Still, the first meeting was successful, and when we left, Ann said, “You’re obviously interested. I’ll be in touch.”
“We do want to take this slowly,” Lance reminded her. “We know this is going to be hard on them.”
“You don’t have forever,” Merry warned us. “They have to be moved out of the Forresters’ for good, and soon.”
They followed Natalie and the twins outside, and we took Natasha back to school to meet her math tutor, who would bring the girl back to us at the center later in the day. “I don’t understand Merry’s hurry,” I told Lance.
“I don’t understand Merry’s anything,” he replied.
The Friday before Labor Day, I went out to dinner with my friend Hannah while Lance got the center shut down for the evening. Two other friends, Liz and Mina, couldn’t come but sent us good luck in the form of toy store gift certificates. “Who are you?” Hannah asked me. “Married a couple of months, and you’re already lying to your husband and nesting at the same time. Art’s dying’s got you rattled. Why don’t you at least tell Lance you’ve applied for the job? It makes sense one of you should take it.”
“Because we agreed not to. We’re field researchers. The teaching has always been a sideline. And I don’t want to start a fight about money. He doesn’t worry about it like I do.”
“What are you going to say when they hire you?”
“If they hire me, Hannah. I graduated from Ironweed, I’d be a teacher whose style closely imitates the person they’re replacing, and I’ve only ever taught part time. All of those are strikes against me.”
“When they hire you,” she repeated, “what are you going to tell your husband?”
“Individual health insurance is too expensive for four people.” Ironweed might bill itself as the only social justice–oriented science university in the nation, but the attitude didn’t extend to part-time instructors’ health care. And the center couldn’t afford to offer such an extravagance. Lance and I had always carried our own policies. When the twins came to us, they would initially be covered by the government. But the day the adoption became final, we had to have them on our plan.
“I guess that’s one angle.” Our entrees came then, and we devoted ourselves to food in uncomfortable silence. Hannah had never been the sort to keep her opinions private. Her outspoken enthusiasm for Ironweed’s historic downtown area had served as a springboard not only for her own business, Hannah’s Rags, but for a total revitalization of the area. In an area with a largely white population, she was a successful black woman who thrived on a large personality.
But she sure wasn’t saying what I wanted to hear today. “Are you with my mom that we’ve lost our minds wanting to adopt these kids?”
“Now there’s a whole different story. I’ve always thought you and Lance would make cute parents. It was one of those things I kind of wondered about but never asked. I mean, I’d heard you say ‘childless-by-choice’ but I know it can mean many things. I think it’s all good. It’s this secrecy thing bugging me. Him not telling you . . . you’ve been together ten years, and he never mentioned his mother was a stark raving lunatic.”
“She’s mentally ill . . .”
“Noel, there’s a difference between ‘mentally ill’ and ‘completely whacko’.”
“And the difference is?”
“She blew up your car.” I couldn’t argue with Hannah’s logic. We were down to one car right now because my mother-in-law had set my car on fire the day before the wedding. “And you telling him one thing and then doing the exact opposite,” she went on. “You’re a good couple, Noel, but you’ll screw yourselves over. Every one of my ex-husbands would say the same.”
I started to tell Hannah she only had one ex, but my phone buzzed in my purse, the ringtone Natasha had programmed into it for her own number. “Speaking of kids . . . what’s up, Tasha?”
“Can you come home now, Noel?” Natasha’s school had scheduled a teacher in-service to correspond with the holiday, so she had been out at the center for much of the day. Lance had dropped her home on his way in to Ironweed University to grade quizzes. Now, she was there alone, waiting for a ride with friends to go to what she swore was a poetry slam later in the evening. I was personally skeptical about the number of teen poetry slams being offered in Muscogen County, but we had the same agreement Natasha had forged with all of her family and closest friends: always the truth, no matter what. I had agreed to extend trust until I saw evidence to the contrary. Even when I confronted her about the alcohol back in June when we hardly knew her, she had stuck to her own policy.
