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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  Natasha had already provided a list of names and descriptions; the best she could, anyway. She was often drunk when she was acting, and even many of the children she knew well had been kept on a first-name-only basis. “We all came from out in the sticks, and if we didn’t, our folks did, especially the moms.” This was information she had already given back in June. “Will and Sara—the missing boy and his sister—they weren’t in the ring.” To me, Natasha explained, “We didn’t age in until we were ten. Gary and Aunt Gretchen had the idea it was all okay after that, but you were too young before. But the twins’ mom was in. She and my mom used to do . . . scenes together.” Natasha shuddered. This was hard. “They got picked up together in the drug bust.”

  “The one leading to your placement with Mrs. Penobscott?” Trudy tapped her screen and scribbled with a stylus.

  Natasha nodded. “The twins weren’t quite two, and they didn’t know what was going on. There was another girl named Layla whose dad got picked up with the twins’ mom and mine. But he was a gang-banger . . . I mean, he was T-Bow Orrice. You know him, right?”

  Trudy stopped writing to stare at Natasha. Yes, she knew T-Bow Orrice. We all knew T-Bow Orrice, currently serving concurrent life sentences for murder. He was a major player accidentally caught when agents believed they were only breaking up a pimping ring. “I know,” she said. “I didn’t know you knew. Why haven’t you talked about Layla before? Did you know she was living out here?”

  “T-Bow was only connected to Gary and them tangentially, and Layla wasn’t ever in Gary’s ring, as far as I know. T-Bow had custody of Layla, because her mom was adamant about getting his name on the birth certificate in the hospital, but ultimately took off and ran back to her parents out here. I guess she spent a year getting clean. It pissed T-Bow off, her ditching him with the kid. He doesn’t like his women and kids to get hooks in him. He wants the kids, but he doesn’t want anything to do with them. He . . .” Natasha trailed into silence.

  “Tasha?” Trudy finally prompted.

  “Sorry. It was a memory, but it went away. Anyway, once he had Layla, T-Bow wouldn’t give her up to her mom for anything. He was punishing this woman by holding onto Layla, but his arrest changed everything around. In the end, Layla got out with her mom. He hated that. He didn’t approve of the mom.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from interjecting. “A gang-banger didn’t approve of an ex-porn star?”

  “He’s weird. He’s real protective of all his kids. The ones he acknowledges, anyway. Plus, the mom, Shannon, she got out.”

  Trudy steered the conversation back to its original focus. “Out. You’ve used that word twice. Out how?”

  “Out. Out out. Home free, no films, no drugs. Layla went to her mom, and T-Bow promised to leave them alone if Shannon didn’t tell what she knew about T-Bow and his gang. The rest of us were supposed to pretend Layla never existed.”

  “She went away and you stopped talking about her?”

  “We all knew what would happen if we talked.”

  “Not pleasant,” Trudy agreed. Clearly, she and Natasha had already discussed the finer points of life inside Gary’s ring.

  Natasha sank her head into her arms, which were crossed on the table. “What does it matter anymore?”

  “Natasha?” Trudy placed a hand on Natasha’s arm. “We don’t know what matters or what doesn’t until we know what it is.”

  I sat on Natasha’s other side and scooted in close to her. Sitting up straighter, she nonetheless moved away from me. I felt the most helpless as her guardian at these moments. I had to call on my own painful memories to connect with and help her.

  And what had I felt in those first couple of years after Alex Lakeland tried to beat me to death with my telephone? I moved away. If I could keep another body at arm’s length, then it would be harder to reach and hit me. But at the same time, I craved softness. Lance and I had known each other for a long time but only moved beyond friendship after I realized how diametrically different he was from his brother, and how much more I wanted his gentle personality than Alex’s cocky cowboy attitude. I would sit near Lance, simultaneously yearning for him to lightly rest an arm on me and grateful when he didn’t.

  I scooted back a pace from Natasha and she immediately turned in my direction again. “Hang on a minute.” I got an afghan and tossed it over her shoulders before resuming my seat.

