“Oh God, Lance, get down,” I said. But it wasn’t necessary. He was already descending, dropping branch by branch more rapidly than he had climbed them.
“Where are you?” Alex demanded. I realized he hadn’t found the nest yet, and I pointed.
Natasha didn’t say anything. I had an idea she was crying. “You can have my shirt. Give me a minute,” Alex said. Rapidly, he unbuttoned his shirt, fumbling with the cuffs and jerking loose the central panel so fast he popped a center button. “Is she very tall?” he asked.
Lance said, “No,” and indicated my height. In fact, she was slightly taller than me, but that was something I was more apt to notice than he was, I supposed.
“That ought to cover her up, then,” Alex said. He was probably right. He was as tall as Lance, but a whole lot broader, and I had a sudden memory of sleeping in his shirts, which he wore long. They never quite lost the smell of his cologne and came down to the middle of my thighs.
He stripped his sleeves off, exposing his forearms. He still had my name tattooed across his shoulder. “Oh dear God,” I said. “I would have thought you would have done something about that by now.”
His eyes met mine in silent apology. I had to give him credit. A thing like that would have driven the man I knew a decade ago to glowers and pursed lips, if not outright violence. “The other one says ‘Joyous,’ ” he said. “Most people think it’s a Christmas thing.”
“You can afford to have it taken off,” I said.
“Yeah.” He handed me the shirt. I didn’t think he was really agreeing.
“Go get Marguerite,” I told him. As he left, I said, “Natasha? I’ve got something you can put on.” She didn’t answer. “Can I bring it to you?” Still, she didn’t say anything. I started over to her hiding place holding the shirt out in front of me.
When I got there, I had to negotiate my way across any number of branches. She was a clever builder, and I was reluctant to destroy her sanctuary. Natasha sat in the middle of her circle, in a place she had padded with leaves. She was facing away from me, her knees drawn into her chest, and her face buried between them. A raw rash across her back suggested an allergy to some of the bedding that made up her protection.
Why had I sent Marguerite back up the hill? She had been right about one thing. Natasha needed a mother. I had no idea what to say to a child so badly damaged and obviously suffering. When it came to the deep hurts, my motto had always been to give my nieces and nephew back to my sister. Same thing with my friends’ children. I was good at friendship. I could listen to sadness and offer general comfort. But the closest I could come to a deep connection with this kind of pain was Rachel’s ongoing experience. Maybe that. And as bad as that was, I felt like it paled next to what Natasha was enduring right now.
Her whole body shook with silent tears. I had an idea she never would have revealed herself if Lance hadn’t started up the tree. I opened up Alex’s shirt and wrapped it around her bony shoulders, trying to figure out how I could access her kind of pain.
And then I knew.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
I couldn’t connect to Natasha as a child. She probably hadn’t been a child for a long time anyway. I tried to imagine myself at that point in my life when Alex had been my overlord. I tried to consider the words someone could have said to get my attention. But I didn’t think anyone could have said anything. I wouldn’t have believed. So instead of trying to talk to the girl in front of me, which clearly wasn’t working, I sat beside her.
I drew my knees up like Natasha’s and laid my head across them, looking at her. After a long time, she turned to me. Her face was tear-streaked and puffy. I couldn’t tell if the purple on her cheek was smeared mascara or a bruise. I hoped the former. I feared the latter. She was still silently crying, swallowing and breathing in jagged but silent gasps. I wondered how long she had been crying like that. How many years. “He’s coming back,” she whispered. “He put me here to wait for you.”
“No,” I said. “Stan is . . .”
“Not Stan. I don’t know what’s taking him so long.”
I could see that she wasn’t going to leave. That it didn’t matter if she was in danger. She seemed to be in shock. Then I registered the first part of her statement. My stomach suddenly knotted. “Who?”
She shook her head, and I thought at first that she didn’t intend to answer. Then she said, “My cousin—Gary,” in that same whisper and turned her face back to her knees.
