The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (8 page)

“Candy?” Natasha knew our enrichment foods didn’t typically include sweets. “Aren’t those bad for them?”

“Not half as bad as staying out.” The macaques had been swooping down from the rafters stealing things all morning. Lance typically wore a ball cap this time of year, to protect his balding scalp from summer sun. He was not wearing it now, and its pieces drifted down from the ceiling. Jen, who was quite nearsighted, had the bad luck to have been wearing her glasses instead of her contacts this morning. The glasses were now somewhere high overhead, and she was squinting her way through the day.

“I guess I’m grateful I can be sure it was my mistake,” Lance said. “We can spare the volunteers a lecture.”

“How do we get them back?” Natasha persisted.

“The same way we acquired them in the first place,” Lance said. “One at a time.”

Three hours later, all of us were sweat-soaked and covered in scratches. Only I had been bitten, the others having the common sense to get their hands out of the way before sharp things happened. We had dodged countless bombs, as the monkeys let their bowels loose wherever they happened to be, without much care for who might be standing underneath. Actual shit slinging was more of a capuchin problem. Only one of our rhesus macaques had suffered from the kind of neglect causing that particular stereotypical behavior, but he had not lost his skill since moving in back in June. He possessed uncanny accuracy.

Our basic tactic was to lay out a couple of candies and wait for an interested party to come close enough. Mostly, the monkeys swiped the first offering and escaped with ease but got snagged on their attempts for a second or sometimes a third treat.

At last, Lance said, “We’ve only got twenty-four. I’ve counted four times.” We were standing in a sweaty huddle around the enclosure.

“There.” Natasha pointed. The final rhesus macaque was hanging out on the spider monkey enclosure chittering away like a neighbor popping over to talk across the fence. Two more candies got him back into the right place. We counted twice more and went back in the barn.

“Why
did
they stick around, Noel?” Bryan asked. “If
my
cage was unlocked all night, I’d be off like a shot.” The rest of us all had extra clothing stashed in lockers, and we had changed out. Bryan wasn’t a regular volunteer, and Lance was tossing through some of Art’s old things to find at least a shirt not covered in monkey hair.

“What would you do if you locked yourself out of your apartment, though?”

“I’d try to get back in!”

“Right. And what if you got lost in the middle of nowhere?”

“I’d want to go home.”

“Exactly. These guys associate us with meals and safety. I’m sure more of them were visiting pals before Jen and the breakfast crew showed up, but most of them came up to the place with the food as soon as it was available.”

Jen confirmed my thinking. “They explored around the grounds pretty thoroughly, but they didn’t go far. They rushed the barn when I opened the back door.” While we talked, a pair of volunteers went out back with a delayed dinner delivery for the other animals, all of whom were still worked into a frenzy. The primates keyed off of our emotions and each other’s so acutely. They picked up on our tension and excitement, and reflected it in their behaviors.

It would be late tonight before the security guards got any peace in this part of the county. Which reminded me, “Why didn’t the deputies notice we had an empty enclosure overnight? They’re supposed to do visual patrols.” In the wake of Art’s death, we had been forced to abandon our old security company. Rather than find a new one, we had started hiring off-duty police officers to keep an eye on things overnight. Rural cops don’t get paid much, and all of them, especially the rookies, needed the extra income.

“I think Lance talked to them,” said Jen. After that, she let herself into Lance’s and my office to call and let our network know the “termites” had been returned to their enclosures.

Later, as Lance, Natasha, and I rode back home in the battered primate-mobile, I posed the question to Lance. “Deputy Greene swears they were all full when they swept the place at four,” he said.

Of all the members of the force who cared for our property when we were absent, Greene was both the most detail-oriented and the most likely to err on the side of over- rather than under-zealousness. If he believed the cages were full, then he had done everything short of a head count. “Must not have noticed they had an exit option until closer to sunrise.”

Lance started to berate himself for leaving the cage open as we rounded the corner on our street, but he dribbled to a halt as we all realized we had a welcoming committee of one sitting on our front porch.

“Crap, that’s William’s sister,” Natasha said.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” I told her. I
did
recognize her from the pizza shop the day before. “Remind me her name?”

