The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (11 page)

A babble of adult voices rose in protestation, but none of them even began to answer the challenge Sara had issued. She didn’t speak in the monotone her folder would have led me to expect, and her cross-armed posture showed body language wasn’t totally alien to her. Obviously, her folder wasn’t fully descriptive. I decided to take its contents with a grain of salt. Aside from its recitation of obvious facts, such as the twins being biracial and Sara being talkative, it seemed to be made largely of Merry’s random observations anyhow. The parts from Natalie Forrester were much more likely to be helpful.

We adults dribbled into silence as quickly as we had started talking. It was Natasha who finally took up Sara’s gauntlet. “You’ve got it wrong,” she said.

“But they
are
getting rid of us, Tasha,” Sara wailed. Suddenly, she was only six again, six and scared. “And so are you!”

“I know they are.” Natasha looked only at Sara, or she would have seen Natalie blushing. But Sara was right. Whatever else happened, Sara and William
would
be leaving Natalie and Adam’s house soon. And the child deserved the truth. “But I’m not. I’ve missed you for too long. I’ll
always
find you from now until forever. Pinkie swear.” Warily, Sara met Natasha’s outstretched pinkie with her own. “I also know,” Natasha went on, “that you’re right about this being the weirdest playdate ever. You know I’ll always tell you the truth, right? And I absolutely promise you we’re here to play, and you’ll see me again soon.”

“How soon?”

“Later this month.” Natasha stared at Sara. “Maybe even at Natty and Adam’s house. I was worried about you the other day, and so were Lance and Noel here. It’s upsetting when a child is missing . . .”

“Yes, because I know all about stranger-danger, and I didn’t talk to anybody at all when I—”

Sara would have gone on longer in this vein, but Natasha cut her off. The folder had this right, then. It said she was easily distracted and would hone in on unexpected portions of a conversation as if those things were central to the discussion. Natasha repeated the first part of her statement. “I was worried about you,” she said, “and so were Lance and Noel here. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Sara’s nose started twitching like a rabbit’s, and she creased her brow and poked her tongue out of her mouth, deep in thought. “Maybe you’ll see us at Natty and Adam’s, and maybe . . . somewhere else?” she guessed.

“Right,” said Tasha, before the adults could shush her.

Suddenly, Sara’s expression lifted, the furrowed brow smoothed, and the eyes grew wide. “Oh!” she said, looking straight at Natasha now. “Okay. Got it. Let’s play.”

The folder warned she struggled to understand cause-and-effect relationships, had trouble connecting the dots between points A and B in any given conversation. But I thought I had seen quite a few dots light up on her face right then. She wasn’t all the way to point C yet. She hadn’t figured out we wanted to adopt them, but she knew we planned to foster them if this meeting went well. And that was enough.

Sara grabbed her brother’s shoulders. “Do you got it?” she asked.

“You got trucks,” William said.
His
folder had identified him as practically nonverbal. It sounded like he had a few more words than Meredith Frasier was letting on. Also, he was stating a fact. While the rest of us had been so focused on Sara, he had emptied two small backpacks onto the floor. He and Sara both had cars and trucks he had stretched end to end in a small line of traffic between the table and a wall. The vehicles were arranged largest to smallest, with like colors together. Each time he picked up a new one from the pile, he adjusted the line to place the newcomer in the right spot.

“Noel,” Lance breathed. “Look. He’s
classifying.
” His tone said,
See? Our little scientist
, as if he and I had somehow had a hand in William’s skill with putting trucks in a row. “Hey, buddy, I love the way you’ve got these organized.” Lance sat down beside William. “Can I maybe try a few?”

William went on picking up and placing. He did not answer.

Natalie warned, “Nobody is allowed to touch William’s trucks.”

Before the sentence was half out of her mouth, though, Lance had plucked a car out of the pile William was drawing from. William looked up sharply and watched Lance, but he didn’t say anything or take the vehicle back.

“Let’s see. This one is yellow, and it’s kind of little. I’m going to put it here.” Lance moved two other cars to place his in the line.

“No!” William flicked Lance’s out to the side, then sat back and watched.

“Okay, sorry.”

“He does them by number of doors, too,” Sara explained. “That one’s got four and the rest of those have two. It should have gone all the way in back of the yellows.”

