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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  William tapped the microphone against his chin and rocked on the balls of his feet. Finally, he looked straight at me, through me really, and said, “William is home-hungry.” Then he dropped the mic, flopped on his stomach, and bawled.

  December came, and with it, the twins’ birthday. Two days before my interview, Sara bounded around the kitchen singing, “It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday, it’s my bi-irthday. Gonna get lots of presents to open for me-e-e.” She tapped her spoon on her cereal bowl when she sat at all, and Natasha nearly tripped over her twice trying to get her own breakfast together.

  William joined us in the kitchen late, since his morning ritual always included a rinse in the tub. “It’s my birthday, too, Dummyhead,” he greeted his sister.

  His outburst stopped everyone on the spot.

  He didn’t ride the bus like Sara did. I drove him. The first school day he was my son, I picked him up at carpool. His teacher, Mr. Bender, met me at the curb. I’d been afraid of trouble, having already spoken with Sara’s principal on the phone over her behaviors. But Mr. Bender had been all smiles and concern. “We loved the Forresters,” he told me. “But we’re so excited for William. He’s talked about your husband nonstop today.” Really? Sara’s my talker. “But we’re going to need your help with a couple of things.” Here it comes, then. “By the end of last year, he could use ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘my,’ and I noticed he’s reverted to referring to himself in the third person. He also needs help remembering to use the number fifteen on his way to counting to a hundred.”

  “Five-teen!” William announced from the back.

  “Fiff-teen” his teacher and I corrected together.

  “Five-teen,” William insisted. And I could tell from the following laughter that we would be fighting the battle of five-teen for some time to come.

  “Anyway, we’ll get all that sorted out. We’ve already seen improvement since the beginning of the term. Our kids are nothing if not inconsistent. I wanted to introduce myself and say hello. You have a wonderful little boy.”

  It was the most stunning moment of parenting, to hear William referred to as mine, to find out he had spoken positively of Lance, to hear him argue with us about the number five-teen. And now, not four months later here he was using those personal pronouns precisely as Mr. Bender had assured me he could do, and in a perfectly grammatical sentence no less.

  “Good job, William!” I praised him.

  “But your sister is not a dummyhead,” Lance added, joining us after draining William’s tub.

  Sara looked hard at her brother, then resumed her tapping song. “It’s our birthday, it’s our birthday, it’s our biiirth-birthday. Gonna get lots of presents to open for me-e-e.”

  A step in the right direction.

  We had worked it out; Lance would take after-lunch cupcakes to William’s school; I would do the same for Sara’s. Since he got the more desirable location, I got the more desirable car. Also, I had missed my convertible ride with Natasha on Saturday when William had once again insisted upon attending her poetry slam. The group had adopted him as a sort of mascot, and he got the benefit of a couple of hours spent in the company of those who seemed to understand him whether he used his words correctly or not.

  “He’s a poet,” one girl assured me. “Listen to his metaphors, and he makes perfect sense.” Great for those who grasped metaphors intrinsically, I supposed. Not so great for Lance and me.

  I was much too smart to bake thirty-five cupcakes for Sara’s class and another fifteen for William’s myself, but Mama was outdoing herself in her efforts to make up for what amounted to her initial shock. She implemented every idea her readers sent in and a few she came up with herself. We had endured all-girl shopping-lunches, received randomly delivered packages, and been bombarded with a barrage of “special-day” cards. The birthday itself had brought bicycles from her and Daddy.

  Thus, the box riding in its own seatbelt on the way to school contained nothing from the grocery store or even the local bakery, but forty of Mama’s pink-and-white iced chocolate and yellow dream cupcakes. The ones Lance was porting to William’s school were sports themed.

  After I signed in at the office, I had a few minutes to wait with Sara’s teacher before the class came back from lunch. Between the few terse e-mails and several phone calls we had received from her and the principal, I was braced for an unpleasant meeting. “You’re Sara’s new foster mother,” she said.

  “We’re adopting her, you know.”

