The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (20 page)

“I get it. You say ‘cheese’ and a light flashes.”

“Exactly.”

“What about circle-dot cars?”

“That one’s recent. It showed up after he vanished. I think it’s rescue vehicles, but I’m not sure. When Detective Carmichael comes out to change the battery in his wristband, he’s fine. He’s excited to see
that
cruiser, but it’s the only one. He covers his ears and makes siren noises when he hears an ambulance or fire truck now, when he never used to do that. It may have to do with context, or it may be something else entirely. Be patient. You’ll learn how to listen to him.”

She hugged us as she left, and I snagged the convertible keys to go get Natasha. I didn’t care if it was November and I had to drive with the top up. The car was sexy, and I’d never felt less like an antique frump. “I guess I’ll get some of this laundry started,” said Lance. But his eyes followed me out the door. Tasha was right. I needed to hide myself a set of those keys before Lance thought to lay claim to them.

Dear Nora:

My teen has more drama than a soap opera! Every time I turn around, she’s having the end of the world again. Help or send thread.

Seeking Peace

Dear Seeking:

Take her to see
Hamlet
or
Macbeth.
Not
Romeo and Juliet.
Something good and gory to remind her she doesn’t have it half so bad as anybody in a Shakespearean tragedy. Keep her away from long swords for a week or so after, just to be on the safe side.

Nora

P.S. I’m sending thread and a nice cross-stitch pattern I found online. It will cheer you up even if it doesn’t do
her
any good.

“Natasha, stop crying and tell me what’s wrong.” Tasha was slumped over her lap sobbing in the respite home’s white lobby, her face streaked purple with mascara.

“It was supposed to be a big . . . big family reunion,” she wailed. “Because they’re both out of the hospital and over here, and Granddad can visit Gram’s room if she had a good day. I snuck in cookies and
everything.
” Tasha collapsed in tears again, and I tried to ignore the nurses sending me dirty glowers. In addition to leaving a minor alone on the premises, I was now letting her continue to make entirely too much noise upon my return. And I couldn’t touch her to offer comfort without being instantly shaken off.

“What happened?” I prompted her.

“I’m afraid we gave her some rather bad news and didn’t do a good job cushioning the blow.” I hadn’t heard Stan enter, as he arrived on smooth wheels, one leg still braced straight out in front of him.

“Noel!” Natasha, who had shoved my arm off her for the third time only moments before, suddenly clamped onto my hand. “Gran isn’t ever . . . she isn’t . . . she won’t be home again!”

“Yes, she
will
!” Stan explained. He appealed to me, “What am I going to do with these
women
?” as if I didn’t share Natasha and Gert’s gender.

I was the only one standing, hunched at an awkward angle because Natasha was dragging on my arm. Clearly, we wouldn’t be leaving right away. I eased in a hard wooden chair. This was no state-run facility of the variety where we had visited my paternal grandfather in his final years. This was a swanky private home where Gert and Stan’s rooms, though in separate wings, were more like hotel suites than nursing home beds. We had been lucky enough to get Nana placed here in one of the two Medicare beds when she broke her hip last year.

Natasha accepted a handkerchief from Stan. Though legally her father, he was not her biological grandfather, and her round face had never looked more different than his narrow oval one than it did right now. Nonetheless, they shared a closeness I couldn’t achieve. He stretched a hand out and stroked the weeping girl’s hair. She didn’t shove him away. “It’s going to be fine, darling,” he assured her.

“How can you
say
that?” Natasha scrubbed her face. “She has multiple sclerosis, Noel. She’s going to deteriorate and deteriorate and
die.
And there’s nothing you can buy that will change her back to how she was before Aunt Gretchen poisoned her.”

Stan ignored the jibe about money. “Natasha, it’s a regressing and remitting variety. She should stabilize. Honey, she was hiding things from both of us long before. She told me she’d fallen a couple of times getting out of the tub when she hadn’t slipped. Lucky she never broke anything. She was having muscle spasms. Gretchen merely put her in a position where she couldn’t deny it any longer.”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t buy her better.”

