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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  The door slammed behind Ace. Forced forward, he pushed us all down the first two steps.

  “Hey!” For a big man, he could move fast. He spun around and shoved, even as the bar crashed down on the other side.

  Natasha gasped.

  “Tasha, hang in there with me. I’ll get your inhaler.” I started fumbling through my purse.

  “They were looking for this,” she babbled. “Ivy, and Charles. I bet they’ve been following us every time we’re even nearby in case we show them. I bet it’s why your chair guy got so bent out of shape. I bet he knows where it is, or they think he does, or . . . or . . . he thinks they think he does . . .”

  Or else he slammed the door himself. That fear sent prickles down my neck.

  “Down. Get down here,” bellowed Darnell. “Let Trudy and me up to the top.”

  I didn’t think Natasha would follow, but then she led the way. “Back door! Come on. It doesn’t lock.”

  “No, you stay put down there,” Darnell ordered. “For all we know, the person who slammed the door at our end is waiting at the other.”

  But Natasha was speeding down. “Wait, Tasha.”

  “I can’t stay down here.”

  I had the impression of more concrete, dank and unfinished, as she pulled me through. And the noise of monkeys down here made conversation almost impossible. At a fast glance, I saw a dozen carriers jammed against the wall. How long had those animals been here? When had they eaten? Been watered?

  There was a bed shoved up into one corner. While I was distracted with the monkeys, Tasha had run to it. “Help me!” She handed me the tablet, where one huge orangutan eye gazed at me.

  “Tasha, wait.”

  “Noel, I can’t!”

  Keying off of our emotions, the monkeys in the cages screamed. Ace grabbed the bed. He yanked it free with one meaty fist and went to work on a wooden door behind the bed. The layer of dust seemed thinner here, the cobwebs fewer. “This end of the room’s been used, guys. And if there isn’t a third exit, Darnell’s right. Somebody could be at the other end of the passage waiting.”

  “Back up,” Ace said, and he started kicking. Three hard blows, and the door came down. This wasn’t any show of martial arts. It was adrenaline and strength. He was as panicked as Natasha.

  “We need to—”

  My voice died in my throat.

  Ivy Dearborn stood in a tunnel, just clear of the fallen door. My flashlight illuminated an axe in her hands. Most likely our axe. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I saw dried blood on the head. “Trudy!”

  Could Trudy hear me over the monkeys?

  Ace could have jumped her. He was big enough, and he’d just driven down a huge piece of wood. Instead, he threw his hands over his head without being asked. “Don’t!” he squeaked.

  Behind us, Trudy and Darnell were shouting, but their words were lost. Ivy called, “Throw your weapons down the stairs and join us. Now.” She took a swing at Ace with the axe, and we all jumped backward.

  Trudy shouted down, but I couldn’t hear her.

  “Axe,” Lance yelled. Ivy swung again. This time, when we retreated, Ace shoved Natasha and me behind him, and he and Lance formed a protective shield. Chivalrous, but stupid, because we were being backed against the bed, and I was the only one with any kind of hand-to-hand training.

  “Noel, I can’t stay here.” Natasha gasped and wheezed. The monkeys nearly drowned her out.

  “Hang with me,” I said. Then, inspired, I added, “Hang with Chuck.” Ivy had not seen the tablet. Or if she had, she hadn’t considered its importance. In my hand, an enlarged orangutan nostril floated into view. Too far away to pick up on the panic, Chuck chuffed amusement.

  When I was in eighth grade, a classmate got his hands on a musical flip-top lighter. Our school was slow to fund buildings and furniture, so we still had wooden seats that had been out of date a decade before. One day, when we had a particularly odious substitute teacher, my classmate flipped open the lighter so it would play, slid it under his leg, and let the sub prowl the room trying to figure out who had the radio. When I later asked why she couldn’t pinpoint him, he said, “The wood disperses the sound.”

  He flashed into my mind when I realized Ivy didn’t know what I was holding. Wood disperses the sound. The bed had a wooden headboard. I shoved the tablet into Natasha’s hands and moved them behind her back. I pushed her, up onto the bed, with the tablet jammed between her body and the bed-frame. “Breathe slow,” I told her. Her hands trembled, but she nodded. “Breathe and talk to the orangutan.” Nearly at once, Chuck chuffed again softly. Damn, I’d forgotten to turn up the volume.

