Darnell said, “If you talked to her Friday, you have a number that isn’t in the staff records. That number was disconnected at the end of May.”
I said, “Let’s say I do. By now, she knows who you are. Gary certainly did. Natasha told me yesterday.” I didn’t let my pleasure at their visible surprise show. “She’s not going to answer a call from Trudy and Darnell at the center.”
“As long as the phone is on, we can use the number to track it using its internal GPS.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to know she’s with the phone first?”
“That’s not your concern. Maybe we’ll call it.”
“And maybe she’ll hang up and run. What do we know,” I went on, “about what Art said to try to save his own life? We know Chuck the orangutan came in and attacked Gary, and that gave Art a chance to flee. We know it probably happened near the new enclosure because Art thought it would be on security video. Gary clearly thought Lance and I knew more than we did. He risked a great deal to send his mother in to lure us out to ‘save’ Natasha. What if that was because of something Art said? And what if Gary called Sally up to warn her off?”
Trudy didn’t say anything. Darnell was also quiet. It was a plausible theory. Finally, Darnell asked, “What’s your point?”
“It’s this. I don’t like those pictures, but I have every confidence you can find Sally without me. However, as you note, I talked to her Friday night. She is still answering the phone for me. She may think I can give her information. If you want my help, then I need something better than safe placement for my animals.”
“We’re not authorized . . .”
“Oh, can it.” Marguerite’s phrase. “You can help us if you want to. We need two things if we’re going to stay open. We need the authorities not to shut us down, and we need the college to perceive the sanctuary in a positive rather than a negative light. We need you to spin-doctor this for us. Art sacrificed his life for your operation. If you want my help to tie up your loose end, then you need to make that sacrifice worthwhile.”
“Wait a minute,” Trudy said. She gestured, and then she and Darnell got back into her rust bucket. I saw her place a phone call from the front seat, and when they got back out, she said, “What can you offer us in return?”
“Sally’s number, obviously. But why don’t I call her once you trace it, so you know whether or not she’s with it?”
Darnell and Trudy quickly located Sally’s phone. It was not in DC. I was not supposed to know where it was, but I clearly heard “Columbus.” While we waited for permission for me to call her, Alex phoned Lance to let him know he was on a plane back to his own home in Texas. We spoke to Christian briefly, but he had imported some of his own staff from the Ohio Zoo to help the afternoon volunteers, as he himself returned to the facility. Lucy was in labor.
Darnell and Trudy waited with us, ate the breakfast smorgasbord, and finally received authorization for my phone call. Part of me wondered if they stayed to make sure we didn’t do anything to warn Sally, but they seemed to genuinely accept my logic. They spent the time coaching me to act natural and to tell the truth without giving anything useful away.
Sally answered on the first ring. I forced myself to stay casual. “Hey,” I said.
“Noel, hi!” Her voice was unnaturally high and fast. “Did you get my texts?”
Oops. “No. You know I don’t text, and it’s been crazy here. I guess I’ll get to them. What did you want to tell me?”
“Oh, just that I couldn’t get in touch with Gary on Friday, and I wondered if you had made contact?”
That was it. That was my entire job. Sally was with the phone, and I could hang up as soon as I could get her off plausibly.
“No,” I said. “Never found his mom’s number.” I doubted if I sounded any more remotely normal than she did. But I was pretty sure I knew why she was so uncomfortable. I didn’t think she knew the same about me. I finally said, “Listen, I’m calling because we’re having Art’s memorial service next Saturday, and I thought it might be nice if you and Gary could come and say something, assuming Gary’s still in the country then.” He was in the country all right. His body was, anyway. The rest of him would never be in this country again. “You were his last graduates.”
She didn’t say anything at first, then, “I can’t, Noel. I . . . can’t.”
“It’s OK,” I said quickly. “I’m sure you haven’t got a lot of spare change right now. We’d cover your ticket.”
“No, really, I couldn’t.” Her discomfort was evident. And I liked it. I wanted to hear her squirming for a thousand years. My mind blossomed with a hundred strategies to keep making her refuse to help us out.
But then she said, “Um. I’ve got to go. Somebody’s at the door.”
That quick, then. As I hung up, my mind suddenly flooded with images of Art. I thought of him on Friday, leaping up after Chuck batted him aside. I saw him throwing the watermelon and bolting back around the building, as alive as ever I’d known him to be. I saw him giving Lance the white wedding suit that he probably had gone out and purchased for that express purpose. And from thoughts of revenge, I fell instead into despair.
Darnell pulled me out of it. “You kept your end,” he said. “Now it’s our turn. Here’s what we’re going to do. You need to call your board members and set up an emergency meeting. As far as we know, none of them were involved in this, but Gary had been cultivating all of them for some time.”