“No,” Stan said. “I can’t. I can throw money into research. I can give her access to cutting-edge medications. I know the research won’t likely pay off in her lifetime, and even the best meds on the market won’t cure her.

“But I
can
bring her home, Natasha. Your grandmother’s problem is as much depression as it is anything else. She always knew Gretchen and Gary were a little cold-hearted. But she never knew what they had done to Linda. What they were doing to you. It doesn’t matter how your mother died right now, all Gert can think about is how she
lived.

“We had to shut your mother out a long time before she died, honey, even though it meant separating ourselves from you as well. And now Gert’s blaming herself for things completely out of her control. We’ve all been doing that lately.”

“Wait.” Natasha’s hysteria was gone. Although she was still swiping off her ruined makeup with the handkerchief, the girl looking up at Stan was totally focused. “I thought you separated from me because I busted Layla’s teeth in.”

Stan’s face registered shock. “You were a kid in a horrible situation. Why would we have cut off a child? Your mother blocked us. The first thing we had to do after she died was prove that Terry creature couldn’t possibly be your father.”

“How did you know he
wasn’t
?”

“She didn’t even meet him until you were two, dear. We didn’t know she was passing him off as your actual father until after her death. We were lucky enough to have your real birth certificate, or his forgery might have passed muster, and then it would have been hard to get you when she died.”

“Why’d he forge it? Why not adopt me? They all had money for that kind of thing.”

“Your biological father would have killed him. He wanted that side of the page blank. But a forgery? Something unlikely to be checked against formal records as long as your mother was alive? It was a measured risk to keep control of you and her.”

They stared back and forth, grandfather to grandchild, until Natasha said, “
Is
T-Bow Orrice my dad?”

“I thought your mother would have at least told you that.”

“She did in a roundabout way, but . . . you know Mom. It was hard to tell whether she was telling the truth or lying. But if he
is
my dad and everybody
does
know it, why wasn’t he on my birth certificate?” She sounded like she already knew the answer.

“He doesn’t want his name on
any
of his children’s birth certificates. It would have given you, and more importantly, your mother, a claim to him.”

“Then how come you’re so sure?”

“Your mother told us. Then, after Linda died, I asked him. The only chance your grandmother and I had to get our hands on you was to prove you weren’t Terry’s daughter. You were so strung out you could barely put two sentences together, and you were rightfully angry with all of us. You seemed to think that bastard . . . excuse me . . . that Mr. Dalton
was
your father.”

“
Yes.
I forgot I knew different until the day I came home with you.”

“Your original birth certificate was on file with the state, and once we got a lawyer involved, the forgery became evident. But it still took DNA testing to prove they hadn’t altered the document to reflect a fact. On paper, at least, he was effectively your stepfather for all that your mother never married him. Your mother was the one with the drug problems. It took a long time to prove he was supplying
your
drugs.

“In the meantime, I contacted T-Bow and asked him for the truth of the matter. He gave me the truth because he knew I didn’t want a connection to him. He’s vain, but he isn’t naive. And he wanted to be clear of the Daltons. T-Bow thinks
he
pushed me into adopting you. Between having me as your father and Terry Dalton, he preferred me by far, especially as everyone would
know
you’re adopted.”

“You didn’t buy him?” Natasha made no effort to mask her skepticism.

“My dear, there is nothing I can offer T-Bow Orrice. He’s already in jail. He runs his gang from the inside, and I’m sure he has more money than I’ll ever see.”

“When Terry died? Was it a coincidence?”

“I have to hope so, Tasha, but we’ll never know. Orrice doesn’t like his women to have their claws in him, but he’s extremely protective of his children. And I assure you, he knows who all of them are, even when he denies it. T-Bow Orrice is all about control. He really does think I adopted you on his say-so, dear.” Stan sounded so offhanded about something that seemed to me like it had obviously been a murder. He seemed perfectly comfortable trading Natasha’s life for that of this Terry person.

“But back when I was with Mrs. P you didn’t stop coming to see me because I pounded on Layla?”

