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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  Drew whistled. “Why in the hell did you hang onto it? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Because I took it in the first place. It’s one of my last decent pictures of her on the only vacation we ever took together.”

  Drew accepted the photograph when she gave it to him. He gave her a receipt, but said, “I don’t know when, or if, it’s coming home.”

  Tasha nodded. From her complacent manner, I guessed this wasn’t her only copy.

  When she had left the room, I said, “Drew, I don’t think William is the one in real danger. I think he was only ever a lure to draw out Natasha. She’s the one I’m scared for.”

  Drew nodded. “So am I. More and more, so am I.”

  Later, Merry arrived, looking wan and thin. You’ve certainly lost weight! “You look wonderful,” I said. You look like hell. Her face was pale and pinched, like weight loss didn’t sit any better with her than being overweight had done.

  She half-smiled at me. “Wonderful,” she echoed.

  She didn’t say anything else, not even when she looked in on William, and she left soon after. “She could have waited until morning,” Drew remarked.

  Later still, after Drew and even Trudy had gone, all five of us sat squeezed together on the couch, William still shedding dust onto everything he touched. He needed a bath but had rejected the idea of taking one, and we were loath to force the issue, since he had endured the entire episode without wetting himself, largely convinced this was another round of Adam’s dungeons and salt mines game, which seemed to be an elaborate form of hide and seek requiring each person to perform a chore when found.

  “I thought they had him again,” Natasha said. “If I hadn’t already spent all afternoon so frantic for Gran, I’d have had an anxiety attack.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.” Lance went on stroking William’s hair, brushing dust out with his fingers.

  “Yeah. Would have slowed everybody down,” she agreed.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Sara wiped her hand on my pants again, as she had been doing all afternoon. “I think I need a question?” she informed me. Like William, most of Sara’s sentences ended in the same lilting, questioning tone.

  “Okay,” said Lance. “Shoot.”

  “Shoot a doodle,” Sara echoed.

  When she didn’t say anything else, Lance face-palmed himself for accidentally derailing her. “I meant ask your question,” he clarified.

  “Yeah. Okay. Here’s the thing? You guys are great at bringing William back to me and stuff?” She stopped again and put her hand back in her mouth.

  “Is that the question?” I finally asked. And is the answer, “You’re welcome”?

  She nodded and went on slurping her fingers. “And,” she suddenly added, “We like you because you make good macaroni.” Clearly her nod was meant to be a shake. This time, we waited her out, and I resisted the urge to prod. “But we kind of already have a mom? And she’s a famous actress? I’m a little worried we’ll go home to her when you get rid of us and maybe get to keep Lance but not Noel?” Ah. The question at last.

  When Sara said “famous actress,” Natasha sagged into the back of the couch. When Sara said our names, Lance and I flinched. The twins were supposed to call us Mom and Dad. But so far, the closest either could come was, “Person-who-is-not-my-mom, please I need a macaroni?” It wasn’t discourtesy keeping the twins from using the titles. In their minds, we simply weren’t their parents. Although they clearly didn’t know what to do with us, neither of them resisted our company.

  William and Lance had developed a game with the trucks where they took turns creating and changing arrangement patterns. Sara’s play was mercilessly repetitious, but she had discovered the small store of children’s books we had rescued from the box they got relegated to when my nephew outgrew them. She wanted them read to her over and over. And, although I was sick of hopping on pop and wearing the fox’s socks, I loved Sara’s head nestled against me, her slobbery little hand in her mouth.

  But I couldn’t tell. Was she worried they wouldn’t be able to keep me, or was she hopeful? She often mixed up opposites. “You know how you and William are a package deal?” said Lance. “Noel and I are the same. You get both of us or neither, not only one.”

  Sara slurped a little harder while she contemplated this. “When Mom finishes her movie, we have to go home without either of you?”

  “This is home now,” said Lance.

  “You’re like me,” said Natasha. “You’ve been emancipated. Your mom isn’t allowed to come take you away.”

