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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  When we got home and I asked Alex which other ones Sophia had meant, he lit into me with a kitchen mug that shattered into a thousand pieces. In the emergency room, I told the doctor I fell through a glass door. He didn’t believe me, and he even managed to get me away from Alex long enough for a nurse to ask if I had been abused, but I kept lying to cover for the man I thought I loved.

  And so we went on for eleven more months. It wasn’t all bad. We still lived in separate cities, and I saw him mainly on weekends. But he would appear at the center sometimes with roses, in the middle of the week. Or he would send candy through the mail. He threw me a surprise birthday party with all his friends at his apartment. And I stayed with him for those times. For the beautiful surprises and the moments of love.

  But Alex was convinced that I had somebody on the side. Somebody named Lance. In reality, I had come to the realization that I wouldn’t leave the center without finding another job. And I wasn’t looking very hard for a job because I knew they didn’t exist. I loved the animals at Art’s sanctuary. And I spent a great deal of time that should have been devoted to my dissertation in developing new enrichment activities.

  Alex couldn’t leave his job. Not a rising star in the world of NCAA coaching. And in any case, his work paid better, and he thought that since I wasn’t planning to use my doctorate to earn big bucks in a lab once I completed it, it must be largely for show. He started referring to it as my “M-R-S.” A therapist later pointed out that he felt threatened to have a girlfriend with more education than he had.

  He started spying on me, and became convinced I was cheating on him with his brother. I was frequently in Lance’s company those days, as I had been throughout grad school. We were research partners and friends. Lance suspected the abuse before he was certain, as much because he knew his brother’s history as because he knew me.

  And then he knew for sure.

  Even though I always wore long sleeves at work, the spider monkeys gave me away one day. I shut their enclosure gate and the mesh snagged on my sleeve at the elbow, jerking me forward and ripping the fabric. I stood regaining my bearings for a moment too long after I got disentangled from the metal. I didn’t feel the tail that snuck in while I was staring straight at its owner. I turned to walk away from the enclosure, and I stepped straight out of my shirt. It was so surprising that I didn’t do any of the things I might have done to stay dressed if I had seen it coming. But my shirt jerked once, I pulled my arms free to get untangled, and it popped off over my head. In an instant, I found myself exposed.

  I squeaked and crossed my arms over my bra, but it was my arms that I should have been covering, and my stomach, and my back. I looked around to see how I might get back my clothing, since its new owner had pulled it close to the mesh and was working it through the two-inch-wide gaps with dexterous fingers. When I turned back, there was Lance, staring open-mouthed, a look on his face that could only be called heartbreak. I fled indoors and got a spare top out of my locker.

  When I came out of the bathroom, clothed once more, Lance confronted me directly. He said, “I have a phone number for you.”

  “Leave me alone,” I told him.

  He said, “No.”

  “Leave me alone, Lance Lakeland. I have to take this kind of crap from Alex, but you’ve got no claim on me whatsoever.”

  “No you don’t,” he told me. “You don’t have to take that from anybody. Listen, Bub’s been engaged twice already. I should have told you sooner, but I don’t mess around in his life. And I didn’t know for sure what was going on. But I know both women broke it off pretty quickly. And I know you’re my friend. And I know he . . . I know he did that to you.” Lance pointed to the top half of my body. I felt like it would never be protected despite the fresh shirt I wore. It was impossible to say which purpling or yellowish mass he meant, or whether he was referring to all of them together. He went on. “His last fiancée was named Nicole. She gave me her number to give to you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Lance said, “I don’t . . . she didn’t mean you specifically, but right after they split, she gave me her number and said to give it to Alex’s next . . . arm candy.” He blushed at the term even more deeply than I had seen him blush at the sight of my bruises.

  “Leave me alone.” I was trying not to cry, humiliated to have this part of my private life exposed.

  “I didn’t know why she gave it to me, or I wouldn’t have held onto it this long,” he began, but I left. It was more than I could stand to hear.

