The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (7 page)

In fact, the top shelf was so high above her head she ultimately fumbled around until the can fell out, bounced on the table, then landed on the carpet, its trigger depressed, and noxious lemon scent spewing straight up. “I got it! I got it!” I aimed it in the pantry and fridge. I jammed the nozzle, but it went on spraying. “Now what do I do with it?”

“Get rid of it before it smells as bad as the food!” Natasha jumped down.

“Where?” I threw it in the sink.

“Not there!” She grabbed it back. “Get it out of the room.” She popped it in the garbage still fizzing. “Help me out, Noel!”

We tied off the bag to a hissing chorus. “Shouldn’t it run out soon?”

Natasha grabbed the brimming trash can on the far side and dragged it backward across the carpet. “I don’t know. It felt almost full.”

I shoved with her. As we forced the lid down atop the overfull bag, the chair’s voice drifted down the hall. “Get the ad out there,” he grumbled, doubtless hassling Travis. “I want to interview for this position on the conference circuit this January.” Their footsteps echoed down the hall, headed for us and our smelly mess. Here he was talking about the job I wanted and about to come upon me manhandling a fetid, whooshing container that probably, now I considered the problem, contained his lunch.

Natasha seemed to have reached a similar conclusion. “What do we do?” she mouthed to me.

“Run! Hide!”

“Where?”

“My office.”

We scurried around the corner as the chair asked, “What in thunder is that
smell
?” By the time he demanded, “What’s wrong with the trash can, Travis?” we were scooting in my door. Bryan perched on the couch arm, one of my red grading pens in one hand, my CV and cover letter attached to a clipboard on his lap.

He didn’t look up. “What’s the commotion?”

Natasha leaned into the door, clicking it gently shut. I snatched up my phone and dialed the desk. When Travis picked up, I said, “The noise in the trash is an overzealous can of lemon spray. It may overwhelm the other smells. Your lunch is the only one I didn’t pitch.” Then I hung up. “I guess you’ll need to use my office,” I told Natasha. “I’m thinking the conference room is out.”

“Is Travis free?” Bryan handed over my papers. “I bled all over these. All the mistakes are nitpicky stuff, but a letter-perfect document will stand out. You have no idea how many reporter applications the
Press
gets from people who can’t spell or put a sentence in the right order.”

“Maybe you could do a series about it.”

“I don’t want to mock . . . but Nora could! Get your mother to call me later, will you?”

“What’s Next, Nora?” was one of the
Free Press
’s most popular columns. It had started as a series of sewing tips years ago, when Bryan’s parents ran the paper. Back then, it was called “Tell Me More, Lenore,” and questions traditionally ended with, “Please help or send thread.” Over the years, it had blossomed into a more general column as people started to send in a broader range of questions. Now, it seemed nothing was off limits. Hence, the updated name. Mom responded to queries about everything from sex to lawn maintenance. Muscogen County had a love for the outré, and Lenore Rue’s column was one of the first sections people turned to when the paper hit their doorsteps once a week.

Occasionally, Mom stepped out of her assigned role to editorialize or satirize something. “It does sound right up her alley.” I followed Bryan out of the office and shut the door behind us to give Natasha privacy. “I can imagine Nora would have
tons
to say on the topic.” Although she was a seamstress by trade, Mom had grown up the child of a single mother in the 1950s, and she and my Nana had lived under the community’s constant scrutiny. She might be making up for her straight-laced childhood in other ways, like badly dyed hair, living in a house that used to be a funeral home, and writing a sometimes racy advice column, but Mom had the diction and grammar of an English teacher. She would enjoy a chance to take aim at some of her pet peeves.

“I do want to talk to you about this morning,” Bryan said more quietly. “But I don’t want to print anything that could make trouble.” Although he appeared to be the least aggressive reporter in the business, Bryan had a way of putting people off guard and extracting far more information than speakers ever meant to give him. But he was also ethical, and on our side here, and not only because Stan was one of the newspaper’s major funders.

“You don’t go to press for a few days, right?”

He nodded.

“Give us another day to get moved in, and we’ll have you guys over for dinner with the detective. I’m not promising gourmet fare; we’ll probably order in pizza from the Marine, but it would give you a chance to talk to all of us at once.”