  Natasha muttered, “Thanks.” She shifted in the chair, wrapping herself in the throw. I sent a mental thank-you note to my grandmother for crocheting us a new one every Christmas. Finally, Tasha flipped her hands palm up and threw her arms out toward Trudy, as if the unpleasantness was obvious. This time, I couldn’t help it. I put my arm across her shoulders. Her mother had, after all, most likely been killed by Gary’s people, even though the death was formally ruled an accidental overdose.

  “Don’t.” Natasha shook me off.

  I pulled my hand back.

  “Did anybody talk about this Layla?” Trudy was writing again. I could see a little of her reasoning. She wanted to know Layla’s last name, her age, and her physical description. I couldn’t remember what names Natasha had given in June, but I was willing to bet Layla had not been one of them.

  Tasha shook her head. “I don’t even know what happened to her after she got out.”

  “What has this got to do with the missing boy?” I said. Was it necessary to put Natasha through this?

  “I’m getting there,” Trudy said. I met her eyes across the table until she leaned away from her tablet and at least pretended to ease off.

  “I know where she’s going,” Natasha said. “Layla’s last name is Dearborn. But I thought her mom was Shannon, not Ivy. Was she the one who called me?”

  “Bingo,” said Trudy.

  “I wondered about her when you said the last name before.”

  “You should trust your instincts.”

  “But it’s been so long, and we weren’t friends. Not at all. We were all with Mrs. P for a while before they decided Shannon was clean enough for Layla to go home. She’s my age, maybe a year younger, but she sounds older. Her voice was always grown up. I still don’t get why she’d call me. She was always jealous because Granddad bought me things. I didn’t know she knew I lived around here. I guess she lives around here, too, then. She could have seen me and the twins and known we were all here. If she knew anything about something happening to Will, maybe she’d have tried to call me and used Mrs. P’s name.”

  “You got it in one, kiddo.”

  “But who gave her my number?”

  “Mutual acquaintance,” Trudy said. From her briefcase, she produced two eight-by-ten glossy photographs. She could have been a talent agent pulling out her model client’s head shots. She pointed to the first picture. “Layla?”

  Natasha ran her fingers over the features of the girl in the picture. “I even know when it was taken,” she muttered. “T-Bow didn’t know about the kid side of things, or he’d have never even sold Gary and them drugs. Like I said, he was funny about his kids. Layla ran with us, but she never knew everything. She thought she did. She thought it was a talent agency and we were all famous models. Gary let her ‘try out’ and took cute kid pics.”

  Trudy indicated the other shot, an obvious school picture. “What about her?”

  Natasha shook her head. “I think she’s some girl over at the public school . . . ohhh.” She sat at the table, looking back and forth now, from one picture to the other and back again. “She doesn’t look the same at all.”

  “You recognize her.”

  “Yeah. Now that you put the pictures together, I do. I guess I have seen her at parties and things. I had no idea who she was.”

  “Ivy Dearborn is her aunt. Layla figured you wouldn’t answer anything from her, and when Noel answered, she had already decided to be someone else.”

  “She used Mrs. P’s name.”

  “Right.”

  My mind was racing ahead of theirs. “So everyth
ing’s okay? Nobody was trying to harm Tasha?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘okay,’ ” Trudy said. “We’ve still got a missing little boy who’s been gone since seven o’clock yesterday evening.”

  “But we can help look for him now? He knows me. He might come to me!” Natasha was already out of her seat.

  “I don’t see why not.” Trudy rose to join Natasha.

  “Sorry for the panic.” I went to the basement door and leaned in. “Hey, everything’s cool. Let’s go help.”

  “It’s been useful to us,” Trudy said. “We had no idea there was another former child member of the ring who we could talk to.”

  Natasha groaned. “She wasn’t ever in. She’s going to be so pissed at me.”

