The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (42 page)

Lance and Darnell braced themselves and lifted a metal bar from across a door, then pulled the handle. The door was practically frozen shut, but slowly it ground open, revealing a set of stairs. “I’m not going down there,” Natasha said.

“I’ll stay up here with you,” Lance and I volunteered together. That pit oozed claustrophobia.

“Stand out of sight inside the door,” Darnell coaxed. “Let Trudy and I go down and look around. Once we see what we have here, we’ll all leave. The two of us can come back later with the police.”

“Who’s going to see us?” I protested. Nonetheless, we crowded into the entryway and turned on our flashlights. We could have
had
some police if not for Natasha’s insistence on getting this over with now. If we could have waited for either Deputy Greene and his partner or the pair currently sitting at the ice cream parlor with Mama and the twins, Darnell and Trudy wouldn’t have needed two trips. But Deputy Greene was already going to have his hands full until he deposited Tony Gibson with Drew, and Drew himself had inherited a busy afternoon. And, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the Muscogen County police department
did
have problems other than ours to solve today. If their senior detective hadn’t been one of the victims of this crime, we never would have merited as much attention as we were already getting.

Lance and I shone our lights as Trudy and Darnell descended through cobwebs. Natasha turned away and looked outside.

The place stank of mildew. “It’s cleaner downstairs,” said Natasha. “Or it was. But not much.” She called down to Trudy and Darnell, “He used to have a bunch of filing cabinets behind the props along the back wall, but don’t get caught up in those. There’s one wall that isn’t concrete in there, and he’s got a hidey hole in it a little like the one where Will was stuck back at Lance and Noel’s house. Try there.”

In the distance, the sanctuary was audible, a constant accompaniment of warbles and hoots, and my purse had started chuffing and grunting. It seemed Chuck was ready to chat today after all. That might be the
perfect
distraction for Tasha right now. Distracted by this, I initially failed to realize the basement sprang to life with racket when Darnell and Trudy descended.

Darnell whistled. “Lance, Noel, you’ve got monkey problems,” he called.

“What?”

A creaking crash, then, “Found the hole, but it’s empty. I said you have monkey problems.”

Natasha held up a hand for silence. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.

“The basement or my purse?”

Tasha shook her head. “Out there,” she whispered.

Then I did hear it. Somebody was crashing through the forest toward us. “Trudy, Darnell, help! Who’s there?” I had a glimpse of someone large, and then a human shape blotted out the light.

“Noel!” Ace nearly knocked me down the stairs.

“It’s okay! It’s Ace.” For a moment, my gut unclenched.

Now, the noise from my purse was unmistakable. “Chuck!” Tasha took the purse and rooted out the tablet. “But you shouldn’t leave him alone with his end, Ace! He’ll toss it, and . . .”

My muscles tightened again. Ace hadn’t run all this way to tell us Chuck found the chat program. “What are you doing here?”

Drew was a solid man, tall, square, and muscular. But his brother Ace was enormous. There wasn’t room for him and us in that tiny space. “You didn’t answer your phone,” he gasped. “Somebody followed you down here.”

“Yeah, you!” Natasha still hadn’t figured out Ace wasn’t here about Chuck’s new enrichment program.

“No. It’s nice enough for Chuck to be outside this afternoon, and I thought we’d try again with that computer. Then another car pulled up and stopped beside your van, and a couple of folks got out. They didn’t pay me any mind when I hollered. I don’t know where they went, though. Thought I’d have found them—”

The door slammed behind Ace. Forced forward, he pushed us all down the first two steps.

“Hey!” For a big man, he could move fast. He spun around and shoved, even as the bar crashed down on the other side.

Natasha gasped.

“Tasha, hang in there with me. I’ll get your inhaler.” I started fumbling through my purse.

“They were looking for this,” she babbled. “Ivy, and Charles. I bet they’ve been following us every time we’re even nearby in case we show them. I bet it’s why your chair guy got so bent out of shape. I bet
he
knows where it is, or they think he does, or . . . or . . . he thinks they think he does . . .”

Or else he slammed the door himself.
That fear sent prickles down my neck.

“Down. Get down here,” bellowed Darnell. “Let Trudy and me up to the top.”

I didn’t think Natasha would follow, but then she led the way. “Back door! Come on. It doesn’t lock.”

“No, you stay put down there,” Darnell ordered. “For all we know, the person who slammed the door at our end is waiting at the other.”

