The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery)

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The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 16

by Jessie Bishop Powell


  “We could put flowers in it,” Lance said.

  “How you get these ideas. I never would have thought that through.”

  “And don’t forget we have five thousand dollars in casserole dishes to return.”

  “Stolen casserole dishes.”

  “Do you want to see them?”

  “No. How were things out at the center this morning?” It felt abnormal. Here we were sitting at the table as if we didn’t have a wedding to attend in four hours or as if Art hadn’t been killed last night.

  “The traps are all laid. Christian was right there helping us lay out additional pads this morning. Actually, he didn’t think I needed to be there at all.”

  The hope was that the orangutans, who were clearly used to humans, would expect us to provide their meals. Even if they weren’t willing to come right up to the barn, they might settle down for an evening someplace easy for us to dart them. The big fellow had hitched a ride on Olivia’s fruit truck. He either knew or smelled that it meant food. So it was probable they would look for the sources of bedding humans might provide rather than trying to make their own.

  It hadn’t worked last night, but nothing had been down on the ground then. Trudy and Darnell had rallied some of our most trusted volunteers to form a round-the-clock on-site crew, and they all went around in pairs. Nobody worked alone, and all of them, according to Lance, felt adamantly that we needed to be off getting married.

  All we could do was hope the animals would get interested in the piles of fruit and blankets and come in. But other than that glimpse on video, nobody had heard a peep out of the second orangutan. Although the first one had sounded off several distinctive longcalls after its successful truck raid, it hadn’t been heard or seen for nearly a full day now. We would absolutely have known if the animal was still making longcalls. The sound is like a cross between a pig’s squeal and a man’s groan, and it carries for miles. There really was nothing left to do but wait and see whether we found them first or the police did. If it was us, Christian Baker was still on hand to make sure things ran smoothly. If it was the police, I didn’t hold out much hope that the animals would live.

  Christian was a good man to have at the helm, and everyone was glad to see Lance off. They wouldn’t have been happy to know what he was going off to do. There wasn’t anything for us in Art’s office at the sanctuary. His computer hard drive had been claimed by the cops, and his files, which we knew by heart anyway, held no answers. We knew how to hack his e-mail, but doing so from the center seemed terribly unwise, and there was a chance that he had left us a clue in our own basement.

  While Lance and I were talking, I realized someone had left me a voice mail at some point in the morning. I checked it briefly. The message said, “Hey, it’s Rick, Art’s nephew. I think . . . can you call me when you get a chance?” The message time was seven fifteen. Sometime during the breakfast-dress chaos, then.

  I tried to return the call but landed in his voice mail and continued the game of telephone tag with, “I got your message. Give me a ring when you get a chance.” Of course, I said that as I headed down into our basement, the original cell phone dead zone. There were ten text messages that I did not check. Probably Rick as well. Anybody who knows me knows I don’t text. If it’s important, they call.

  It might have stymied our cell phones, but the basement was fine for our computers. Our router worked pretty much anywhere in the house, and we kept the grant work in our home office. There was always something happening at the sanctuary, and our offices were right there in the barns, making administrative activities difficult. Art had joked for years about adding an admin building so we could get some paperwork done without driving ten miles away. But we ran on a shoestring. An administration building was not in our budget. So the ongoing and funded grant projects were in our basement and the rejected ones were in Art’s office at the college. If he’d left his records at the college, or if it wasn’t in e-mail, we weren’t likely to find anything. But we had to try.

  We knew all of Art’s passwords, because they were all variations on the same thing: Pr1mat3. He used it at the center, at home, and at school, with sticky notes on the monitor to remind himself how many threes to put at the end and whether he was using a lowercase i or the number one that month. Only insecure if you knew the basic password or understood what “i, two threes in login” or “one, four threes in e-mail” might mean.

