The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (15 page)

My eyes had gone dry and my butt and feet were numb. Our office was too small for three people, and all of us were sweaty, even with the door open. My phone had vibrated twice on my hip while we watched, and I needed urgently to return the call. Then Lance said, “I’m going to go back to the truck and advance frame by frame through that one.”

I sank back down in the chair, resigned to several more hours of staring at a computer without blinking. The detective looked as frustrated by Lance’s announcement as I felt. His expression asked
why
? Lance answered, “Maybe I saw something. It’s nagging me. We’ll leave after this, I promise. We’ve got good people here and we really are getting married tomorrow. Really.” This last was directed to me.

I breathed in and out, letting go of my tension. “It’s fine,” I said. “I want to know as badly as you do.”

“Thanks, honey,” he said, and squeezed my hand.

He scrolled through the truck scene for a few seconds, then stopped as the truck rolled past our security shack. The shack partially obscured the truck from the camera, which was mounted on the gate. “There,” Lance said.

At this slower speed, I could see what had caught his eye when the video was going much faster. “Ohh,” I breathed. “Oh, no. Oh,
Art.
”

“I don’t see a thing,” Detective Carmichael said.

“There,” Lance repeated, jabbing a finger at the screen.

“Tell me.” The detective was starting to sound angry again.

“Look.” I grabbed a pen and pointed at the screen’s fuzzy background. “Run back to the very first frame.”

Lance had some trouble doing this, as the computer wasn’t really set up to view this kind of recording at more than a cursory level. We were watching on a basic media player, and he was reversing and advancing by the click-and-drag-very-slowly method. But eventually, he got back to exactly the moment we were looking for.

“There, do you see that?” I used my pen to point at a blur.

Detective Carmichael asked, “What exactly am I looking at?”

I don’t think he needed me to tell him. But I said it anyway. “That’s a second animal. It rolls off the side of the truck and into the woods behind the shack too quickly. I can’t tell what it is.”

Again, we moved through the video, image by agonizing image. And finally, in a single frame, the film caught the second animal clearly.

We groaned in unison.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Carmichael said.

“I’m sorry,” I answered him. “We’re looking at another orangutan.”

He groaned again and started dialing his phone. It looked like the animal was thrown from the speeding truck, though it was difficult to know whether it had fallen or jumped. But why didn’t Art go out front to check it out? Shouldn’t the video have shown Art later walking or driving past the security shack?

“Yes sir, I’m still here. Yes, sir, I did hear you the first time. I’m leaving now. Sir, they identified a second orangutan.” The detective nodded to us and departed.

It was too much, there were too many questions, and I was exhausted. We alerted Christian, Trudy, and Darnell to the second animal’s presence and finally made our way back to our own truck. “We should be the ones spending the night here,” I said. The relief crew, as I had started thinking of our intern, volunteer, and Columbus import, said it was time for some watchful waiting. Most of the police had already gone home, and the orangutan would be sleeping.

“Now might be the perfect time to try and find it,” I argued.

“Possibly,” Lance agreed. “But now might also be the perfect time to get killed. The orangutans are
not
the only dangerous creatures in our woods. And we need to trust our people. Christian knows more about orangutans than either one of us. He’s already planning to move the bedding out of the trees tomorrow.”

“Why move it?” Volunteers had been placing bedding the whole time Art was wandering in those woods. But nobody had seen or heard anything unusual.

“Art had them put it up high because orangutans are arboreal in the wild. But in captivity, they are as likely to look for it on the ground.”

“OK. But shouldn’t we be here?” The sentiment felt as halfhearted as my body felt exhausted. We got in the truck.

Lance said, “Trudy has been interning with us for almost two years now. And Darnell is one of the best volunteers we have. We are getting married. We
must
go.” Lance started the engine, then added, “Art was a really good leader because he knew to trust his people. Right now, you and I are the leaders, and we have to do the same thing. They haven’t let us down all day. And they know to call us if things get out of hand.”

He was right. And I had been the one aching to leave not even a whole hour ago. It seemed like my desires yawed along with my grief for Art. Our lane was deserted, as the police had, after asserting control over the situation, left most of the actual investigation for the light of day. With nothing left to distract my attention, I reached for my phone to return the call that had buzzed back while Lance and I were sitting with Detective Carmichael. It was a call I dreaded.

