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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  “Why’d he forge it? Why not adopt me? They all had money for that kind of thing.”

  “Your biological father would have killed him. He wanted that side of the page blank. But a forgery? Something unlikely to be checked against formal records as long as your mother was alive? It was a measured risk to keep control of you and her.”

  They stared back and forth, grandfather to grandchild, until Natasha said, “Is T-Bow Orrice my dad?”

  “I thought your mother would have at least told you that.”

  “She did in a roundabout way, but . . . you know Mom. It was hard to tell whether she was telling the truth or lying. But if he is my dad and everybody does know it, why wasn’t he on my birth certificate?” She sounded like she already knew the answer.

  “He doesn’t want his name on any of his children’s birth certificates. It would have given you, and more importantly, your mother, a claim to him.”

  “Then how come you’re so sure?”

  “Your mother told us. Then, after Linda died, I asked him. The only chance your grandmother and I had to get our hands on you was to prove you weren’t Terry’s daughter. You were so strung out you could barely put two sentences together, and you were rightfully angry with all of us. You seemed to think that bastard . . . excuse me . . . that Mr. Dalton was your father.”

  “Yes. I forgot I knew different until the day I came home with you.”

  “Your original birth certificate was on file with the state, and once we got a lawyer involved, the forgery became evident. But it still took DNA testing to prove they hadn’t altered the document to reflect a fact. On paper, at least, he was effectively your stepfather for all that your mother never married him. Your mother was the one with the drug problems. It took a long time to prove he was supplying your drugs.

  “In the meantime, I contacted T-Bow and asked him for the truth of the matter. He gave me the truth because he knew I didn’t want a connection to him. He’s vain, but he isn’t naive. And he wanted to be clear of the Daltons. T-Bow thinks he pushed me into adopting you. Between having me as your father and Terry Dalton, he preferred me by far, especially as everyone would know you’re adopted.”

  “You didn’t buy him?” Natasha made no effort to mask her skepticism.

  “My dear, there is nothing I can offer T-Bow Orrice. He’s already in jail. He runs his gang from the inside, and I’m sure he has more money than I’ll ever see.”

  “When Terry died? Was it a coincidence?”

  “I have to hope so, Tasha, but we’ll never know. Orrice doesn’t like his women to have their claws in him, but he’s extremely protective of his children. And I assure you, he knows who all of them are, even when he denies it. T-Bow Orrice is all about control. He really does think I adopted you on his say-so, dear.” Stan sounded so offhanded about something that seemed to me like it had obviously been a murder. He seemed perfectly comfortable trading Natasha’s life for that of this Terry person.

  “But back when I was with Mrs. P you didn’t stop coming to see me because I pounded on Layla?”

  “No. Your mother and Terry showed up for a hearing, and then for a visitation, and she stopped testing positive for drugs. Once she got you back, she took out a restraining order. And Gert and I had to accept we almost surely couldn’t win in court against a mother who seemed to have it together. But we knew better. And Gert couldn’t stand to get her heart broken anymore. We pulled away completely, and we never had a chance to tell you why, or how sorry we were.

  “We thought we’d put a stop to it when we finally brought you home. But we hadn’t. And Gert feels like she failed your mother and you both . . .”

  “But she didn’t . . . she couldn’t . . .”

  “I know,” said Stan. “I know. But I feel the same way. It’s a lot for her, and it’s slowing down her recovery. We’ll all be home before you know it.”

  “And I can come here for Thanksgiving with you guys?” Natasha’s voice wavered again. She took hold of Stan’s hand, which was cradling her cheek now.

  “Absolutely. We’ll spend Thanksgiving together here, and Christmas, too, if we have to.”

  Merging onto the freeway half an hour later, I mulled the levels of secrecy and deception in Natasha’s history. The day had turned rainy, and I was wishing I’d brought the minivan to navigate traffic. Travis called when we were halfway between Columbus and Ironweed. Besides teaching me to text since she had come to stay with us, Natasha had programmed my phone and Lance’s both into the car’s audio system. I still hated texting, but I did it when necessary, and I rather enjoyed thumbing my steering wheel to answer a call.