  “What the hell was that?” I demanded when Ivy failed to notice.

  “Don’t try to distract me.” Had she seen us messing with the tablet behind Ace? I didn’t think so. What little illumination we had came from our dropped flashlights, scattered around our ankles, and every few seconds, Ivy jerked her head from side to side, trying to locate the screeching monkeys. Chuck made another noise, this one louder, and I mentally thanked Natasha both for calming down and for being agile enough to turn up the volume without seeing what she was doing.

  “It’s the orangutan!” I didn’t have to feign hysteria. “He’s out again! Ace! I thought you had it fixed.”

  “What?” Ace was not following my game. “No! I don’t know what he’s doing once he moves that camera, Noel. But he’s never gotten out in the day before. I swear nothing—”

  “Chuck!” called Natasha. “Chuck, it’s me! Help me, Chuck, because I’m losing it down here.”

  I eased out from behind the men and gently twisted Lance’s arm when he tried to hold me back. Ivy couldn’t see any better than we could. If she was shadowy to us, then so were we to her.

  “Shut up, all of you! And call off your monkey.” Ivy shifted slightly, her arm wavering.

  “You don’t call off a great ape!” shouted Trudy from almost behind her in the semi-dark. Ivy whipped around to see who had spoken, and Trudy enflamed us with her flashlight.

  Ivy ran at Trudy as a rhesus macaque skittered into view in front of the flashlights on the floor. Ivy screamed and swung wildly, missing its tail. It had been coming to inspect our flashlights, but now it turned and ran up her leg.

  Ivy shrieked and dropped the axe. She flung out her arms in an effort to throw the monkey, but it only clung harder, and, panicked, it bit her. “It’ll give me rabies!”

  I kicked her in the knees. This wasn’t tae kwon do. It was from a women’s self-defense class. As soon as she fell, Lance dove onto her legs, immobilizing her with his own weight. Ace kicked the axe away. The monkey bit her ear, and, not satisfied with that result, screeched like a banshee.

  Trudy stood over Ivy with the gun. “Don’t move,” she said. “You’re under arrest.”

  I spared a glance behind me. Natasha, who I had expected to see collapsed and struggling to breathe, instead hunched over the tablet in her lap, tapping the screen with each finger of one outspread palm. She was smiling. One, two, three, four, five. It was an old game she and Chuck had played often face to face. She tickled his palms by tapping them with her fingers. Watching her do it was, apparently, as funny as having her do it in person. The orangutan’s chuffing laughter increased in intensity until he was downright cackling.

  Natasha held up the tablet close. “Hey,” she told the ape, “good to see you.”

  “What’s going on down there?” shouted Darnell.

  “It’s okay, come down!” Lance called.

  “No, I’ve got problems up here. Trudy, can you—? No. Hang on . . .”

  The door grated open, and Drew bellowed into the entrance, “Ironweed police! Drop your—you don’t look like Ivy Dearborn in the least.”

  “It’s us,” shouted Darnell. “How do you know who’s down here?”

  They descended, their voices rising to be heard over the monkey chatter. “We’ve apprehended a man we believe to be Charles Dalton, but you’ll have
to tell us for sure. He looks nothing like those photos. Ace said there were two, a man and a woman, so I was expecting Ivy.”

  “Ivy’s here,” I called. “And I doubt she’s leaving under her own steam.”

  “Ace, you down there?” Drew shouted.

  “I’m here.”

  “Good. I’m glad you’re all right. I’d have had some serious explaining to do to Mom and Dad if you got hurt.”

  “Thanks for coming so fast, man.”

  “Thanks for calling.”

  “You called Drew?” I was frankly shocked. It wasn’t that I thought Ace would lack the presence of mind to phone the cops if things got bad. It was more that I thought the brothers’ personal enmity would have prevented him from doing it.

