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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  “Go! Go! Get it clear.” Deputy Greene led the staggering charge away from Will like a man guiding a battering ram. There had been a discussion of using car jacks to hoist the thing, but it would have taken longer to get those than it did for the half-panicked rookie deputy to run door-to-door and roust neighbors out of four houses. Clearly, he was posted at this edge of the search because it was where William was least likely to be found.

  In all this time, the child had not stopped screaming, though he only bumped his head once more before the hastily assembled team lifted the weight off his hip. His piercing cries intensified as sunlight struck him.

  “Easy.” Natasha’s voice was barely audible. “Easy, I’ve got you Will.”

  Deputy Greene called, “Natasha, don’t move him. We don’t know how he got there. He may have broken bones.”

  Natasha looked up long enough to glare at him. Her eyes carried a level of sarcasm her voice alone couldn’t have conveyed. “I’d never have thought of that. Would you stop shouting? You’re making it worse.” We could barely hear her over Will’s wails.

  She disentangled her fingers from his long enough to scramble to him on all fours. When her body’s shadow fell over him, partially blocking the bright light, he suddenly fell silent and looked up. He saw her, then flipped from his stomach onto his back and seized her shirt, nearly pulling her down on top of him.

  “I’m thinking his bones are fine,” I said.

  “Careful, buddy.” In the absence of Will’s cries, Natasha sounded loud. I crawled over to them and pried his fingers free from her shirt so she could sit down. At once, he sprang up and tackled her in a hug that would have sent her sprawling backward if I hadn’t caught her. As it was, I tumbled and scraped an elbow landing.

  His poor foster mother arrived. “I could have sworn he was with us. I know I saw him in the car,” she sobbed. Will wouldn’t go to her and remained wrapped around Natasha.

  “He’s hungry,” his foster mother said. He couldn’t eat until X-rays confirmed his hip had only been wedged in his crawl under the Dumpster and he didn’t need surgery of any kind.

  A few cuts stood out red on his black skin, and his wild tangle of hair had picked up debris. Tasha tried to pick it out while she held him, but it seemed firmly twisted in. “You’re safe,” Natasha said, rocking him.

  Finally, he looked up, as if seeing us all for the first time. He found his foster mother and launched fluidly into her legs. She sat and held him. He wrapped one of Natasha’s hands in a death grip.

  And then he saw me. His eyes lingered. “Hey there.” I gave him a small wave.

  At once, he grabbed my hand so that he held me captive along with Natasha. It seemed like an afterthought to him. Something necessary because hands were for holding. But for me, that moment was life changing. In the instant that his fingers clasped around mine, I felt myself rent by a gulf of loneliness. I wanted to clasp him and Natasha both and never let go.

  It didn’t feel like much time had passed, though my phone swore it was nine in the morning, before William was swept away for a medical evaluation. Will remained spastic and disoriented, repeatedly blatting, “no more circle dots” every time a new police car arrived. I couldn’t say why, but when he and his foster mother climbed into the ambulance for a potentially unnecessary ride to Ironweed General, I wanted to take her place with him, never mind that I had never met him before.

  I reminded myself he was safe, a thought that made me smile in spite of the empty feeling. I caught Lance’s gaze for a moment and saw the most peculiar expression on his face. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Talk later,” he told me.

  With the departure of their star subject, reporters crowded around hoping to talk to Natasha and me. Tasha had been identified only as an anonymous victim in all the June scandal. Her name and face had been kept out of the news, and, given that she was already well known through her grandparents, she preferred it. I wasn’t surprised when she waved off the microphones shoved in her direction. The reporters persisted and, although they were on one side of a crime-scene tape and we were on the other, their cameras all followed Tasha.

  I put myself between her and them, but I’m shorter than she is, so it didn’t have much effect. Then Lance got in the way, hiding us both, and I let out my breath in a long sigh.

  “Come on.” Detective Carmichael beckoned us through the Marine’s back door.

  “Thanks, Detective,” I said.

