Layla seemed ready to speak, but Ivy was glaring daggers, and the girl kept silent.
We rode out in moody silence, the disc from Layla and the one ultimately recovered from Eric’s dresser tucked in my glove box. On my way to the center, I settled Natasha in with Emily and Christina (who was horrified the whole thing had happened at her sixteenth birthday party) to figure out what kind of damage control they could do as a group.
It was eleven o’clock before I got to Midwest Primates, and I opted for the back gate rather than the front. I hadn’t been down to see our resident orangutan, Chuck, in what felt like ages, and, since he was directly responsible for saving Natasha’s life when Gary tried to kill her, he was on my mind this morning.
“Morning, Ms. Noel!” Drew Carmichael’s brother Ace was the volunteer who worked most closely with Chuck. He was, in fact, the man who had dumped the orangutan on our doorstep back in June in deplorable health. Although he had a poor relationship with his brother and a deep suspicion of officers of the law in general, Lance and I liked him.
Frankly, Chuck needed Ace. He had rescued the animal from the same mismanaged Michigan zoo whose enclosures we bought at auction. The zoo had been closed when two disaffected zoo employees released all of the animals into the wild, where Michigan and Ohio police had killed most of them to protect human populations. Ace thought his options were to hide the big orangutans or place them in mortal danger. He had meant well by Chuck and that zoo’s other orangutan, Lucy, but he had lacked both the resources to care for the animals and the common sense to hand them over to those who could help until it was almost too late.
Now, he spent at least part of every day with Chuck. Lucy, who had become pregnant in Ace’s care, was still in the Ohio Zoo with our friend Christian Baker. She was hand-raised herself, and had no idea how to parent, but she watched her infant with a surrogate each day and allowed her keepers to pump milk for its bottles through the enclosure’s mesh. Christian had hopes of reuniting mother and child, though those hopes waned every day Lucy showed no interest in the baby.
For his part, Chuck was thriving in our care, though I worried about loneliness. Orangutans don’t typically live in large groups in the wild, but they don’t eschew all contact with others of their species, either. Still, Chuck loved Ace and associated the keeper with forbidden treats and good music. He was allowing Ace to slowly cut off the fecally encrusted dreadlocks hanging over his entire lower half.
I tucked my keys into my pocket. “How’s everything in this part of the world?” Because Art had added the orangutan enclosure as a surprise wedding gift to Lance and me (one that we had promptly donated to the sanctuary, as I’m sure Art intended us to do), it was separated from the rest of the enclosures by a large swath of forest. There was an unoccupied mall in the adjoining site. Stan had gifted it to Art, who had given it to us along with the orangutan enclosure. We had no idea what to do with it.
“It’s all good down here. Now.” To my surprise, it was Lance who answered.
“Hey, thought you were up at main,” I told him.
“I came down to get some stuff done and wait for Rick.”
When Art added the orangutan enclosure, he also put in a much-needed administration building. Lance and I maintained an office in the barn, but we had shifted most of our actual paperwork to this part of the sanctuary. “Why are you waiting for Rick? What do you mean, anyway, that everything is okay down here now? Was it less than okay before? Is everything not okay someplace else?”
“Noel, the monkeys were out again this morning.”
“What? Why didn’t you call me?”
“You had enough on your plate.” Lance’s right hand had worked its way up to the top of his scalp, where it was tracing whorls in a bald spot I knew well. His left hand drummed on the handheld radio clipped to his belt. He looked like nothing so much as a giant ape himself. I wanted to kiss him.
I focused instead on what he had said. “What do you mean the monkeys were out? The rhesus macaques?”
“The same.”
“Surely you didn’t forget the lock twice.” Things had been hectic between meeting Natasha’s needs and preparing our house for the twins’ hopeful arrival, but Lance was methodical, and he had been feeding the rhesus at bedtime ever since their last foray into the barn. By putting himself personally in charge of the headcount, he felt like he could compensate for his earlier error.
