The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (28 page)

Mama had been waiting for this maneuver, and she seized the plate on its way skyward. “Not in this house, Buster.”

William squealed his dismay, but Daddy swooped in with a pair of pruning shears. “Bad idea,” I said as he passed them to Will, who was startled into silence. “It’s not safe outside, there’s nothing he can do with them in December, the novelty is going to wear off, and those are sharp.”

“Sshh,” Daddy commanded me. “Want to help me in the garden?”

“Oh yes.”
William bopped along after him and out the door. He had a jacket at Mama and Daddy’s, but he refused to put it on, just as he refused to wear a coat for us most of the time. William hated to have his arms covered and only endured long sleeves because he had been forced to do it for at least one winter before he was ours.

Darnell was muttering on his phone in the corner. I appealed to him with my eyes, and he followed Will and Dad outside. The property had been examined and deemed “safe enough for the present,” but I felt exposed with my coatless son out there.

“Mama, that could have ended badly. It still may. It’s impossible to predict . . .”

“Have a little
faith
, dear,” Mama chided. “It’s perfectly safe. We bush-hogged at the end of the season. We can see people coming from any direction but the road. The rose garden is the safest place on our property. And your daddy knows what he’s doing. If I’m not mistaken, those shears are blunt plastic. It’s the pair Poppy and Bryce used before they graduated to the real thing. And there isn’t anything to cut anyway right now. They’re playing out back.”

“Oh.”

Trudy arrived, looking as weary as ever I’d seen her. She had her tablet again, and Darnell came in and produced a pen and paper. Before they would tell
us
anything, they had each of us, including William and Sara, relate everything we could remember from the time we left the center until we got here. We had already been through this with Darnell alone, but we repeated it now for Trudy’s benefit. Drew arrived looking like he’d had even less sleep than the federal agents, and we went over it all a third time.

Then Darnell said, “Okay, we don’t know exactly what happened last night, but we have ideas. There’s what we know, and there’s what we guess. We
know
two individuals, probably men from what I could tell, broke out a pane of glass in your kitchen and sent car exhaust through the window. We
know
they have studied your house’s layout in some depth, because they knew where to break in to be closest to a carbon monoxide detector on the side of the building.”

“And,” Trudy added, “we know they’re not the brightest, because they stood there arguing when you failed to come out the back door. I saw the hose and heard their voices when I started to leave via that door myself. It was why
I
came out front instead.”

“Why would we go out back? We only ever use the back door to go in, almost never to go out.” Lance jiggled his leg under the table.

“They didn’t seem to realize that, which suggests they’ve been studying the place when you aren’t home.” Darnell tapped his pen against his pad.

Drew accepted a cup of Mama’s coffee. He yawned deeply. “Here’s what I figure. Most people around there use the back door for everything because of the way the driveway is situated, and it was your kitchen detector going off. I think they assumed you’d run out back and straight into their arms.”

“Yeah,” I echoed Lance’s position. “But our driveway is full with the convertible and primate-mobile. We park the minivan in the street. If we could figure out how to leave our mud on the stoop, we’d go in
and
out by the front.”

Drew let me finish talking, then repeated patiently, “Which is why we think they were checking the place out while you were gone. Acting on that misunderstanding, I think they parked in the alley running between your house and Elm Avenue. You’d have noticed if they were there during the day, and Darnell would have seen them if they’d come by way of the front after dark. They pulled up out back after dark and tried to run you out. When you came out the wrong door, they took off back down the alley. Trudy followed until I caught up, then I chased them almost to the bypass, but they pulled into a box store lot and down a dirt road. I followed the road to the end, but they had turned aside somewhere, and it was too dark for me to do anything else. I’ve got a team out there this morning trying to follow up.”

“It doesn’t explain why they were there in the first place.” I was watching William and Daddy out the window.

Will had forced Darnell to come outside to interview him, and he’d provided nothing more helpful than, “Circle dots are bad cars.” Now, he had on gardening gloves, and he was using his shears to hold up woody hibernating rose stems for Daddy to actually cut. He should have been freezing. Natasha was upstairs with Sara, helping the younger girl play dress-up with Mama’s clothes.

