I pulled Margie in between Lance and me. We all hooked arms, then walked down the aisle together.
At the end of the aisle, I stood aside and let the rest of the wedding party stream past us. Then I tugged Lance and Marguerite around the edges and back around to the front, where we needed to pose for a few pictures. Lance and I had stressed that we only wanted to take a few formal shots. Mostly, we wanted informal photographs to commemorate our marriage.
“Do you see her?” I asked Marguerite, pointing to Gert’s lurching body. By the way she was walking, this was hitting her very hard, and I wasn’t at all sure she should be driving. I briefly explained the situation to my sister. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Yeah,” she said. She knew what I wanted.
“Come over for two family photos, then catch Gert up and get her settled somewhere. See who is taking care of her granddaughter.” Surely even a teenager needed someone for the death of a grandparent. “Find out who can come get Gert. If she wants to come over to the reception and cry her eyes out, it’s fine with me, but don’t let her go driving off again in that state. I don’t know how she got parked without hitting anybody, and I don’t want her to get herself killed getting out again.”
We all hurried up front to pose. A woman in a wine-red dress lingered in the audience, as did a dark-haired girl who looked around Rachel’s age. The red dress likely belonged to Xian’s wife (when had he gotten married? How did I know that? Was she a girlfriend? Friend? No, I was pretty sure they were married). And the young woman was almost certainly Lisa. It was unlikely they knew another living soul here. They were planning to sit through the photos so they could go in with their dates.
Marguerite might have the market on long-term planning cornered, but I can roll with almost any developing situation and adapt quickly. I scanned the exiting guests and spotted Chesley’s wife, Annie. Ches was a grad school buddy, one who we stayed in closer touch with than Xian, who now lived in New York. Annie knew all of our school friends and had plenty of people to sit with. I waved a little and caught Annie’s eye.
“Stay a minute for pictures?” I called out.
“Sure!” she called back to me. Then she said something to the three women she was with, who I belatedly realized were my own dear friends Hannah, Mina, and Jan, and they headed into the tent without her.
“Lance, get your brother.”
Lance asked, “Are you sure?”
“I thought you weren’t taking many pictures,” Marguerite said.
“I’m not,” I told her. I nodded to Lance. “I realized I want to do one with the wedding party, one with family, and one with spouses and partners.”
Behind me, Rachel made a strangled sound, sort of a cross between a gasp and a laugh.
To my right, Margie said, “Oh Noel, why do you have to encourage this. High school kids are still in that uncertain stage. This could all go away next month for all we know.”
Now Rachel sighed. An oft repeated argument, then. I stopped, forcing Marguerite to stop also. We looked at each other. “First of all,” I said. “It’s my wedding, and if I want to get Mama’s dogs out of their run and add them to the picture, I’ll do it.” Margie looked somewhat chagrined, but I wasn’t finished. “Second, I don’t think someone who celebrated her twenty-first anniversary with her high school sweetheart has any place claiming that teens don’t know their own sexuality.” Now Margie wouldn’t meet my eyes. “And third, I’m not ‘encouraging,’ I’m ‘supporting.’ Now come on, we’ve only got a couple of minutes for the family shots.”
Nobody else argued, because by now everyone had seen poor Gert staggering across the lawn to us. Half the guests were staring out of the tent. Gert probably would have gotten to us long before we got so much as a single picture lined up, but with a glance toward me and a quickly interpreted wave, Hannah, Mina, and Jan all took off in her direction. Thank God for good friends.
The family pictures were awkward. I gritted my teeth and insisted on a sisters picture. And a brothers picture. And a spouses with their siblings picture. That one was worst, because Alex in his well-heeled suit seemed to be trying to catch my eye, and I was doing everything in my power to look away from him. He could, after all, still be the man who had killed Art and Stan Oeschle. I thought he was innocent. He seemed different. But I didn’t trust myself where he was concerned. And I certainly didn’t trust him where I was concerned.