“I don’t think I even forgot it once,” he replied. “Deputy Parks said the primates all went bonkers around three or four o’clock, but when he went around back, nothing seemed amiss. He mentioned it to me when I got here at five, and stuck around to make sure everything was fine while I got set up.”
“And when I opened up the back door, the whole second cage of macaques came spilling out toward the barn. The deputy stayed around to help me round everybody up. And after we’d caught them all, we had a look around the perimeter and found some suspicious footprints.”
“How could you tell the suspicious footprints from the unsuspicious ones after you’d all trampled back and forth a million times taking the monkeys back?”
“Because these particular footprints had a rotated toe, and they were about twelve inches across. It looked like the walker used the outside edge of—”
“Stop.” I told him. “We do not have a third orangutan loose on the property.”
Lance shot a look at Ace, whose back was turned. “That hasn’t been ruled out,” he said. “Not completely. But I have a feeling what we have is a problem with the current resident.”
“What about a chimp? Lector is a pretty big fellow . . .”
Lance shook his head. “It’s good and muddy all down in there, and there aren’t any footprints around the chimps’ enclosure. Besides, I don’t think even Lector’s feet are quite this big. Rick is on his way down to study the enclosure and see if he can find anything Chuck could be exploiting to get out.”
“And then . . . what? Put himself back in after he’s busted out some of his buddies? If he’s letting them out, why isn’t there evidence of damage to the rhesus cages?”
Lance shrugged broadly. “No idea. None. Drew’s coming with Rick, and we’ll all try to brainstorm. In the meantime, I’ve put a plain old padlock on the macaque cage so if somebody has a key and . . . I don’t know . . . orangutan boots or something, they’ll at least have to use bolt cutters next time. You, Jen, and I are the only ones who ever open up in the morning, and Jen has one key, and you and I have the other.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“And,” Ace added, “here it is not even noon.”
Half an hour later, Rick and Drew arrived. Lance and I had thrown ourselves into working on several of our grant proposals all needing similar data. “Hello, hello!” called Drew, and for one moment the familiar greeting, in a rhythm so like Art’s but a voice so different from his, pulled my dead friend to mind so strongly that I rose half expecting to see him in our hall. But no, it was another friend, one we wouldn’t have made if Art hadn’t died, and one whose eyes looked tired in spite of his jovial grin.
“Welcome, gentlemen.” Lance got up with me and we left our papers behind. “Coffee? This is a brand new machine. It lacks the overused office aroma necessary for all workplaces, and we need to break it in.”
“Thanks, no,” said Rick. “I’ve already got my caffeine for the day.” He jumped up and clicked his heels together Tin Man style.
Drew laughed. “Me too,” he said. “Been up and going since early, and I think I’ve had a dozen or so cups.” Drew did not click his heels. “Rick and I had a look around out there before we came inside.”
“Chuck’s getting out, all right,” said Rick. “We found those Sasquatch footprints you described overlapping each other coming and going from his enclosure, but I’m buggered if I can figure out how he’s doing it.”
Before we went any further, I left a message on Christian Baker’s voice mail. “I think I need another favor. Call m
e.” Then we all went outside.
“See, the prints start about here . . .”
“Wait,” Lance said. “The area directly around his enclosure isn’t disturbed at all?”
Rick shook his head.
“Then we can’t be sure he’s getting out. What if we do have . . . er . . . company?” Lance scratched madly at his scalp.
“He might be exploiting the tree,” I suggested. At Art’s behest, Rick had constructed the enclosure so its domed center encircled a huge old oak. The tree actually grew up beyond the mesh, its trunk protected by a steel circlet designed to prevent the orangutans from climbing directly up and out.
“Might be,” said Rick. “Do you want me to take it down at the top of the mesh? I could close off the dome.
“I hate to if it isn’t called for. Art wanted this tree.”
“I know,” said Rick. “I know.”
My phone shrilled in my pocket. “Christian, hi!”