  Since he couldn’t get me to listen, he went behind my back and gave the number to my mother. Mama already knew. Arguments with her about Alex had led to me moving into the apartment. She tried to get the police involved, but since I wouldn’t report any abuse, they didn’t take an interest. When Lance brought Mama that phone number, she called Nicole, who agreed to call me.

  I wasn’t home, so she got the machine. She said, “Hi, my name’s Nikki, and I hope you can call me back.”

  That was it. She didn’t leave her number, and she even concealed her voice, tried to use a chipper lilt so nobody could recognize her. But Alex did. Checking up on me, he played the messages before I got home that day to hear them. I always checked my complex’s lot for his car, because he was showing up more and more frequently without warning.

  So I knew he was at my apartment before I went inside. I was braced for trouble. But delaying trouble with him made it worse in the long run. When I walked in, I knew at once by the collection of beer cans spilling out of my sink that he was drunk. I came inside and shut the door. Then I turned my face to the wood and leaned into it, drained from the days of listening to Lance and my mother say horrible things about Alex, things that were that much worse because they were true. Standing there, I heard Nicole’s voice, and it confused me. “Hi, my name is Nikki, and I hope you can call me back.” Click. Click. Understanding washed over me. The answering machine.

  He would want to know who this was, this Nikki, and what would I tell him? “Hi, my name is Nikki and . . .” Click. Click. No. He didn’t want to know. He already knew. Alex was rewinding the tape. Playing it over and over again. He had done this before with messages from Lance, searching innocent statements for signs of an affair.

  “Hi, my name . . .” Click. Click. It wouldn’t do any good to claim I didn’t know her and couldn’t imagine what she wanted. Lying, like putting it off, only made things worse. Mama had told me to expect the call. I had been fuming all the way home about her interference, her attempts to involve the police, and this ridiculous effort to drag in Alex’s ex-girlfriend.

  “Hi, my . . .” Click.

  Click.

  “Hi . . .” Click.

  Click. He played the message repeatedly while I stood breathing, bracing, because I knew what was coming. If I tried to leave, he would be on top of me faster than I could open the door I was leaning against.

  “Hi, my name is Nikki . . .” Click. Click.

  Bang! The answering machine hit the door beside my head.

  I flinched to the left and tried to explain. “No, please, Alex. You don’t understand.”

  Another bang, this one on the other side of my head. The phone. Terrible choice of words. I knew better than to tell Alex he didn’t understand something.

  The next sound was a crunch. I turned from the door to see him coming toward me, spinning the phone base by its cord. The crunch was a picture splintering as the impromptu mace connected with it. Alex continued whipping the phone base around his head, coming at me with a look like murder in his eyes.

  “Help me,” I whispered. I shouted it, screamed it. “Help me! Help me!” But nobody answered, and I barely had time to drop to the ground and bury my head between my knees, trying to protect it from a man who wouldn’t show me mercy.

  It must have gotten worse and louder, because a neighbor called the cops. But I don’t remember anything after that moment when I realized Alex didn’t mean to let me esc
ape my apartment alive. At the hospital, this hospital, Lance and Art sat vigil with my family until they sent me to Columbus in a helicopter.

  Now, I couldn’t stand being out in the waiting room, knowing that Art wasn’t going to walk out the doors again. Lance and I had left Art’s room to give Rick some time alone. His mother was Art’s sister, and Art was the only remaining sibling of three. Now Rick had no family left on that side. I didn’t know about his father. Maybe Rick had no one left at all. I couldn’t stand to be still, but I couldn’t bear to invade Rick’s space, and my anxiety sent me straight back into memory.

  They thought for a while that I might die, and I still bore scars down my back from the electric cord’s prongs. The neighbor’s screams drove Alex out before the police arrived, and that saved my life. That and my dropping down face forward. My facial bones were broken in several places, but not destroyed. He went after my shoulders and spine, and he fled before he broke my neck. Through plea bargaining, he wound up in a rehab program instead of jail. To his credit, he had never tried to violate the restraining order. Had never tried to make contact.