But Natasha was speeding down. “Wait, Tasha.”

“I can’t
stay
down here.”

I had the impression of more concrete, dank and unfinished, as she pulled me through. And the noise of monkeys down here made conversation almost impossible. At a fast glance, I saw a dozen carriers jammed against the wall. How long had those animals been here? When had they eaten? Been watered?

There was a bed shoved up into one corner. While I was distracted with the monkeys, Tasha had run to it. “Help me!” She handed me the tablet, where one huge orangutan eye gazed at me.

“Tasha, wait.”

“Noel, I can’t!”

Keying off of our emotions, the monkeys in the cages screamed. Ace grabbed the bed. He yanked it free with one meaty fist and went to work on a wooden door behind the bed. The layer of dust seemed thinner here, the cobwebs fewer. “This end of the room’s been used, guys. And if there isn’t a third exit, Darnell’s right. Somebody could be at the other end of the passage waiting.”

“Back up,” Ace said, and he started kicking. Three hard blows, and the door came down. This wasn’t any show of martial arts. It was adrenaline and strength. He was as panicked as Natasha.

“We need to—”

My voice died in my throat.

Ivy Dearborn stood in a tunnel, just clear of the fallen door. My flashlight illuminated an axe in her hands. Most likely
our
axe. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I saw dried blood on the head. “Trudy!”

Could Trudy hear me over the monkeys?

Ace could have jumped her. He was big enough, and he’d just driven down a huge piece of wood. Instead, he threw his hands over his head without being asked. “Don’t!” he squeaked.

Behind us, Trudy and Darnell were shouting, but their words were lost. Ivy called, “Throw your weapons down the stairs and join us.
Now.
” She took a swing at Ace with the axe, and we all jumped backward.

Trudy shouted down, but I couldn’t hear her.

“Axe,” Lance yelled. Ivy swung again. This time, when we retreated, Ace shoved Natasha and me behind him, and he and Lance formed a protective shield. Chivalrous, but stupid, because we were being backed against the bed, and I was the only one with any kind of hand-to-hand training.

“Noel, I
can’t stay here.
” Natasha gasped and wheezed. The monkeys nearly drowned her out.

“Hang with me,” I said. Then, inspired, I added, “Hang with Chuck.” Ivy had not seen the tablet. Or if she had, she hadn’t considered its importance. In my hand, an enlarged orangutan nostril floated into view. Too far away to pick up on the panic, Chuck chuffed amusement.

When I was in eighth grade, a classmate got his hands on a musical flip-top lighter. Our school was slow to fund buildings and furniture, so we still had wooden seats that had been out of date a decade before. One day, when we had a particularly odious substitute teacher, my classmate flipped open the lighter so it would play, slid it under his leg, and let the sub prowl the room trying to figure out who had the radio. When I later asked why she couldn’t pinpoint him, he said, “The wood disperses the sound.”

He flashed into my mind when I realized Ivy didn’t know what I was holding.
Wood disperses the sound.
The bed had a wooden headboard. I shoved the tablet into Natasha’s hands and moved them behind her back. I pushed her, up onto the bed, with the tablet jammed between her body and the bed-frame. “Breathe slow,” I told her. Her hands trembled, but she nodded. “Breathe and talk to the orangutan.” Nearly at once, Chuck chuffed again softly. Damn, I’d forgotten to turn up the volume.

“What the hell was that?” I demanded when Ivy failed to notice.

“Don’t try to distract me.” Had she seen us messing with the tablet behind Ace? I didn’t think so. What little illumination we had came from our dropped flashlights, scattered around our ankles, and every few seconds, Ivy jerked her head from side to side, trying to locate the screeching monkeys. Chuck made another noise, this one louder, and I mentally thanked Natasha both for calming down and for being agile enough to turn up the volume without seeing what she was doing.

“It’s the orangutan!” I didn’t have to feign hysteria. “He’s out again! Ace! I thought you had it fixed.”

“What?” Ace was not following my game. “No! I don’t know what he’s doing once he moves that camera, Noel. But he’s never gotten out in the day before. I swear nothing—”

“Chuck!” called Natasha. “Chuck, it’s me! Help me, Chuck, because I’m losing it down here.”

I eased out from behind the men and gently twisted Lance’s arm when he tried to hold me back. Ivy couldn’t see any better than we could. If she was shadowy to us, then so were we to her.

“Shut up, all of you! And call off your monkey.” Ivy shifted slightly, her arm wavering.