  “Yeah, if he’s going to be the local law, I better make him do something to earn his pay.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Dear Nora:

  Thank you for giving my daughter the courage to fight her worthless ex in court, but now she’s getting remarried, and I have a problem. The groom’s mother has chosen the same outfit as I have for the wedding. I don’t want to cause friction, but all the books say I get first choice. The wedding’s in a month. What do I do?

  MOTB

  Dear MO

  Whatever the dress is, take it back! Short of the gown itself, the hurt feelings aren’t worth the victory! Besides, I don’t care if the wedding’s tomorrow. I can whip up something that will drop that woman’s jaw. Think about your budget and meet me at the Free Press Thursday morning. Be sure to bring your daughter’s colors!

  Nora

  “Santa’s outside!”

  No, Santa finished stuffing your stocking at two o’clock this morning. “I’m coming, Sara. Let me find a robe. Lance, get out of bed.”

  “Come see, come see!”

  William joined his sister, “Santa’s Claus! Santa’s Claus!”

  As I shuffled into the hall, William was followed by the middle-aged rescue dog we had gotten him for an early Christmas gift. It slept in Will’s bed now, in place of his sister. Sara had moved to her own room, where her pillow was occupied by a somewhat snobbish cat that barely tolerated the rest of our ministrations but came immediately to our daughter’s purring call.

  I stumbled to the front room, our front room, in our own home, behind the boy and dog. But I felt a pang of sympathy for whichever of our neighbors was celebrating Christmas with a trip to the hospital when I saw what the kids were hollering about. “Honey, I don’t think Santa drives an ambulance.” Then the driver turned off the lights and swung down, revealing a full Santa suit. Understanding dawned. “I guess he does sometimes. But I think this is a delivery for your big sister. Wake her up quietly.”

  In spite of the fact that Gert and Stan had been sprung from rehab, they simply weren’t ready to have Natasha home yet. Her grandparents tired quickly, and Gert especially still needed a slow, quiet pace of life. Tasha tried to pretend it was okay she had to come home to our place, not to her own home, every day, but except for daily visits with Chuck, she had been dejected ever since we escaped Charles and Ivy.

  “All that, and the journal was in his apartment the whole time, if I’d remembered it,” she moaned.

  “They found plenty of other things to wrap up their investigation in that basement,” I reminded her. “And if not for that, you’d never have remembered him asking Merle to cut a hidey hole in his apartment wall.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s what matters. They got it in the end.” The apartment had long since been rented again, and nobody would have thought to search it so thoroughly again. And the journal was every bit the goldmine authorities had hoped for. Among other things, it contained the first solid leads on the other children in the organization. Natasha should have felt only pride.

  Instead, her hysterical nightmares had returned, and it was hard for her to even talk to her therapist about the flashbacks that were surfacing. If Ivy Dearborn and her friend had not been safely under lock and key, they might have been in serious danger from Lance’s and my fury at the progress they had unraveled.

  Perhaps the red-suited gentleman walking up to the front door might turn her around. “Tasha, Tasha! Santa camed here for you!” Sara wasn’t quiet in the least as she bounded past me down the hall. “He camed! He did! He’s here right now!”

  “All the way from the Northpoleland!” The dog chased Will, barking at his heels.

  “Lance, honey, hurry up. I’m going to pull the cars out. We’ve got a couple of wheelchairs to get inside through the kitchen.”

  Later, I told Stan, “We were going to bring her to you.”

  “I know, but then she’d have missed out on your family’s celebration this afternoon, and she’s been looking forward to that, too. This way, she won’t have to choose, and we got to watch them all open their stockings. We forgot we were old and infirm for a morning, and I finally found someone capable of signing my cast.” I wasn’t sure whether he actually wanted that last or if he was being polite because Sara hadn’t offered him a choice in the matter. “Noel, she needs to be around you kids a while longer. It’s been good for her. Gert and I won’t give her up forever, but as much as she’s impatient for it, she needs to come home slowly as much as we need her to.”

  We pretended not to notice Gert had dozed in her wheelchair for a good portion of the morning. She was improving daily as the effects of Ivy’s poison wore off, but she had several doctors who would have preferred she return to the nursing home for care. They only consented to Stan’s insistence she go home because he could practically re-create a medical ward in her bedroom.