“What’s wrong?” My mind flew immediately to the sight of her half-dressed in a borrowed shirt, trapped with us in an empty enclosure on our property. Her life had been in danger then, and so had ours. “Do you need the police?”
“It’s not so bad. It’s awful.”
“Tasha, calm down, which is it?”
“It’s . . . I’m in the kitchen and everything is horrible. Fine. Really. Dreadful.” Kitchen was her paranoid code for “It’s okay, nobody’s forcing me to say this.” If she’d said she wanted to go lie in her bed, I’d have known to call the cops, and the feds, and probably also her grandparents. Though it was possible I would have left them for last, since there wasn’t a thing they could do but worry.
“Okay. I’m coming, honey.”
Her first couple of weeks with us had been hysterical ones, and this sounded like a return to the girl who had wakened sobbing quietly every night. I hoped she also hadn’t returned to self-medicating in my absence.
Ironweed is a small town, and I was home within ten minutes. But it felt like a thousand years. Natasha was no calmer when I walked in the front door, but I didn’t see any conspicuous bottles, and I couldn’t smell any booze.
“Tasha, what?”
I sat beside her on the couch while she tried to tell me something coherent. I had to keep reminding myself she would get prickly if I got too maternal. She related to me because I had been a victim myself for some time. I tried not to treat her like a kid when she was struggling with her past, but sometimes, like right now, when her face was buried in her hands and soaked-through tissues littered the floor around her feet, I wanted nothing more than to hold and rock her. I laid a hand on her shoulder, but no more. It was about all the human contact she could handle at times like these. She didn’t shake it off immediately, so I knew I’d done right.
Finally, she hiccupped to enough of a stop that I could understand her. She said, “I guess Layla . . . I guess she got in big trouble for imitating Mrs. P.”
“I can see why!”
“She blames me for it. It’s not my fault, Noel. Is it?”
“Of course not!”
“But it doesn’t matter because she put it around at school I used to do sex tapes.” Now she shuddered away from even my hand on her shoulder. “The public school hasn’t gone back yet, and she’s got nothing better to do than sit around and make trouble for me. I can’t ever go to school again. I’ll die of shame.”
Naturally, Stan and Gert had enrolled Tasha in the only private school in the vicinity, a parochial school with conservative attitudes. I understood Natasha’s worry about the other kids. Her mother had never put her education at a high priority level, and at fifteen, she was only starting her eighth-grade year. All of the friends she had made over the summer were freshmen at the least. Most were sophomores. She had already spent the last week and a half trapped in classes with the same kids she had dealt with the year before and without a friend at her side.
“Natasha, that’s horrible!”
“It gets worse,” she wailed.
“Worse how?”
“She got her hands on a copy of my first film, when I was ten, and high, and . . . Noel, I don’t even remember what happens in it.” She wheeled around and seized my shoulders. “It could have anything. And I found out because Emily went to Christina’s birthday party last night, and these guys Ryan and Eric
were there, and they brought a copy, and Emily tried to get the disc, but she couldn’t, and now everybody knows. I nearly went to that party. What if I’d been there? And sooner or later Trudy and Darnell are going to find out, and then I’ll have to testify about it, and I’ll have to watch it to remember what it has.”
“Easy, easy. One thing at a time. I’ve been going back and forth with the high school headmaster about whether you ought to be promoted to be a freshman. It’s time to get your granddad involved there. Then you’ll be up with your friends, and they can shield you.”
“But it’s my friends who found out! And Gram and Granddad don’t know! I mean, they know, but they don’t know know . . .”
“And we don’t have to tell them. I’m going to tell Stan the same thing I’ve been telling the headmaster for the last two weeks. You’re smart; you’ll catch up; we’ll get you more tutoring if you need it; and if your friends are good ones, it won’t matter what they know. How did Emily act when you talked to her?”
Natasha gulped. “Worried,” she finally admitted.
“Not judgmental? Even a little?”
She shook her head.