As soon as the family photos were finished, I sent Marguerite up to the house to figure out what was happening with Gert, and we proceeded with the pictures of the wedding party. Mercifully, Alex faded into the tent.
We finished, then turned around and headed into the tent. Mama’s voice cut through the crowd chatter before the DJ could introduce us. “You did so tell them a flavor!” she called out.
“Ah, you’ve seen the cake then?”
“Yes, I’ve seen the cupcakes,” she told me. “I think you got every flavor they sell!”
“Do you like them?”
“Of course I do. You got me lemon pastiche.” A flavor the bakery had sold and Mama loved long before the trendy cupcake shop had moved in out at the bypass.
Then the DJ finally said, “Announcing Mr. Lance Lakeland and Mrs. Noel Rue,” following the carefully worded instructions we had given him. We passed through an artificial arch, nothing so beautiful as the natural arch in the garden, but still effective for the purpose.
As soon as I stepped into the tent, the smell of dinner struck me. Curried chicken with mango. The name of the dish Lance made for our engagement flooded into my mind along with its smell. “We only ordered last week!” I protested.
“I ordered it eleven months ago,” Lance said. “You confused everyone last week when you called up and asked them to send us whatever was on hand.”
If Gert Oeschle hadn’t been lingering in my mind, the moment would have been perfect. We swept into the room laughing together. I completed a fast round of the guests, maybe ten minutes to cover the most populous tables. I made my way toward the front, but Poppy tripped and crashed into me with glass of punch. The drink missed us both and splashed onto a white linen tablecloth. What happened to my plastic? Mama, no doubt.
I bent over to fix her shoe, a patent leather Mary Jane that had come unbuckled and caused the fall. “Put your foot up here.”
Bending over to chair level in the dress was tight, but manageable. As I finished the buckle, I saw Margie’s feet approaching. Perhaps if I had seen her face first, I would have been prepared.
Instead, when she said, “You have to go,” in a strangely choked voice, I jerked back so hard that I nearly pulled Poppy off her feet.
“What are you talking about?”
Poppy took down her leg and dashed in another direction as I met Marguerite’s eyes.
They were wide, and her face was flushed red. She held out the cell phone she had confiscated from me earlier. “Now,” she said. “You have to go now.”
CHAPTER 24
* * *
“Go where?” I asked. There was nobody on the phone when I brought it to my ear. Apparently, she just wanted me to have it.
Instead of answering, Marguerite grabbed my elbow and tugged me off toward the house. As soon as we passed out of the garden, she broke into a rough run. The wedding dress, with its double petticoats and ankle flare, was not designed for running. I lost my balance and stumbled right out of my chafing high heels. I probably would have toppled if Lance hadn’t been running right beside me. He grabbed my arm, steadying me before I could land in a face-first heap of lace and tulle.
“Marguerite, what did Gert say?” We were running again, even though the house was nearby.
“It’s bad,” was all she would tell me. I had guessed that much. Only a little while ago, Marguerite had been offended by my tardiness to the wedding. Now she wanted me to go somewhere. I had no trouble believing that Gert’s news was bad. But, as heartbreaking as I considered it, Stan Oeschle’s death held no urgency for me.
Not in the way Art’s did.
I knew Stan socially and professionally. But now that I wasn’t sitting on the curb with Christian, I didn’t feel any need to go rushing off to the hospital. I had never crashed on Stan’s couch in a dissertation haze. He had never picked Lance and me up from the airport and talked African primates for six solid hours in his living room until we tumbled upstairs to sleep, too tired and jetlagged to even consider going home. I didn’t think Marguerite would consider Stan’s death urgent for me, either.
In fact, my sister was probably uniquely wired up to avert such a disaster. Where a lifetime of living with Mama and her charts left me averse to all forms of planning, it had given Marguerite planning superpowers. She anticipated things that could go wrong, developing outrageous worst-case scenarios that would have left others feeling terrified and helpless. Margie did this so she could figure out the solutions. She was a long-term planner in the strangest sense of the term. So if Margie’s solution to Gert’s news was, “You have to go. Now,” then she had predetermined a situation that would require me to leave. So I had to go. Now.
