sanctuary that was our passion as well as our profession.

Stan, a wealthy man who donated to all of Ironweed’s foundations, made three bedside calls and purchased the home behind our backs. Then he sold it to us for a dollar. When I told him, “You can’t buy us a house like that, Stan!” he smiled and went mute, as if the pneumonia he had developed in the hospital had suddenly stolen his vocal cords.

What I wanted to tell him, “You can’t buy back Natasha’s mental health,” didn’t need to be spoken. He knew it. And it hurt him as badly as the broken bones that had put him in the hospital.

His realtor was sitting across the bed from us with a pinched look. Nurses stopped by regularly to count us (we technically numbered entirely too many for this wing of the hospital) and shoot glowers reminding the patient he needed to stop doing business when he should be healing. Our refusal to accept the sale was delaying him.

Lance looked as frustrated as I felt, but we had experience in arguing with Stan. It was pointless. He had been known to forge signatures to achieve his philanthropic goals, while judges in our small Ohio county pretended not to see. The fact that he was in a Columbus hospital coated in casts, tubes, and wires made no difference. The officials would come to him if he could not get out.

If he wanted to buy us a house, then we could either live in it or rent it to someone else. Mostly, we could be grateful he was a kind man, because money bought things in Muscogen County, and it would have done so regardless of Stan’s intent.

On the way home from the hospital, Natasha wept, “This is my fault. I told him I got scared at night out there.”

“None of this is your fault, Tasha,” I told her. “He’s assuaging guilt. He also blames himself for Art’s death and everything you’ve been through.” It didn’t matter to Stan that until he and Gert finalized her adoption, Stan had been her step-grandfather. Natasha was his only grandchild, and he and Gert were her only grandparents. She was the most precious thing in their worlds. Art was our good friend who founded the Midwest Primate Sanctuary and headed it until his death. He had also been dear to Stan.

Gary, who had hurt Natasha and killed Art, was technically Gert’s nephew, but Stan had paved the man’s path in Muscogen County. It certainly didn’t affect Stan’s position that he himself had nearly died at Gary’s hands; he still felt at fault. The fact that we had
all
failed to grasp how dangerous Gary was did nothing to ease Stan’s mind. Gary was determined to come to Muscogen County with or without Stan. He manipulated his way into the invitation to hide his illegal activities. Art simply got in his way.

We
all
got in his way. If Chuck, an orangutan abandoned on the sanctuary’s grounds, had not interrupted Gary’s encounter with Stan, Stan would have been dead before rescue workers could find him in the Ohio woods. As it was, he was preserved by his cell phone’s GPS.

Although his survival was now certain, his departure date from the hospital was far less so. Gary’s mother, a participating member of the pornography ring her son operated, had poisoned her own twin sister. Gert was alive, but her health was far less stable.

Natasha was the only one with any idea of what Gary was capable of at that time. And he’d terrified her into silence. She had spent four, nearly five years trapped by him, not even completely escaping when her mother’s death from a drug overdose allowed her grandparents to adopt her over the protests of her mother’s boyfriend, who turned out not to be her father at all. With Gary dead and the majority of the people who had hurt her in federal custody, Tash had finally developed a sense of empowerment in our care. She recognized and was willing to identify many of the guilty parties.

But that, too, took a toll. Because she was a minor, she would be providing taped testimony for several trials, not taking the stand. But she had not yet done so, making it even more difficult for her to move beyond the things that terrorized her. She took a veritable pharmacy of anti-anxiety medications to get through each day. And our old backyard had too many dark shadows.

When we realized how badly injured Gert and Stan were, and that Natasha had nowhere to go with her grandparents disabled, we impulsively invited her to stay with us. I thought Lance was motivated purely by sympathy. But it was more personal for me. I knew a little more about what she had been through, once having been sucked into an abusive relationship myself, and I hoped I could reach her where another might not be able to do so.

After Stan bought us the house, we didn’t do anything at all for two days, as our workload at the sanctuary, where Lance and I shared management duties, was heavy this time of year. We didn’t have summer interns from Ironweed University, like we did the rest of the year, and many of our long-term volunteers were vacationing. Natasha provided a highly useful pair of hands. We all left for work early in the morning and came home exhausted each night, making a perfect excuse to avoid talking about Stan’s latest purchase.

But on the third morning, when the sound of a tree branch scraping against the house had kept Natasha up most of the previous night, the topic became unavoidable. “We should consider going,” I told Lance. “For now, anyway. I’m afraid out here at night, too, these days.” After all, I wouldn’t have known Natasha was awake and frightened if the same noise that troubled her hadn’t also pulled me from a deep sleep to check all the doors and windows. I hated not feeling safe in the country, but I couldn’t deny the pervasive unease I experienced when the sun set each evening.

We rented a truck, packed up our things, and moved into the town of Ironweed. However, now that we had done it and were preparing to rent out the old place, I felt less sure of the decision. I wanted my small home back.

As we placed the last of the plates and silverware, the phone once again ceased to rattle. Lance picked up another box. “That thing makes the whole counter shake.”

“It doesn’t.” I started working on the pots and pans.

When we invited Natasha into our home, we hadn’t realized Gert would suffer a disabling stroke as a result of the poison her sister had administered. We hadn’t realized Stan’s broken pelvis alone would have left him in the hospital and rehab for a long time, and this didn’t begin to address the other bones Gary had smashed in his uncle’s body.