  We did know, and we exploited it. But even before Lance navigated to Art’s e-mail, I found a file marked Orangutan in the big cabinet labeled Research. He wasn’t trying to hide anything at all, if one knew where to look and had time to bother. Which was much more like the man I knew than the one I’d seen yesterday. Marguerite really had a point about him staying away from us for more than the graduation. We had come here so many times when Art was alive. I couldn’t count the number of Saturdays we had spent working out grant proposals in the basement while something cooked up in the Crock-Pot. I spread the file out on the computer-free side of my desk, half waiting for the man himself to come clomping down the stairs with gourmet coffee and junk food to sustain us. But he did not come, and he never would again.

  I tried not to think about this as I pored over pages of rejected grant proposals, all composed in the last nine months, all of them completely new to me. I had never seen any of this before, and here it sat in my own house. Art had been working on this for three quarters of a year without our knowledge, smuggling the paperwork into our file cabinet because we kept the open research files. We could have stumbled onto it at any time. But Art liked to joke what a paper suck our research really was. Other than the three or four files in current use, we rarely got into the back files.

  Eight months. An unheard-of length of time for him to keep an idea to himself. Although Art was perpetually engaged in fund-raising for us (and I tried not to think that Lance and I would have to do that alone now, or worse, that the board might find someone to replace Art and put that stranger in charge of our sanctuary), these proposals all related to an orangutan enclosure Art wanted to build. I tried to think. Had he been particularly cagey about his files? I didn’t think so. Unusually organized, yes. But closed off? Never. Not Art. For most of the last year, Lance and I would arrive home to find he had everything sitting out on the table ready for us. He had been planning this very quietly indeed. Except Art couldn’t ever be quiet. He would have told someone.

  But who? Gary and Sally, perhaps? I made a mental note to call Sally back and see if she had any knowledge. Surely she would have mentioned it last night if Art had been talking to her about anything orangutan-related. But then, I’d delivered a piece of horrible news. Orangutans and grants might not have been at the forefront of her mind.

  There wasn’t anything in the papers from the filing cabinet to suggest where the orangutans running around the sanctuary’s property might have come from, and I didn’t see anything to suggest a grant had come through. “Do you think he was making general plans but hadn’t gotten down to specifics yet?” I asked.

  “No,” Lance said. He didn’t elaborate. We had been here nearly two hours, and I wasn’t sure how much longer we could spend on the project today. We still needed to get married, after all.

  I looked up from the files strewn across our desk. Lance was scrolling down an e-mail message, one hand on the mouse and the other hand cupping his chin. “Damn,” he said. “Look at this. Look at this.” He jumped up out of the chair and stomped out into the hall. Faced with a choice between following him and finding out what had infuriated him, I opted for the latter.

  I had to scroll around to read the message from the bottom up, in the order it had developed. When I did, I understood why Lance was steaming in the corridor. The chain started on an abrupt note, as if it were really the middle of a conversation, maybe a continuation of a phone call. And it suggested exactly what I had feared.

  From: Aldiss Carmichael [mailto:[email protected]]

  To: Hooper, Arthur J.<
br />
  Sent: March 18, 6:00 p.m.

  Subject: Help

  Sir I am sorry we have not met, but I need your help. I am sure you understand why I cannot take these animals to the zoo.

  v/r

  Ace

  From: “Hooper, Arthur J.”

  To: Aldiss Carmichael

  Sent: March 23, 8:00 a.m.

  Subject: RE: Help

  Ace,

  I am sorry I did not reply at once. I see my sanctuary e-mails sooner, and you should contact me there. At the present time the Ohio Zoo is best equipped to help you in your situation. I repeat that I do not think they would arrest you, as you were uninvolved in the original crime. We do not yet have an enclosure to house orangutans, although I am steadily working toward that goal. I hope to be ready soon.

  From: Aldiss Carmichael [mailto:[email protected]]

  To: Hooper, Arthur J.

  Sent: March 23, 6:00 p.m.

