The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (29 page)

And suddenly I realized she had come to me.
They
had come to us. Neither of them had gone to Natasha. Indeed, Sara had rejected Natasha and games in favor of my boring presentation. William hadn’t demanded Natty to arbitrate, either today at Mama’s house or yesterday at the sanctuary. I couldn’t place when the shift had happened, the changeover in loyalties from them to us. But our children had finally come to us. Now, I couldn’t put Sara down. I couldn’t
possibly
put her down. “Okay. You can come. But you have to quit crying.”
Or else I’m going to start.
“And you have to sit in my presentation as quietly as ever you can. Somebody get me some crayons. Tasha, what about you? You staying here or kicking around with us up at school?”

“If I’m not staying here, I’m going wherever Trudy is. Um. If it’s okay with you, Trudy.”

“It’s fine. In fact, it’s my preference. I’d rather you
all
stayed where someone could keep an eye on you. I’d rather I didn’t have something needing attention elsewhere. But that’s neither realistic nor likely to happen. Let’s ask if the deputy can get you some clothes from your house. Tasha, you can look at some pictures for me this afternoon.” Though Mama was clearly irked to be stuck with the final deputy, Daddy seemed happy enough to chat the man up.

Fifteen minutes later, Lance dropped Sara and me at the Bio Science building. “Knock ’em dead, babe.”

“And text us when you get there safe and sound,” Darnell added.

We reached the conference room with ten minutes to spare. Only one member of the search committee had arrived before me. “Anything up, Doc?” I greeted him with false casualness.
Should I call him Dr. Chambless? I work with him every day. But he barely knows me. Don’t set the wrong tone.

“Nothing up here, Doc.” He returned the ritual department joke, then sat comfortably in a seat to the right of the projector, where he was guaranteed to see almost nothing of my slide-show.

“Ooooh, what
stinks
?” Sara tried to put herself at the head of the table, where I would go, but I transferred her to the seat opposite James Chambless, where she would also miss seeing most of my slides.

The conference room carried its usual reek of long-forgotten lunchmeat and vastly overdue milk, along with a nasty fishy smell.
Didn’t Tasha and I clean this out again after it nearly ruined our ice cream? Are they bringing in the rotting food from home after it goes bad?
There was another smell as well, a hard water smell, almost metallic. I couldn’t quite place it. For some reason, I associated it with the center. I mouth-breathed and cursed whomever had tanked my presentation before it even started.

Naturally, the chair arrived last, after the rest of us had been seated and making awkward conversation for some time. I had been on job interviews as a graduate student before I realized my work lay here in Ironweed and I wouldn’t be leaving the center after graduation. But those had been outside affairs. If I was nervous, it was only for a little while. If I screwed up, it was in front of strangers who would never see me again.

But as the inside candidate, all my actions carried a different weight. The search committee was filled with my colleagues. When they ultimately filled Art’s position, I would have to face these people in the halls. I would see them less frequently, of course, when I went back to my part-time schedule, but it would still be embarrassing for all of us.

We had moved beyond the nervous chit-chat about the twins, Natasha, and our adoption process and reached a lull where I was clearly expected to speak, when Dr. Prescott stomped in and all but threw himself into a chair. “All right, get on with it,” he snapped. And I commenced.

The first part of the interview involved the usual questions. Qualifications, experience, and, my least favorite question in any interview, why they should hire me. Then I gave a short version of a lecture of the variety I might use in a freshman classroom. Here, my insider knowledge benefitted me because I could safely choose a somewhat edgy topic.

With the exception of Dr. Prescott and the mandatory reviewer from outside the department, I knew everyone’s position on genetically modified organisms and their role in our food. GMOs always made for lively discussion, and even among our small group, who largely agreed with one another on the subject, the conversation ranged broadly, and the interview ran well over its allotted hour.

Sara colored quietly for every moment. She didn’t say one word, though she did change seats to crawl into my lap when I sat down at the end of the slideshow. Finally, we wrapped up, and I set her down. I was beginning to think the interview had gone off without a hitch in spite of the odor when Mama’s brooch snagged on a cabinet handle as I stood. The door flew open and smacked me in the nose. “Ow!”