“What were you needing, Noel?” he asked in his faintly Scottish accent. “I don’t mean to rush you, but we’re shorthanded.”
“Oh, dear. Have you got room to babysit an orangutan? We think Chuck may be getting out of his enclosure at night, but we aren’t sure how.”
“Normally, I’d say I’m on my way to get him, but today, with us being shorthanded as we are, I don’t know how I can.”
“We could provide transportation.”
“See, four of our volunteers got in a nasty wreck last night carpooling back to the zoo after we all had dinner out.”
“I’m so sorry to hear it.”
“Not as sorry as them. They’ll be fine in the long run, but one of them came in nearly every day and all of them were scheduled for this morning. Right now, I barely have enough hands to deal with what I’ve got. I’ve had to pull in the other keepers, and you know how it can go.”
I did know. Working outside your own specialty in a zoo was a daunting task. It might look like zookeepers knew everything, but they were as specialized as the employees in any other field. Pulling from another area was the rough equivalent of asking the HR department in a firm to bounce on over and write a marketing report. “Do you have any ideas for us? What can we do?”
“If you can hang on until tomorrow, I’ll be back on track here. I’ve got almost all my slots filled, and I can set up our quarantine area for Chuck so you can study the enclosure. I’m assuming your quarantine zone is all full of macaques again?”
“And four other kinds of newcomer. Four! We can leave him in his night enclosure to study the thing, but I don’t know how long it will take us to fix it.”
“I see the problem. One day inside won’t hurt the big guy, so . . .”
“Oh! . . .” I suddenly realized the flaw in my thinking. “He’s getting out at night already. That’s the area he’s exploiting. No wonder the outdoor enclosure doesn’t have footprints directly around it. We may not be in such a bad spot after all. Art built the downstairs with room for several separate containment areas. They’re all ape-centric. Couldn’t keep a monkey in if we tried. And believe me, we would have tried if we could! Maybe we can shift him to one of the unused ones.”
I hung up with Christian feeling much relieved only to have the phone ring again before I could put it away. “Hi, Noel,” Ann said when I answered. “I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time. Do you have a minute to talk?”
Uh-oh. “Sure.” I held the phone up with one hand and clutched Lance’s arm with the other. From the serious tone of her voice, I knew at once Merry had fouled it all up. We wouldn’t be parents after all.
“Thanks. I appreciate your taking the time.”
I tried not to let my thoughts spiral as she spoke, but it was next to impossible. She had a long-winded description of the custody process we had already memorized ten times over, and I knew how it was going to end. Hurry up so I can go cry.
“. . . Sunday afternoon?”
“What?” I’d gotten lost in my own mind and missed her actual words. Was there a chance to argue our case? Could there be an authority to appeal to about Merry’s idiocy? On a Sunday?
“I asked if you are able to take custody Sunday afternoon.”
“What? Tomorrow?” I repeated, feeling slow and stupid, like the kid who arrives late to a birthday party without a gift for the guest of honor.
“Noel, you heard the woman.” Lance pried himself free of me. “Give me that thing.” He took the phone. “Yes,” he said. “We’re absolutely ready. We can’t wait. What? Noel’s fine. I think you stunned her into silence.”
“They’re coming?” I couldn’t escape my daze to process the information. Dizzy joy enveloped me, and I sat down hard.
“Hey, watch out!” Drew offered me a hand up, but I didn’t stand.
“They’re coming? To our house? To live forever?”
Lance beamed and nodded, then went on answering the advocate’s questions. The dizzy feeling still hadn’t left me, so I tucked up my knees and buried my head between them. I heard Lance’s goodbyes, and then he sat next to me and slung an arm around my shoulder. “They’re coming,” he reassured me.
The dizziness finally lifted enough for me to look up at my husband. “Lance,” I said. “We have to go buy a car. Right now!”
CHAPTER 10
Dear Nora:
I work in a cubicle, and a coworker eavesdrops on my conversations, even personal ones! My boss shrugs it off!