  “Hey,” said Travis. “Did you ever tell Lance you applied for Art’s old job?”

  “Mmmno.” I flashed a look at Natasha, and she rolled her eyes at me. She couldn’t understand this complete failure to communicate on my part.

  “Then you better make sure he’s no place near in the next twenty minutes or so. The chair’s going to be calling you.”

  Natasha barely had time to get into her anxiety-ridden lecture about the things she feared would happen to our marriage and relationship when the phone rang again. “Shush,” I said. She rolled her eyes once more.

  “Noel,” the chair’s voice boomed. Winfred Prescott always boomed. Natasha turned down the volume. “We’ve determined a short list of initial candidates to interview up at the Biological Research Organization Convention in January. Of course, you won’t be there, so the committee has agreed to make an exception for you and interview you on campus.” He didn’t sound happy about this. “We’re expecting to take under an hour, and it’s scheduled for the Wednesday after Thanksgiving at two.”

  What? The other candidates get two months, and I get a little over a week? He hung up before I could say a word. “I thought I was a long shot,” I wailed.

  “I told you Lance needs to know. Travis has said all along . . .”

  “What does he know? He’s only worked here a few months.”

  “Plenty, obviously.”

  “Wednesday after Thanksgiving . . . okay. Lance will be at the center.”

  “You have to promise to tell Lance after the interview. I don’t see what the big deal is, anyway. Why weren’t you two supposed to apply for this thing?”

  “We’re field researchers, Tasha. If we’re married to a university schedule, we’ll never be out in the field again. We’ll get tied to classrooms, and labs, and . . . why are you shaking your head?”

  “How are you going to take the twins on field research? Me, I’m temporary. Gran and Granddad come home, and I go with them. Sara and William aren’t going anyplace.”

  “Of course not! We’ll have to adjust our schedules to accommodate theirs, of course, but we’ll travel in the summers.”

  “You’ll travel in the summers. You’ll take William with you in the summer?”

  “Yes. He’s a smart little boy, Natasha. He already loves the sanctuary. They’ll both get so much . . .”

  “Trudy isn’t going to play nanny forever, you know. Eventually, they’ll find her an actual job instead of leaving her to follow up on a practically closed case. She won’t have free time to play around with your kids then. How are you going to get any research done keeping track of a kid who follows bugs off into the brush?”

  “I haven’t worked it all out in my head, but we’ll manage. But if I’m stuck teaching a summer class, or if there’s a unique research opportunity one of us could take during the school year, what then? We can’t both go, of course, because the kids will be in school, but if I’m at the university, the only one who can go is Lance. I won’t have any kind of clout to take sabbaticals like Art used to do.”

  “It sounds to me like you’ve got it all worked out not to take the job if you do get it.”

  “No, but . . . I’m buying trouble. I probably won’t get hired. But one of us has to do something. We can’t raise two children on Lance’s sanctuary income and what a few adjunct classes can bring in.
”

  “Have you and Lance talked about this at all?”

  I shook my head. Mama was right. Adopting the twins was the most impulsive decision we’d ever made in our lives. I didn’t regret it for a moment. But I wished we’d spent a little more time getting ready to be parents.

  The phone rang again. “Wow. Three calls in one ride. You’re getting to be quite the twenty-first-century gal,” Natasha teased.

  It was Lance. “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “Honey, are you almost home?”

  “Ten minutes out. What’s up?”

  “Drive faster. I’ve got the Forresters coming back, and Drew swears . . .”

  “Go back, what’s wrong?”

  “I can’t find William! Drew swears his Project Lifesaver bracelet is in the house, but what if it isn’t attached to his arm anymore? Trudy’s almost here. I’ve looked everywhere. I can’t find the damned thing. I can’t find him. Sara’s sitting on the couch, and her eyes are huge, and I can see she’s reliving the last time he got lost.”