Inside, Gert hunched over the kitchen table, a collection of glossy pictures scattered in front of her. She had a walker shoved over into one corner of the room. I didn’t realize she had a walker. I hadn’t seen one yesterday at the courthouse. My three friends sat with her, and Nana stood over by the sink bobbing a teabag up and down in the cup in her hand. “Hurry,” Nana said when we clattered through the door. “I hope your mother picked up more than one change of clothes in that overnight bag yesterday, because we don’t have a thing to fit Lance in this house.”
“But what . . .?” I tried to ask.
“There isn’t time. We’ll talk while you’re changing.” Hannah scooped up all but one of the photographs and herded us along.
In the hall, she handed half the stack to me and half to Lance. I took a moment to glance at them, but only that long, because in the next instant I threw them all on the floor and stopped dead in my tracks. “Jesus Christ, what was that?” I demanded.
I looked at Lance, but he had thrown his pictures down too, and he was gagging into his arm. Without a word, Hannah picked up one of those Lance had dropped and held it out to me. I wouldn’t touch it. But I looked. Reluctantly, I looked, and then looked away, bile rising in my throat as Hannah dropped it. My picture was bad enough. It showed Stan and Gert Oeschle’s granddaughter Natasha posed provocatively in panties and garters, hands instead of a bra covering her breasts.
Lance’s picture was worse in a terrible way. Natasha was outright nude, crouching with one hand on the ground between her splayed knees. Her head was cocked coquettishly, lips shaped in a pout. Everything about the print, from its glossy sheen to Natasha’s bright pink lips, screamed professional. I processed that certainty to avoid the rest of the insult, which lay in Natasha’s other hand. That other hand was stretched out ahead of her, hooked through the bars of a cage. Looking back out at Natasha was a monkey. Our monkey. The girl was stripped naked, gazing lustfully at the rhesus monkey Lance and I had spent the past two weeks rehabilitating. The one that had thrown its stinking feces at him yesterday morning only a few minutes before actually eating in our presence for the first time.
I reeled between nausea and absurd realizations: No wonder it’s taking so long to normalize him. Did it bite her? Is that why she had a bandaged hand?
“Noel!”
I didn’t realize I had fallen down until Lance’s face loomed into mine.
“Art, what have you done?” I said.
“I don’t think it was Art.” Gert stumbled in from the kitchen. “He was the one who brought them to my attention. He delivered an envelope yesterday morning. I didn’t have time to open them before that blasted adoption hearing, or . . .” She cut that thought short and said, “I think he found them in your new building.”
“But why not turn them over to the police?” I had not gotten up, so I remained tangled in my wedding dress at the foot of the steps.
“I did,” she said.
“But Art . . .”
Lance gripped my elbow and hoisted me up. Gert said, “Art gave them to me first, God knows why. These aren’t even the ones he gave me. Those were alarming, but not damning. He wrote a letter. He said there was worse but asked me to come to him if I felt I really needed to see them. By the time I opened the envelope, he was . . .” Gert cut herself short. Then, she continued, “I found these in the basement.” Then she started to sob, though she continued talking.
I couldn’t initially understand Gert’s words. They were lost to her tears. I went back down the hall to her, and I started to understand what she was telling me. The first thing I got was “. . . had her with him.”
“Wait, what?” I asked. “Natasha? Who had her with him?”
“Stan! We fought when I showed him the photographs. I shouldn’t have done that. He had her swearing up and down she wanted to do that!” Gert waved at the pictures. “And then they drove off, and I went to the police.” I noticed my friends retreating to the end of the hallway, returning to the kitchen even as Nana joined us, my family closing in around me to listen to Gert’s horrible story. Gert’s face was oddly puffy, I supposed from crying, and when she continued, her voice was hoarse. “When I found out Art had been . . . was dead . . . I thought Stan killed him.” I pulled the old woman into a tight embrace, my own shock driving me to hold onto her as she continued. “But then, the police came and got me this afternoon. And someone has beaten Stan half to death.” She dissolved back into tears.