“Ah.” Slowly Lance picked the rejected car up again and scooted it to a different place in line.

“Yes,” said William.

“Can I try another?”

William didn’t answer, but he allowed Lance to choose and place again, and when it had been scooted to his satisfaction, he nodded and said, “Yes.”

“Now there’s something,” said Natalie. “He’s never let Adam and me play with them. But then, I don’t think either of us figured out his method.”

“Duh.” Sara hadn’t moved. “Half those are mine,” she told her brother.

“Be polite,” Natalie reminded her again.

“What do you want to play?” Natasha indicated the other toys in the room, which seemed designed for younger children.

Sara was evading even her friend’s eyes now. She didn’t say anything.

“Sara, would you like to play trucks?” Natalie asked.

“Yeah, trucks,” she mumbled. She seized half of William’s pile. He ignored her. Where William’s game consisted entirely of lining the cars up, Sara handed Natasha and I each a car, deliberately walked past Natalie and Merry, then offered a car to Ann. “Now,” she told us, “they go in a big circle.” Her play was repetitive. While she seemed to enjoy it tremendously, I couldn’t help feeling a bit bored.

Still, the first meeting was successful, and when we left, Ann said, “You’re obviously interested. I’ll be in touch.”

“We do want to take this slowly,” Lance reminded her. “We know this is going to be hard on them.”

“You don’t have forever,” Merry warned us. “They have to be moved out of the Forresters’ for good, and soon.”

They followed Natalie and the twins outside, and we took Natasha back to school to meet her math tutor, who would bring the girl back to us at the center later in the day. “I don’t understand Merry’s hurry,” I told Lance.

“I don’t understand Merry’s anything,” he replied.

The Friday before Labor Day, I went out to dinner with my friend Hannah while Lance got the center shut down for the evening. Two other friends, Liz and Mina, couldn’t come but sent us good luck in the form of toy store gift certificates. “Who
are
you?” Hannah asked me. “Married a couple of months, and you’re already lying to your husband and nesting at the same time. Art’s dying’s got you rattled. Why don’t you at least tell Lance you’ve applied for the job? It makes sense one of you should take it.”

“Because we agreed not to. We’re field researchers. The teaching has always been a sideline. And I don’t want to start a fight about money. He doesn’t worry about it like I do.”

“What are you going to say when they hire you?”

“
If
they hire me, Hannah. I graduated from Ironweed, I’d be a teacher whose style closely imitates the person they’re replacing, and I’ve only ever taught part time. All of those are strikes against me.”

“
When
they hire you,” she repeated, “what are you going to tell your husband?”

“Individual health insurance is too expensive for four people.” Ironweed might bill itself as the only social justice–oriented science university in the nation, but the attitude didn’t extend to part-time instructors’ health care. And the center couldn’t afford to offer such an extravagance. Lance and I had always carried our own policies. When the twins came to us, they would initially be covered by the government. But the day the adoption became final, we had to have them on
our
plan.

“I guess that’s one angle.” Our entrees came then, and we devoted ourselves to food in uncomfortable silence. Hannah had never been the sort to keep her opinions private. Her outspoken enthusiasm for Ironweed’s historic downtown area had served as a springboard not only for her own business, Hannah’s Rags, but for a total revitalization of the area. In an area with a largely white population, she was a successful black woman who thrived on a large personality.

But she sure wasn’t saying what I wanted to hear today. “Are you with my mom that we’ve lost our minds wanting to adopt these kids?”

“Now there’s a whole different story. I’ve
always
thought you and Lance would make cute parents. It was one of those things I kind of wondered about but never asked. I mean, I’d heard you say ‘childless-by-choice’ but I know it can mean many things. I think it’s all good. It’s this secrecy thing bugging me. Him not telling you . . . you’ve been together ten years, and he never mentioned his mother was a stark raving lunatic.”

“She’s mentally ill . . .”

“Noel, there’s a difference between ‘mentally ill’ and ‘completely whacko’.”

“And the difference is?”

“She blew up your car.” I couldn’t argue with Hannah’s logic. We were down to one car right now because my mother-in-law had set my car on fire the day before the wedding. “And you telling him one thing and then doing the exact opposite,” she went on. “You’re a good couple, Noel, but you’ll screw yourselves over. Every one of my ex-husbands would say the same.”