“Who?” But even as I spoke, my mind was running through images and names, coming to the conclusion that I only knew one Gary and that, yes, he would have been Linda’s cousin if his mother was Gert’s sister. My mind hadn’t bothered with this before, even though I should have realized it.
“The one that finished his degree,” Natasha said. “I think he maybe went to kill Gran, even though he promised to leave her alone if I came with him. But he never got done killing Stan, and . . .” She drifted into silence.
I thought a little information was in order. “I guess he beat Stan up pretty badly,” I said. “But your gran is OK . . .”
“You’re lying.” She said it in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she was making an observation about the weather. It’s sunny. You’re lying. All the same. And she went on crying. She looked back at me. “And I bet you think it’s all Stan’s fault anyhow . . .”
“Well, he did . . .”
“He’s my grandfather! Or the closest thing to one I’ll get. He wouldn’t do that. Gary and Aunt Gretchen are spreading around that he had something to do with this, but it’s because they’re caught.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s too bad you don’t know. Then he’d at least have a reason to lure you out here.”
“Know what?”
“Those two volunteers of yours.”
“Which two . . .”
“Trudy and Darnell.”
“What?” Had we left Art’s killers in charge of the sanctuary?
“They’re some kind of federal agents.”
I stared at Natasha, opening my mouth and closing it again.
“When Uncle Gary’s passport was blocked, it didn’t take him long to figure out they were behind it, but he figured you, and Granddad, and Mr. Art had to be involved. He’s been hiding with Aunt Gretchen ever since she fell.”
I had visions of the dozens of interns Art had brought through the center over the years. “Natasha, how long . . .?” I wanted to ask her how long this had been going on, how deep it went, but I wasn’t sure she knew, or that I wanted to know even if she could tell me.
“Mom brought me into the films when I was ten. She was aging out. And then she went and OD’d, so it was only me. I guess Gary’s been using your monkeys ever since Granddad bought into his sob story and got him into the graduate program at the school. It made a good cover, and Art’s such a putz. He never thought his best buddy’s nephew would be anything but perfect.” My heart flared in defense of my friend. But Art’s focus was almost entirely on the monkeys. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind to ask why Stan’s nephew wanted to study primates. It certainly hadn’t crossed my mind. I hadn’t even thought to find out how closely the two of them were related.
Now that she was talking, Natasha didn’t seem able to stop. She showed no urgency to leave, and I didn’t know how to break into her trance to get her out. She said, “But Gary thought Stan would give him his own monkey house. And when Stan found all those pictures . . .” Natasha strangled a sob.
“Wait . . . Stan found the pictures? Not Art?”
“Yes! Weeks ago. He’s been after Gary to turn himself in, and he wanted to call the police, and I should have let him, but I don’t want the kids in school to find out I’m that kind of girl. And now he’s killed Gran because I couldn’t get her out of the hospital. He’ll get in there and finish poisoning her.”
“Your grandmother’s not in the hospital,” I said.
“No I guess not, now. She’s
dead,” Natasha responded.
“She’s fine . . .”
“She’s not. He’s killed her.”
I tried, “How else would we have known to come looking for you?”
“Because Gary sent Aunt Gretchen in to get you.”
It clicked. The walker. The stumbling gait on uneven ground. The way she had leaned into me and looked so old in comparison to my grandmother. The woman in my parents’ house was not Gert Oeschle. It was her sister.
“She was supposed to go in pretending to be Gran, hysterical since your friend dropped off those pictures for her. Her job was to get the two of you out here so he could get you out of the way. And when Gary gets back here, he’ll kill you. Then I’m going to get to star in my own personal snuff film.”
Finally, some of her message reached me. I knew the term “snuff film.” It referred to fetish pornography in which women were killed and their bodies sexually assaulted. I had been listening for ways to help Natasha. I should have been more concerned with ways to get her moving. The police had never been called until Nana called them. If she called them. I had left an impostor at my house. With my grandmother. Sooner or later, Gary would come back, and Lance and I had sent our defense arm up the hill to get my sister. We needed to go.