Muzzled
Dear Nora:
My company is a cubicle maze. One coworker places personal calls all day long and shouts across the room, broadcasting “juicy” tidbits. The boss doesn’t care! Help!
Overheard in the Office Pool
Dear Nora:
My employees are crowded together in cubicles. Two of my best workers constantly report on each other over trivial concerns. Short of replacing them, what can I do?
Bossed Into a Corner
Dear Muzzled: Stop gossiping.
Dear Overheard: Put on some headphones and mind your own beeswax.
Dear Bossed: You’re welcome.
Nora
We had met the twins several more times in the three weeks since our first gathering, in a variety of different venues, each time with Ann, along with Merry and either Natalie or Adam present. We had watched them clamber out of high-backed booster seats at a restaurant and a mall. The restaurant was more popular with the children because of its play zone, so we had chosen this for our most recent meeting. However, for the first time, we arrived without Natasha, and Will pitched himself under the table screaming, “Tasheeeeeeeee!”
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked Natalie.
“Welcome to autism,” she told me. Lance reached for the flailing boy, but Natalie held him back. “He hates being touched when he’s melting down.” Her voice was slightly raised, but her body language was relaxed. She did not seem to notice the other diners, many of whom were openly gaping at us. A woman standing near the play area muttered something I couldn’t hear and led her own child away with rolled eyes. Never in my adult life had I felt so exposed.
“Can I go slide?” Sara didn’t seem to be any more perturbed than Natalie. Merry and Ann had vanished. I craned my neck and saw them outside walking beside the cars.
“What do we do?”
Natalie shrugged. “Depends on what set him off. In this case, since you won’t be producing Natasha, we wait it out.”
“How do we . . .” Natalie turned away before I finished the question. She didn’t answer me. I suddenly realized she and Adam were not in agreement about relinquishing this pair of difficult foster children. She wanted to keep them, and my questions were showing her how incapable a replacement I would be.
The restaurant manager made his way around the end of the counter and began maneuvering toward us. Natalie plunged a hand into her purse and produced a handful of business cards. She handed them to me and walked away. “I’m going to keep an eye on Sara.” I doubted Sara needed many eyes
right now. Where the hell did Lance go? I found my husband crammed under the table with the screaming child, his knees curled up at a painful angle and his arms tucked in close by his sides so he was not actually touching the boy. He was talking, though I couldn’t hear him.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” said the manager. “You’ll need to quiet him down.”
I started to retaliate, but then realized I didn’t need to. I handed him one of the cards Natalie had passed me instead. They had Will’s picture on one side, and the other bore the text, “Hi, I’m William, and I have autism. I don’t talk a whole lot, and sometimes I can be a little loud, but if you give me a few minutes, things will be fine. I’m sorry if my words don’t make much sense to you, but they’re the only words I’ve got, and if you learn how to listen, I bet we can be good friends.” Cheesy, but effective.
The manager took the card. He looked from it to me and back again. I thought he would hassle us further, but he shook his head and walked away. Screaming kids were in his purview, but autism, it seemed, was above his pay grade.
I sat on the floor in front of my husband. There wasn’t room for three under there. It was the first time I had been forced to face the things Will struggled with every day. Until then, he had been an adorable curiosity, too small for his age, short on words, large on trucks, bounces, and smiles. Now, he was rocking back and forth, his knees tucked under his chin. Every time he rocked back, he came within centimeters of smacking his head against the chair. Every time he rocked forward, he seemed ready to topple onto his face.
I could hear Lance. “. . . Tasha said to tell you ‘hi’ from her, though, and she’ll see you soon. She’s trying to get some makeup work done for school.”
Natasha’s consistent academic progress was my biggest gun in the battle against the headmaster. As soon as the school year started, she had gotten a friend to “borrow” her freshman textbooks in the classes she wanted to take. She got the assignments through her friends’ grapevine, and, while she largely blew off the eighth-grade homework, she completed everything assigned to the freshmen and sent it in to the baffled teachers for grading.
The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 10