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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  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.

  The front doorbell rang, then the door popped open. “Yoo-hoo! Hello the house!” called an all-too-familiar voice.

  “I’m going to hide in my room now,” Natasha whispered.

  “Too bad I can’t go with you,” I told her. To our new guest, I called, “We’ll be right out, Merry.”

  I let Drew greet the newcomer and went with Lance to settle Sara in on the couch, covering her with the afghan we kept draped over its back. We sat with her for a few minutes in silence. I gathered my thoughts and stroked her forehead.

  I started to get up, but Lance laid a shaky hand on my arm. The look I had seen in the hall had returned. I settled back down and he pulled me in. For several long minutes, we sat in silence, listening to Drew bustle around our kitchen making coffee like he lived here. Perhaps he, too, had seen Lance’s open, wounded expression. Or maybe he knew we hated the Orangutan Lady and expected us to delay a second meeting with her.

  Finally, Lance found his voice. “Noel, we have to talk,” he said. “We’ve needed to for a long time, but especially since this morning. I owe you some explanations.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Dear Nora:

  How can I make people believe me when I speak my mind?

  Fed Up

  Dear Fed,

  Stop acting and start doing.

  Nora

  “You’re sure?” Lance held my face in his large palms, looking into my eyes as if he expected uncertainty.

  I nodded, sorrow and guilt in my heart stopping my voice at the throat.

  “Then let’s go talk to Merry.” We rose, and he embraced me. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for . . . everything.”

  “Easy,” I murmured, patting his back. “We still have to deal with the Orangutan Lady.” Why was it so difficult not to cry?

  Sara’s foster father arrived, the mother being still wrapped up at the hospital with William. He checked on the little girl but opted not to wake her, since there were forms to complete and conversations to hold before he could take her anyway. Besides, as we had suspected, she had not slept at all last night.

  “I’ve barely talked to Nat since she went to William this morning,” he explained. “It seemed impossible to me he could be fine, especially when they’ve kept him at the hospital so long. I kept watching the news, looking for some proof he wasn’t all right. I think Sara picked up my worry. And then I fell asleep with the TV on, and when I woke up, Sara was gone. None of the other kids saw her leave, but then they wouldn’t. None of the others have much to do with the twins. But I never thought she’d . . . she’s not my wanderer! That’s Will! I had no idea she could use the computer like that, and I . . . I . . . I can’t do this anymore. Those children need to be in a home without other children . . . they need . . .”

  “There,” said Merry, using Adam Forrester’s discomfiture to transition seamlessly into her earlier harangue of Lance and me, adding William’s sister to our imaginary foster tribe as if she hadn’t had the two of them all but broken up before. “This would be the perfect foster environment for William and Sara. There’s only one other child, and she’s a teen who . . .”

  “Stop!” Lance’s voice sounded unnaturally harsh, but he repeated, more gently, “Please, stop. You can’t keep doing this to me. To us.”

  “Merry, we don’t want to foster those two children,” I said.

  “But if you . . .”

  “Would you shut up long enough for me to finish a sentence?” I’m not normally so rude, even to people I can’t stand, but my recent conversation with Lance had left me more rattled than I could have expected. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me of his mother’s mental illness, another thing I had only learned about recently. It was her instability that led to his and his brother’s placement in foster care in the first place.

  On the couch, he had told me, “Mom was always so . . . angry, Noel, and we never knew why. We never knew what to expect. She used to yaw between exhilaration and fury. One hour, we’d be on a shopping spree, drinking milkshakes in the mall while she bought pairs and pairs of shoes. Then, on the car ride home, she’d be screeching at us about school, and our grades, anything at all.

  “It was one of those trips . . . I won’t go into depth about it, Noel. I can’t. But I was a ten-year-old kid, and I couldn’t take any more of her ranting. I told her . . . and I waited for her to take a break and get quiet before I said it, so I could sound calm to prove she couldn’t make me lose my temper . . . I told her she was the worst mother on the planet. And she looked back at me . . . I’ll never forget the hatred on her face. She didn’t say anything else, but she took off her seatbelt, twisted the steering wheel and plowed the car across two lanes of traffic into the opposite embankment.

  “She rode out from the accident scene in one ambulance and Alex and I rode out in two others. I had a broken collarbone and a compound fracture on my arm. Alex had whiplash so bad he couldn’t move his head; he was convinced he had broken his neck. And she was thrown from the car and landed in a blackberry bush. I could barely think over my own pain, but she was screaming, “Look at your little brother, Lance Lakeland. Look at him. He’s probably going to die, and it is all your fault.”

