“I’m not seeing the connection.”
I thumped the steering wheel, and the horn blatted. “You weren’t there the first day we brought William with us. He recognized those guys, and he didn’t like them. He wasn’t upset about the chimp enclosure. He was completely fascinated by the spiders. It was the rhesus macaques bugging him. He’d seen all of those things at the zoo before, and there was no reason for him to be especially upset by this one species. He saw something upsetting about the macaques. We thought it had to do with the monkeys themselves and didn’t pay enough attention. He kept saying, ‘no cages.’ I think he saw them in cages in that delivery truck. I think he was afraid of what we would do to them, and by extension, him, since the last time he saw rhesus macaques, he wound up locked in somebody’s garage.”
“But maybe it’s because the macaques looked so human.”
“Come off it. Rhesus macaques look like little old men. Capuchins and chimps have more humanesque features. He saw something at the pizza parlor, and somebody is either afraid he’s going to tell us or thinks he already has.”
Darnell didn’t argue with me further for the rest of the drive home, though he clearly remained unpersuaded. I could see why Lance had chosen a solitary stakeout. Darnell’s skepticism was wholly misplaced. My husband was going to be furious with me. But I had already decided I preferred him alive and angry. Darnell, and probably Trudy, wanted to waste too much time being sure when the truth was warbling around in my macaque enclosure risking the little animals’ sanitary conditions and all of our lives. Once I saw all those monkeys, I knew we had reached the point of needing Stan’s help, and we’d gotten there even sooner than I’d anticipated. We needed a new enclosure. Maybe two.
Firth (firth? Were my ordinals devolving into lemon-nanners?), we needed to re-catalog all our monkeys. Was it only rhesus macaques? What if we had extras everywhere? What if all our head counts were off? Seconth (yes, lemon-nanners and cheese-lights) we needed to stop the inflow before things got worse.
Nana went to have what she called a lie-down as soon as she and Trudy arrived. Since she hardly ever napped at Mama’s house, I knew this morning had taken a toll on her. “Noel, come help me get settled,” she ordered.
I followed. It saved me Trudy and Darnell’s demands and Lance’s towering silence. Drew had cleared him out before going inside to confront the Gibsons, and we hadn’t heard from Drew since.
“You were right,” I hissed at my husband in passing. “And you couldn’t have done anything else but get hurt by staying back there.” We didn’t have confirmation, and it was always possible this particular truck had held no monkeys. But I was sure. The monkeys were coming through the Marine.
As soon as I returned to the kitchen, Natasha called, “Here she is. Sit down, Noel. Close your eyes.”
“What . . . ?”
“Sit.” Once I was arranged, she went on. “I now present to you their majesties Sara and William, crown princess and prince of the Rue-Lakeland household.” When I didn’t do anything, she added, “Uh, you can open your eyes now.”
Sara’s princess gown was finished. It was elegant and pink, with drapes of fabric fitting for any royalty, but a practical hemline ending above its owner’s ankles. “Nobody has ever made me a dress before for my own,” she proclaimed. I doubted most kids her age had custom dresses. But it clearly meant more to this one than the other children my mama had sewn for in the past. Margie and I took her for granted growing up, yearning for department store clothes so we could be more like our friends. My nieces had lost their love of her creations several years ago. And my nephew never did have much interest to begin with.
“It comes with the territory of having a seamstress for a grandmother,” I told Sara, thinking suddenly of the stream of similar dresses my mother had produced from this exact pattern. All three of my nieces had princess outfits, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought it resembled the one Marguerite and I used to fight over as children. I wondered if it was too late to ask Mama to sew my clothes again.
Far more amusing was William. Mama had retrieved and washed the suit with powder blue lapels Will had worn all weekend. She had already altered it for my son, and the fit was perfect. It was the way he wore it, rocking even as he strutted, flapping his arms and spinning as he moved, that made him so delightfully funny. The suit and dress clashed majestically, and I had to hold back laughter. The twins carried themselves tall, both beaming lopsided joy. “Your highnesses,” I told them, “you look wonderful.”