  “Call me Drew,” he reminded me. That was far easier to do when we saw him socially and he wasn’t in uniform.

  He and Lance shook hands, Drew’s chocolate skin highlighting the sunburn Lance perpetually sported by this point in the summer. They and Natasha sat down so she could give her statement and Lance his. I joined Deputy Greene for the same purpose.

  As I signed the form, a woman I hadn’t noticed coming in said, “If it isn’t the fastest home study in the Midwest.”

  I froze in the middle of handing back the deputy’s pen. I liked Natasha’s social worker, a smiling woman with wrinkles around her eyes and at the edges of her mouth. Jane Hurtz’s concern for Tasha was evident in every one of our interactions. This woman was not Natasha’s social worker. This was Merry Frasier, whose mouth turned perpetually down at the corners. She spoke every sentence like it was a question, but somehow made each of those questions into a command. Also, she stood with a slight stoop and dangling arms that had led Lance to dub her “the Orangutan Lady.” As in, “Look busy, Noel, here comes the Orangutan Lady,” followed by nudging and giggling equal to any grade school kid.

  Merry was one of the bevvy of people we had met during the whirlwind of classes and home-study meetings. Never mind we had only ever considered the process a formality necessary to keep Natasha, she had visions of us housing half the county in our tiny house. She never seemed to realize this was the home with one bedroom and one room with a bed. Every time she saw us, she turned her baggy eyes on Lance with a covetous expression that said, “stable father figure.” At a guess, she was in her mid-sixties, and surely she used the same hairdresser as my mother, because their hair was dyed the same horrible shade of bright yellow I called way-off-canary.

  “Ma’am.” Deputy Greene plucked the pen from my fingers, tipped his hat, and departed.

  “Not a chance,” I said, even as Merry poured herself arms first into the seat opposite me. From the kitchen, pizza odors began wafting out. It seemed the Gibsons were planning to open as usual in a couple of hours. “You aren’t going to fob some kid off on me. This has always been about Natasha.” Merry had never failed to present me with a list of Ohio’s waiting children when we met.

  “You listen to me.” Instead of domineering through questions, Merry spoke in a flat voice. She leaned across the table and exhaled a stench of garlic and onions. She appeared unaware I had eased backward. “That woman is overwhelmed.”

  “Who?”

  “Natalie Forrester. His foster mother. She’s got too many children to keep track of a kid like that, and she knows it. She took him on a provisional basis, and she’s not going to keep him after this. He needs a house with few or no other young children . . .”

  Not going to keep him? I tried to quell an irrational jolt of hope. Hope for what? “Doesn’t he have a sister?”

  “It’s why Natalie took them. Sister’s fine. She’s not going to have a problem there. But they’re going to have to be split up . . .”

  No! “I thought the foster care system tried to keep sibling groups together.”

  “Except in extreme circumstances. And I have to say, these are some pretty extreme circumstances. You ought to see her house. Red stop signs everywhere and alarms on all the doors, and she still lost him because she took her eyes off him for a split second at the pizza parlor. There will be an investigation, and in the end, all we’ll determine is her house isn’t suitable for a child who needs constant supervision like that one. She didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll guarantee it. It’s
so easy to lose a kid like that.”

  Right. Easy to lose. Settle down here. I’m just reacting to a stressful morning. I can’t save the world. I’m hardly ready to mother a young child, let alone one with autism. Autism! What do I know about that? And what about Lance! He’s never wanted children. Fostering him is out. Right. Out. I tried to still my spinning mind and the jumble of answering emotions in my chest.

  “Like William,” Natasha said. “I take it you’re his social worker?”

  Merry hadn’t seen Natasha coming up behind her, and now she jumped as the girl who was in my care leaned forward so her hair brushed lightly against Merry’s face. Natasha carried a tray of sodas, which she managed to keep upright. She held the pose a moment too long before standing up again and setting the tray down. “His name is William.”

  Merry flushed and fumbled with her top, as if its scoop neck might somehow reveal too much cleavage. She didn’t know Natasha’s history and so didn’t know what had happened to her, but her discomfort was evident.