  It was only when I was recovering from being beaten half to death by his brother that I realized how much Lance cared for me. I could barely complete even basic tasks for myself when I was released from the hospital, so he helped my parents move me back home, into a downstairs room because I still had dizzy spells and couldn’t manage stairs.

  He brought me the results of the experiments we had completed, collected books and articles from scientific journals for me, then typed up dissertation chapters I wrote in shaky longhand because I couldn’t lift either arm as high as a keyboard yet.

  In the first six weeks, when it seemed like all I could really be grateful about was that the disorientation from the head trauma decreased the more I used my mind, Lance waited patiently for me to think through concepts that were my own to begin with and hid the frustration he must have felt when I simply couldn’t remember. When physical therapy for my slowly healing left shoulder left me in tears, Lance put a pen in my right hand because he knew I craved work to overcome my thousand degrees of guilt and self-doubt. When my family watched me with pity as I limped around, and jumped in to help me with even the smallest tasks, Lance bought me space to do things on my own, no matter how long it took.

  I resisted my growing emotions for him, frightened of walking into a rebound relationship that would only end in sorrow, but I slowly came to understand that I loved Lance deeply, more passionately than I had ever loved his brother. Our first real date followed the night I hobbled across the stage to collect my PhD a few minutes after he collected his.

  In the years since we moved in together, Lance had resumed conversations with his brother, clipped discussions that rarely lasted more than a few minutes. They had never completely lost contact. But Alex did not call the house, only Lance’s cell. And from what little I overheard, most of their talk centered around their parents.

  Mostly, I left the room and tried not to think at all when Alex called. But now, his face was impossible to drive out of my mind.

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  Mama turned on Lance. “That horrible brother of yours,” she began. She clutched her ladle so hard her whole arm shook. And then Nana eased it out of her fingers so Mama could sit down.

  I hastened to say, “But Alex wasn’t anywhere near the center today, so don’t worry.”

  “Yes he was,” Lance cut in. He took my arm as he spoke, cradling and supporting it, holding on to me in case I fell.

  “What?” I nearly spilled my own soup jerking my arm away.

  “He came out to talk about Mom. He wanted to see me in person. I guess he got there right after we left, but Art put him to work.”

  “He was there?” I demanded. “He could have . . .”

  “I don’t think so.” Lance was clearly choosing his words carefully. “Trudy says Art swore her and Darnell to secrecy, then lied and told Alex we would be right back after we got the license. Art meant well. He couldn’t possibly understand how serious this is with Mom. Anyway, Alex got sick of waiting, and after he’d helped with primate lunch, he went home. He was long gone from the sanctuary by the time Art went missing.”

  “He would have been furious when he found out we weren’t coming back!” I said, backing further away from my fiancé. “What if he didn’t leave at all? What if he drove down the lane and waited?”

  Lance shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said again. “But I guess we might see that on the security video. If he did wait, and Art stumbled around . . . it still doesn’t make sense, though. I was with Bub at our place when Trudy called. And Bub’s got other stuff on his mind right now. I don’t think so.”

  “Where was the branch?” I demanded, trying now to concentrate on that. If I thought about the branch, then I wouldn’t think about Alex. But instead of distracting me, thinking about the branch made it worse. Alex had always been one for using whatever was on hand.

  “I don’t know,” Lance said.

  “So has anybody actually seen it? How do they know?” What if it wasn’t a branch? Had I looked the way Art had? So bloody that I was barely recognizable? Hard to say. Most of the damage had been done to my shoulder, back, and skull. Alex had purpled the left side of my face, but I’d managed to shield those bones from breakage.