And then I finally knew what to say to her. “Natasha, this isn’t your fault.” She didn’t believe that. I knew by the way she blew out a breath and shook her head. But it was still the right thing, because she unclenched one of her elbows from around her knees and started sliding her arms into Alex’s dress shirt.
She shifted onto those knees to button it up.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you to your grandmother. Wherever she is.”
Natasha froze, and for a moment, I thought I had spoken wrongly, but she said, “Shhh.” And pointed. She was smiling. I expected to see Gary standing behind me, but all the fear had relaxed away from her face. “Look,” she whispered. “That’s why Gary never finished Stan. I’m sure of it. But . . . he took my clothes, and I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon, and I can’t really think . . . and . . . but, look, will you look!”
It was the first passion I had heard in her voice. Slowly, I turned my head. “Ohh.”
Natasha’s protective circle of greenery extended to the mesh, but she had made a half-moon shape that left one edge completely open to the outside where the greens met the enclosure’s sides. From the outside, it looked like nothing was there, even though she would have been clearly visible from above. She could easily move to hide from anyone outside of the enclosure, leaving her nest empty and looking no more manmade than the other plant life Art had dragged in from the forest.
And now, on the other side of the wire, stood the orangutan we had been hunting for two days. I could smell him. I had been smelling him for some time, but I had been so wrapped up in Natasha’s words that I had not paid attention to my other senses. Chuck poked his fingers through the mesh, palm up. Without prompting, Natasha reached out and tapped them with her own fingers. One, two, three, four, five. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Natasha sucked in her lower lip, and I knew she had forgotten me. Then, she made a pincer out of her hand and used it to tickle Chuck’s fingers. One two three four five.
The orangutan peeled back his lips from his teeth and gurgled breathy laughter. At close range, his grin didn’t look at all funny, and his burble would have been easy to mistake for a threat. I had a sudden insight about why Gary hadn’t come back. Art had told me, “It tried to save me.” Chuck tried to save Art. Natasha said something about Gary not finishing Stan. Chuck did that. The orangutan bought the injured man time. Chuck went after Gary when Gary beat Art, and he intervened again to help Stan. And now he was protecting Natasha, and by extension, us. It was impossible to know what he understood, but he wasn’t incapable of emotion, and he had lived with humans for probably his whole life.
“Look at that,” I heard Lance whisper. He was right behind me, though I hadn’t heard him approach.
“You do this much?” I asked Natasha.
“All night,” she said. The ape pulled out a hunk of cantaloupe from behind his back with the other arm and mashed it against the mesh. “He’s been feeding me,” Natasha said. “He’s so sweet.”
In my hip pocket, my phone trilled. I had barely picked it up when Marguerite shrieked in my ear: “You’ve got to get out of there! That wasn’t Gert Oeschle at the house! I don’t have time to explain . . .”
“Nana!” I shouted.
At the noise, Chuck reared back.
“She’s OK. Your friends did something to that other woman and they called to warn me. But listen, we’re all three locked into the shack up here, and he’s coming after you and Lance.” A loud crash echoed across the line.
“What? Who?”
“That was Alex. He’s going to bust down the door, but it’s taking a while.”
“Who slammed it in the first place?”
“How should I know? He slammed the door and yelled at us after Alexander came in. Go! He’s going to come find you next!”
Standing as close as he was, Lance heard. “We have to go,” he said.
Natasha’s joy vanished as fast as it had come. “It’s Gary, isn’t it?” she said.
I nodded. I was afraid she would retreat back into herself. But she said, “We can’t let him hurt the orangutan.” She spoke in a tone I wouldn’t have believed possible a few minutes earlier. “Go, go!” She made shooing motions at Chuck, then darted away, exiting her nest in the same way I had come. “He’ll leave if I go,” she shouted to Lance and me.