  Subject: RE: RE: Help

  Respectfully sir what is your sanctuary address so I can send you mail there? I have done all I can. But the big guy is getting bored which is not good and the female may be pregnant I cannot tell. I can no longer afford for their upkeep and such and I beg you to help me. I cannot have an arrest on my record. I have done my best but the animals are neglected they need a better home and they will arrest me. If you cannot take them I do not know what I can do.

  v/r

  Ace

  From: “Hooper, Arthur J.”

  To: Aldiss Carmichael

  Sent: March 26, 8:00 a.m.

  Subject: RE: RE: RE: Help

  Ace,

  What makes you think the female is pregnant? Does she have labial swelling? My academic duties are extremely consuming at this time. Boredom is not a good thing in a great ape, but it is not necessarily a sign of neglect. Can you wait until the middle of June? I will arrange for you to donate the animals anonymously to the primate sanctuary and secure their safe transport to Columbus myself.

  From: Aldiss Carmichael [mailto:[email protected]]

  To: Hooper, Arthur J.

  Sent: March 26, 6:00 p.m.

  Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: Help

  Sir,

  I will try to hang on. Please send your sanctuary email address.

  v/r

  Ace

  I pulled myself away from the computer, breathless. “My God, he knew!” I said to Lance, who was still storming back and forth outside the door. “He did know.”

  “How did you know,” Lance asked me, coming back to the doorway.

  “It was after the shower. I was thinking about how my whole family duped me, and how even the people you know best will turn around and surprise you. And that made me think about how much Art liked surprises. And then I flashed on his face, when we all jumped into Darnell’s jeep.”

  “Yeah,” Lance said. “I follow.”

  “He didn’t look upset in the least. He looked exhilarated. And him saying, ‘You came too soon,’ ” I went on.

  “Right,” Lance agreed. “I was furious that he thought our help was a bad thing, but now I get it.”

  “It was such a strange thing to say. And it stuck with me. But he wasn’t talking to us.”

  “No,” Lance said. “He was talking to this Aldiss guy.” On the phone, we had both thought it was the orangutan, but now I agreed with Lance. Art was saying that Ace had come too soon. Did it really matter? It meant Art, gentle Art, was complicit in a crime.

  I surrendered the computer chair as Lance returned to try to find the rest of the conversation chain in Art’s center e-mail. That search petered out quickly, and it became clear that Art either had never provided the sanctuary e-mail address or that he had continued the conversation by phone.

  The best we could find was a series of urgent and mysterious e-mails between Art and Stan that broke off around the time the orangutans arrived Friday morning. Stan was upset about missing “the big reveal” because Gary had not yet left the country due to his mother’s fall. Stan thought he and Gert might need to leave Natasha alone immediately after the adoption hearing to stay with Gert’s sister.

  “I didn’t know Gary was Stan’s nephew,” I said. “I knew they were related, but I didn’t realize his mom was Gert’s sister.”

  “Me neither.” Lance shook his head. “We should have, though, if we’d thought about Gary’s mom and Gert’s sister both having MS. Stan’s not even related to Gary, and it would have been an odd sort of coincidence for two people in his life to have it. I think it’s relatively rare.”

  “Yeah. Gary never talked about his mother much, though.”

  “True. Or not to us, anyway.”

  “Yeah.” We both got along better with Sally. “Funny Stan didn’t say anything about it when we saw him at the court house.”

  Lance shrugged. “I want to know what this ‘big reveal’ was.”

  “I bet either Stan or Rick knows,” I said.

  “Art’s nephew? Why?”

  “When Art can’t find a grant, where does he turn, every time?” I didn’t wait for Lance to answer. “Stan. And when has Stan ever said no. He’s building an enclosure, Lance, and Rick’s always been his go-to builder.”

  “Was. He was building an enclosure.”

  I sighed and bit my bottom lip so I wouldn’t cry. I tried to remember if Stan had acted in any way in the know about the orangutan when we mentioned it to him yesterday morning.