“Why did they leave a decapitated body at your sanctuary but hogtie my
living
deputies in your refrigerator?”

“Do you
know
it’s the same people at the center and our house?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence. Natasha’s necklace didn’t get into your spider monkey enclosure by magic. Right now, we want to question Charles Dalton about Natasha’s necklace, but I doubt he’ll be much help. Our force is too small to have surveillance teams everyplace we expect trouble, though, and we figured it was more likely to crop up at the sanctuary, since that’s where it came before. Frankly, if Trudy and Darnell hadn’t been available to keep an eye on you, last night could have gone a whole lot worse.

“For now, don’t go home. Stay here with your folks or go to a motel. It’s kind of hard to do in a small town, but try not to take the same route twice in a row going places. Make sure the kids are accompanied to and from the school doors.”

“But it’s Christmas!” I protested. “We’ve got presents to wrap, and our tree is up. We can’t . . .”

“. . . live like the devil is watching over our shoulders.” Lance finished my thought.

“I think he is.” Drew rose. “But it’s nine o’clock in the morning, I’ve been awake since
six
o’clock
yesterday
morning, and if I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to fall over dead from exhaustion. And that would be no good, because until we find Hugh, I’m the acting senior detective.”

“You’re . . . wow . . . congratulations,” I said. “Wait. What time did you say it is?”

“Nine.”

Mama’s analog clock confirmed this truth.

“What am I going to do? I have the most important job interview of my life in an hour, I haven’t had a shower, I’m still wearing yesterday’s cruddy blue jeans, and all my work clothes are at home in my closet!”

ATTN: ADVICE

Dear Nora:

You can read all the advice you want, but nothing will substitute for a long talk with your daughter. Find out what you can do for her. Ask her what she needs most. Build up your bond, because she’s going to need you, Grandma!

Your Therapist

“But Trudy, I
need
my clothes.”

“You can’t go over there. I can bring you what you want and meet you at school.”

“No time! I need fifteen minutes to drive to the college, ten to walk to the Bio Science building, another ten to get set up . . . Setup! My slides! Okay, calm down, I have a copy on the hard drive at school. I’ve only got twenty-five minutes to get showered, dressed, and in the car.”

“
Plenty
of time,” said Mama.

“What? Even if Trudy leaves when I hop in the tub, she’ll be twenty minutes to the house, at a minimum. It will take her
at least
another five to find my stuff, then she’d need fifteen more to get to school, get parked, and I’d be wearing blue jeans in the middle of my presentation before she walked in.”

“Why would you have time to get your stuff if I wouldn’t?”

“Because . . . because . . .”
I know where it is; I’ll speed the whole way; I’ll . . .
“I wouldn’t. What am I going to do?”

“I may not wear them often, but I do still own dress pants, Noel. We’re of a size around the middle, and I have
plenty
of time to hem a pair of slacks while you’re in the tub. She knew how I eschewed skirts. I’ve still got all of your measurements from the wedding.”

“Mama, I love you.” I appreciated being descended from a professional seamstress now more than I ever had in my life.

Fifteen minutes later, she greeted me at the bathroom door with a muted tan suit. The pants bore inexplicable pale red squares that were almost, but not quite, professional looking.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
I buttoned myself in cursing the scratchy, hot wool. I couldn’t decide whether to wish Mama’s blouse was long sleeved to stave off my itching or to be grateful it was short sleeved to keep down the heat.

Although foot problems had long since driven her out of high heels, Mama had never gotten rid of a single pair. The ones she gave me were maroon, presumably to go with the unappealing un-plaid design on my pants, and they were only half a size too large. A little newspaper in the toes, some borrowed lipstick on my face, and I was ready to roll.

In the kitchen, Lance was waiting to drive me in. He had a 10:30 lab he couldn’t cancel any more than I could my interview, even though all three children were home from school for a second morning, thanks to last night’s adventure. “Hey, hot stuff,” he greeted me.

I tried to look appreciative of the compliment, but grimaced instead of smiling. I reached for one final swig of coffee as I followed him to the door. Right then, William catapulted in from the garden and collided with me from one side, and Sara pelted into me from the other.