They paraded out. Lance followed them, still pointedly ignoring me. He returned quickly enough when Trudy sat down and started talking, though. “You have to understand, T-Bow Orrice isn’t your average gang-banger,” she began. “He’s an empire-builder. He’s probably got thirteen kids, and he’s intensely protective of them, even though, except for his oldest son and Layla, he pretends they don’t exist. He’d rather not claim Layla, but he had custody of her for too long to deny it. His son is running his empire right now, not that anybody can prove it, and Layla’s running wild. He’d go to great lengths to ensure their safety, if he thought it would work.
“I have it on good authority Layla’s life has been threatened more than once in the last several weeks. I think Orrice believes he has been working with Liam Metcalf to ensure her protection. In all reality . . . I already told you what I think Dalton intends.” She shot a glance toward the hall, where Tasha had the twins modeling on an imaginary catwalk. He was probably the person pulling Gary’s strings last June. I just wish Orrice didn’t know so much. Assuming Dalton is alive, I’d like the man to live long enough for me to arrest him.”
Maybe Nana had been flummoxed. She certainly sounded worn-out upstairs, and like she didn’t want the man to know any more than she had to reveal. “Don’t get mad at somebody whose last act of subterfuge was pretending to be married to Mama’s daddy to keep from getting ostracized in the 1950s. She can’t lie smoothly.”
“Point taken. And Dalton surely would love to find that journal. Natasha has said before that he was one of the group’s distributors. We knew his name, but we had no formal evidence connecting him to the group. Since he has not been arrested, he must know we don’t have all the evidence yet. He may think Tasha knows but has kept the journal from us to use for herself.”
“I would never!” Natasha called from the hall.
“I didn’t say we think it,” Trudy assured her. “We need to go over all the places Gary spent time in this county again.”
Not long after, Drew arrived. If Lance wasn’t speaking to me at this point, he was at least standing close to me again. “You will not be surprised to learn,” Drew said, “the Gibsons didn’t invite me in back or volunteer to hand over the monkeys you think they’re harboring.”
Lance shot me a look. See? I returned his glower with my best Intractable Professor Rue face.
Drew sat down, and Trudy brought him up to date. “Now what?” Drew asked, when she had finished. “Anybody got a magic lamp or psychic to show us to that journal?”
“Can I ask a stupid question?” Natasha returned from playing with the twins. “Relax, the front, parlor, and patio doors are locked,” she said as Lance and I turned her way. “William can’t get out except through this door.”
Of course he could. But the kitchen door was open, I could see him parading, and quite honestly, this conversation needed Natasha more than me. I moved to a position where I could monitor the twins and smiled, hoping my expression was light and relieved, not heavy with worry. “Thanks, hon. Ask away.”
“You guys have searched the old records room with the film equipment, right?”
“The what?” said Lance.
“The old records room at the sanctuary.”
“We’ve been through our office a dozen times.” Lance caught my hand on the way by and held it, so that, although I could still keep an eye on the twins, I couldn’t leave the kitchen.
“Not your office. The old records room.”
>
“Tasha, what are you talking about? We keep the outdated records in our old barn office, up at the school, or in the basement at home.”
Natasha stared open-mouthed between Lance and me, then sank into the chair I’d just vacated, her head in her hands. “I guess I should have asked sooner,” she muttered. Then, quickly, defensively, she added, “I only even remembered last Friday, okay?” This explained some of her despondency. Whether the information was relevant or not, her flashbacks always came with guilt.
“What room do you mean?” asked Trudy.
“I should have said something on Friday, but I kind of assumed you already knew. It’s right on the edge of the sanctuary. I assumed you’d have tripped over it six months ago.”
“Don’t you think we’d have asked you about it, if we had?”
Tasha shrugged and looked back at the table.