  They were lucky. The nursing home was a huge facility, and Stan and Gert had been in different wings. Trying to be inconspicuous, Ivy had no justification to visit Stan’s room, even if she was Gert’s favorite nurse. As long as Stan was alive, Gert was potentially valuable to use against him. If she had managed to kill Stan, Ivy surely would have done the same to his wife. She still did plenty of damage.

  The morning had been suspiciously devoid of Stan forcing gifts upon Lance and me. We were grateful. But our radar was turned down by the time we left the twins with Mama and Daddy to go shut down at the center for the evening, Jen having let the other volunteers in that morning. We met a whistling Rick in the parking lot of the new enclosure and found surveyors’ stakes in the space adjoining Chuck’s outdoor home.

  “What’s that?” I asked him. “What are you doing here on Christmas?” I spun in time to catch a glimpse of Natasha fleeing toward Chuck’s enclosure, doubtless to text her grandfather the picture she’d just taken. She was giggling, the first happy sounds I’d heard from her in weeks.

  Rick ignored the second question to concentrate on the first. “Come spring,” he said, “it’s going to be your rhesus macaque house.”

  “It’s enormous.”

  “I hear you’ve got the state involved to hold onto those extras for you. Nobody else is liable to want them, right? He said you’ve got ideas about your mall, too. Let me know so we can start working with the architect to get some plans together.” Rick did not have to say who he was. We would be writing a lot of thank-yous to Stan Oeschle.

  “When can you fill in that basement?” Lance wanted to know.

  “It will have to wait until spring, and I guess the authorities will have to clear it. I know you want it gone, but I think we’re all going to have to be patient while they finish sorting all this out.”

  There wasn’t much left to sort. We had all guessed a little bit of the puzzle. Ivy and Charles hadn’t known precisely where Gary recorded when he filmed with the animals, but they had known it was on the sanctuary grounds. And they knew he had a journal, and, having searched for it everywhere else, they narrowed in on here.

  They had apprehended Hugh Marsland, thinking he would know where the filming room was because of the police’s thorough search of the area back in June. When he proved useless, they killed him. He had been dead for some time, his head most lik
ely stored in lye before it was placed in the university’s cupboard. Then they started looking for the man they believed built the sanctuary, Merle Evans. They didn’t have to search hard.

  Gary had kept his monkey smuggling activities largely separate from his filming. Though, as the journal revealed, he delivered his films disguised as pizza deliveries, he did not tell this to the employees at the Marine who helped him smuggle the animals. Robby and the Marine’s delivery truck driver, Justin, along with Merle, were all in on the macaque smuggling. Merle was the one who had shown Gary the “old records room,” which he had built to brew drugs years before when he had been forced to take down the beginnings of the original sanctuary. Now that he knew it was a floodplain, he also knew nobody else would want to build there, making it ideal to hide his own activities. But Merle was, it seemed, as bad at drug manufacture and distribution as everything else, and he hadn’t used it for years before he introduced Gary to it.

  After that, Merle had only ever known it as a holding space for the rhesus macaques they were moving in and out. Gary never explained the other equipment stored there, and nobody ever asked. Because Gary and Merle took care of the rhesus macaque area at the sanctuary, they were able to juggle the headcount sheets to look right as animals flowed into the center, arriving once a month on the pizza truck’s weekly delivery.

  It was difficult to say, but at a best guess, the monkeys had started piling up because the chain broke at some point after Gary died. Not immediately, because Justin, who was all too willing to talk to possibly avoid jail, said he was still getting paid through July. But when the money dried up, Merle didn’t stop accepting monkeys. He kept storing them in that dank basement, siphoning off our food to care for them, since there were more than he could sneak into an enclosure.

  Merle, his driver, and his sixteen-year-old protégé were left with an increasing number of rhesus macaques to hide in our facility. Justin didn’t know who brought the monkeys. He was in charge of collecting them from a barn, where he led us to thirty more of the little animals caged. He claimed he and Robby had fed them until the Friday when Robby was caught, but I doubted this.