  Trudy and Natasha continued to talk while Trudy gathered her things. I explained the situation to Lance, and he came up the steps carrying a computer cord. He’d been setting up our wi-fi. Neither of us liked being without a connection to search engines. Social media sites, which were the primary Internet access we could use with our particular smartphones, were not helpful at all in the event of a need to do real research. Technically, we could use the Net from our cells. In reality, we hunted, pecked, and committed more autocorrect errors than nearly all the other people we knew.

  I hated the phone, but it had become an ingrained part of my life since June. With my oldest niece going away to college, I was forced to admit my weekly phone calls with her would no longer be a practical means of communication. Using Stan’s money, she, her younger sister, and Natasha had conspired to set Lance and me up in what they termed the modern world right after our wedding. They called it a spontaneous gift. I called it a spontaneous hassle.

  Seeing Lance with the hookup paraphernalia reminded me I needed to check my text messages. They tended to accrue before I remembered to open the folder. Indeed, I had seven now, all from my grandmother. The girls, in their enthusiasm, had also brought my parents and grandmother into the twenty-first century. Actually, Mama had owned a smartphone before the teenaged conspiracy, and got upgraded considerably. She now liked to say she had a genius phone and it was too bad her IQ was only average. Nana, though she hadn’t quite gotten the hang of texting, adapted better than the rest of us. Nana’s only real issue was she thought if she didn’t get an immediate reply to a text, her note hadn’t gone through. So she sent it again. And again. All seven messages said: No el. Restaurateur youre tacking me to colobus for med apt Weds.

  Translated, she was reminding me I was driving her to Columbus for a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. However, the combination of the small screen, random text corrections, and her generally bad eyesight led to a message suggesting she might know something about a wedding involving colobus monkeys. Nana still tooled around town on her own steam, but she didn’t drive on the highways any longer, and she relied on us to ferry her as far as the big city. I would also be bringing Natasha to visit her grandparents and do a little school shopping at the same time. I hadn’t done that last since I was in grad school. I planned to take a book, and Tasha could get what she needed while I waited and Nana napped in the car.

  I set aside my thoughts about tomorrow in favor of today’s concerns. Lance said, “They’re dispatching all the volunteers from the foster parents’ home on East Clover, and we’re doing a fingertip-to-fingertip, house-to-house search.”

  “Can we do something first?” Natasha, who had been so eager to go once she realized there was no immediate threat to herself, suddenly seemed hesitant.

  “What?” We were climbing into the primate-mobile, the beat-up truck that was our only real means of transportation these days, and I paused with one leg hanging out of the vehicle.

  “Can we run by The Submarine Pizza?”

  “It’s on the other end of town. Why do you want to go there?” Lance looked at his watch and tapped its face as if to remind us all how important this trip could be. “If we’re going to be any help, we need to get into the search.”

  Natasha pulled her door shut, and I finished mounting the running board and did the same. “He’s been gone twelve hours now,” she said quietly. “They won’t find him.”

  “They may.”

  “The longer he’s gone, the less likely he’ll turn up. I promise I’ll be quick. Can we please go to the pizza place?”

  “Why?” But Lance was already turning left rather than right to accede to Natasha’s request.

  “He might be there,” she mumbled into her shirt.

  “He might . . .” Lance applied the brakes, slowing the truck well ahead of the stop sign at the end of our road. “Natasha, what part of ‘the other end of town’ isn’t computing here? How would he even get so far from East Clover?”

  “It’s not that far. And it’s where I saw them yesterday. Autistic kids sometimes go a long way, and faster than anybody would expect. And it’s the last place anybody knows where he was for sure, right?”

  “Did his foster mother lie about where she saw him last?” The woman insisted he came home with her.

  “Trudy told me to trust my instincts, didn’t she, Noel?”

  “She did. Maybe the foster mother convinced herself she saw him in the car.” I did think Natasha’s theory was worth looking into.

  Lance made a final stab. “Don’t you think they’ve looked there already?”

  “He likes to climb up into small places. If they were looking outside and after dark, and he was inside or crawled up under something, maybe they didn’t see him.”

  “Text the detective, then. Tell him why we’re running late. He knows you know the kid, and he’s looking to get your ideas over at the foster mother’s place.” He tossed his cell to Natasha so she could send a message to Deputy Carmichael.