Two members of the committee screamed, and the chair’s face paled. “Oh, no.” He staggered back away from his seat.

What the hell? I’m the one with the bloody nose. We’re nearly all biologists. We’ve seen blood before.
The brooch wouldn’t come loose.
Blood. The metallic smell.
It was iron, it was . . . it was blood. I had smelled it yesterday when the macaques tracked it through the barn. I jerked and pulled, all the while trying to cover my nose with my shirt.
What would smell like blood, though?
The more I wiggled, the more tightly wedged the brooch became. Finally, with one great wrench, I ripped it off the jacket. Something splatted out of the cupboard with a meaty thud.

“Oh, no,” the chair repeated. “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

“Shut up, Winnie,” Dr. Chambless snapped. “You’ll scare the kid.”

It didn’t sound a bit like lemon cleanser hitting the ground this time.
What would have smelled like . . . blood?
“Oh, no.” My nose sent another geyser of red down my shirt. I couldn’t stop myself from looking, even though the only question I had now was
who
I would see when I peered around the door.

The head was rolled onto one side, saving me from seeing the other, and I was looking at it upside down, from the scalp. Two hands and two feet were collected in a baggie and tied in its hair. It looked like Detective Hugh Marsland would not be returning to claim his badge. No beach bunnies for him. No cozy fireside dinners with his wife, either. My bloody nose seemed suddenly trivial.

“Sara, grab hold of me and make like a choo-choo train, but walk right behind me so you can’t see a
thing.
”

“What’s going on? I don’t like to be blind.”

Listen for the important questions, and answer them honestly. “Honey, you remember the headless guy yesterday? We found the rest of him.”

“I know. I saw.”

“I don’t want you to look at it again. It’s awful. We’re heading for the bathroom, little caboose, so I can clean up my face, and then I think we’re going to spend another afternoon at the police station.” I edged her around the conference table and toward the door.

“Oh,
no
,” babbled the chair. “He’s going to kill me. I’m
next in line.
Somebody save me.” And then he collapsed in the middle of the doorway, completely blocking our exit.

Dear Nora:

How right you were! I should have trusted you more. I
do
love your attorney. As soon as my divorce is finalized, we’ll be announcing our engagement. Instead of a ring, he gave me my own housekeeping company. Please say you’ll come to the wedding.

Formerly Worked to the Bone

By the time we got home, it was late afternoon. My Nana had arrived at Mama and Daddy’s, as had all of our unwrapped presents and enough clothes to get each of us through several days. I felt increasingly edgy about being here. There wasn’t a burglar alarm, and Ironweed was a small town. We wouldn’t be hard to track down.

“We ought to go to a hotel. In Columbus.”

“Maybe so,” Lance agreed.

But Mama wouldn’t hear of it. “Honey, you’re better off than if you’d joined up with those witness protection people.” Drew’s people were needed elsewhere tonight, and we were left with the federal agents. Even though there were only two of them, my mother had total faith in Trudy and Darnell.

And then there was Natasha. For the first time since she had joined us, she was wearing makeup, not the heavy, overdone stuff I’d seen her in at our first meeting many moons ago, but bright colors in moderate amounts. And instead of black, the eye shadow and lipstick were paired with a pastel top and flowery shorts, because Mama kept the kitchen unholy hot. “I wish you a Merry Christmas, I’m going home, home, home, home,” she sang. “They’re springing Granddad from the retread hospital, and I’m going home in a week.”

“Retread? What?” We had barely achieved some kind of normalcy in our house with our three children. Now one of them was leaving?

“Retread. It’s what he calls rehab. Like fixing the tread on a car, only . . . yeah, you get it,” she explained. Then she added, as if maybe I’d missed her point, “He’s getting out next Wednesday if everything goes right this coming week.”

Sara wrapped her arms around Natasha. “I’m going to miss you!”

“Me, too!” Tasha said at once, as if this portion of the equation hadn’t occurred to her. It seemed we had inadvertently dampened her good humor. “But,” she knelt beside Sara and beckoned for William. “Remember. We talked about this. Sleepovers, movie nights, and you can come swimming whenever you want to in the summer.”

