Robby, when he finally broke, insisted that when Merle was about ready to give in and start bringing the animals in again, even if he couldn’t once more move them back out, Chuck started opening the enclosures and Lance took over the head count.
Merle planned a return to Michigan to attempt to set the old distribution system back up. Trudy said she thought it was more likely Merle was getting ready to skip town. When Lance finally gave the care of the rhesus macaque area back, Merle immediately began moving animals in. It was on one such journey that Ivy and Charles accosted him, tipped off by Justin.
Justin said he was accosted at the Marine several times by Charles and Ivy, who scared him. He was increasingly out of pocket to Merle and, like Trudy, he felt the man was about to skip town. Finally, he claimed to Charles that he and Robby didn’t know where the records room was located but that Merle might. Thinking Charles was another disaffected member of the smuggling ring with a plan to get the money from Merle, he told Charles when to find Merle alone at the sanctuary.
The day William ran up the delivery truck ramp was also a monkey delivery day, and Charles, having already tried Robby and Merle for information, had been harassing Justin on the opposite side of the truck when the child appeared. Besides seeing rhesus macaques in cages inside the truck, William probably also saw the two men talking nearby. Ironically, it was Will’s appearance that delayed Charles’s discovery of the monkey smuggling, since he left quickly once he thought the child had seen him.
According to Robby, Merle dispatched him to capture Will, and Justin backed Merle’s authority. Neither he nor Merle recognized the significance of the conversation Justin had been holding at the same time. None of them had met Charles until then, and it wasn’t until Charles killed Merle that Justin realized Charles had only learned about the monkeys at all by talking to the three of them.
Merle simply wanted to intimidate the child into silence about the monkeys. But when Robby brought William home, it quickly became clear that he couldn’t explain what he had seen. Unsure what to do with him until Merle’s shift was over, he locked Will in his garage. That was where Layla found and accidentally freed him. Panicked, and completely believing Robby’s story, Layla got Ivy involved. Layla revealed little, but it was clear from what she did say that Ivy had learned how attached Natasha was to the twins from the whole affair and filed it away for future use.
After they killed Merle, Charles and Ivy decided Natasha was the only one left who could tell them about the records room. They sent Robby and Justin one of Merle’s fingers and an anonymous threat to their own lives if they didn’t catch the little boy for them. Justin convinced Robby to use Layla to steal Will. Ivy meant to use him to get Natasha.
Of course, Charles and Ivy denied all of this and all responsibility for Hugh Marsland’s death. Authorities believed the deputies nearly caught Merle transferring monkeys into the enclosures. He instead disabled them and hid their cruiser out of sight well before Ivy and Charles arrived. When they found him, perhaps Merle refused to tell them what they wanted to know even when threatened. Perhaps he didn’t have time to answer them. Ivy seemed the impulsive type.
Nobody was admitting what happened after, but it was clear Merle never left the sanctuary. His head, hands, and feet remained missing. But the ring Drew recovered from the spider monkeys had belonged to him, and he did indeed have A-negative blood.
“None of that goes to tell us who gave you that knot on the head,” said Mama. She and I were lunching with Bryan and Travis, whose duties had lightened considerably. Mama and Bryan were working up one-liner responses for “What’s Next, Nora?” I was mostly along for the ride, having developed a new appreciation for my mother, now that I had children myself.
Travis rolled his eyes. He disliked talking about this. “Knots,” he said. “And it was Winnie. Can’t prove it. I barely remember anything except waking up in the dark a couple of times. The closest they have to a picture of my assailant is when he roars up and dumps me in Lance and Noel’s car. He was driving a common vehicle without license plates, and it’s impossible to say who it is.
“Have I ever told you how grateful I am you forgot to lock your van, Noel? Lenore, you can see in the video that I was already struggling by the time he threw me in there. God only knows what he’d have done if I’d had time to really come around again.”
“You think he did that over a cooler of fish?” Mama demanded.
“See, we know he’d been intimidated.” Dr. Prescott had received a finger, just like Robby and Justin. Like them, he had thrown it away in a field, where it was never found. “I think it sent him off the deep end. By the time that detective’s head fell out of the cupboard, he’d already conked me out. But when he saw it, I think he figured out poor old Merle was dead.”
Dr. Prescott admitted all of these things except taking Travis. He even said he located the original plans for the sanctuary in Merle’s old records and delivered them to an empty field. Unless those plans were different from the ones Rick had, the records room wasn’t on them, which was why Charles and Ivy had begun to focus so heavily on Natasha.
“Well, I’m glad he’s leaving you alone now,” said Mama. “Letting you have lunch once in a while.”
I snorted. “He’s retiring in May. The fish cooler incident was egregious enough that tenure was not enough protection. Ironic that the thing that really tanked my interview was the one intended to intimidate him.”
“You’re such a pessimist,” said Travis.
T-Bow Orrice seemed to be biding his time. I thought Robby ought to watch his back whether he got out of jail or, as was far more likely, was prosecuted more deeply into the system. William was safe from Robby. But Robby wasn’t safe at all from William’s biological father, especially if Layla ever turned on him.