I had left messages with Art’s two most recent graduates, Gary and Sally, and it was Sally trying to return my call while I was inside. This time, she answered on the first ring. “What’s up?” she asked. “You sounded all upset on my voice mail.”

“Sally,” I said, “I don’t know how to tell you this. We’ve got really bad news here, and we wanted you to hear it from us first.”

“OK, how bad are we talking? Did one of my chimps die? I was worried about Lolly’s blood sugar.”

“No, the chimps are fine. We got Lolly and Arrin both stabilized this past week. This is a lot worse.”

“What is it?”

“Art,” I said. And suddenly the rest of the words couldn’t move from my throat to my mouth. My chest constricted, my jaw locked, and tears coursed down my face again. Lance took one hand off the wheel to rub my neck. Finally, I got back enough control of my emotions to say, “Art’s been killed.”

“Ohhhh.” Sally made a sound like the wind had been let out of her. “That’s really bad. What happened?”

Haltingly, I related the day’s events, and by the time I finished, Sally and I were crying together. She asked, “What about Gary? Does he know yet?”

I said, “No, I haven’t been able to get a hold of him. It could be days before he can call back from Africa.”

“Haven’t you heard? He didn’t go,” Sally said. “Or not yet. He’s stuck with his mom in Philly until this Friday.”

“What? No, I thought he took off right after graduation.” This combined academic and practical approach to primatology was still relatively new, and Art’s students remained the only ones in the field. Gary and Sally were both slated to complete postdoctoral field research starting almost immediately after they got their degrees in hand. Sally was working for the National Zoo, and Gary was supposed to be headed for fieldwork in Africa.

“No, no. His mom broke her hip again. I think she lay there a day or so before anybody found her. I mean, nobody thinks about a sixty-year-old woman getting hurt that badly, and she still won’t tell her neighbors about the MS. Anyway, he’s here until Friday. She got stable today. Maybe he’s stuck in family mode. I’ll text him and try to get him to call you.” Sally knew how low the probability of my sending out an actual text was, let alone answering one from Gary. “Do you want me to tell him what happened if I talk to him first?”

“That might be good.”

“Yeah. If he calls me first, I’ll let you know.”

I thought it more likely that he would call Sally than me. She was politely not saying that Gary felt Lance and I complicated his research by refusing, along with Art, to allow him to increase the number of interspecies enclosures and experiment with putting animals together that wouldn’t have been near each other in the wild. “Thanks, Sally,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

After we’d hung up, I told Lance about Gary’s mother and said, “I guess we should send him a card or something while he’s still in the States this week.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry to hear she got hurt. I can’t imagine what it would have been like waiting for somebody to find her.”

We talked about Sally and Gary and Gary’s mother most of the rest of the way to my parents’ house, to avoid thinking about the center. But they weren’t topics we had any heart for, and we couldn’t keep it up long enough to make it all the way home. We fell silent until we rounded the last curve, when we saw flashing red and white lights and a dull orange glow. Something at Mama and Daddy’s was on fire.

In days gone by, Granton grew up along a train line. The line was long since gone, and after most of the town burned in the Depression, the other buildings had been torn down over the years. So now, my parents’ house sat alone at the end of a small wooded street. Because it wasn’t nestled into other buildings, it had survived the fire that claimed the rest of the village. Unfortunately, that meant there was no possibility of this fire
not
being on their property. Would it now be destroyed by the element that had taken the rest of the town?

Wordlessly, Lance accelerated, as if our speedy arrival could somehow reduce the damage.

“Maybe we
are
cursed,” I groaned.

“Surely Dad and Alex kept Mom out of there,” Lance said at the same time.

“Oh, no! She wouldn’t . . .”

“Yes,” Lance said. “She would. She would. Listen, Noel, after the wedding, you and I need to sit down. There’s stuff I haven’t ever told you about my mother. Stuff I should have brought up a long time ago. But I thought it was in the past, and it was a history I wanted to exorcise. If she’s burned your parents’ house, I’ll never forgive myself.”

