The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (31 page)

It was the first passion I had heard in her voice. Slowly, I turned my head. “Ohh.”

Natasha’s protective circle of greenery extended to the mesh, but she had made a half-moon shape that left one edge completely open to the outside where the greens met the enclosure’s sides. From the outside, it looked like nothing was there, even though she would have been clearly visible from above. She could easily move to hide from anyone outside of the enclosure, leaving her nest empty and looking no more manmade than the other plant life Art had dragged in from the forest.

And now, on the other side of the wire, stood the orangutan we had been hunting for two days. I could smell him. I had been smelling him for some time, but I had been so wrapped up in Natasha’s words that I had not paid attention to my other senses. Chuck poked his fingers through the mesh, palm up. Without prompting, Natasha reached out and tapped them with her own fingers. One, two, three, four, five. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Natasha sucked in her lower lip, and I knew she had forgotten me. Then, she made a pincer out of her hand and used it to tickle Chuck’s fingers. One two three four five.

The orangutan peeled back his lips from his teeth and gurgled breathy laughter. At close range, his grin didn’t look at all funny, and his burble would have been easy to mistake for a threat. I had a sudden insight about why Gary hadn’t come back. Art had told me, “It tried to save me.” Chuck tried to save Art. Natasha said something about Gary not finishing Stan. Chuck did that. The orangutan bought the injured man time. Chuck went after Gary when Gary beat Art, and he intervened again to help Stan. And now he was protecting Natasha, and by extension, us. It was impossible to know what he understood, but he wasn’t incapable of emotion, and he had lived with humans for probably his whole life.

“Look at that,” I heard Lance whisper. He was right behind me, though I hadn’t heard him approach.

“You do this much?” I asked Natasha.

“All night,” she said. The ape pulled out a hunk of cantaloupe from behind his back with the other arm and mashed it against the mesh. “He’s been feeding me,” Natasha said. “He’s so sweet.”

In my hip pocket, my phone trilled. I had barely picked it up when Marguerite shrieked in my ear: “You’ve got to get out of there! That wasn’t Gert Oeschle at the house! I don’t have time to explain . . .”

“Nana!” I shouted.

At the noise, Chuck reared back.

“She’s OK. Your friends did something to that other woman and they called to warn me. But listen, we’re all three locked into the shack up here, and he’s coming after you and Lance.” A loud crash echoed across the line.

“What? Who?”

“That was Alex. He’s going to bust down the door, but it’s taking a while.”

“Who slammed it in the first place?”

“How should I know? He slammed the door and yelled at us after Alexander came in. Go! He’s going to come find you next!”

Standing as close as he was, Lance heard. “We have to go,” he said.

Natasha’s joy vanished as fast as it had come. “It’s Gary, isn’t it?” she said.

I nodded. I was afraid she would retreat back into herself. But she said, “We can’t let him hurt the orangutan.” She spoke in a tone I wouldn’t have believed possible a few minutes earlier. “Go, go!” She made shooing motions at Chuck, then darted away, exiting her nest in the same way I had come. “He’ll leave if I go,” she shouted to Lance and me.

Barefoot as she was, she still ran ahead of us to exit the enclosure. What happened next felt like it came in slow motion. She bolted out into the woods, the door crashed shut behind her, and for a moment Gary materialized, slamming home the padlock in a fluid motion, then turning toward Natasha. She heard the noise, looked over her shoulder once, then kept running. “You can’t catch me!” she shrieked. But Gary could catch her, and he meant to. She had barely a two-step lead on him, and youth wasn’t giving her much in the way of speed. Gary moved to close the distance between them.

And then Chuck exploded from beside the enclosure, loping easily alongside the human he perceived as a threat to his girl. He backhanded Gary in almost the same way he had smacked Art out of the way yesterday, only harder. And where Art had flown out of the way and then bounced back to his feet, Gary spun all the way around. His body made an impossible arc and flipped over. He landed on his head with a crunch audible to Lance and me, trapped behind the enclosure’s mesh. I think he was dead before he struck the ground. I think he was dead as soon as that giant hand connected with his face in that backhanded slap.