  The teacher shrugged. “I’ll tell you something, if you haven’t already figured it out for yourself. That girl is lazy.”

  My gut clenched. I wanted to throw a cupcake at the woman. I pictured Sara at the kitchen table the previous Thursday begging, “But I don’t want to go to school. The kids are all mean, and Mrs. Grim never lets me have recess.”

  “Honey, we’ll talk about this later,” I had told her, herding her out to the bus. “Everybody has to deal with frustrations at work and school.” But the conversation had never come. I regretted that now.

  “I’ve seen children with autism. I know what it looks like, and she’s not it. I taught her last year. If she hadn’t come to me with the educational diagnosis, I can assure you she would never have been assigned it here. I—”

  “You will need to discuss this with my husband and me at Sara’s next IEP meeting. Today, I’m here to celebrate her birthday.” Natalie had cued me into the hazards of the Individual Education Planning meetings controlling what accommodations the school would have to make for our daughter. Sara’s IEP bought her extra time on tests, a quiet testing location, away from the classroom, and visits with the district occupational and speech therapists, but little else. As Natalie had ruefully told me, “She’s too high functioning. The system won’t help her like Will.”

  In fact, William’s placement at the charter school was a result of his IEP as much as any lottery. He had good grades, but the district had few mainstream classes able to meet his unique needs, and fewer still teachers willing to look deep enough to help him achieve his potential. Perhaps because it was smaller, the charter school was completely onboard with the process of working with him so he could perform to his best.

  In contrast, Natalie had warned me, I would have to fight for every little thing Sara required. She had been sorry to see Sara assigned to this teacher a second year in a row, thinking they had left the woman behind in kindergarten. The teacher’s real name was Mrs. Grisby, but she had always been Mrs. Grim in our house. Mrs. Grim had been promoted to first grade along with her students, and she had nearly exactly the same class all over again. Natalie’s efforts to have Sara’s class changed had fallen flat with the principal.

  The children returned from lunch before Mrs. Grim could launch another attack. We had exactly ten minutes for this ritual, and I suspected she would hold us rigidly to her schedule. “Everyone sing happy birthday to Sara,” she commanded in a weary voice as they sat down.

  The chorus greeting her instruction was halfhearted at best. Sara didn’t notice. She stood beside me beaming, humming her own birthday present song from the morning while the other kids almost chanted through the more traditional version. “Now,” the teacher went on. “Who wants to help her pass out cupcakes?”

  Nobody raised a hand.

  The knot in my stomach tightened and twisted. In my day, birthday cupcakes were a big deal. Surely school hadn’t changed so much that nobody cared about an influx of lesson-delaying sugar. “Never mind,” I chirped. “More fun for Sara and me, right honey?” But Sara’s bright smile faltered.

  “I’ll help,” one little girl said. I couldn’t tell if the hesitation I heard in her voice was shyness or something else.

  “Thanks!” I called out before she could add “I guess” or anything at all to suggest unwillingness. It was enough. Sara’s lips turned up again, and she began her deliveries.

  I don’t know how the trouble started. I asked those who wanted yellow cake to ra
ise their hands and sent Sara and her half-willing assistant to deliver them. Then we moved on to chocolate. The treats had nearly all been distributed when a scuffle erupted at the back of the classroom. I turned in time to see Sara smash a chocolate and a yellow cupcake together, then cream them down the front of a boy’s shirt. “I guess that makes you a floop-de-dooping dummyhead,” she shouted.

  “That,” Mrs. Grim’s bellow was almost triumphant, “is exactly what I’m talking about. That kind of attitude is exactly what holds you back, young lady. As soon as Mrs. Robinson can get down here from the library, I’m taking you to the principal’s office.”

  “But he said I . . .” Sara opened and closed her pink-and-white frosted fingers.

  “I don’t care what he said. You do not swear in my classroom, and you are not entitled to ruin other people’s clothes.”

  “She didn’t swear,” I protested. “She said . . . dummyhead and floop-de-doop. The one is an insult, and the other I’m pretty sure she made up.”