“Noel, I love you!” He planted a big kiss on my cheek right as Travis came out of the office.

“Honey! Cheating on me!” Travis said in mock horror.

“It’s not what you think. I mean, I love her, but I don’t
love
love her. I don’t. . . .” He paused, then untangled his verbal web by kissing Travis on the lips. “See? Cheeks are for friends, lips are for families. Let’s go to lunch.”

“You know I can’t. I’ve got a dozen syllabi to make fifty copies each of, and . . .”

“Of course you can!” Bryan interrupted Travis’s spiel. “You’re salaried. Nobody is watching you punch the clock.”

“The chair is watching everything I
do.
Besides, I brought my lunch.”

“Technically, I did, too. Let’s go anyway. If you want, we can sashay past his office arm in arm . . .” Travis and Bryan were about the least sashaying couple I knew.

“I’d like to, but I’d rather get home on time tonight, and he wants me to revise his ad for Dr. Hooper’s position. He wants somebody with a different specialty to bring new ideas to the department.”

My heart sank. Travis rolled his eyes. Bryan patted my back. Travis had known I was applying for the job ever since it came open, and if Bryan hadn’t already, editing my cover letter had surely clued him in. “Don’t worry about
him
,” Travis said. “The rest of the committee won’t go along with it. They like the ad exactly as it’s written. I have to compose something for them to reject to humor him. Come
on
! Half of them expect you or Lance or both of you to apply for it. You’re a
shoo-in.
”

“I wish I felt so sure. Listen, Lance doesn’t know . . .”

“You haven’t told him? What if he wants to apply, too?”

“You know something I don’t?”

“No . . . no, but it seems . . .”

“Noel!” Natasha came pelting down the hall. “Where’s your cell phone?”

“In my pocket, why?”

“Call Lance back. He’s been trying to get hold of you ever since he got to the sanctuary.” I pulled out the phone. Predictably, I had it silenced. I had missed ten calls. “He rang the office,” she went on. “And he wants to know if we can get a ride out to the sanctuary.”

“What? Why?” I fumbled in my haste to dial. Naturally, Lance didn’t answer. “Is something wrong?”

“I think so. He sounded rushed. He said something about catching the little termites before they got into more mischief.”

“The what? Bryan, can you . . . ?”

“You bet, but I want an exclusive on whatever it is . . . as long as it won’t mess you guys up.” He turned briefly to Travis. “You. Me. Tomorrow. Lunch,” he said. “And the chair can go to hell if he tries to interrupt.”

Dear Nora:

My neighbor’s cat gets out of his house and uses my yard as a litterbox. The neighbor refuses to believe this is happening, even when confronted with direct evidence. What can I do?

Pooped

Dear Pooped:

Get a dog.

Nora

“Don’t open that!” Lance slammed the barn door as I tried to come in through the back.

“Hey!You nearly mashed my fingers.”

“Should have warned you.” He opened the door a crack and rapidly ushered Bryan, Natasha, and I through.

“Good thing we’re all thin. What’s the . . .” Something brown shot by my ankles and connected with the door as Lance threw himself backward once more. It ran back the way it had come, brushing me again on its way past.

Natasha screamed and jumped as it latched onto her.

“What was
that
?” Bryan demanded.

“A monkey,” I said. “A rhesus macaque. The more relevant question is, what’s it doing in here?”

Natasha screamed again. The monkey shimmied up her body and sat on her head, yanking her long brown hair as it chittered insults at Lance. “Ow!” The barn rose in a symphony of answering simian screeches and screams.

“I’ll get it.” Lance reached over me, but the monkey used his arm as a launching board to make a bid for the wall above the door. As it grabbed for purchase, I looked up to find the source of the other voices. Our rafters were littered with macaques. They stared down at us with interest writ large on their human-esque faces.

“Lance, what’s going on?”

“I guess I forgot to lock the enclosure after head count last night. Jen said it was wide open this morning when she got here to do breakfast. They were hanging out all over the other enclosures.”

“We weren’t here yesterday. We were moving.”

“I was. I ran by between loads to check in around dinnertime.” He meant primate dinnertime, not ours. “The volunteers were all scrambling to keep up, so I pitched in for half an hour or so. I was distracted the whole time, and I couldn’t stay long. But I did the rhesus enclosure. I must have forgotten to lock it up.