“See? I’ve met a couple of your friends. They’ll stick with you. You need to be with them where you’ll feel safe at school. It will give Stan something he can do for you, honey.”
“Yeah, okay, but I’ll probably be expelled for violating the moral code once this gets around.” She exploded into another crying fit.
“I wouldn’t put it past them, but I’ll leave it to Stan.” I patted her back. “How many copies of this thing do you think there are?”
“I don’t know. At least two. Layla had to have copied it.”
“I need to talk to her mother, and to Ryan or Eric’s . . . both, I suppose. What about Christina?”
“You can’t. Then I’ll never live it down.”
“Tasha, it sounds like Layla is in enough hot water already. If I offer her mother the chance to keep from having charges added, don’t you think she’d listen? And if Ryan and Eric’s parents understand what their sons are facing—if you want to talk about who is in violation of the school’s moral code, I think you should start there—I’d have to imagine they’d cooperate. I assume they go to school with you, don’t they? What about Christina, honey? Is she in on this or not?”
“Emily says Christina was in another room. She was pissed when she found out. What good could it do? How could it change anything? It’s already out there, Noel!”
“It’s out there, but on a limited scale. Possibly it will turn up over the course of the trial anyway. Possibly Trudy and Darnell already have a copy and haven’t asked you about it. We won’t bring it up with them until they ask. And it makes a difference because I’m going to tell Layla and those boys if every copy they know of isn’t in my hands by tomorrow afternoon, all three of them will be charged as part of a federal investigation. Believe me, it will carry some weight.”
“You’d . . . you’d blackmail them for me?”
“Absolutely, honey.” I tried not to think about what I was agreeing to. Trudy and Darnell were too intense with Natasha. They had plenty of information in their investigation. She didn’t need to be pushed on any other points. “We’ll get this taken care of, and things will be fine. Trust me, okay? I’m right, and I’m telling you the truth.”
CHAPTER 9
Dear Nora:
I tried what you suggested. I got a dog. But it won’t chase the cat, and now they’re both dropping dung in my yard. Now what?
Pooped
Dear Pooped,
In that case, stay inside lest you become the next member of the family who needs to cop a squat in the great outdoors.
Nora
It was midday before I got to the primate center the next day. Lance had snagged a ride with one of our volunteers so I could have the truck. I had to first find Natasha’s high school headmaster at home on a Saturday, then finagle him into a helpless position sure to make Stan proud when he finished the job by phone later in the afternoon. Then I needed to negotiate with Eric and Ryan’s parents and meet them at their homes to soundly humiliate their sons and get back the offending material. Against my own better judgment, I followed this up by taking Natasha along with me to meet Layla’s mother.
It turned out to be Layla’s Aunt Ivy who met us, along with Layla herself. “Do you have any idea how much trouble I’m in?” Layla demanded, her voice sounding nothing like a fourteen-year-old girl and everything like a thirty-year-old woman. I no longer had trouble believing this was the person I spoke with when William vanished. “And I was only trying to help.”
“Why did you pretend to be somebody else?” Natasha refused to come in until I tugged her arm. Ivy led us to an L-shaped couch.
Layla studied her shoes. “I didn’t figure you’d want to talk to me.”
“You’d have been right, but I’d have taken the call, idiot.”
“No name-calling,” I said to Natasha between gritted teeth.
She brushed me off with a wave. “Do you know how hard my granddad has worked to keep everybody from knowing about me and those films? It’s about the only thing holding me together. It’s . . .”
“Lucky you.” Ivy had her arm around Layla’s shoulders. “Layla never even showed in one, and she can’t get into that school because everyone knows about her mother.”
“Ohhh.” Understanding settled on Natasha’s face. “That’s . . . I’m so sorry.”
“Not all of our grandparents can own the whole county,” Layla added. “You know that’s why those girls hang out with you, don’t you? Because Stan Oeschle has more money than God.”