  “Do you blame yourself?” I asked him. I hadn’t meant to interrupt whatever he had to say, but his cheeks were etched with remembered pain, and it seemed so important to know.

  “Not anymore. But I did then. It was a long time before I stopped holding myself accountable for her actions. It was a long time before I realized I probably had the worst injuries of anybody in the vehicle.

  “She wouldn’t consent to inpatient psychiatric treatment, and Dad wouldn’t abandon her while she went through an intensive ou
tpatient program. Alex and I were removed from the home and placed with a family. We saw Dad once a week and Mom hardly at all.”

  “It sounds awful.”

  “It was wonderful. It was the best year of my childhood. It was . . . there were two other kids in the house, one of them Alex’s age, the other a year older than me. We were instant best friends. Every day after school Angelina made us a snack, and we did homework at the kitchen table. And when I was a sassy little jerk, she called me out on it. She’d say, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Lance. You should go upstairs to your room and think about things until you feel better.’ Then she’d come up and talk me through it.

  “She had to take away slumber parties, field trips, all kinds of things. I did everything I could think of to make her mad, but she never lost her temper. She always said the same thing. ‘I’m sorry you feel that way. You should go upstairs to your room and think about things until you feel better.’

  “And Noel, if I have any patience myself now, it’s because she was patient with me. She let me rage and get my anger into the world, then. Alex repressed everything. The anger came to him later, and by then . . . you know.” I did know. I had been engaged to Lance’s younger brother for a short, violent period a long time ago, and I saw Alex in Lance’s descriptions of their mother.

  “If I am a scientist,” he went on, “it’s because she let me cut up her nature magazines and glue them to poster board with pages I copied directly from the encyclopedia. It’s because she told me I could go to Africa if I was resourceful and brave enough. I owe so much to her, Noel, and at the end of the year, when my mother’s course of treatment was over, Alex and I were taken away from her. We had to go back home, and Mom tried to kill herself again almost immediately. She finally went inpatient, and Alex and I were stuck with Dad, who didn’t know anything about little boys. He went back and forth to work and watched sports on TV and did the bare minimum to keep us from being taken by the state again. I never had the kind of stability Angelina gave us again until I was an adult, and I could make my own peace.”

  Lance didn’t explain any of these things to the group at the table now, but he laid his hand over mine and looked straight at Merry Frasier. “My mother was mentally ill,” he said. “You must know that.” Part of our home study had included an extensive background check. She probably did know it, but Drew clearly didn’t. He jerked in surprise. “My brother and I spent a year or so in foster care when she was in treatment. We had all of our foster mother’s stability taken away when we had to go home. It was devastating to enjoy certainty and safety only to have it snatched back right when I got comfortable with it.

  “Foster care is meant to be temporary, Merry. I will not, I cannot do that to a child. Natasha’s situation is wholly different. When her grandparents get better, she’ll go home to them. To their safe, stable home. Who knows where these two would go next. Any foster kid is apt to get shuffled around in the system when one thing works and another doesn’t. Look at where William and Sara have already been. From family, to foster care, back to family, back to foster care. I can’t be part of that cycle. The only child we can foster is Natasha.” Lance steepled his hands under his mouth as if in prayer.

  Adam studied his own folded hands on the table like a guilty child. “They’re good kids,” he mumbled.

  Merry’s coffee cup was halfway to her lips. “Yes, good,” she backed Adam up. “They simply need an environment . . .”

  “Did you not hear a word Lance said?” I demanded. “We do not want to foster William and Sara.”

  Before Merry could interrupt with more protestations, Lance returned one of his hands to its place on top of mine. “We can’t foster them,” he said. “We want to adopt them.”

  “You wha . . .” Merry dropped her mug. It bounced off the table’s edge and shattered on the floor. “I’m so sorry, I . . . but . . . you . . . have you got any paper towels?”

  I was already halfway across the kitchen for a broom and dustpan. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “But I thought . . .” she continued to stammer, her gaze never straying from Lance. “You keep telling me you’re childless by choice,” she finally finished.

  “And we are.” His voice was steady, pressuring. “I never wanted to have children. I know my genetic makeup. The probability of making somebody exactly like my mother or brother was too high. But it doesn’t mean I dislike kids. This is the first summer in I don’t know how long we haven’t had one of Noel’s nieces or her nephew staying with us. We do okay with them.”

  “A summer visit is hardly the same as an adoption,” Merry warned.