“Sara. She’s Sara.” The little girl sat on the step, elbows propped on her knees, chin cupped in her hands. Frowsy black hair framed her face, and she stared into space without turning her head, even after we pulled into the driveway.

“Let me out, Lance.”

As soon as Sara saw Tasha, her lassitude evaporated. “Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi!” She threw her arms around Natasha’s middle.

“Hi, Sara.” Natasha wiggled loose and took Sara’s shoulders. “Tell me . . .” she began.

“
You’ll
tell me!” Sara’s excitement vanished in an instant. She looked up with wide, entreating eyes. “Everybody else acts like I’m a baby, and they won’t say a thing, but
you’ll
say.”

“Say what?”

“Is William okay? The TV doesn’t make any sense, and nobody wants me to know anything.”

“The last time I saw him, he was fine.” Natasha smoothed Sara’s hair.

“Then why won’t they
tell me
? They all act like he’s
dead.
”

Natasha shook her head. “He was pretty shaken up, and I guess he was sore, but he was alive at the Marine this morning.”

“Thank
God.
” Sara didn’t sound like she was six. She sounded like she was a hundred. She collapsed against Natasha and began to sob. “I thought he was
dead.
I was for sure somebody had killed him.”

“Sara, listen.” Natasha seemed to have regained some of her original purpose. “I need
you
to tell me something. Does anybody know where you are?” In the time we’d been talking, no adult had manifested.

Sara blinked and sniffled, hiccupping like she’d been crying for much longer than she actually had. “Y-yes,” she wavered.

“Who?” Natasha said. “Who knows where you are?”

“
You
do,” Sara said, as if this should have been obvious.

Natasha groaned. Sara burst into tears again. Natasha hugged her more tightly, but the look she cast in my direction was a helpless one. It begged for an established protocol for escaped foster children matching the one for escaped rhesus macaques.

Behind me, Lance muttered as he scrolled through his phone contacts. “Detective . . . Drew?” he finally asked, “is the girl missing now? The sister of the boy we found this morning?” I couldn’t hear Detective Carmichael’s response, but I knew what it was when Lance’s groan mirrored Natasha’s earlier one. “You can cancel the alert. She’s here. At our place. We got home from work and she was out front. I don’t know how she arrived. Okay. We’re not going anyplace.”

Lance put his phone back in his pocket. Sara had amped up from a sob to a wail. “I thought he was
d-d-dead
!” she bawled. We all tried to talk to her, but nothing could shake her from her screaming dismay.

“Noel, I have to pee, and she’s
crushing
me.”

“Sara, honey, you have to let go,” I said. I peeled her off of Natasha, and she latched instead onto me. Tasha buzzed toward the door, and I lifted the little girl. It was at once the most natural and unnatural thing in the world. I had cuddled my nieces and nephew through many hurts and temper tantrums, but I had never simply picked up a strange child. I had never whispered soothing things to a person who clearly couldn’t hear me. The lonely feeling that had come over me while holding William’s hand swallowed me once more.

I tried to gauge Sara’s weight as I swayed from leg to leg. She felt too light. It seemed like my sister’s children had weighed more than this when they were six. I knew I hadn’t been able to lift them so easily by this age. It was like holding a much younger girl.

Lance joined us and wrapped an arm around me. Natasha returned and picked up a handful of papers off the porch. Wordlessly, she passed them to Lance.

The top sheet proved to be a computer-printed map with nearly two and a half miles of walking directions. Then came two envelopes, addressed to “Sweet Sara” and “Wonderful William,” respectively. The return addresses were circled on both cards. “They collect cards.” Natasha shouted to be heard over Sara. “As soon as I started seeing them around here, I got their address from Natalie so I could write.”

“How’d Sara even know to come here, though?”

“Saw . . . saw . . . saw Natasha on TV,” Sara blubbered from my shoulder. Her sobbing finally started to taper off.

“And so you . . . what, dug up your card . . .” Lance probed.

“It wasn’t
buried
! I don’t put things underground.”

“Okay, Miss Literal-minded, you . . . found your card . . .”

“And William’s!”

“So you went online . . .”

“And printed out a map like Natty does when we have to go into Columbus!”

“That’s . . . impressive,” my husband marveled.