I was afraid this would unsettle Natasha, who had spent the morning running through a list of people who she couldn’t possibly face. But she said, after only a beat of silence, “Yeah? Then why weren’t they my friends last year when I was stuck in seventh grade? Everybody knew who my granddad was then, but they all thought I was some kind of stoner and stayed away from me.”
I wanted to steer the conversation back on track before the quarrel could get any worse, but Layla’s face suddenly reddened, and she jumped up. “You get everything you want because nobody knows the truth.”
“Do you want to know the truth?” Natasha was up too, right in Layla’s face.
“Easy, Tasha.” I stood up and took one of Natasha’s arms, but she shook me off.
“My mom’s dead. How’s that for truth? I take four kinds of anti-anxiety medication, and I have nightmares anyway. I can’t talk to anybody on the phone without making sure, double-sure, they’re who they say they are. I can’t go anyplace Lance and Noel don’t check out first because I’m so afraid of my great-aunt sending somebody after me. My cousin tried to kill me in June, Layla. Granddad nearly got killed trying to save me. And Aunt Gretchen poisoned my grandmother so bad she’s still having muscle problems. She may never get out of the nursing home. Still jealous?”
“Girls!” Ivy maneuvered between Natasha and Layla, and she shoved them in opposite directions. “Sit down. Both of you. You asked to come here for a reason, Natasha. Layla, would you please get her that disc so she can leave?”
Layla, who had thrown herself down onto a couch when ordered to sit, did not initially stand. “Yeah. Okay.” She finally slouched off toward her room.
When she had gone, her aunt turned to me. “Look Mrs. . . . Dr. Rue,” she said. I had been pulling the professor card all morning to get people’s attention. There are times when it pays to have a title in front of my name. “I know we aren’t in a position to ask any favors, but Layla is in a horrible spot right now because of what she did. She’s a good kid. We’ve been trying to shield her for the last five and a half years, and she’s gotten nothing but bullied. She doesn’t think through her actions all the time, and it . . .”
“If she’s so nice, where did she get a copy of that thing in the first place?” Natasha demanded.
“Your stupid cousin.” Layla tossed a CD ca
se into Natasha’s lap. From the cover, I would have guessed it held useless health and exercise tips. It was generic green and showed a woman in a warm-up suit. The title Physical Education 101 was printed across her middle. It was the kind of box liable to hold a weight loss video. It had the look of something a college professor might assign.
“He gave it to me about a year ago when he figured out I lived here. He wanted me to put it around then, but I wouldn’t do it. But I kept it because . . . I don’t know . . . I guess I wanted ammunition if you ever did something to me.” Layla flopped back on the couch, her passion deflated.
“Why would I do something to you?”
Layla flipped her hair and rolled her eyes. “As if you didn’t know.”
“I don’t know,” said Natasha. “Obviously.”
“Your mom’s dead,” Layla taunted. “Why not live with your dad? Why not go to the—”
“This conversation is pointless.” I interrupted them before their argument could devolve into violence. “Tasha, we have what we came for, and Layla’s aunt has given us her word nothing like it will ever come out of this house again. We need to—”
“Wait. Please, sit down.” Ivy beckoned to the couch again. She was perched on the edge of an armchair. Layla started to say something. “Layla, hush a minute, child.” She turned, not to me, as I had expected, but to Natasha. “We aren’t in a position to ask you favors,” she repeated. “And Layla’s attitude probably doesn’t make you want to, but I think it would help us out an awful lot if you would tell those federal agents Layla didn’t mean any harm. She didn’t, you know . . . not with the phone call, anyway. She’s . . .”
“Yeah,” Natasha interrupted. “I can. For what good it will do. Mostly, she ought to tell them everything she knows about everyone she knew when we were kids. It’s probably why they’re pressuring her anyway.” She stopped talking to Ivy and looked directly at Layla. “I left your name out of my list for a reason when they were asking me what other victims I knew. I figured you didn’t want to be having to explain your whole life to a bunch of people you’d never met. And for your information, I don’t even know who my dad is.”
The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 9