  “Trudy overheard the police radios,” Lance said. Then he crossed his arms and sat back down to his own cold meal. Trudy was a dispatcher for the sheriff’s office who volunteered at the sanctuary before Art charmed her away from that job with promises of an underpaid internship. He persuaded her to go back to school and get a completely different degree by offering her less money and the nosebleed insurance that Ironweed gave its grad students. She jumped at the chance. Never having liked police work, she wasn’t a hard sell. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered if she had loved it. Art could coax anybody. His love for his work made the listener want to share it. And it was good now that Trudy knew most of the force, a little bit of police procedure, and every single code that squawked out of the police radios.

  If she said the police found a branch, and the police thought someone used the branch to beat Art, then what she said was certainly the case. “Oh God,” I said. I wished I hadn’t jerked away from Lance. I wished Mama hadn’t sat down beside the soup. In spite of all my efforts, all I could think about was fists. Alex’s fists. And the telephone base.

  Lance might not think his brother had killed Art, but the coincidence seemed too great for me. It pulled me back a decade, and suddenly I couldn’t stand up any longer as memory took away the strength in my legs and made me sit down. Lance moved nearer as I started crying again.

  I leaned into my fiancé, trying to get myself under control. Lance pulled me in close, stroking my back and saying, “It’s going to be OK,” over and over, until my ragged tears wound down.

  Almost as soon as I’d regained my composure, my phone rang. Trudy. “Damn, I meant to call Lance,” she said. “I know you’re distraught right now, Noel, but we’ve got trouble. These cops have no idea what to do with our primates. I had to take a gun away from the spiders.”

  “A what?”

  “A service revolver. Spider monkey picked it straight up with its tail.”

  “Oh dear Lord, a gun!” I said, envisioning the harm that could cause.

  “A gun what?” Mama asked.

  At the same time, Lance exclaimed, “Who has a gun?”

  “The spiders got one,” I said.

  “I got it back!” Trudy was quick to clarify. “And I don’t think it could have fired. That’s not our biggest problem, though.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No,” she said. “They don’t understand that even if an orangutan could have taken a branch to Art like that, it wouldn’t have done so. And they can’t even be formally sure it was a branch that . . .” Her voice quavered, because she had as much trouble talking about what had happened as th
e rest of us.

  Finally, she continued, “If they see the orangutan, they’re going to shoot it on sight.”

  “We’re coming,” I said, and hung up.

  There wasn’t anything we could do in the hospital, and there wasn’t any reason for us to malinger in the emergency waiting room, where we must have made a strange sight for the people coming in with broken arms and bloodied faces. There was a grieving room we could have gone to, but Rick’s wife and children had arrived and were there with him. And he was Art’s real family. All of it. He had been so kind to let us stay with him to say goodbye, but it seemed inappropriate to disturb such a sharp and private grief any further.

  We didn’t need to be taking up any more room out here. Trudy needed us back at the sanctuary to save the animal that Art insisted had tried to save him. “Can you tell . . . um . . . my brother that there’s an emergency at the animal sanctuary?” I asked a nurse. “He wanted me to wait for him, but I can’t.”

  It was true. Rick had said, “I think I need to talk to you,” in a choked voice as his wife came in. But whatever he might have needed to talk to us about would keep. I was not going to call him when he needed to be with his family and when we needed to get back to work.

  As we left, Mama said, “I guess I’ll call the guests. Do you think Sophia could help me do that?”

  Lance and I exchanged a glance. Mama thought the wedding was off. I embraced her tightly before I said a word. I was so grateful that she could recognize the depth of our tragedy, and that she was willing to throw over her perfect chart for a crisis. “Only the ones coming to the rehearsal dinner,” I said. “Can the rest of you walk through it without us tonight? I think we probably have the simplest jobs tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?” Mama asked.

  It struck me, as it had when Lance asked me if I still wanted to marry him, that Mama wasn’t asking the smaller question. She didn’t only want to know if I wanted to get married tomorrow. She wanted to know if I wanted to get married at all. She remembered, still, every bit as painfully as I did, what happened the last time I was engaged.