“Miss Becky will be so
proud
of me!” Sara veered from one form of hysteria to another with fluidity. “I . . . I remembered left, and right, and before, and after, and even
then
all afternoon.”

“Have you had anything at all to drink? It’s ninety degrees out here!” Her little body felt sweaty, and she didn’t seem overheated, but I suddenly feared heat stroke.

“I’ll get her some water.” Natasha turned to go back in.

“I
hate
water.”

“Sara, you’re dehydrated,” I said. “You need to drink something . . .”

“No! No. No. No. No. NO!” Perhaps this was an improvement from the implacable fit about her brother. At least now, she was engaging with me. With us. But she needed to replenish her system.

“Okay, no water,” Natasha said. “What
will
you drink?”

“Lemonate. I only drink lemonate.” Sara enunciated her mispronunciation.

Where the hell am I going to get that? Ah! I now live in a neighborhood. There are benefits.
“Tasha, I saw kids playing out front two houses down when we were unloading yesterday. Will you see if they have anything even resembling lemonade?”

Natasha returned with an entire pitcher, and Sara guzzled it. She had resumed the hiccuppy breathing that came with hysterical weeping, and I had an idea this was only a short gap before she launched into another crying jag. Instead, she dropped the paper cup Tasha had brought and clutched her crotch with one hand and my arm with the other. “Now I have to
go
!”

“Come on, I’ll show you the bathroom.” Natasha guided her away from us and toward the house. Sara tripped going up the porch stairs and would have fallen if Tasha hadn’t been holding her by the shoulder. While we waited for her to come back out, Drew arrived in a squad car. “She in there?” He pointed to the house.

We showed him inside, where we found Natasha standing outside the bathroom. “But you
have
to come out,” she said.

“I want William,” Sara bawled.

Tasha turned to us. “She locked herself in. She won’t come out without her brother.”

“If we have to, the fire department can take the door out with axes,” Drew said in a low voice.

“I can probably pick it if you give me five minutes,” Lance offered.

“Less traumatic for her.”

“Not to mention our house.”

While we waited for Lance to root through my hairpins, I said, “How come the junior detective drew two high-profile problems in one day?” Typically, Drew backed up investigations led by the senior detective. “Boss on vacation?”

“Right now, I am
the
detective. Hugh Marsland’s supposed to be at a conference in DC, but nobody can get ahold of him. His wife’s about out of her mind.”

I whistled my dismay. “What’s going on?”

Drew shook his head, unwilling to say more. Sara went on caterwauling while Lance began to probe the lock, which proved to be sticky, drawing what should have been a two-minute operation into ten. Sara didn’t seem to notice we had stopped rattling the handle and had, instead, started loosening it. Bit by bit, she quieted down, and by the time Lance finally got the door to open, she had been entirely silent for some time.

He twisted the handle and pushed gently on the frame, prepared to use his weight against the door to nudge a resisting body out of his way. Instead, the door opened freely. Sara was curled into a sleeping ball on the bathmat. She was sucking on four fingers of her right hand.

I bypassed the others to crouch beside her. “Come on, Sara. I’m sure your foster mother is worried to death about you.”

Sara rolled over and curled tighter around her own knees. “I want William,” she mumbled around her hand. She did not wake.

“Say what?” asked Drew.

“Same thing she’s been saying all along,” I told him.

“I’ll take your word for it. All I heard was slobber.”

“Let her sleep,” Lance said. “I’d imagine she’s gotten little enough since last night.”

“She can’t stay on our bathmat.” I slid my arms under the child and lifted her, marveling again at how little she weighed.

“I’ll take her.” Lance reached for the girl. A jolt of static electricity sparked between us when I handed Sara over. She twitched, and Lance grabbed her with reflexive tightness.

I glanced up at him and saw a disproportionate level of shock in his eyes. “Day catching up to you?”

“Must be. She hardly weighs anything, Noel.”

Lance’s face closed as quickly as it had opened. But in the moment I stared at him, I remembered he had spent a portion of his own childhood in foster care. No wonder he had reacted so oddly to William earlier and to Sara now. For all the time I had known him, Lance had only told me this after our wedding, and then only under duress. He had not spoken of it since, but I now wondered what happened to him in that year, and what could possibly have been worse than the insanity his mother was perpetuating at home.