“Surely he’ll be all right,” I told her.
She stopped crying, pushed me away and seized my shoulders. “That goddamned pornographer!” she burst out. “If he ever wakes up, I’ll rip out his throat myself. He destroyed my Linda and now he’s taken away Tasha.” Linda was Natasha’s mother, the one whose instability and eventual death had led to Natasha’s becoming Gert and Stan’s ward in the first place. I didn’t see what she had to do with this, but before I could try to work it out, Gert wailed, “And I was so blind! So blind.” This acknowledgment seemed to deflate her. She sank against me for a moment. “She’s gone!” Gert whispered. “Tasha’s gone. He had her with him. The police are combing the area around your facility, but they haven’t found a thing. They don’t know how to search. He has her stashed somewhere in that new building . . . somebody has told you about the new building?”
“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”
Gert revived momentarily. “Stan paid for it, for God’s sake!” As Lance and I had suspected, Stan Oeschle and his personal fortune had once more stepped in to save us.
“But surely you told the police?”
“They couldn’t find a thing.”
“Then why do you think we can?” My baffled horror wasn’t only fueled by the fact that we had no idea of the new building’s layout. It was that we were no longer facing something inexplicable at the center. When Art had been killed by someone violent with an unknown motivation, I didn’t fear going to the sanctuary with appropriate company. But pornography was nasty business, and I had to believe these people were behind Art’s death. If he had taken the time to contact Gert, then who else might he have told? Who might he have angered? And how could he have exchanged such a banal e-mail with Stan?
Oh, Art. Why hadn’t he gone at once to the police? It was the orangutans all over again. He tried to give people time to act appropriately on their own and instead exacerbated two bad situations. And this one had surely led to his death.
Marguerite was pulling on my arm. “You have to go,” she said again.
“Go get killed?” Stan may not have been a very physical man, but Art was strong. Neither Lance nor I would stand up long against whoever was out there if that person could kill him. But it was Marguerite demanding that I go. The woman who barely an hour before had been adamant that I stay. I knew where her urgency came from. It wasn’t that hard to figure out now. Natasha was a year younger than Bre
nda, three years younger than Rachel. My sister had spent her children’s lifetimes protecting them from exactly this sort of exploitation. The danger to a girl a little younger than the two oldest of her babies would be like an ice pick in her gut.
“You have to find her,” Gertrude implored.
“The police have to find her!” I insisted. “This is horrible. But I don’t see what Lance and I could do that they couldn’t. I don’t even know where the new building is.”
“Rick knows,” Lance said. “He’ll take us.”
“He can take the police!” I said. “We cannot do anything that they are incapable of.”
“Since when did you trust them so much?” Marguerite demanded.
“Since when did you stop trusting them?”
“This argument is pointless.” Nana’s voice sliced through Marguerite’s and mine both. I had nearly forgotten her, even though she was standing directly behind Gert. “Noel, the way I see it, you have a choice. You and Lance can either call Art’s nephew and ask him to escort you, or you can tell the police that he will know where to look.” I had forgotten she knew Rick, but Nana knew everyone, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. She went on, “And if you want my opinion, I think you ought to do both.”
Lance asked, “What?” while I stared.
“Clearly, you can only risk your own lives so far, no matter what the situation,” she explained.
“They’ve combed the whole forest. They can’t find her,” Gert said. “Please, help me find Natasha. She’s all I have left.”
I breathed deeply and tried to set this emotional appeal aside. “Nana, what were you saying?”
My grandmother continued. “You and Lance know how the building is designed . . .”
“No, we don’t!”
“Not specifically,” she agreed. “But generally. You know what your sanctuary is like. Niches that would seem secret to a law officer . . .”
“Would, to us, be someplace where we could quietly observe the animals. Predictable, maybe, if Art had a hand in the design.” Nana, at eighty, looked so much younger than the sixty-year-old Gert right now.
The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 22