But when we got there, my parents’ house was not on fire. In fact, I was so focused on the building on the other side of the two fire engines that I initially didn’t see the real source of the acrid, rubbery burning smell. Finally I found the flames and realized what was burning. It was sitting in the street under a couple of towering oaks. When I saw it, my eyes widened in recognition. I shrieked, “My car!” and threw myself out of the truck even before Lance could fully come to a stop.

I pelted forward at a run, blind to the danger ahead of me. I barely registered the sound of Lance’s door slamming behind me. He seized me around the waist before one of the burly firefighters standing back by the trucks could run to intercept us. It
was
my car, visible in the flames and the glare of our head-lamps. I lunged against Lance’s arms in a futile effort to save my little blue Mazda.

Technically, the truck—the beat-up rust bucket that Lance and I had been rattling around in all week—was Lance’s. It was the vehicle we used most, saving mine for distance trips or events where we needed to look presentable. The truck was scheduled to give out long before my little car. My car that I bought for myself brand-new, in the aftermath of my relationship with Alex. My car that I cleaned out weekly, took for timely routine maintenance, and splurged on custom seat covers for. My car that was burning in the street outside my parents’ home, with flames shooting up so high I feared they would ignite the oaks and maples along the drive.

“My car,” I sobbed over and over again. It was the final indignity to an impossible day, and when I stopped fighting Lance, I sank down onto the curb and bawled. He sat beside me, an arm around my shoulders, once again holding me while I fell apart. The reek of burning kept the car in the front of my mind and made it that much harder to stop crying.

At last, though, I realized that he and I weren’t alone. In the collection of feet gathered around us in a protective half circle, I recognized Mama’s pumps, Daddy’s practical loafers, and even Nana’s orthopedic clompers, the ones she called a pair of square Dutch barges. Another set of high heels could only belong to my sister, Marguerite, and the men’s dress shoes beside her had to be her husband Dag’s. On her other side, a pair of worn but expensive running shoes belonged to my niece Brenda, and behind Brenda, I saw my older niece Rachel’s smooth flats, and my youngest niece Poppy’s pink house slippers. A pair of little boy’s sneakers indicated my nephew, Bryce. Standing with them, a little apart but still close by, I saw a pair of cowboy boots. Those could only belong to one person.

“You,” I bellowed, leaping to my feet and charging toward Alex Lakeland. He backed quickly away. “Get away from my family,” I shouted at him. “How dare you come back into my life and do
this
to me?” My throat felt raw already from the smoke and all the crying, and now my voice started squeaking as I advanced and he retreated.

“How
dare
you?” I demanded again. “How
dare you
?”

My father’s voice cut through the fog of my rage. “Noel!” he called. “He didn’t do it. He was inside with us when it happened.”

“Don’t you defend him,” I snapped, rounding now on Daddy. “You have no idea what he might have done.”

Rushing to Daddy’s defense, Mama cried, “It was Sophia!”

“What?” I felt deflated, like a pumped-out bellows without any wind left.

“The police have already taken her away,” Marguerite added. “Alexander is waiting for a cab to take him to his hotel.”

Alex added, the first words he’d spoken to me in over ten years, “I rode here in your car with Mom and Pop or I’d already be gone.”

Lance asked, “Where’s Pop?” He wrapped his arm, which had been around my shoulders when I was sitting on the curb, around my waist instead.

“The police let him ride with them down to the station. I guess he’s still sleeping at your place tonight.”

“But, Mom?” Lance asked.

“She went kind of crazy,” Alex said. “Crazier than she had been, anyway.” Although he was answering Lance, Alex was looking at me. I hated for him,
him
of all people to see me this way, wretched and disheveled. My hands balled up into fists and I leaned hard into Lance.

Alex went on speaking, coming closer now, talking low, telling us what had happened between the time Lance left him and now. I barely heard him. Instead, I saw him. The closer he came, the better I could see. And by the time he reached us, I realized the only thing this Alex had in common with the man who had tried to kill me was those ostentatious boots and the ten-gallon hat that he wasn’t even wearing but flipping around in his hands.