  “We know.” I slopped shards into the dustpan. “But before all the brouhaha around our wedding, we were talking about how empty the house felt without kids in it.”

  “And it was one tiny house.” Nobody had heard Natasha coming in, but now she was standing in the hall, leaning against the wall with an I told you so smile making me wonder whether we were caring for her or the other way around.

  “But you can’t announce out of the blue . . . you don’t . . . you have to meet them first, for heaven’s sake!”

  “We met them already,” said Lance. “We met them today.”

  “That absolutely does not count.” Merry had regained some of her control. “We have to schedule a formal meeting, and you have to be approved, and . . . there are steps to be followed. Adoption is a process!” Since Lance wasn’t giving any ground, she turned her appeal to me.

  “Start following them,” I said. “We aren’t exactly all set here anyway.”

  “Precisely!” She leapt onto my statement. “Beds. You have to have beds for . . .”

  “We have beds,” Lance cut in. The bunk beds from the infamous room with a bed had followed us, along with a new double bed we had purchased for Natasha.

  “There are lots of things you still need. Call me tomorrow at my office if you’re still interested.” Merry abruptly rose and huffed out of the kitchen, then let herself out of the house entirely.

  “Don’t expect her to be helpful.” We had all nearly forgotten about Adam, still staring down at the table. “She’ll want you to do all the work.”

  Lance whistled. “You don’t say.”

  “She keeps looking for a permanent place to park them where she can drop in from time to time like a benevolent dictator. Natty and I have been fostering kids for ten years now. We’ve adopted twice. I have never met a social worker as unhelpful as Meredith Frasier.

  “Natty thinks half the reason William got away from her last night was because Merry accosted her in the parking lot of the Marine, and she got stuck talking while she was trying to get everybody buckled in. She forgot to do a head count—when you have a house full of kids, you always do a head count. One of the big kids was supposed to buckle William. He swears he did, but I doubt it. Normally Sara would have noticed something as big as her brother not being in the car; they sit right by each other. But Sara was arguing with our thirteen-year-old the whole way home. All the kids insist they saw William get out of the car at home, but I think they’re covering for each other. Natty and I are beginning to think he never got in it in the first place, poor kid.

  “Anyway,” Adam sighed heavily and finally looked up from his hands, “am I free to take her home?” He nodded toward our living room and looked at Drew. “I’d like her to wake up somewhere familiar.”

  Drew had been waiting in silence for some time. “Yeah. We’ve got everything we need for now.” The two men rose together, leaving only Lance sitting at the table, and he made no move to follow when they departed.

  I left what remained of the coffee mess and watched Adam collect Sara. When he tried to disentangle her from our afghan, she knotted her fingers through its holes without waking. “Let her keep it,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” But he was already picking her up without trying to further unswaddle her.

  “Yes,” said Lance. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me, but now I leaned
automatically into his warm chest. “She’ll be bringing it home soon enough anyway.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Dear Nora:

  My crazy family is driving me out of my mind. Every time I turn around, my parents and uncle are going off on extravagant vacations and trying dangerous stunts. My mother jumped out of an airplane! Now, my grandmother wants to run smack into buildings and climb up the sides because Parkour is big in Europe. What can I do?

  Appalled

  Dear Appalled:

  Stop living their lives and live your own instead. Also, the Parkour club jams on the Ironweed U campus Saturdays, and we try to be flexible. You aren’t required to scale the buildings if you don’t want to. We could always use new blood.

  Nora

  “Are you out of your minds?” My mother was washing the dinner pans in her lavishly oversized sink while Natasha loaded them one by one into a dishwasher so large you could lose a small country in it. “I think your friend’s death has given you a case of the crazies.”

  “Or is this some kind of belated April Fool’s joke?” My father puttered by with his rose shears, ready to do some serious pruning out back.

  Lance stopped wiping down the counter and met Dad’s eyes. “It’s not a joke.”

  “And,” I added, “I think we’re finally in our right minds.” I did not stop cleaning the table, but instead continued wiping overlapping ovals of wet onto its surface.

  “You never wanted children!” said Mama.

  “I never wanted children,” Lance corrected her. “I’m pretty sure Noel’s always wanted them.”

  I heard a question in the silence following this statement. I wasn’t sure how to answer. Although Lance and I had only married back in June, we had lived together for nearly a decade, and been a couple since we finished grad school. When we first got serious about each other, Lance had warned me, “You should know I don’t want to have kids. It’s not something you can change, and if it isn’t something you can live with, we should probably stop teasing each other along.”