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.”
I didn’t speak. Not initially. My recent experience with liars and deception was too raw to accept her words at face value. And yet, the conversation was punctuated by bursts of another voice in the background, like she was being hurried along to come help with something. Her urgency seemed so real. “I’ll talk to Natasha,” I finally said, “and I’ll call the sheriff’s department. They will be able to tell us where to meet.” If this is real. If you aren’t calling from some rented phone trying to lure my foster daughter into danger herself, under the pretext of a rescue mission. If June isn’t about to come back around and bite us in August.
I hung up the phone. “What do you want to do?” I asked Lance.
“You wake up Natasha,” he said. “I’ll wake up Officer Carmichael.”
Over the course of the investigation in June, we had become friends with a deputy, a junior detective, at the county sheriff’s office, and he could be trusted to give us honest information, even if we dragged him out of bed from a sound sleep.
Lance got out his own phone and started dialing while I walke
d down to Natasha’s room. I knocked. She didn’t answer. “Natasha?” I knocked again.
“G’way, Gram. I’m sleeping.”
“It’s Noel. I need to talk to you about something.”
A pause, then, “Yeah, I think I’m up.”
Natasha’s meds knocked her out soundly and fast. Although she was allowed to stay up until midnight on these last few summer nights before school began, she was often in bed by ten-thirty or eleven. As soon as she surrendered her phone, she powered down. Right now, it was going on toward one in the morning.
As soon as I said Nelly Penobscott’s name, though, she leapt out of bed and started pacing. “Why didn’t you let me talk to her?”
“For all I know, she’s one of those crazy people.” I didn’t finish the thought. I didn’t need to. Lance and I had been lured by Gert’s murderous twin Gretchen to try to find and rescue Natasha at the primate center. Gretchen showed up at our wedding, looking enough like Gert, and projecting sufficient distress, so we played right into her hands, rushing in where we should have maintained caution.
“Let me see the number. She’s in my book.”
I handed Natasha the phone. “This one came up without a name.”
Natasha studied her call history. “If it’s really Mrs. P,” she finally said, “she’s calling from someone else’s house.”
“Agreed.”
“But she knew so much! I saw Will and Sara at the pizza place yesterday and again earlier this afternoon. Sara was the little girl talking my ear off while we waited in line. You might have noticed her, but Will’s quiet. He doesn’t talk much. He’ll wander off where nobody can find him. Wait! Did Mrs. P. say kindergarten? Anywhere in the conversation, did she use that word?”
“No-o-o, why?”
“It’s our safe word. So I’ll know it’s her. But if she was upset, and confused because you answered, she might not have remembered.”
Lance poked his head into the room. “Be right back,” he said.
“Why? Where are you going?”
“Drew says it’s all legit. I want to check out the place where the volunteers are gathering.”
“Don’t go.” Natasha, who had blazed at me for withholding her phone call, sounded frightened. “Let me call Mrs. P back first.”
“If it’s not . . .”
“She didn’t say kindergarten. If it’s her, somebody is going to answer at either this number or the one in my book. And then we’ll know at least one thing.”
Natasha’s wariness since June was equivalent to that of a jealous spouse. While she would go places with her friends and stay out past her curfew if not monitored, she made Lance or I check all destinations first. Her friends grumbled when their own parents wanted to speak to a new pal’s mother before allowing more than a casual gathering. Natasha begged us to pretend we were doing the same thing against her will, when in reality she was the one who wanted her new acquaintances checked out. She told them a limited amount about her situation and had established safe words with all of them. I had packed the list somewhere in the pile of boxes from the office. It had accidentally gotten lumped in with something nonessential and gone missing. Natasha knew them all, but I certainly couldn’t keep track of them. And she was right. A call to a trusted number could at least establish some things.
“Use the number in your contacts first,” I advised her.
Our arrangement worked out well, since it meant we had an honest kid. Her social worker, the same one who had been with her in the months leading up to being adopted by her grand-parents, had warned us to expect problems with lying at the same time as she congratulated us for clearing all the system’s hurdles in a mere two months. I had no doubt that even from what had nearly been his deathbed, Natasha’s grandfather had eased those to speed the process. Somehow, the home study was already in progress while we completed the six weeks of parenting classes, even though the classes should have come first.
Thus, what should have been a three- to six-month delay to formalize Natasha’s durability as our guest wound up only taking eight weeks. We might not have needed to go through the formality at all if our connection to Stan and Gert hadn’t been so tangential or if Natasha’s former situation hadn’t been so dire. In the height of absurdity, we’d started receiving checks from the state to support her care, even though Stan had ordered us to use his credit cards and buy her anything she needed.