“Natasha, help me.” It was yet another moment when I wanted to mother her but instead had to respect her space. Everything about her body language said she didn’t want to be touched. I kept my hands to myself. “I know all the sanctuary buildings. There is no ‘old records room’.”
When she finally replied, Natasha’s voice was flat, almost emotionless, as if she’d had to cut herself out of the discussion to hold it at all. Everything, all of this, was supposed to be between her and a therapist. It should have been private. “When we . . . when we filmed with the monkeys,” she said, “we always used the old records room. It’s the . . . it’s over on the other side of the creek behind the sanctuary. It looks like you’re going into a fruit cellar or something, but it’s the size of a basement. You get there from the employee road behind the mall site, but you break off before you get to the new enclosure.”
“Can you take us there?”
“She’s got therapy in less than two hours, Drew,” I told him.
“This won’t take long.” Trudy clearly shared Drew’s perspective.
“It’s okay,” Natasha insisted. Then she turned away from us. She was talking to Drew, Darnell, and Trudy. Lance and I weren’t even there as far as she was concerned. Maybe she needed us to be elsewhere so she could come back to herself later. “You knew so many names and stuff, I figured you’d found the place already.”
Trudy shook her head.
Natasha shrugged. “Let’s go,” she said. “I want to do something first, though.”
“What?” We all wanted to know.
“Can I talk to Layla?”
“Why do you want to?” Lance demanded.
“Because as dumb as I feel about Friday, I feel worse for her. She’s stupid and naive, and . . . maybe I can help her. I don’t know.”
“I’ll have to ask her guardian ad litem,” said Drew.
“They did take her from her mom?” Tasha asked. We were all entirely too familiar with Drew’s legalese. A guardian ad litem was a court-appointed individual who was supposed to act in place of a parent and ensure the best interests of a child were being met.
“For the moment. Let me make a call. Why don’t we take care of all this after your therapy appointment? It’s not like two more hours’ delay . . .”
“No. I want to deal with all of it now. I’ve got to be in school tomorrow. We’re getting ready for midterms, and I’m barely keeping up. Barely. I have a C average, and I know they regret letting me jump ahead a grade. I need to be in class. I need to be in bed and calm tonight. And right now, I’m worried sick.”
“Let me see if I can get an answer,” said Drew. “You have to promise you won’t assault her.”
“Yeah, I know. I was majorly freaked out on Friday.”
He walked outside to place the call.
“It sounds like I’ll take Natasha down to the station,” said Trudy. “Then she can show the deputy where this extra room is. I’ll bring her to her therapy appointment and home, and you can all . . .”
“No,” Lance and I said at once. Whatever personal differences we might have, we were still on exactly the same parenting page.
“You aren’t taking her anywhere without me,” I added.
“Us,” Lance corrected me. He gently squeezed my shoulders.
I gripped his hands with my own. “Us. Natasha needs us right now. The twins will be fine with Mama and Daddy for a couple of hours. Drew’s got people back out here. Mama, don’t forget to wake Nana up to pee.”
Trudy and Darnell didn’t like it, but they ultimately split up again, Darnell staying with the twins largely because William had trapped him into a game of trucks, and his departure would have caused a meltdown.
When she saw who the guardian ad litem was, Natasha started walking backward away from her. Lance stepped gently to one side, so she backed straight into him.
“Hello, Chandra,” I said.
“Hello, Noel.” She turned to Natasha. “If this conversation becomes unproductive at any time, I will bring it to an end. Clear?”
After her initial retreat, Natasha seemed to have recollected her resolve. “Completely.”
“And,” Chandra said, “before we begin, I want to know what you hope to accomplish.”
“I need to know she’s as naive as she seems. I need to believe I wasn’t completely screwed up to think she, at least, seriously didn’t mean any harm on Friday. I want to help her. I mean . . . she’s my sister. I don’t want to hate her guts forever.”
“I won’t allow her to incriminate herself,” Chandra warned us. “I’m no lawyer, and anything she says cannot specifically reference Friday’s events.”