  We drove fast, Lance darting through the early stages of what passed for Ironweed’s morning rush hour. “Let’s let Lance go around the block and talk to the owners, and you and I look around outside,” I said once we reached the Marine (as Submarine Pizza was fondly known all over Ironweed).

  Natasha nodded. She was still clutching Lance’s phone with the deputy’s reply. It said, Good idea. Gibsons live a block over. Sending Greene to meet you there. Tell them you’re searching again. They should open up to let you look around.

  As she and I climbed out, Tasha passed the device back to my husband. “He said it was a good idea!” She sounded like an infatuated schoolgirl, and it took me a minute to realize she was responding to the praise about her thought process. Her fragile self-confidence had been bumped up a notch. Points to Deputy Andrew Carmichael.

  We started around front, peering under hedges and in bushes. I took a quick glance around the Marine’s stylized sign, where a wooden scuba diver resolutely held a pepperoni pizza out in offering to the world. Reluctantly, we concluded the boy would have had a hard time putting himself in the blue mailbox (and someone with a key would have to confirm this), then we moved around the building to one side, both softly calling William’s name.

  Out back, the Dumpster smell permeated everything. Without discussion, we went to examine it first, even though it meant we bypassed a parked delivery truck and broke up our otherwise methodical examination of the property. A police siren whooped to a halt up front, and Natasha spared it a dirty look. “Turn that thing off,” she grumbled. “You’ll scare him away if he’s here.”

  She was dressed fashionably, in high-cut shorts and a pair of tank tops that had probably cost more individually than every shirt in my wardrobe combined. Still, she dropped to the pavement without hesitation to look underneath the looming garbage bin. “Noel!” she hissed as I lay down beside her.

  She didn’t need to say my name. I saw the same thing she did. An oblong object connected to a distorted shape. A child’s shape.

  “How did he get under there? William?” Natasha burst into sudden tears and forgot to whisper. “Will?” she shouted. She gasped for breath and I suddenly realized I’d left her inhaler in the car. The little torso jerked, and the head thumpe
d against the bottom of the Dumpster, but he didn’t cry out. It seemed he’d been asleep. His head swiveled around and he reached for Natasha. She quickly mastered her own emotions. “How did you get . . . never mind. Scoot over to me, and let’s get you out.”

  William kept reaching, but he didn’t move. Footsteps clattered around the corner out of our sightline. I pointed to William’s hips, wedged between the Dumpster and the asphalt. “I think he’s stuck.” He lay mostly on his stomach, and he retained a full range of motion, even if he wasn’t getting anywhere.

  “Is he there? Did you find him?” That was Deputy Greene, whose face appeared cattycorner to ours under the Dumpster.

  William began to keen, a wordless howling wail that punctuated the morning more loudly than the police siren. “It’s all right!” Natasha had reined in her voice and was whispering again. “It’s all right. We’ll get you out.” She inched forward until her fingertips brushed Will’s.

  Deputy Greene was up again, and from the sounds of it, he was talking on his radio. “Clear the channel. Clear the channel. Cut the chatter. Deputy C, do you copy? Over.”

  After a pause, Andrew Carmichael’s voice replied, “Copy. What’s the noise? Over.”

  “We found the boy. Copy? Repeat, we found the boy. But he’s stuck, and I need a dozen guys here ASAP to get him out from under this Dumpster.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Dear Nora:

  I can’t find bras that fit anymore. I think I’m a J or K cup. I never knew they got that big! It’s like I’m constantly being crushed by a tendril.

  Done In

  Dear Done:

  I think you mean anvil, and I’m assuming there was a question in that list of statements. I’m somewhat under-endowed myself, but those things will smother you. I’m sending my plastic surgeon’s number. I see her for plenty of other complaints, and you’ll love her. I want to hear back in a week telling me you made an appointment and purchased a dictionary.

  Nora

  “One, two, three, heave!” Strategically positioned people hoisted the Dumpster high in the air.