  Stan could be fairly disinterested in the center. He and Art went way back, and he willingly funded our work, but in fact, we were just one of the only local millionaire’s projects. He liked to play philanthropist, and any number of charities and even businesses could thank Stan Oeschle for saving them with money. Ironweed U had an Oeschle Building that he had been the largest donor for constructing. When no bank wanted a part in Hannah’s Rags, thanks to the state of downtown Ironweed at that time, she had gone to Stan for a start-up loan. He darted from interest to interest, enjoying each as it suited his pleasure. So he might not have known much about progress after he signed the check.

  I remembered last year when we acted as intermediaries between the roadside zoo in Indianapolis and the Ohio Zoo. In that case, the orangutan turned out to be an illegally smuggled animal, part of a small network of illegally traded exotics. Art had enthused to everyone for days about our role in shutting down what he termed a primate mill, even though several species of animals were involved. Stan’s praise had been lukewarm at best until one afternoon he saw footage about it on the news and suddenly realized the importance of what Art had done. I wondered if this wasn’t a similar case, where Art’s tendency to wax eloquent had simply caused the man to stop listening. I hoped not. Or he would surely be feeling terribly responsible right now.

  “The board!” I said. “We haven’t called the board!” We hadn’t spoken to Stan at all since yesterday. What a mistake. I needed to call him now, or we were sure to wind up discussing Art’s death at the wedding. And even if Stan and Gert were taking care of Gert’s sister, other board members would be coming.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “I talked to Gert Oeschle last night while you were getting that deputy’s hat back from the spiders. She was distracted, but she said she’d talk to Stan. I’m sure that’s all we can do.”

  Lance shifted out of e-mail and instead tried to hunt up anything relevant about Aldiss Carmichael. Returning to the paperwork on the desk, I said, “None of this explains why Art told people he was going out front yesterday, when he was clearly going out back. And why was June so relevant? Because Gary and Sally would be graduated and the semester over? Surely that wouldn’t keep Art from taking care of an animal. It’s unethical, Lance. It’s unethical what Art did.” The words made me want to cry again. “Why would he leave a couple of animals, suffering animals, and not call the authorities?”

  “Noel, June is relevant because of the wedding. Art planned .
. . whatever this was . . . for us.”

  “That makes it worse!”

  “Look. What if he thought they had decent conditions? All the e-mails said was that the male was bored, not that it was filthy.”

  “Why would Art think that? This guy is talking about getting arrested! Art would have known why he was afraid of that.”

  “People don’t get arrested for animal neglect,” Lance said. “They get fined. They get arrested for theft.” He pointed me once more to the computer screen. “I knew I’d heard the name before,” he said.

  I looked up at the screen and saw a headline: EARLY REPORTS OF ORANGS INCORRECT.

  As I started to read, Lance added, as if the computer could hear him and correct the words on the monitor, “The word is ‘orangutan.’ ”

  Earlier this week News Nine told you about the Michigan animal sabotage. New information in the case has now come to light. At this time, most animals are accounted for, having been put down by Michigan or Ohio police or captured by staff from the Ohio Zoo. This newspaper has also learned that there are not orangutans unaccounted for as was previously reported. Caretaker Aldiss Carmichael confirms that there were never orangutans in the collection.

  I stopped reading. “Okay,” I said, “so he lied and there were orangutans after all?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So Art might have thought Ace had a place to keep them and got tired of doing it.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Lance said.

  At the very least, I preferred this image of Art to the one that suggested he would leave an animal suffering because of his academic duties or some secret grand plan. The Art I knew would have abandoned everything to save a primate in danger. But I wondered how much I really knew about Art anymore. If he thought the animals were stable, then yes, he might have done it exactly that way, delaying the situation until he could give it his full attention and pull off something flashy. Especially with Gary and Sally’s graduation to consume him. And double especially if he meant to surprise us.

 

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