  “You should not encourage her behavior.”

  “You know what? You’re right. I shouldn’t. Sara, come with me. We’re leaving before someone gets hurt.”

  “But he . . .” The smile was gone completely, and Sara was smearing the icing on her face as she swiped away tears.

  I tucked the cupcake box under one arm and swept Sara along with the other. Damned if I was giving that woman Mama’s chocolate dreams. “Mrs. Sara’s Mom!” Sara’s assistant was suddenly all afire. She grabbed my elbow on the way past, and I nearly dropped the box. “He said she has lice and she smells like poop all the time. But he’s the one who had . . .”

  “Right. Got it, sweetie. Thanks, gotta go.” I hauled Sara out the door behind me.

  She wailed, “We have to sign out!” She had gotten icing all over both of our shirts by then, and the chocolate dreams were significantly squashed under my arm. I didn’t get her coat, and I skipped signing out on my way past the office. By a tiny margin, I resisted the urge to flip the principal a bird. I wasn’t sure I could un-ruin my daughter’s day, and I wasn’t even sure how to try.

  But at the car, she gasped, the tears replaced by wide-eyed amazement. “I get to ride in the convertible?”

  Oops. Natasha was supposed to be the only kid who got in there. Aside from the twins being roving disasters, it was a two-seater. No back bench for small boosters. And speaking of boosters, I didn’t even have hers packed along. Double oops. So much for clean seats and child safety.

  “Absolutely. You ought to get something out of today.”

  “But I thought I was in trouble.”

  Where to draw the line? “Sweetie, we’ll deal with it later. If I argue well, they’ll give you an out-of-school suspension and buy me time to think. You shouldn’t have mushed the cupcakes all over your classmate’s shirt, and it probably would be good to ask an adult for help next time something like that crops up. But it’s your birthday, I’m not angry, and . . .” I cut myself short.

  “Mrs. Grim is another dummyhead.” Sara finished for me.

  I had been thinking “big meanie,” but it amounted to the same thing. I scraped a portion of the icing off both of us so only a minimum got on the seats. “I’ve still got to teach today, but I don’t have to be there for another forty-five minutes. What do you say we get some ice cream? And I want you to tell me again how mean your classmates are. This time, I promise to listen.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Dear Nora:

  I put groomer’s dye in the spot where the cat poops. Of course, my dog got blue feet, too, walking through it, but I caught the cat in the act! And I filmed it! My neighbor was not home to confront. However, the next day, my beloved dog went missing for several hours. When it mysteriously returned to my yard, it had been groomed with a rival team’s football colors! Please Nora, I need some real advice here!

  Pooped

  Dear Pooped,

  Have you considered a different hobby? You seem to have exhausted all the possibilities this one has to offer.

  Nora

  Monday never improved above its cupcake-smashing baseline. Travis arrived at the ice cream shop right after Sara and I sat down. He dropped a newspaper over my shoulder with a scribbled note attached to it. The note said, “Chair, six o’clock.” The newspaper said, “Cancer claims social worker.”

  It took me a moment too long to realize the note and paper were unconnected, and I wasted several seconds trying to figure out how I was supposed to meet the chair at six, why I should desire to do so, and how it related to my sudden need to flip over every copy of the Free Press floating around the shop.

  Thus, in spite of Travis’s warning, Sara still surprised me with her cry of, “Hey, there’s your boss-guy. Hi boss-guy!” Sara and William had met Dr. Prescott exactly once, and it had gone badly, as he continuously tried to engage William in conversations and William only stared harder at the ground. Chair at six. He meant I should look straight ahead to see Dr. Prescott at the six o’clock position on my personal clock.

  “Hello Noel, and . . . Mara, is it?”

  “No, I’m Sara. Mara is somebody else, and I’ve never actually met her before, or come to think of it even heard of her, so I don’t think we probably even look alike.”

  “Mmm.”