  “I’m coming. Calm down. I’ll be there. Nobody broke into our house and took him. And he didn’t go out either, if you didn’t hear the alarm. If Drew says the bracelet’s inside, then it’s inside on William. Sit down and make a list of all the places you’ve already looked, and when I get there, we’ll start all over and go room to room methodically.”

  “But honey, what if we’ve lost him forever?”

  My heart wanted to panic, but my voice locked into calm. “He’s fine, Lance. We need to find him, but he’s okay.” This was almost always how I acted in a crisis. As long as there was action to be taken, I asserted control, analyzed, and organized. It was only when completely helpless that I fell apart. In contrast, when we couldn’t do anything at all in a bad situation, Lance drew himself together and asserted calm. When Gary murdered Art, all I could do was cry. But Lance started dealing with it right away.

  At this moment, there was plenty we could do. And Lance’s hysterics were surely making Sara’s fears worse. I needed to get home to her as much as him. I urged the car forward above the speed limit, only to see blue lights in my rearview mirror as I exited the bypass.

  “Not right now,” I muttered, aiming my car for the side of the road.

  The cop car blasted its horn when I slowed down, and I glanced in my rearview mirror. It was Drew, and he was waving me ahead, not pulling me over. I was getting a police escort home to find my kid.

  CHAPTER 17

  Dear Nora:

  I can’t ever find my car keys. Please don’t tell me to hang them on a hook by the door. I can never remember which one I used last. And please don’t tell me to have one certain bowl or something, because I’ve tried that, and I could never remember where I put it.

  Lost in the Sticks

  Dear Lost,

  Get a bike.

  Nora

  After several hours of searching, I was all out of actions, reduced to a weeping puddle on the couch while Lance directed traffic and assured me, “We’re going to find him honey. The device is in the house. The kid is in the house. He’s going to be fine.” Our roles had utterly reversed.

  “We’ve looked everywhere,” I groaned.

  “Twice,” Sara added, because that was how I had phrased the statement the last time I said it. She was curled between Natalie and me, sucking her hand, then wiping it dry on my pants.

  “Obviously, we’re missing something.” Lance paced out to the kitchen, where Mama had brewed a pot of the new stuff that everyone agreed tasted like road tar or battery acid.

  “Think about your house,” Adam advised me. “I know you haven’t lived here long, but imagine its layout, and try to picture the tiny spaces. What would appeal to a child who likes to squeeze down little and hide?”

  “We’ve looked under beds, in the tops of closets, and even in the attic, though I’ve got no idea how he would have gotten there. I’ve emptied every cupboard and cabinet, and he won’t come out. The only thing left is inside one of those packing boxes in . . .”

  “I think we’ve got something down here!” my father called from the basement.

  Lance scooped up Sara and pounded down the stairs ahead of me. Daddy and Drew had muscled our few remaining moving boxes out from the wall, checking each as they went. Reaching them without stepping on our belongings was hazardous going. And they had to shush the crowd of us twice so we could hear what they had found.

  Although the basement is finished, it had clearly been in need of some repair since before Stan bought us the house. Our boxes served to cover over a couple of small gaps between pieces of drywall. Daddy thought he had seen something behind one of these gaps, so he tapped gently. Nearly at once, his tap was echoed. Once we fell silent, he continued rapping back and forth for a few moments, until Lance burst out, “William, is that you?”

  “Are you stuck, William?” I asked at the same time.

  An aching silence, nothing, then three more taps. Drew turned his light into the crack. “I still can’t see a thing. If it is him, I’ll be damned if I know how he got in.”

  “Of course it’s him! Our walls don’t have an echo. Let’s get him out,” said Lance. He set Sara down and reached for the crack. “I’ll pull this whole wall down if I have to.” He gave a mighty heave, but instead of breaking off a portion of drywall, he caused a creaking rip running the length of the wall. “Look at that.”

  Drew shone his light along the length of the tear, which ran smoothly to the other chink in the drywall we had been concealing with boxes. Lance yanked again, and a whole panel peeled free and flopped open, revealing, alongside several nests of spiders, one William, curled into a ball. “Somebody had themselves a regular little hidey hole, didn’t they?”