  “No,” Sara countered. “Your mom is dead. And dead people can’t come take you away.”

  “Tasha’s basic point is right, though,” said Lance quickly. “Your mom can’t come get you, even though she’s alive. The law says she can’t even know where you are.”

  Sara wedged herself further against me. “Not ever?” Worried, then. Not hopeful. Sara wanted to stay here. I squeezed her more tightly.

  “Not ever.” Lance leaned out so he could meet her eyes. She held his gaze without looking away, but William rocked and looked everyplace but my husband’s face.

  Sara took her hand out of her mouth. “Then what does happen when you want to get rid of us?”

  Not if. When. “We’re not . . .” I stopped short. Natalie had warned me to think my answers through with Sara. She had so many questions it could be easy to miss the big ones. And most of them were big.

  “Mom got rid of us, Uncle Ugly got rid of us, and Natty and Adam got rid of us. I think I need to know where’s next, so I don’t have to worry.” Her voice betrayed no hint of sorrow, but the questioning tone was gone. Possibly she was asserting her bluntness to mask fear, and possibly she was simply planning for the future. “Also, what about if we want to get rid of you? William and I wanted to get rid of Uncle Ugly for a long time before he was ready to get rid of us. I think we need some options here.”

  “Was that one question or six?” Lance was rubbing his temples.

  Sara didn’t reply. I certainly didn’t know what to say. “It’s more complicated,” Natasha said.

  “Is not.” Sara’s hand had come out of her mouth for most of the previous speech, but now it was back in place, making her words hard to understand.

  Before Natasha could get trapped into an “is too” loop, I said, “Let’s look at it this way. Your mom had a hard time taking care of you.”

  “Yup. She was too busy acting. And it left her tired all day.” At least I think that’s what Sara said. Her hand was lodged between those lips.

  “It sounds like you didn’t want to be at your uncle’s any more than he wanted you to be there,” I continued. Sara shook her head. “And Natalie and Adam were a foster family. You were only supposed to stay there for a little while. Natasha’s our foster daughter.”

  “Her grandparents are sick,” Lance added. “When they get better and come home, she’ll go back to them. But we’re adopting you. Forever.”

  “He thought Uncle Ugly kept us forever.” Surprisingly, this came from William, who had barely spoken since we rescued him from the wall.

  “I know,” Lance said. “But that was an awful mistake. We’re not a mistake. And we’re not going away. You can trust us.”

  But could they? After this evening, I wasn’t at all sure about my ability to keep them safe.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dear Nora:

  My husband likes to shop out on the bypass, but I prefer to shop downtown. What’s your take?

  Trying to Keep it Local

  Dear Trying,

  The marriage sounds hopeless. Get a divorce. I’m sending my attorney’s name. You’ll love him. His office is right downtown. In case you’re determined to beat a dead horse and save the relationship, I’m including my therapist’s name as well. You won’t love her, but she’ll get the job done. I want to hear back in a week that you’ve contacted one or the other. (And I’m telling you, those men who shop out
on the bypass aren’t worth a dime.)

  Nora

  “I know it’s a lot to ask.” Natasha stood on the kitchen table flicking a wet dishtowel at the ceiling. Bit by bit, she was divesting it of the new pudding William had shot up this morning. I caught him before he flung his own breakfast, but hadn’t thought to put the larger bowl out of his reach in the fridge. He’d gotten himself a tasty refill to pitch around while I tried to wash dishes. Lost in thought about my upcoming interview, I hadn’t been aware he got in the fridge, let alone climbed on the table. But when the bowl cracked against the ceiling, I sure noticed!

  After the nightmarish experience of losing William, I knew I couldn’t possibly interview the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. I had gone into school and twisted the chair’s arm about the amount of warning I was receiving in comparison to the other candidates. Reluctantly, he moved the date to early December, but he once again put me on a Wednesday, the only day every member of the committee was present. It meant scheduling a sub to run my final lab of the term, but it meant I had enjoyed Thanksgiving in relative peace, and I had been able to react without panic about lost preparation time when Natasha asked me to come to her post-Thanksgiving poetry slam tonight.