“No. Your mother and Terry showed up for a hearing, and then for a visitation, and she stopped testing positive for drugs. Once she got you back, she took out a restraining order. And Gert and I had to accept we almost surely couldn’t win in court against a mother who seemed to have it together. But we knew better. And Gert couldn’t stand to get her heart broken anymore. We pulled away completely, and we never had a chance to tell you why, or how sorry we were.

“We thought we’d put a stop to it when we finally brought you home. But we hadn’t. And Gert feels like she failed your mother and you both . . .”

“But she didn’t . . . she couldn’t . . .”

“I know,” said Stan. “I know. But I feel the same way. It’s a lot for her, and it’s slowing down her recovery. We’ll all be home before you know it.”

“And I can come here for Thanksgiving with you guys?” Natasha’s voice wavered again. She took hold of Stan’s hand, which was cradling her cheek now.

“Absolutely. We’ll spend Thanksgiving together here, and Christmas, too, if we have to.”

Merging onto the freeway half an hour later, I mulled the levels of secrecy and deception in Natasha’s history. The day had turned rainy, and I was wishing I’d brought the minivan to navigate traffic. Travis called when we were halfway between Columbus and Ironweed. Besides teaching me to text since she had come to stay with us, Natasha had programmed my phone and Lance’s both into the car’s audio system. I still hated texting, but I did it when necessary, and I rather enjoyed thumbing my steering wheel to answer a call.

“Hey,” said Travis. “Did you ever tell Lance you applied for Art’s old job?”

“Mmmno.” I flashed a look at Natasha, and she rolled her eyes at me. She couldn’t understand this complete failure to communicate on my part.

“Then you better make sure he’s no place near in the next twenty minutes or so. The chair’s going to be calling you.”

Natasha barely had time to get into her anxiety-ridden lecture about the things she feared would happen to our marriage and relationship when the phone rang again. “Shush,” I said. She rolled her eyes once more.

“Noel,” the chair’s voice boomed. Winfred Prescott
always
boomed. Natasha turned down the volume. “We’ve determined a short list of initial candidates to interview up at the Biological Research Organization Convention in January. Of course, you won’t be there, so the committee has agreed to make an exception for you and interview you on campus.” He didn’t sound happy about this. “We’re expecting to take under an hour, and it’s scheduled for the Wednesday after Thanksgiving at two.”

What? The other candidates get two months, and I get a little over a week?
He hung up before I could say a word. “I thought I was a long shot,” I wailed.

“I told you Lance needs to know. Travis has said all along . . .”

“What does he know? He’s only worked here a few months.”

“
Plenty
, obviously.”

“Wednesday after Thanksgiving . . . okay. Lance will be at the center.”

“You have to promise to tell Lance after the interview. I don’t see what the big deal is, anyway. Why
weren’t
you two supposed to apply for this thing?”

“We’re field researchers, Tasha. If we’re married to a university schedule, we’ll never be out in the field again. We’ll get tied to classrooms, and labs, and . . . why are you shaking your head?”

“How are you going to take the twins on field research? Me, I’m temporary. Gran and Granddad come home, and I go with them. Sara and William aren’t going anyplace.”

“Of course not! We’ll have to adjust our schedules to accommodate theirs, of course, but we’ll travel in the summers.”

“You’ll travel in the summers. You’ll take William with you in the summer?”

“
Yes.
He’s a smart little boy, Natasha. He already loves the sanctuary. They’ll both get so much . . .”

“Trudy isn’t going to play nanny forever, you know. Eventually, they’ll find her an actual job instead of leaving her to follow up on a practically closed case. She won’t have free time to play around with your kids then. How are you going to get any research done keeping track of a kid who follows bugs off into the brush?”

“I haven’t worked it all out in my head, but we’ll
manage.
But if I’m stuck teaching a summer class, or if there’s a unique research opportunity one of us could take
during
the school year, what then? We can’t both go, of course, because the kids will be in school, but if I’m at the university, the only one who can go is Lance. I won’t have any kind of clout to take sabbaticals like Art used to do.”

“It sounds to me like you’ve got it all worked out
not
to take the job if you
do
get it.”