  While Drew followed the tiny tunnel to see where it originated, my father fingered the rusty inner hinges Lance had folded down. Even with the panel lowered, William was still trapped behind a lip of real drywall. He knocked again, with the back of one hand. “William,” he said in a conversational, if muffled voice, “is that you? William, are you stuck?” Then, he went on to add, “William, would you like some help there, buddy? We don’t want to be playing in the salt mines all day.”

  “Looks like it goes into the furnace closet, like it was originally supposed to be part of the ducts but never got hooked to the central system,” Drew called. “There’s a grate pushed out onto the floor behind the furnace itself. That hole is tiny! How did he get in there?”

  Lance didn’t answer him. “Let’s see what we can do.” Lance grabbed some of the real drywall and pulled. A handful came away in crumbling clumps. He repeated the maneuver with similar results. The going was made slower because William was pressed right up against both sides of the wall, making it hard to keep from grabbing him as well or else suffocating him with plaster dust. Eventually, though, he popped free, and Sara threw herself on top of him as soon as he rolled out.

  He seemed unhurt, if somewhat dazed by his adventure, and when he got tired of Sara’s clinging, he pulled away and darted upstairs calling, “I bet she’s hungry. Would he like a little dinner?” William frequently mixed up gender pronouns in this way, treating them interchangeably.

  Lance chased after him, but I remained on the floor, stroking Sara’s back while she sobbed the tears she had held in all afternoon.

  “His Project Lifesaver band saved his life,” I said. “I want to kiss whoever put it on him in the first place.”

  “Nelly Penobscott, of course,” said Natalie. “His mother and uncle took horrible care of the equipment, though, and he was with us a little while before we got it functioning in our house. I didn’t sleep until we did. You can see why.”

  “We wouldn’t have known where to look! We would have been sure he was gone. We would have . . .”

  “. . . found him for you by the middle of the night if we had to tear your house down one piece at a time,” Drew said. “But it would have been hours from now, and he might have hurt himself get
ting free. Those little bands save people. I don’t know why more places don’t use them. If you all will excuse me, I’ve got a report to fill out and Hugh Marsland’s wife probably still in my office to deal with.”

  “Nothing good there?”

  “Ah, poor thing, I shouldn’t sound so callous. We’re all worried about him. She got a nasty letter. Supposedly photographic evidence he left her. He’s standing on the beach with some trophy girl. It’s an obvious digital creation. She doesn’t understand there’s not a thing I can do I’m not already doing. I put the picture in a baggie and labeled it, then looked at it through a magnifying glass to make her feel better before I sent it off as evidence.”

  “He’s missing?”

  “The whole thing is weird, Noel. I sent the picture down the pipe, but I doubt it will do any good. Maybe somebody can trace the postmark.”

  “Can I ask a weird question?” We hadn’t been paying attention to Natasha, the only other one who lingered to comfort Sara with me after Mama and Daddy followed Lance up the stairs.

  “Ask away. I may not answer, but you can always ask,” Drew told her.

  “What’s the beach babe look like?”

  “Hugh’s digital girlfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know. Typical specimen. Blonde, fake tan, red bikini.”

  “Heart tattoo on her hip? Is she turned away from the camera looking back over her shoulder?”

  “Y-e-s-s.” Drew turned a one-syllable word into three. “How did you know?”

  “Definitely digitally altered. You should get a copy to the feds. Stay put. I’ll get you the original.”

  “You’ll what?”

  Upstairs, Trudy called a greeting to the house along with, “It looks like I missed all the fun! I’m so glad you found him safe.”

  “I’ll get you the original,” said Natasha. “But you have to promise not to shred it to pieces and at least try to get it back to me.”

  “Natasha, I’m not following you,” Drew said.

  “Do I have to spell it out? The woman in the picture is my mother, and it was originally Terry Dalton with her. It was another one of those weird things Gary’s guys used to do. When somebody was a danger to the organization, they killed him, then put a photo of his head on the picture in place of Terry’s and glued the new picture to his face when they buried him, so he’d have a cute piece of tail to look at while he rotted.”