  I set down the paper long enough to crumple Travis’s note, and Sara saw the article. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “Miss Merry Quite Contrary is dead.”

  Thereafter, I juggled the conversation between her and the chair, answering questions that weren’t questions from both of them at once.

  “We’re certainly looking forward to your presentation.”

  No you aren’t. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Wow, it says she had terminal cancer. I didn’t know there was a special cancer you catch in airplane terminals.”

  “In this case, terminal means final, fatal, Sara.” No wonder she was in such a hurry. Did she rush to place all her kids, or only these two? I didn’t wish this when I wished she’d go away. And I certainly didn’t wish for the Iron Lady in her place!

  “A pipe broke in the bathroom above the room we wanted to use. The ceiling’s still dripping. We’ve had to relocate you to the conference room.” And when were you planning to let me know this?

  “Then I guess I’m glad we ran into you. Thanks for telling me.” Now go away.

  “That’s how we wound up with the Iron Lady! It makes so much more sense now. I thought Merry had ditched us, too, but it turns out, she ditched everybody.”

  “Cancer’s not the same thing as ditching.” And will you hurry up and finish your cone. As if on cue, Sara jumped up and pitched forward. The cone flew over to splat at the chair’s feet, coming within centimeters of decorating his wingtips.

  “I’m sorry!” she wailed.

  “You know what? Let’s get half a gallon and take it home so William can have some too after school.”

  “And can we get a box of waffle cones? I love waffle cones.”

  “Yes, absolutely. Waffle cones.” The shop sold them six to an overpriced plastic box. I cut in line ahead of the chair to get Sara out before the inevitable tears began. We were due for a meltdown after this morning, and I didn’t want it to happen right there.

  In fact, she twitched but held steady until we got home after my class, even when we had to store the ice cream in the smelly department freezer. Then she finally went off because we hadn’t thrown a formal birthday party. She forgot we had discussed this and agreed a family trip in lieu of a party might be more fun anyway. She hadn’t gotten to enjoy her cupcakes with her classmates, and I couldn’t give her the alternative she wanted.

  I had barely convinced her to settle down in front of a video game when the phone rang. I spent much of what remained of the afternoon negotiating with her principal. He wanted to shame Sara with an in-school suspension, masking his desire with concern, saying she didn’t want a real suspension on her permanent record. I said, “Yes, she does,” at least forty-fi
ve times, and he gave up.

  “Fine. It’s five days. She can come back next Tuesday; you have to sign off on it; she has to do all her work, but she isn’t eligible for any credit.” I hung up before he could make the list longer. I suspected the sentence length was connected as much to my bad attitude as Sara’s. I had bought my time to think, but I had no idea what it would do for me. I couldn’t see why a child this young wouldn’t be let off the hook with detention or some other, less intense punishment. He had labelled her behavior “bullying” to justify Mrs. Grim’s overreaction, but I had expected no less.

  I had been prepared for him to try the in-school suspension tactic, which Natalie said had been used twice the previous year. Those were worse for Sara than even sitting in an overloud class, because everything she did was observed and criticized, and even her usual restless wiggling got her in disproportionate trouble. The kid needed a break. I hoped I hadn’t purchased her one in exchange for an entire school year. I could absolutely imagine Mrs. Grim flunking Sara out of first grade over this.

  The next morning was one of our days to open the center, a duty we had been juggling with Jen, as our actual employees were usually responsible for closing. Lance sometimes did it alone, but Natasha liked to help, and the only way we could manage to give her the chance before school (without inciting a twin riot) was to travel as a family and let the kids change clothes after they carried around food.

  Natasha took the duty seriously, and her favorite part was after we had finished with the rest of the primates and we could drive over to the other end of the property and give her a few minutes with Chuck. Ace saw to most of the orangutan’s needs, especially now that he’d practically moved in to help identify and quell the roving problem. But the big ape shared a special bond with Natasha. He offered her a safe outlet for her pent-up emotions. Days when she saw Chuck in the morning, Natasha had fewer anxieties.