  “Honey, it’s not. If you want me there, I’ll make it.” I was back on dish duty, and Lance was sweeping up the remains of the bowl. Even plastic snaps in multiple places if hurled with enough force.

  “Thanks. It means the world.” She flicked the dishtowel again, then handed it to William. “Rinse it out again, Bud,” she instructed. If it wasn’t safe for him to collect the sharp-edged plastic, and he was too short to wash the ceiling, Will could at least help Natasha. William had been required to wipe the table clear of what had landed around his seat, but he didn’t seem to view this as much of a consequence. He had installed himself as the chief table wiper at our house on day one. Helping to clean the ceiling, though, was clearly a chore, and he kept drifting away from the table. He did so once more now, only to find himself redirected wordlessly by Lance. With William, nonverbal communication was sometimes best.

  The only one not in the kitchen was Sara. We tried to assign her chores, as Natalie had suggested, but she found subtle ways of resisting them. She agreed readily to whatever was asked of her, but then completely failed to perform most tasks, or did them slowly enough to make the frustration of supervising her not worth the supposed lesson in responsibility. Lance and I had landed at the compromise position of picking our battles.

  When the issue was scattered toys and games (as it would be in a scant few minutes, the twins having devastated all of the hard work of a day before in two hours of morning play), we worked as a family. Sara was then more apt to comply. But when each of us had a separate task to perform, we let her off the hook.

  Because Natalie was also the one who taught us to let some things go. “You’ll lose your minds if you don’t,” she had explained bluntly, after watching us argue fruitlessly with Will about taking himself to the bathroom right away in the morning instead of holding it for three hours and wetting himself again.

  He complied willingly with pull-ups at bedtime, particularly as Sara, who slept tangled up with him, insisted. But during the day, he forcefully insisted, “William is a big boy. Day-diapers hold babies.”

  “I know it smells bad,” Natalie had told us, “but you have a rug and upholstery cleaner, and you’ve got to pick your battles. This is a stress thing with him, and he’ll get over it faster if you let him help with the clean-up and otherwise pretend it didn’t happen.”

  Allowing Sara to skip individual chores fell into this category. “You can screw up adoptive parenting as easily as you can screw up biological parenting,” was the mantra Natalie had programmed in us. “And as long as everybody is happy about the mistakes most of the time, then you’re no worse off than any other mom and dad out there.” At the moment, Sara was installed in the wreck of a living room, playing video games, while the rest of us cleaned up from breakfast.

  “Hey, Will,” she called. “I’m bored without you.”

  “Will’s busy,” Natasha said. “You could come help us.”

  “Boring.” After a few minutes, she tried again. “Hey! I know. Let’s watch Mom’s movie! We haven’t done that since we moved.”

  “What?” The skillet I had been wiping sank out of my hand and back into the suds. “Tasha . . .”

  “Right,” she said.

  By the time we reached the living room, Sara had located the disc. “That’s mine!” she said when I took it.

  “Honey, we’ll try to find you . . . this isn’t . . .”

  She sighed explosively. “I don’t know what the big deal is about her being naked! I had to steal it back from Uncle Ugly twelve million thousand times before we moved.” Sara’s mother was not a minor, so her movies were not hidden except, as this one had been, in plain sight. Jolly Roger: Booty Call appeared to have more swashing and unbuckling than actual seamanship. All the women on the disc cover had hats, eye patches, and virtually no clothes. The heart on one woman’s hind end suggested Natasha’s mother was also in the video.

  “Older one,” Natasha remarked. “Do you want me to go through the rest?”

  “We’ll let Trudy.”

  Natasha returned to cleaning the ceiling. “Come on, Will. Help me out,” she said.