“
You
have a burglar alarm!” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

Natasha understood at once. “You’re brilliant! I could go home
now.
”

“Noel, our house is safe,” said Mama.

“No,” said Lance. “It isn’t.”

“And,” Mama overrode him, “We have more than enough room for all of you.” There, at least, she had us. She and Daddy lived in a vast old mansion that had once been a funeral home. When we got married, they had boarded not only Lance and me, but also Nana, my sister and her husband, their four children, and ultimately Natasha.

“I want it to be,” said Lance. “We love it here. But if we hadn’t had an alarm to go with our federal escort, we could still have been in trouble last night. Stan has space
and
an alarm.”

Mama ignored him. “Plus, we have a tree up here,
and
all of your presents
and
my presents,
and
your sister is coming down in a couple of days.” My mother crossed her arms. “If you’re going, I’m coming along, and so is all our stuff. I
guarantee
everyone else will stay where I land.”

“Don’t be absurd, Mama.”

“You can’t go without me, Lenore.” Daddy sounded outraged.

“See?”

“Not you, too, Daddy.”

“Now you hold on!” said Nana.

“Finally! Someone with sense.”

“You’re not leaving me here all by myself.” She sounded as plaintive and grouchy as Sara had earlier. “I came over here expressly to get the dibs on your escapades, and you will
not
get away from me until I hear every word of what happened yesterday, last night, and this morning.”

“Nana . . . you can’t . . . would all of you stop and think! We have no idea how long this is going to drag on, and Stan does not need to come home to a madhouse. Everybody forget it. We’re staying here.”

“That’s better,” said Nana. Lance and I exchanged resigned shrugs. Daddy reclaimed William and they returned to the morning’s imaginary pruning. Lance went along to supervise. Sara trailed after Mama to go feed the dogs.

Natasha and I were left alone. “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to get your hopes up.”

“The madhouse would probably be better,” she mumbled. “The two of us rattling around up there are going to be mighty lonely.”

“What about . . . oh. Gert can’t leave yet.”

“You mean
won’t
leave.” Her ebullience had completely disintegrated.

“Sweetheart.” I wished I could hug her.

“She
could
come home, Noel. The absolutely worst part is that she’s determined to mope and waste in the stupid nursing home. She’s not very old, and she’s not even very sick anymore. But Granddad said it’s like . . . like she’s lost the will to live. The doctors are all out of ideas, and even her favorite nurse can’t think of anything. Granddad’s all out of ideas. She thinks it’s all her fault, and I know exactly why she does, because I always think the same thing myself.”

“What same thing?”

Natasha looked out at me from her made-up face and didn’t say a word.

“I’m sorry, honey, you don’t have to answer.”

“It’s okay. My shrink says I ought to get it out there and make myself believe it isn’t true. I’m starting to agree with him. I guess I thought you would know.”

“No. I’m sorry, Tash. You and I have been through some similar things, but this is one I can’t touch.” I had ended the abusive relationship with Lance’s younger brother only when Alex nearly beat me to death. Memories of that time in my life could only help me so far in connecting with my foster daughter.

“See, as long as I believe it’s my fault, then it can’t be Mom’s. And then I won’t be mad at her.”

“Man. I
should
have seen that.” I wanted to hug her. I wanted to wrap my arms around Natasha and hold her as close as I had held Sara earlier. But this sister didn’t want for holding. My arm around her shoulder at the poetry slam had been a huge step forward. Natasha would come to me if she wanted physical contact. “Does Gert know you’re fighting with the same things as her?”

“I don’t want to dump on Gran.”

“You might be able to give her some perspective. You’ve always been close to her, haven’t you?”

“Even when we hardly ever got to see them, Gran and Granddad were like my sun and moon. It was always peaceful out here in the country. When I was with Mom and Terry, there was . . . I don’t know exactly how to explain it . . . an edgy feeling. I thought I liked it when I was a kid. I never knew what was coming next, and life felt like one big adventure after another. And then . . . I guess when I found out how the adventure got funded, things weren’t so good anymore. There were six of us girls around the same age, and I wanted to impress the others so much. I acted tough, like I didn’t care, or like I thought it was as great as they did. But behind their backs, I was begging to get out. I know those girls hate me now, wherever they are.