“I don’t want to talk about Friday. We’ll accomplish a big argument if we talk about that. She’ll be all ‘Robby-my-true-love,’ and I’ll have to puke and leave. I want to know about Layla. I want to know she’s not a . . . not already a player.”
“Come on, then.” We all started to follow, but Chandra stopped us with a glance. “Only the two of us,” she said. “This isn’t a party.”
I might have protested, but Natasha agreed quickly. “Good.”
Left suddenly at loose ends, we trailed along with the detective back to his office. “I think you’re right,” he told us. “If they don’t have monkeys back there, the Gibsons sure seem to have something. Tony was downright agitated about my questions, and he had no intentions of letting me into the back room. And now he’s wise to me. I don’t have anything concrete a judge could use to grant me a warrant to look around before all the evidence drives off, but what you’re saying makes sense. I wish those two kids weren’t mixed up in it.”
He didn’t mean my children. “Why are you sympathetic to Layla and Robby?” Natasha’s life was in danger. William was the one who nearly got stolen. I tried not to sound indignant.
Drew held out his hands in a placating gesture. “They’re being used by some powerful people, Noel. You know what those people can be like.”
“They tried to take—”
“Robby convinced Layla she was playing hero. Now they’ve been caught, he’s ready to throw her to the wolves, but she won’t say a word against him. But he’s not telling me everything useful about himself, either. We all agree there’s a good chance he’s the one who took William in the first place. But he’s terrified. Somebody has him convinced it’s better to go to jail for kidnapping than sell out. He’d love to be rid of Layla, but he won’t give up the people who are responsible.
“They’re both getting used. And they’re kids. If they can’t make some good choices in the near future, they’re likely to wind up in detention until they turn twenty-one.”
“Good.”
Drew looked to Lance in supplication, but my husband said, “I’m with Noel.”
Drew gave up. “Tell me about your monkeys.”
We were still talking when Chandra and Natasha returned, too soon.
“She won’t talk to me.” Natasha looked weepy and shaken.
“She demanded her aunt again,” Chandra confirmed, “and then she turned away and refused to say a word to either one of us.”
“And I . . . I . . . I need to sit and breathe. She looked like . . . she made me think of . . . the angle of her face when she . . . it made me think of when Mom died.”
Drew had her seated before she finished speaking. I stood ready with her inhaler, but she slowly mastered her emotions.
“I appreciate your effort,” Chandra said. She turned to go.
“Listen, I don’t know if I can help her, or if I even want to,” said Natasha, “but I feel sorry for her. Here’s what I think is going on.” Chandra turned back, and after that, Natasha seemed to only be speaking to the social worker.
“She’s in deep with Robby. He goes to school with me, but he’s flunking out this year. The scuttlebutt is she practically lives with him. Her mom works in Columbus and travels with her job. She thinks she’s leaving Layla with one friend when she goes out of town, but Layla convinces that friend another one has her. The other one thinks she’s with the first. Her mom only ever calls Layla’s cell. She never really checks up.”
“Wait,” said Lance. “You know she’s doing this?”
“It’s only gossip. But come on . . . she thought the guy was going to marry her. Plus, she brags as bad as her mom. Robby’s been giving her driving lessons, and if he was smuggling monkeys into the sanctuary, I bet Layla was helping him out the whole time.”
“You think so?” Layla’s mother had arrived, and she was furious.
CHAPTER 30
Dear Nora:
I never get places on time. Even when I leave fifteen minutes early, I arrive late. What can I do?
Missed the Bus
Dear Missed:
Identify “Tardy” as your new lifestyle choice and hope to be invited places anyway.
Nora
“How dare you,” Shannon Dearborn demanded of Drew, “prevent me from seeing my own daughter? She is a minor.”
“Excuse me,” said Chandra. “I am Layla’s guardian ad litem . . .”
“Hello.” Shannon’s greeting didn’t suggest she was happy to see Chandra Evans at all.
The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 30