She shifted the phone from hand to hand after she dialed. From the look on her face at the answer, something was wrong. Natasha handed me her handset and buried her head in her pillow. “This is all my fault!”
“I . . . uh . . . kindergarten . . . ,” I blurted out.
The woman who answered had obviously been asleep. “Natasha? Honey, it’s the middle of the night,” she said.
“I’d better call Drew back,” Lance said. “I’m going to bet that kid didn’t wander off.” He snorted. “It’s like one of those problems in your mother’s advice column. ‘Dear Nora: Stalkers keep trying to lure my teen into danger. Please help or send thread.”
I appreciated my husband’s stab at humor, but I doubted we would be seeing my mother tackle this issue in “What’s Next Nora?”. I briefly outlined the situation for the real Nelly Penobscott, but hurried her off the phone. I needed to make another call, this one to a federal agent. And I needed to see about getting Natasha a new cell phone, one with a better protected number.
CHAPTER 2
Dear Nora:
I have the worst trouble with houseguests. It seems like they’re always dropping by uninvited. What can I do?
Teeming in the Country
Dear Teeming: Lock the doors. Pretend you aren’t home. If that fails, leave.
Nora
The next morning brought Trudy Jackson and her partner, Darnell Marshall, who worked for the feds. Technically, the agents had come and gone once already, but they only popped in for a few minutes in the middle of the night before leaving to contribute what they could to the search for the boy. None of us slept well. We were worried about the missing child, but we weren’t stupid enough to go rushing out after our last similar experience. Other people could hunt for now.
At first light, I opened the back door and waved to Trudy’s beat-up sedan, the same one she used to pose as a sanctuary volunteer. “Come on in, Trudy,” I called reluctantly. “Where’s Darnell?”
“Talking to our people down the block.” Trudy joined me on my front stoop. For a moment, I hesitated to step aside and let her in. I didn’t trust her. Not any longer. When she was merely a volunteer technically in my employ, I had held her in great esteem. I still felt conflicted about her role in the federal operation ongoing when Art was killed. If she and Darnell had broken their silence to let at least Lance and me know a little, could our friend have been saved?
She waited outside the door, not answering my confrontational stance. I didn’t mean to be so judgmental, not when my own decisions also contributed to Art’s death. If Lance and I hadn’t been dashing around with last-minute wedding preparations, we would have been there to keep him from going out back looking for the abandoned orangutan that would ultimately save Stan, Lance, Natasha, and me. It tried to save Art when he crossed Gary’s path out there. I drew a deep breath and moved out of the way.
Once inside, Trudy gave Natasha back her phone. She had taken it when she pulled up in the middle of the night. By the time she and Darnell arrived then, they had already researched the number Natasha got the call from. Their clothing had been neat, but Trudy’s hair pointed out in several directions, as if a mere hairbrush had been inadequate to tame it when she rose from slumber. Darnell had motioned to us, and Lance followed him outside, while I stayed with Tasha and Trudy in the doorway.
Trudy had told Natasha, “The phone number belongs to somebody named Ivy Dearborn. Mean anything?”
“Dearborn does, not Ivy.”
At the time, Tasha had simply handed the phone to Trudy, who didn’t elaborate. Now, howeve
r, Trudy said, “Tell me what you know.”
Natasha sat at the kitchen table, her back rigid, clasping and unclasping her hands. Then she sagged. “About Ivy Dearborn? Nothing.”
“About the missing boy, his sister, how you know them, and who would know you saw them since you came here.” Trudy’s voice was clipped and professional. She needed information, and she needed it fast. A national alert had been released hours before the alarming call Natasha received, but most people wouldn’t see it until they got up in the morning. Right now, the authorities’ best chance of finding the boy lay in talking to the people who knew him.
“Okay.” Natasha swallowed. She rested her head in one hand. “I guess Mrs. P . . . Nelly Penobscott . . . could tell you more about them than I could . . .”
“We have someone interviewing her now. What do you know?”
“Not much. I mean, I guess more than you. I’m not sure.” I wondered if Natasha’s mood was addled by more than her meds. I didn’t smell alcohol on her, but there wasn’t any way to surreptitiously look at the champagne bottle, and I didn’t want to outright ask in front of Trudy if she’d taken a sip.
Instead, I got her a soda pop and told my part, about the phone call itself, first. By the time I finished speaking, Natasha had gathered her wits. “Here’s what I think,” she said.
“Is that different from what you know?” Trudy had a tablet computer out, ready to take notes.
“A little. I know you didn’t pick up any of the other kids they were using in the ring, even though you got most of the adults.”
The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 2