Yet again, the cell on the counter vibrated. “Gah! If that thing goes off again, I’m turning it
off.
” Lance banged the spice box too hard, and I was momentarily grateful for the wasted paper and overpacking.

“If it rings again, I’m answering it. These kids can’t keep calling here at all hours.” In fact, I was delighted to have those kids calling late at night. Not that I was planning to let Natasha stay on the phone after ten, but it meant she had friends to call.

When she came to us in June, she was friendless. Partially, this was because she was still grieving for her mother. Partially, it was because she had finally passed the seventh grade the day after her fifteenth birthday. Schoolwork was simply not a priority for her mother and the other criminals who had provided most of what passed for her care. But much of Natasha’s condition resulted from her inability to accept that she was a victim rather than a perpetrator. She still apologized out loud to her grandparents in her sleep and took responsibility for everything that went wrong in her vicinity.

Her therapist had been helping to ease her fears of socialization with amazing speed. She
wanted
friends, after all, and her sweet personality made it easy for her to keep them. But she hadn’t known how to make them.

Her other problems were taking more time to deal with. When she was in the ring, she had gone to extreme lengths to dull the pain of exploitation. She had come to Gert and Stan the year before with a cigarette addiction and an unhealthy taste for whiskey. They had cured her of the cigarettes, and they thought they had rescued her from the alcohol. But Lance and I quickly figured out otherwise. She was still self-medicating.

After she’d watched me throw away a cabinet full of perfectly good liquor, Natasha complained, “I only drank a finger! I needed something to stop spazzing out so bad.” Her “finger” was nearly half the bottle of whiskey. “I want to go home so hard I could throw up, and every time I see Gram’s face half frozen, I feel so
guilty.
”

“Gert and Stan don’t blame you for what happened to them. This isn’t your fault.”

“Your saying that doesn’t make it true.” That was when we took up her psychiatrist’s refrain and pressured her into trusting the anti-anxiety meds over her nonpharmaceutical varieties. We also emptied the house of liquor to ensure the behavior’s cessation.

Until she moved in with us, Natasha had been largely a stranger. We knew her grandparents better. Gary had passed easily for an uptight graduate student with a few decision-making problems to work out of his research plans. Only after he murdered Art and nearly killed all the rest of us did we learn Gary was harming not only Natasha, but also the apes and monkeys at our primate center by putting them in his pornographic photos and films.

Again, the phone stopped. “Dr. Rue,” Lance said to me, “I believe we are moved in.”

“Dr. Lakeland, I think you’re right.” Other than the detritus of boxes scattered around the living room and the trash can full of pizza boxes and paper plates, we had now unpacked everything. It helped to live so economically.

“A celebration!” He reached for the stemware I’d so recently put away and I went for the bottle of champagne that was the only alcohol in the house.

“A toast!” I held up my glass and looked around our new home, with its four bedrooms and basement of unseemly proportions. “To excess and holding down two jobs to achieve the American Dream.” Not that we were technically carrying a mortgage for the house, but we had agreed between ourselves to set aside money as if we were, so we could argue appropriateness with Stan at a more suitable time. If we were going to live here, we were going to offer at least something like market value.

“Indeed. May our return to teaching this semester be as simple as hiring graduate students to move our boxes proved to be.” We toasted and drank, but didn’t get to enjoy so much as an entire glass of the bubbly.

On the counter, the phone buzzed again. “Really?” I sipped my champagne and picked up the offending device.

“Turn it off.” Lance flopped on the couch with an arm crooked for me to sit in. “Her friends need to learn to call at reasonable hours.”

No name displayed with the number on the caller ID panel. “It’s not in her contacts list. And it’s a Columbus number. Six-one-four area code.”

Lance sat up and lowered his arm. Columbus could mean bad things for Tasha’s grandparents or bad things from her past. If it were the grandparents, someone would have been trying to reach
us
, not her. Which meant this might be the other.

“Hello?” I used my “Dr. Rue” voice, the one I had been practicing to use on undergraduates. The one I used setting limits with my foster teen.

“I thought I was calling Natasha Oeschle.” It was a woman on the other end of the line. An adult, not a kid, and she sounded breathless.

I kept my tone professorial. “Who’s calling, please?”

“You must be her foster mother. I’m Nelly Penobscott. Tasha fostered with me when she was twelve, and we’ve always kept in touch.”

“I see.” When she was twelve, Natasha had been making skin flicks for two years. Her mother’s drug issues meant she
had
briefly been in the care of the state, but I didn’t trust this caller. Lance had moved to stand behind me, and I twisted the phone so he could hear, too.

“Yes. I don’t have much time. I know what she’s been through, and I’m glad you’re protective of her. I have a message, and you can deliver it or not.”

“And what message is that?” I had dropped from professor to ice queen.

“When she was here, there were these twins, Sara and William. They went to live with an aunt and uncle in Muscogen County about the same time as Tasha went to her grandparents out there. Only now they’re back in care, and the little boy’s gone missing. They’re mounting a house-to-house search, and I thought maybe Tasha would want to help. They’ve bumped into her a couple of times. William knows her, and maybe he’d come out for her. If he’s only hiding. He’s
got to be
only hiding.” Her voice shook, as if she was begging me to make this missing child be a hidden one, not something worse. “You can call the sheriff’s department if you think I’m lying.”