Natasha stopped running and looked back at Chuck, who threw back his head and started a longcall. He emitted the initial screech, then his body suddenly stiffened and he crumpled inches from the human he had inadvertently killed.

“Everybody OK?” Christian asked. “I can’t believe how long he fought the dart. I think it may have caught in his hair. And when he got that burst of energy at the end, I thought he wouldn’t give in.” Then he indicated Gary. “Sorry about
him.
”

As he spoke, Christian clambered down the hill from the other side, skidding around tree stumps. Natasha stared from him to the fallen Chuck. Then she screamed, a sound of rage entirely worthy of her orangutan friend, and threw herself up the hill at Christian.

“He’s fine, Natasha,” I yelled. “Christian tranquilized him.”

“You’re lying,” Natasha screamed. “You’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying!” She changed course and threw herself on top of the prone animal instead of attacking Christian. “You’re lying!” she screamed again, then in the same hysterical tone, “He’s breathing! You didn’t kill him!”

“He’s fine,” Christian said. “Look.” He turned the dart gun so Natasha could see it. But she wasn’t looking. She buried her face in the ape’s fetid fur, like he was possibly her only friend left in the world. Maybe he was.

In the distance, I heard the wail of approaching police cars. “Art’s nephew has the key,” I said. “If you can get him out of the security shack, he’ll help you let us out, and we can maybe move Chuck in here until you can get a truck down to get him.”

Sunday dawned clear, and my mother and grandmother’s voices drifted up through the floor. “Pancakes,” Mama said.

“Waffles,” Nana argued.

I groaned, “Neither,” and buried my head under my pillow.

Margie said, “Sausage.”

Last night had been another long one, and the sky was barely light now. Marguerite, Alex, Lance, and I had been tied up with the police for hours after sunset. We would be dealing with the chaos resulting from Gary’s pornography ring for a long time, but remembering the way his body had twisted as it broke still made me shudder. Nobody deserved to die that way.

Tranquilized, Chuck had been moved into the temporary enclosure, and Christian planned to move him to the Ohio Zoo until our barn was finished and the whole complex passed inspection. Christian, ever the optimist, assumed our facility wasn’t about to be shut down for its inadvertent role in the scandal.

We did find out that Stan Oeschle was alive. He was airlifted to Columbus, and the full extent of his injuries was still unknown, but his condition was listed as serious but stable. Gert Oeschle was located, alive, in a Columbus hospital, recovering from the effects of poisoning Natasha said was administered by Gretchen. We were only able to obtain limited information on the phone, but the consensus seemed to favor Gert’s ultimate survival.

And then there was Natasha.

She retreated into herself as soon as the police arrived. She sat outside a cruiser on the ground and refused to speak. Marguerite tried to mother her, but Natasha shook off my sister’s hands and turned away from her words. I was busy with the orangutan when Marguerite stalked over to me. “You see if you can get anything out of her.”

“What? Who? The detective is a man.”

“Natasha.”
She projected disgust with my misplaced priorities.

Natasha had curled back up with her head against her knees, and she was rocking slightly. Someone had provided her with a sweat suit, and Alex had regained his shirt. We had Chuck on a makeshift litter, and Lance and I were helping push him while Christian tugged him forward. He was heavy, and even with Christian’s strength, the progress was slow.

“Tell her to come down here.” I turned back to the animal.

“Noel! What are you doing? Isn’t a child more important than a monkey?”

“He’s an ape, and Natasha doesn’t want our
pity.
”

“What are you talking about? She’s in
shock
!”

“She’s in misery. There’s a difference.”

“You have no
idea . . .
”

“Oh, yes I do.” I finally gave up pushing the orangutan and stood up. “When he,” I pointed to Alex, “pounded me into my apartment floor, do you know what hurt the worst?”

Marguerite shook her head.

“Watching my family watch me afterwards. You couldn’t hide the
pity,
and that made the humiliation so damned bad. So go up there and tell Natasha to come down here, and don’t get all maudlin about it. Tell her we need help getting the orangutan to safety, and she won’t hesitate.” I bent back down and flopped one of Chuck’s arms onto the stretcher.

Within a minute, Natasha was standing beside me. “She said you needed help.”

“This is going really slowly. The cops are busy doing police stuff, and we don’t have enough people pushing.”