  “Why can’t he and his sister be sent somewhere together?” I asked in the ensuing silence. Stop. Be quiet. Stop. Don’t do this.

  Natasha eased into the seat beside me, the sexual body language evaporating as if she had never displayed it. “Nobody wants kids like them,” she said.

  “Pretty much,” Merry agreed. The sodas manifested in front of us. Merry squnched her considerable eyebrows together and viewed hers with suspicion.

  “I hope you don’t mind.” Natasha sipped long from her own straw. “I took the liberty of ordering for our table.” She cocked her head and tapped her tongue to her top lip.

  I wanted to laugh, but knew better. It was easier to shoot her my own raised eyebrow in a cut-it-out gesture, knowing what it felt like when she turned those carefully widened eyes on me or how badly Lance squirmed when she pulled the tongue-tap trick while he was looking. Natasha didn’t always do this deliberately, and it was her default response to new or uncomfortable situations. She, Lance, her therapist, and I had held a few tense meetings on the subject of appropriate behavior and boundaries when she first came to us.

  But right now, her actions were utterly over the top. She wasn’t acting this way by accident, but because she agreed with Lance and me about the Orangutan Lady and considered her fair game. She nettled people like Merry on purpose.

  Before Natasha could come up with some way to obey my unspoken order to the letter without doing so in spirit, Lance loped over and nudged Merry further into the booth so he could perch on the end beside her. Surely he and Natasha had planned this, but it didn’t seem to be having the effect of rescuing me from Madame Long Arms. Rather, she and I were now both sitting on the inside of our respective seats, more effectively trapped into conversation than before.

  “Let’s have a hypothetical conversation,” Lance said without preamble. He stared in a pointed semi-circle at the collection of police officers in the room and then back toward the kitchen, where the wafting pizza smells were reminding me I hadn’t had breakfast.

  “Why,” I asked, “would we want to?”

  “Because Drew Carmichael said he loves hypothetical conversations, especially when all of the speakers have good intentions.” He directed his gaze at the woman on his right, not at me.

  Merry had been blushing bright at Natasha’s suggestive behavior, but Lance’s stare brought her face to a deep purple. To keep from snickering, I raised my eyes as if rolling them. “Hypothetically, what does the detective suggest we discuss?”

  “Let’s assume there was a childless couple in Muscogen County. One who had previously expressed an interest in foster care but who had, for their own reasons, ultimately only decided to foster one teen girl. Why would they, who had never been put in charge of children at all, be an appropriate placement for a little boy who requires constant eyes-on supervision?”

  Lance, what are you doing? Don’t let me break my heart over this kid!

  Merry said, too quickly, “Oh, other than wandering, he’s easy to care for. Other than a little bit of autism. Hypothetically.”

  “Has he learned how to talk, this imaginary kid?” asked Natasha. “Other than randomly repeating stuff?” The eyes she turned on Merry were suddenly narrowed like Lance’s, and she folded her hands around her drink and leaned into the table. “Does he eat more than three foods? Has he stopped having night terrors? Hitting? Biting?”

  “Wait a minute.” Lance laid a hand on Natasha’s arm, and she jerked it away. “Sorry.” He meant the arm. “I thought you were the one who wanted to have this conversation in the first place.”

  Stop! Oh, stop! Oh, won’t you all please stop!

  “Didn’t you say Drew . . .” I began.

  “I am. I do.” Natasha appealed to Lance with her eyes before she turned to me. “And the detective was backing me up. But there’s a difference between being hypothetical and spouting lies.” She did not look at Merry.

  Merry flinched. “It seems obvious . . . you would . . . this hypothetical couple . . . be perfect . . . well, because they already work with monkeys all day!”

  We all recoiled. Pizza arrived. Natasha had ordered something meaty with a thick crust, something I normally wouldn’t have taken even a bite of. We stared at Mr. Gibson as he deposited the hot pan in our midst. “It’s on the house!” he said. “We’re celebrating because we could be mourning, right? Chase away the bad with the good.” He backed away from the table as if the daggers we were staring were aimed at him.