“William is timed for
school
!”

“Don’t leave me! I want to come with you!”

Coffee sloshed up onto my face, lapel, and white blouse. “I don’t have time to change!”

“I’ve got an easy fix.” Mama scurried out of the room.

“William is timed for
school.
”

“I thought you were pruning?” I plucked a thorny leaf out of his hair. Moments before, I would have sworn it would have been difficult to roust William and Daddy from the rose beds anyway. Never mind that the child wasn’t wearing a coat, he had looked settled in for the
day
out there. None of the other grandkids would have humored Daddy for half so long as William already had, especially with everything bloomed out and the work revolving around rose hips and repeating already completed winter preparations.

Darnell was prepared to come with Lance and me. Trudy had work to do in Columbus, but the kids and my parents wouldn’t be staying alone. Drew had given them a pair of deputy watchdogs.

It seemed far safer and more logical to leave the kids there. But now, William was rocking, glancing back and forth between Lance and me and the open door. There wasn’t a threat there, but I saw the temptation to run etched on his forehead.

Lance did, too. “Okay, I’ll have time to take you in after I drop Noel.”

“Lance, it’s not
safe.
And he’s wearing
pajamas
!” Also, no underwear. We hadn’t exactly brought any of his undies along, and the pull-up he’d been sleeping in was decidedly soaked by the time we got here.

“He’ll be safer there than anywhere else. They’ve got detectors on the doors, a fence around the playground, and an aide to keep him from running. And they keep an extra set of his clothes in his cubby. He’ll be fine. Get in the car, buddy.”

I began dabbing my shirt with a wet paper towel in a futile effort to clean it. “Fine.” We watched until we were sure he was scrambling into the minivan.

“But what about
me
?” Where she had been querulous at first, demanding and angry, now Sara’s voice had taken on a plaintive edge.

“Don’t you want to play with me today, Sara?” Natasha tried.

Sara didn’t so much as glance away from me. “Don’t
leave
me.”

“Sara, there’ll be nothing for you to do,” said Lance. “Noel has to give an important presentation, and I . . . honey, we’re dissecting fetal pigs today. You
cannot
come to my lab.” Lance hated teaching classes like this. He questioned the ethics of dissection when we had vividly detailed computer programs available.

Sara sat on the floor and howled. “Don’t
leave me
!” she sobbed.

“Go on, you guys. We’ll be fine.” Natasha hunkered down beside her younger sister. Layla might
sound
more like an adult than a child, but Tasha was the one who acted the part. When I first met her, she had seemed like a typical goth teen to me. But I hadn’t known about Gary’s ongoing abuse then. As the fragments of the deep depression she had lived with for the last four years began to lift, the young woman who emerged wasn’t a child at all. There was nothing typical or goth about Natasha.

Mama dashed back with an enormous, flashy brooch. She pinned it below my right shoulder, perfectly hiding the remains of the coffee stains. I leaned down to kiss Sara and tell her she’d be fine, but when I buried my nose in her thick, soft hair, with its faint honey scent, I found myself squatting down and wrapping my arms around her middle. Somehow, when I stood up, I hadn’t let go. She slid easily over to my hip, smashing her face against the side of my neck that wasn’t now covered with the appalling brooch.

“Please,” she sobbed. “Please, please, please. Don’t
leave
me.” Her whole body shook with tearful tremors. Intellectually, I knew this was simply a meltdown. It had been due ever since the burglar alarm’s first screeches, and it could have been triggered by anything at all, when the real cause was a combination of fear and overexhaustion. William had melted right away and would now, with careful management, likely be fine until the overtiredness caught up with him this evening. Sara had instead, as was her habit, waited until the crisis was over to fall apart.

I remembered the first meeting on our lawn, when she threw herself into Natasha’s arms, accepting me only when Tasha had to go to the bathroom. She had howled then with the ferocity of terror at losing her brother. Now, she was afraid of losing him again. The people who broke into our house could easily have been coming to take him from her. And to take
her
from
me.
Sara wasn’t the only one having a delayed reaction. I squeezed her back.