I started to tell Hannah she only had one ex, but my phone buzzed in my purse, the ringtone Natasha had programmed into it for her own number. “Speaking of kids . . . what’s up, Tasha?”

“Can you come home
now
, Noel?” Natasha’s school had scheduled a teacher in-service to correspond with the holiday, so she had been out at the center for much of the day. Lance had dropped her home on his way in to Ironweed University to grade quizzes. Now, she was there alone, waiting for a ride with friends to go to what she swore was a poetry slam later in the evening. I was personally skeptical about the number of teen poetry slams being offered in Muscogen County, but we had the same agreement Natasha had forged with all of her family and closest friends: always the truth, no matter what. I had agreed to extend trust until I saw evidence to the contrary. Even when I confronted her about the alcohol back in June when we hardly knew her, she had stuck to her own policy.

“What’s wrong?” My mind flew immediately to the sight of her half-dressed in a borrowed shirt, trapped with us in an empty enclosure on our property. Her life had been in danger then, and so had ours. “Do you need the police?”

“It’s not so bad. It’s
awful.
”

“Tasha, calm down, which is it?”

“It’s . . . I’m in the kitchen and everything is horrible. Fine. Really. Dreadful.”
Kitchen
was her paranoid code for “It’s okay, nobody’s forcing me to say this.” If she’d said she wanted to go lie in her bed, I’d have known to call the cops, and the feds, and probably also her grandparents. Though it was possible I would have left them for last, since there wasn’t a thing they could do but worry.

“Okay. I’m coming, honey.”

Her first couple of weeks with us had been hysterical ones, and this sounded like a return to the girl who had wakened sobbing quietly every night. I hoped she also hadn’t returned to self-medicating in my absence.

Ironweed is a small town, and I was home within ten minutes. But it felt like a thousand years. Natasha was no calmer when I walked in the front door, but I didn’t see any conspicuous bottles, and I couldn’t smell any booze.

“Tasha, what?”

I sat beside her on the couch while she tried to tell me something coherent. I had to keep reminding myself she would get prickly if I got too maternal. She related to me because I had been a victim myself for some time. I tried not to treat her like a kid when she was struggling with her past, but sometimes, like right now, when her face was buried in her hands and soaked-through tissues littered the floor around her feet, I wanted nothing more than to hold and rock her. I laid a hand on her shoulder, but no more. It was about all the human contact she could handle at times like these. She didn’t shake it off immediately, so I knew I’d done right.

Finally, she hiccupped to enough of a stop that I could understand her. She said, “I guess Layla . . . I guess she got in big trouble for imitating Mrs. P.”

“I can see why!”

“She blames
me
for it. It’s not
my
fault, Noel. Is it?”

“Of course not!”

“But it doesn’t matter because she put it around at school I used to do
sex tapes.
” Now she shuddered away from even my hand on her shoulder. “The public school hasn’t gone back yet, and she’s got nothing better to do than sit around and make trouble for me. I can’t ever go to school again. I’ll die of shame.”

Naturally, Stan and Gert had enrolled Tasha in the only private school in the vicinity, a parochial school with conservative attitudes. I understood Natasha’s worry about the other kids. Her mother had never put her education at a high priority level, and at fifteen, she was only starting her eighth-grade year. All of the friends she had made over the summer were freshmen at the least. Most were sophomores. She had already spent the last week and a half trapped in classes with the same kids she had dealt with the year before and without a friend at her side.

“Natasha, that’s horrible!”

“It gets
worse
,” she wailed.

“Worse how?”

“She got her hands on a copy of my
first
film, when I was ten, and high, and . . . Noel, I don’t even
remember what happens in it.
” She wheeled around and seized my shoulders. “It could have anything. And I found out because Emily went to Christina’s birthday party last night, and these guys Ryan and Eric were there, and they brought a copy, and Emily tried to get the disc, but she couldn’t, and now
everybody knows.
I nearly
went
to that party. What if I’d
been
there? And sooner or later Trudy and Darnell are going to find out, and then I’ll have to testify about it, and I’ll have to
watch it to remember what it has.
”