  I was about to dial the federal agent when the doorbell rang. “For heaven’s sake. Hannah knows she doesn’t have to stand on ceremony with us.” I had been expecting my friend, but I’d hoped to get things a little cleaner before she arrived. Trudy had not been present much lately. As time passed and no threat to Will emerged, she saw less and less need to front as our hired child-minder. Also, Tasha was right. Her responsibilities in Columbus were increasing.

  “Oops. I’ll get it. Forgot to tell you,” said Lance. “Ann called this morning. Merry resigned. The twins have a new social worker.”

  “Lance, you can’t . . .” But he was gone, and I didn’t see any way around letting the social worker see our mess in any case. It wasn’t as though we could stand around on the front porch chatting him or her up, hoping to keep the door closed. Random spot-checks were part of the landscape of adopting from the foster care system. Or they were supposed to be. This was our first. “Wait . . . what about Merry?”

  “Merry, Merry, quite contrary,” Sara chanted.

  “Hush!”

  At the last second, as Lance led the woman into the room, I remembered to hide the offensive video in my waistband. I was wearing yesterday’s sweatpants and a stained sanctuary shirt, and I hadn’t showered since the day before yesterday. My hair wanted for cutting, and I had pulled it back into a raggedy ponytail. I was not ready to meet a new authority figure.

  The new social worker preceded Lance from the kitchen into the living room, her crisp blazer and skirt a vast contrast to my own disheveled state. Rather than introducing herself, she stared at Natasha. “What’s she doing on the table?”

  “Spider detail,” Tasha lied easily, hopping down and guiding William to the sink to empty the water bowl. In spite of her history of lying, Natasha rarely dropped any bald-faced untruths into conversation these days. And when she did, she often felt she had good reason. I never knew when to call her on it.

  In this case, William darted from the sink to the social worker and began a chorus of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Pick your battles, then. “Thanks, hon,” I said to Tasha.

  “I’m Chandra Evans.” The woman extended her hand in a four-fingered shake, forcing us to only touch fingertips rather than actually gripping.

  “Noel Rue.”

  She and Lance began a discussion I barely heard. I was having problems with my wardrobe, as the disc slid down instead of remaining stuck to my skin. I had pulled these pants on in an exhausted stupor. I only realized there was something wadded up in the crotch when I sat down to breakfast. I hadn’t had time to deal with it, and yanking out my waistband long enough to cram in the disc had shoved the
bulge ever so slightly. Now, I regretted not dealing with the problem immediately. But there was little I could do. Yesterday’s panties were slowly, and in accordance with the laws of gravity, sliding down my leg. The porn disc was all set to follow them.

  “William!” I said suddenly, and in my brightest voice. “You haven’t been potty yet this morning!” I clamped my hands against my backside to halt the disc from further descent. The underpants were a lost cause, but the disc needed to stay hidden.

  “Noel, I thought we weren’t . . .” Lance began.

  I trammeled along as if I hadn’t heard him. “Let’s have a race to see who can get to the bathroom first!” I darted out of the room, not caring whether William met me or not.

  To my surprise, he did come, barreling past me in the hall, and darting into the toilet with his shorts already halfway to his knees. He flipped up the toilet seat and let out a stream of urine so pent up I heard it hit the water from three rooms away while I rapidly changed into slacks.

  Sara followed, too, begging me to return the disc, which I disappeared under my bed in the band of the sweats. Natasha saved me. “Sara! Check this out! I downloaded your princess song on my phone!” I blew her a kiss over the little girl’s head.

  Hannah arrived as Chandra was leaving, and they passed in the living room doorway. Though we typically used the back door for entrances and the front door only for departures, Hannah always came to the front. Chandra glowered at Hannah like she was a criminal we were letting into our home. “I’ll be back to check on your housekeeping.” The social worker gave a final look around our house as she swept out front.

  “Lovely lady,” Hannah muttered.

  “You’re not kidding. She’ll be back to check on our housekeeping?” Yes, the living room was a mess, but it had been thoroughly cleaned only a day before, and Lance and I had kicked a path through the toys before breakfast. It wasn’t like she was stepping on any of the kids’ plastic bricks or trucks.