That Will was safe now, we felt certain. Or anyway, as safe as he could be with a murderer for a parent. I wasn’t sure how Lance and I could move out from under that shadow, but the threat felt more distant, more like it would be to us, not our child if it came at all. T-Bow Orrice knew too much about us, but we couldn’t live our lives in hiding from him, and we seemed, at the moment at least, to be out of his scope of interest.
Jen dragged in her husband and his sister to replace Trudy and Darnell in our volunteer roster. The husband was good-humored about having been wrangled, though it was clear his passions didn’t lie in monkey dung and lunch buckets. His sister, on the other hand, already seemed as passionate as Jen herself. As for Trudy and Darnell, they left us for Columbus nearly immediately after they had collected all the information they could from Gary’s storehouse. Liam Metcalf had always wanted them back in town, and he convinced their boss to recall them quickly.
While he was working with Chuck and his tablet one day, Ace saw a flash of gold in the big ape’s mouth. Through a great deal of bribery, he traded for the item, which proved to be a key identical to the one Natasha had retrieved.
“I think I figured it out,” he told me. “Chuck poked the camera with that stick, then used the stick to grab my keys off the hook. It took me so long to figure that part out, because he put the danged keys back. Not quite on their hook, but on the ground underneath, so I thought they’d just fallen.
At the very least, he hadn’t gotten out since Ace took his stick, and his new electronic enrichment was improving his mood dramatically. “It’s too bad he couldn’t get out when those people killed that fellow up at main. I’m no fan of the boys in blue, but what happened there was plain wrong.”
Back home, Sara couldn’t start Miss Henderson’s class until after the holidays, because she came down with a nasty case of the flu the day her suspension ended, having caught it from Julie Carver on their one playdate. The playdate was successful, so getting the flu was worth it. I expected it to hit Will next, but in fact, it took down Lance and me. Will was the only one who stayed healthy. The illness lasted until Christmas break began. Christmas with the Oeschles was the first time I allowed an
y of us but Natasha near anyone elderly, and I hadn’t planned to do that. Nana didn’t catch it from us, and neither did Margie’s children, but I kept us mostly quarantined until school went back in session.
When she did go back, if she didn’t flourish in her new classroom, at least she seemed to suffer less, and I only had to deal with one call from the teacher, early on.
It came less than a week after the new year. “Mrs. Rue,” explained Miss Henderson, “You need to discuss appropriateness and context with Sara.”
“What do you mean?”
“The short version is she grossed everyone out at lunch.”
I could hear Sara sobbing hysterically in the background. “Let me talk to her.”
“I only told them what you said,” Sara bawled.
“What did I say?”
Suddenly, the tears dried up, and she began a recitation. “Do you know what’s in the chicken you’re eating? Have you considered what genetically modified organisms are doing to our foods?” The GMO lecture. I knock down a dead man’s head, and she remembers my classroom spiel word for word instead.
“Honey,” I interrupted her, “I think I see what went wrong. You should never talk about GMOs at the actual lunch table. The point is to educate, not to make people vomit.” She put the teacher back on, and I promised it wouldn’t happen again.
A few weeks after that, in the middle of February, Travis called while we were getting the kids dressed. “I am not on the phone and you are not talking to me,” he practically sang.
“Congratulations! Social services approved you that fast?”
“No, no, no. Nothing to do with that. Like I said, this call isn’t happening.”
“Okay,” I interrupted him. “I’m assuming the job search has been put on hold.”
“Not exactly, no.”
“Well, I had assumed since Dr. Prescott is retiring at the end of the year . . .”
“They don’t want two empty seats to fill, Noel.”
“But I thought he left the search committee.”
“He tried to.”
“Mmm.”
“So act surprised when he calls you.”
“Wait. The search hasn’t been put on hold. The APES meeting was back in January. And you’re not calling me to say somebody else got hired. Are you?”
“Nope! You can tell Lance he’s now a trailing spouse. But maybe he’ll put in for Dr. Prescott’s slot.”
I hung up and stared at my husband, who was wrestling William into a sweater, an attempt to make him presentable for court. Chandra had reassured us at every meeting that things were going well. While I wouldn’t fully believe it until the judge shook all of our hands later this morning, I was beginning to think at least some of her words might be true. “Honey,” I said, “I think we might be able to afford this after all.”
“Well, that’s good.” The sweater popped over Will’s head and immediately shot off again. “Because it’s a little late to do anything about it.”
Yes, it was. More than a little. But that was fine with me. Indeed, it was wonderful. “Lance, don’t fight the sweater,” I advised. “We’ll take it along. Come on, kids, let’s go! We’ve still got to drop off Tasha at school on the way in.”
We headed out the door, a motley little parade. Lance kissed my cheek in passing, then locked the door behind us as the kids piled into the van. He still hadn’t figured out I’d gotten hired. Well, he’d know soon enough. I kissed him back, not on the cheek, but on the lips, full on and hard. “You’re going to be an awesome daddy. No. Check that. You already are.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessie Bishop Powell grew up in rural Ohio. She now lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with her husband and their two children. She has master’s degrees in English and Library Science from the University of Kentucky.
Her children have Asperger’s syndrome, though their issues differ drastically from those of William and Sara. The first book in this series, The Marriage at the Rue Morgue, was published by Five Star in 2014. You can find out more about the author and her works on her blog Jester Queen, at http://jesterqueen.com.
The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 34