Barefoot as she was, she still ran ahead of us to exit the enclosure. What happened next felt like it came in slow motion. She bolted out into the woods, the door crashed shut behind her, and for a moment Gary materialized, slamming home the padlock in a fluid motion, then turning toward Natasha. She heard the noise, looked over her shoulder once, then kept running. “You can’t catch me!” she shrieked. But Gary could catch her, and he meant to. She had barely a two-step lead on him, and youth wasn’t giving her much in the way of speed. Gary moved to close the distance between them.
And then Chuck exploded from beside the enclosure, loping easily alongside the human he perceived as a threat to his girl. He backhanded Gary in almost the same way he had smacked Art out of the way yesterday, only harder. And where Art had flown out of the way and then bounced back to his feet, Gary spun all the way around. His body made an impossible arc and flipped over. He landed on his head with a crunch audible to Lance and me, trapped behind the enclosure’s mesh. I think he was dead before he struck the ground. I think he was dead as soon as that giant hand connected with his face in that backhanded slap.
Natasha stopped running and looked back at Chuck, who threw back his head and started a longcall. He emitted the initial screech, then his body suddenly stiffened and he crumpled inches from the human he had inadvertently killed.
“Everybody OK?” Christian asked. “I can’t believe how long he fought the dart. I think it may have caught in his hair. And when he got that burst of energy at the end, I thought he wouldn’t give in.” Then he indicated Gary. “Sorry about him.”
As he spoke, Christian clambered down the hill from the other side, skidding around tree stumps. Natasha stared from him to the fallen Chuck. Then she screamed, a sound of rage entirely worthy of her orangutan friend, and threw herself up the hill at Christian.
“He’s fine, Natasha,” I yelled. “Christian tranquilized him.”
“You’re lying,” Natasha screamed. “You’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying!” She changed course and threw herself on top of the prone animal instead of attacking Christian. “You’re lying!” she screamed again, then in the same hysterical tone, “He’s breathing! You didn’t kill him!”
“He’s fine,” Christian said. “Look.” He turned the dart gun so Natasha could see it. But she wasn’t looking. She buried her face in the ape’s fetid fur, like he was possibly her only friend left
in the world. Maybe he was.
In the distance, I heard the wail of approaching police cars. “Art’s nephew has the key,” I said. “If you can get him out of the security shack, he’ll help you let us out, and we can maybe move Chuck in here until you can get a truck down to get him.”
CHAPTER 27
* * *
Sunday dawned clear, and my mother and grandmother’s voices drifted up through the floor. “Pancakes,” Mama said.
“Waffles,” Nana argued.
I groaned, “Neither,” and buried my head under my pillow.
Margie said, “Sausage.”
Last night had been another long one, and the sky was barely light now. Marguerite, Alex, Lance, and I had been tied up with the police for hours after sunset. We would be dealing with the chaos resulting from Gary’s pornography ring for a long time, but remembering the way his body had twisted as it broke still made me shudder. Nobody deserved to die that way.
Tranquilized, Chuck had been moved into the temporary enclosure, and Christian planned to move him to the Ohio Zoo until our barn was finished and the whole complex passed inspection. Christian, ever the optimist, assumed our facility wasn’t about to be shut down for its inadvertent role in the scandal.
We did find out that Stan Oeschle was alive. He was airlifted to Columbus, and the full extent of his injuries was still unknown, but his condition was listed as serious but stable. Gert Oeschle was located, alive, in a Columbus hospital, recovering from the effects of poisoning Natasha said was administered by Gretchen. We were only able to obtain limited information on the phone, but the consensus seemed to favor Gert’s ultimate survival.
And then there was Natasha.
She retreated into herself as soon as the police arrived. She sat outside a cruiser on the ground and refused to speak. Marguerite tried to mother her, but Natasha shook off my sister’s hands and turned away from her words. I was busy with the orangutan when Marguerite stalked over to me. “You see if you can get anything out of her.”
The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 24