“Jen lured them into the barn with food when she found them earlier. She was trying to call me the whole time we were finding that kid. If we’d transferred the landline to the new house or had our cell phones on this morning, we’d have known about it sooner.”

“Wow.” Bryan looked around the ceiling. “You have a regular barrel of monkeys, don’t you? How can you be sure you get all of them?”

“Head count.”

“But what are you going to do now?”

“Catch them and return them to the enclosure.”

“Which enclosure?” Natasha asked. A recent change in Ohio’s exotic animal ownership laws had resulted in an amnesty period inviting people to give up wild “pets” without penalty before they had to obtain permits. This included certain types of monkeys. A record number of several varieties had been surrendered to the sanctuary in the month and a half since Art’s death.

Although rhesus macaques were one of the most popular monkeys to find their way into private hands, ownership of that specific primate was not affected. This was unfortunate since, as they got bigger and developed a tendency to bite and destroy furniture, their owners often removed teeth and claws and neglected them. Even so, we had received more of them than any other.

Few sanctuaries are even set up to handle rhesus macaques. They’re mischievous and stubborn, and they are extra territorial. Plus, they don’t carry the same cachet as apes. An ape sanctuary gets more donations. People look at apes and see hairy humans. They imagine their own ancestries and ask themselves what-if. They look at monkeys and they see dogs, cats, and birds. Pets, in other words. All of our chimps had several adoptive “parents” who funded a portion of their care in exchange for a photograph, a thank-you letter, and a tax deduction. Even Chuck already had several extra mothers and fathers.

But few people wanted to invest in monkeys, which they often considered better fodder for zoos and research laboratories. And even though it was driving us to outrageous lengths, our fears of the owners donating the animals to facilities engaged in less ethical research than ours, which was focused on studying the behaviors of primates in captivity, led us to keep adding space for more macaques.

Merle, the volunteer in charge of the area, had recently presented us with ten new intakes and the apology, “They all came from the same pet store. It was getting late, and I was the only one here, and I didn’t know what else to do.” What he should have done was call Lance or me or one of the three actual employees to complete the intake. By accepting them, he had put us close to our capacity for housing. But I doubted any of us would have turned them away in his place.

The general public also lived under the illusion that the state would euthanize animals given to a state holding facility, when in fact the facility was designed with the goal of finding appropriate placements for exotic pets across the nation. By and large, people contacted zoos and rescue centers like ours privately. Most zoos won’t take hand-reared animals, and sanctuaries were filling up fast.

We were nearly overfull ourselves, but our mission, Art’s mission, had always been to protect unwanted primates from inappropriate public scrutiny. In the wake of his death, our friend Christian Baker, an ape-keeper at the nearby Ohio Zoo, had banded together a group of keepers to donate materials in Art’s honor for several new enclosures, including a second spider monkey area and a second rhesus macaque enclosure. Art’s nephew Rick, a builder who maintained ties to Midwest Primates even after his uncle’s death, assembled the structures, doubling our available housing for several species. If necessary, we could take on up to 150 rhesus macaques in particular. We were running dangerously close to the line.

“The new one,” Lance answered Natasha. It wasn’t actually a new construct, merely the newest of our acquisitions. We had purchased it at auction from the same defunct zoo that once housed our orangutan. Enclosures aren’t typically mobile, but one of the less savory aspects of the unlicensed facility were its enclosures, which were entirely too easy to disassemble.

We hadn’t initially been interested, but here again Christian helped us out. “The materials are fine,” he said. “Lance ought to come up with me and see if there’s anything you can use.”

Lance took Rick, who also approved. The structure he built us was as solid as anything he had made with newer materials. But it was smaller. “Good,” Natasha said. “Fewer to catch. How does this work?”

Natasha had learned our procedures quickly, and she had proven adaptable to our constantly changing needs. “Anybody got soft fruit candy?” I called. In all the time I had been with the center, I had only ever known something like this to happen one other time. Then, someone had noticed the open door right away. Only a couple of monkeys had escaped, and they were quickly captured. But we were all trained for this kind of problem in theory.