I was pretty sure I understood then what Rick had meant about Art getting pushback about handing his job down to Lance and me. I thought Gary had been trying to engage in a little politicking behind Stan’s back and bring the rest of the board around to making him Art’s successor. I wondered if he had known or surmised anything about Art’s planned retirement. In any case, the board would hopefully be easy to win back now, because we were going to need their full backing to keep the college on board with its funding.
“And you need this.” Trudy removed a computer printout from a binder she had been carrying under her arm.
It was a letter from Art. Or part of one. It said:
Dear Lance and Noel,
I want to congratulate you warmly as you celebrate your marriage. Soon, you’ll be in Ecuador, and I know you will learn tremendously there. But I’m afraid that will be one of the last trips you’ll be taking for some time. I have an opportunity to live in Africa for several years, my dears, and I would be a fool to pass it up . . .
The letter said more about working with primates in the wild and using the things he learned to come back here and launch the next phase of his interconnected research facilities. It was clearly the beginning of a speech, probably the one he had intended to make when he unveiled the unfinished new orangutan center. I finished reading in tears.
Trudy and Darnell waited as Lance and I spun through this final gift of Art’s words, recovered from his hard drive. Then Darnell continued, “Tomorrow, we’ll get a couple of news crews out to posthumously award Art for his assistance in bringing a federal investigation to a successful close. That’s about the best we can do.”
“And federal authorities won’t be swooping in to shut us down?”
“No,” Darnell said. “There will be formalities, but the end result is that Trudy and I can both attest to the quality of care your animals receive and that will go a long way toward quieting the ruckus. This won’t go away quickly, but I think you will be able to continue your operations.”
He had other things to say, but I barely heard him. We weren’t being shut down. The center would survive for Lance and me to win over our board and the college. The worst of my fears would not be realized. They could not, or possibly would not, explain much else about the pornography ring, but Trudy did tell me we would need to hire a different security firm, and she drew my attention to an article on the Internet that said the head of Baywater Security had been arrested in a federal sting. By the time Darnell and Trudy left, I had a much better feeling abo
ut them than I had when they had identified themselves as federal authorities. I thought we might someday in the future consider them friends again.
Before Lance and I could gather our things and our new foster daughter and leave my parents’ home, we had one more call to make. Like Sally, Christian answered on the first ring, though I was much happier to hear his voice than hers.
“You finally got my messages!” he said.
“Did you text? No, look . . . It’s been another long day here. We wanted to know how Lucy’s doing.”
“Well enough,” he said. “Well enough. She’s delivered a healthy male baby.”
“Can she mother him?”
“No, not yet.” That was no more than we might have expected of any captive-raised animal. When primates had no mothers to model with, they had no idea how to care for their young. “We’ve got a good surrogate, though,” he continued. “We had a mama come to us last year, and we’re trying her out to make sure she remembers how to act before we give her this little guy for a while.”
“Do you think Lucy can learn?”
“We’ll see,” he said. “No reason to think not. She responds to the clicker, and she’s got good rapport with the trainers. Right now, we’re going to stabilize her health. We’ll put her where she can see everything and see if we can’t get her back together with this baby soon.”
And finally, everything was done. I hung up and turned to Lance. “Let’s go home.”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” It was Mama. “You two and those blasted monkeys. You’ve conspired to ruin your own rehearsal dinner, your wedding reception, and our little brunch. You are going to stay for supper, and you are going to tell us everything starting,” and here she turned to Lance, “with when your mother lost her mind and your brother somehow looked sane by comparison.”
She turned and walked away, leaving us to process her admonishment. Lance looked at me and shrugged. “It looks like we’re staying for dinner,” he said.
We were in the back parlor again, sitting together on the couch. I leaned into my new husband, and he pulled me in close with one arm. I said, “What do you say we postpone our honeymoon?”
He buried his nose in my hair and wrapped the other arm around my back. “You know,” he told me, “I was thinking the exact same thing.”
ABOUT ORANGUTANS
* * *
Orangutans are an endangered species whose existence is threatened by deforestation of the rainforests on their native islands, Borneo and Sumatra. To find out more about them, and to learn how you can help slow or prevent their extinction in the wild, search the Internet for great ape sanctuaries in the US and abroad. Your local or regional zoo might also be a good resource to learn more about an extraordinary creature that is losing ground against human intrusion.
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.
Jessie’s first book, Divorce: A Love Story, was published as an e-book in 2011. You can find out more about her and her family on her blog Jester Queen at http://jesterqueen.com.
The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 26