“You don’t call off a great ape!” shouted Trudy from almost behind her in the semi-dark. Ivy whipped around to see who had spoken, and Trudy enflamed us with her flashlight.

Ivy ran at Trudy as a rhesus macaque skittered into view in front of the flashlights on the floor. Ivy screamed and swung wildly, missing its tail. It had been coming to inspect our flashlights, but now it turned and ran up her leg.

Ivy shrieked and dropped the axe. She flung out her arms in an effort to throw the monkey, but it only clung harder, and, panicked, it bit her. “It’ll give me rabies!”

I kicked her in the knees. This wasn’t tae kwon do. It was from a women’s self-defense class. As soon as she fell, Lance dove onto her legs, immobilizing her with his own weight. Ace kicked the axe away. The monkey bit her ear, and, not satisfied with that result, screeched like a banshee.

Trudy stood over Ivy with the gun. “Don’t move,” she said. “You’re under arrest.”

I spared a glance behind me. Natasha, who I had expected to see collapsed and struggling to breathe, instead hunched over the tablet in her lap, tapping the screen with each finger of one outspread palm. She was smiling. One, two, three, four, five. It was an old game she and Chuck had played often face to face. She tickled his palms by tapping them with her fingers. Watching her do it was, apparently, as funny as having her do it in person. The orangutan’s chuffing laughter increased in intensity until he was downright cackling.

Natasha held up the tablet close. “Hey,” she told the ape, “good to see you.”

“What’s going on down there?” shouted Darnell.

“It’s okay, come down!” Lance called.

“No, I’ve got problems up here. Trudy, can you—? No. Hang on . . .”

The door grated open, and Drew bellowed into the entrance, “Ironweed police! Drop your—you don’t look like Ivy Dearborn in the least.”

“It’s us,” shouted Darnell. “How do you know who’s down here?”

They descended, their voices rising to be heard over the monkey chatter. “We’ve apprehended a man we believe to be Charles Dalton, but you’ll have to tell us for sure. He looks
nothing
like those photos. Ace said there were two, a man and a woman, so I was expecting Ivy.”

“Ivy’s here,” I called. “And I doubt she’s leaving under her own steam.”

“Ace, you down there?” Drew shouted.

“I’m here.”

“Good. I’m glad you’re all right. I’d have had some serious explaining to do to Mom and Dad if you got hurt.”

“Thanks for coming so fast, man.”

“Thanks for calling.”

“You called Drew?” I was frankly shocked. It wasn’t that I thought Ace would lack the presence of mind to phone the cops if things got bad. It was more that I thought the brothers’ personal enmity would have prevented him from doing it.

“Yeah, if he’s going to be the local law, I better make him do
something
to earn his pay.”

Dear Nora:

Thank you for giving my daughter the courage to fight her worthless ex in court, but now she’s getting remarried, and
I
have a problem. The groom’s mother has chosen the same outfit as I have for the wedding. I don’t want to cause friction, but all the books say I get first choice. The wedding’s in a month. What do I do?

MOTB

Dear MO

Whatever the dress is, take it back! Short of the gown itself, the hurt feelings aren’t worth the victory! Besides, I don’t care if the wedding’s tomorrow. I can whip up something that will drop that woman’s jaw. Think about your budget and meet me at the
Free Press
Thursday morning. Be sure to bring your daughter’s colors!

Nora

“Santa’s outside!”

No, Santa finished stuffing your stocking at two o’clock this morning.
“I’m coming, Sara. Let me find a robe. Lance, get out of bed.”

“Come see, come see!”

William joined his sister, “Santa’s Claus! Santa’s Claus!”

As I shuffled into the hall, William was followed by the middle-aged rescue dog we had gotten him for an early Christmas gift. It slept in Will’s bed now, in place of his sister. Sara had moved to her own room, where her pillow was occupied by a somewhat snobbish cat that barely tolerated the rest of our ministrations but came immediately to our daughter’s purring call.

I stumbled to the front room, our front room, in our own home, behind the boy and dog. But I felt a pang of sympathy for whichever of our neighbors was celebrating Christmas with a trip to the hospital when I saw what the kids were hollering about. “Honey, I don’t think Santa drives an ambulance.” Then the driver turned off the lights and swung down, revealing a full Santa suit. Understanding dawned. “I guess he does sometimes. But I think this is a delivery for your big sister. Wake her up quietly.”