  “Autistic kids are a bunch of monkeys?” I didn’t shout, only because Natasha had latched onto my shoulder. She was pushing down on it, like she could hold my voice down by pressing on my body.

  She leaned close to my ear, but before I could get on her case about inappropriate sexuality, she murmured, “You do call her the Orangutan Lady.” Touché Tash, touché.

  “I don’t know much about autism, but your analogy sounds pretty inaccurate to me.” I snatched a slice of pizza too soon and scalded my fingers, then crammed it in my mouth—beef, pork, and all—and burned my tongue.

  “No . . . of course not . . . but they . . . he . . . this particular hypothetical autistic child needs constant supervision. Who better than researchers? You’re behavior specialists. You spend all day supervising creatu—”

  “Stop.” Lance had engaged in a similar murder of his fingertips, but he stopped short of killing his taste buds. “Pull back. Are there classes this couple could take to . . . prepare to make such a decision, maybe with a more realistic understanding of the situation?”

  A Grinch-worthy smile blossomed on Merry’s face. “Hypothetically,” she said, “they already have. You have my business card. Now if you’ll excuse me, I should meet William and his current foster mother at the hospital.” She pushed past Lance and left without eating any of the pizza, suddenly far less interested in talking to us.

  Lance tried to continue the conversation in her absence, but I shut him down. “Later. I’m still completely overwhelmed, and I’m not thinking rationally.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m probably not either.”

  I brooded over his words on and off for the next several hours. Was he experiencing the same things I was, or exactly the opposite?

  We hid out longer than anyone else, and by the time the Marine opened as usual at eleven, most of the press had given up trying to get a glimpse of Natasha and me, but one persistent Columbus reporter met the three of us sneaking out the back. He had a camera, but no video recorder. Lance shuttled Natasha to the truck. I gave a short statement and let him take a single picture of me so he would go away quickly.

  Stan Oeschle’s granddaughter had already been identified from today’s news coverage, but I refused to discuss her presence with this man. She was too easily recognized in this part of the state. There was another reporter I would talk to, but he wasn’t hanging around. He knew how to find me later, and he doubtless already had his photos.

  “Where to?” Lanc
e asked.

  My stomach rumbled a complaint about a late breakfast of meat pizza and soda. “Someplace to get me antacids.”

  Ten minutes and one drugstore visit later, Lance dropped Natasha and me off at Ironweed University and drove toward the primate sanctuary himself. I needed to finish and print my syllabi before the semester started, not to mention get them turned in for copying. Lance needed the same things, but he planned to wing it when classes started next Tuesday.

  Tasha could have opted to spend time with friends, but by the way she alternately yawned every few minutes and flinched away from small noises, I suspected she preferred to curl up on the couch in the department secretary’s office and sleep nestled in the certainty of being watched and safe. She could have crashed in my office, but it had been Art’s, and the sofa in there was legendary. The secretary rushed to greet us as we stepped out of the elevator in the Biological Sciences building. “I saw you on the news, and I was so worried!”

  “Thanks, Travis,” I greeted him as Natasha made straight for his couch. “We’re doing fine.”

  “What about the little boy? How did you ever find him?”

  “I think he’ll be fine, too.” If his social worker doesn’t get him killed from ineptitude. “How are you settling in here?”

  “One day at a time,” he said. “One long day at a time.” He patted my arm as he moved away toward his office.

  Travis was the new secretary. The old one had retired in the wake of Art’s death. Travis was, like Lance and me, still getting used to the department. We shared regular stories of bewilderment about policies and the locations of things. Lance and I had always taught part time at Ironweed U, but our one class each per academic year was an upper-level course taught out at the primate sanctuary. The school didn’t even maintain office space for us.

  When Art was murdered in June, only Lance and I could teach the classes his students had already registered for at the end of spring term. Cancelling them would have created havoc. Lance and I had been cordially invited to fill the gap. In other words, the department chair called us up and told us our new schedule in the middle of July.