“Why not get him?” She pointed to Alex.

“Because he tried to kill me one time, and I prefer to keep my distance.” I looked up at her as I spoke, but in the darkness, it was hard to gauge her reaction.

Finally, she said, “So what do you need me to do?”

“He’s so big, it’s hard not to drag the stretcher right out from under him. He keeps sliding off. If you get back here with me and help push and flop, Lance can go up with Christian and pull.”

She took Lance’s place, and we worked together until Chuck was a few feet from the enclosure door. My shoulder and back begged for our golf cart. “He tried to kill you?” Natasha asked.

“Damned near succeeded.”

“Well, how come he was with you earlier?”

“He’s a lot nicer now . . .”

“They all say that.”

She was protecting me. She was protecting the ape. She was protecting everybody but herself. “I know. That’s why I prefer to keep my distance. But we needed his help to find
you.
We knew there might be trouble here, and he wouldn’t be too easy to beat up.”

“I don’t guess so.”

Chuck was in. We pulled the stretcher free and exited, locking the door behind us. Christian would have a truck here before the orangutan woke, since a padlock would be a small obstacle to our new ape.

“What about you?” I asked her. “Your grandparents are both in the hospital. Will they let you go home alone?”

“No, and I don’t want to.”

“Are you going to stay with a friend?” I pressed.

She huffed through her nose and looked away. “I haven’t
got
any friends. They can probably find one of Gran’s friends, or I can go back into foster care for a few weeks. I’ve been there before. It’s not so bad, really.”

I didn’t realize Lance was listening until he spoke. “Stay with us.”

“Yes!” I echoed him immediately. “We’ve got a spare bedroom, and one way or the other, we’re going to need extra hands out at the sanctuary in the next few days.”

“I guess . . . I already know some of the smaller monkeys.” Her discomfort seemed to come from our offer, rather than from the way she had developed her familiarity with our residents.

“Good,” Lance said. “I’ll go figure out how to make it happen.”

Now, downstairs, Natasha said, “I can
cook,
” in a tone that suggested someone was trying to baby her out of the kitchen. We owed that kid something, and I struggled out from under the covers before Marguerite or my mother could drive her to anger with their pity. She needed our help. Everything she’d been through, and it was her hysteria that would probably save us from a media outcry about our homicidal ape when word of what happened last night reached the public. If Natasha was vocal enough, maybe more people than Lance and I might recognize Chuck’s heroism. And if I didn’t get downstairs soon, she was likely to get very vocal indeed with my mother and sister. Or else very quiet. I didn’t like the thought of either.

Our connection, slight though it was, felt real. And I had an obligation to protect her from their pity. I thought I might be able to help her better than anybody, even my sister. The girl might have a shot at recovery if she could maintain that relationship with the big ape. I doubted she could continue to maintain the illusion she had held up ever since she had come to her grandparents. School was liable to be hell when she went back in the fall. I didn’t see any way for her to pretend away the last four years of her life. I knew how much the sanctuary had helped me when I was broken and recovering, how much it mattered that I could throw myself into the needs of creatures who needed me. I hoped she could take similar comfort, if only for a little while.

The center. I groaned. We were surely going to be shut down. Even if we didn’t have to close because of our role in the pornography gang, I doubted the college would be interested in continuing to fund an institution with such an uncomfortable reputation. And Stan and his money couldn’t save us from everything.

It wasn’t all bad. Natasha was safe, and Art’s murderer lay dead. If Lance and I were allowed to keep it, we had a little home for two orangutans. It wasn’t a big space, but it was a beginning. I hoped it was one Natasha would help us foster into something larger.

The argument downstairs had expanded to include Brenda’s voice and a proposal of bacon. Then the doorbell rang. “Enough, I’m up!” I said to the room.

It was probably Hannah, Jan, or Mina. After we left to find Natasha, the false Gert—Gretchen—pulled a pistol on Nana to stop her from calling the police. She thought they were alone in the kitchen when she did it, but Jan had not gone with Hannah and Mina to break up the reception. She was actually in the bathroom. Jan was my Tae Kwon Do partner. And unlike me, Jan
had
been in her fair share of street fights, albeit many years before.