The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (12 page)

In the first six weeks, when it seemed like all I could really be grateful about was that the disorientation from the head trauma decreased the more I used my mind, Lance waited patiently for me to think through concepts that were my own to begin with and hid the frustration he must have felt when I simply couldn’t remember. When physical therapy for my slowly healing left shoulder left me in tears, Lance put a pen in my right hand because he knew I craved work to overcome my thousand degrees of guilt and self-doubt. When my family watched me with pity as I limped around, and jumped in to help me with even the smallest tasks, Lance bought me space to do things on my own, no matter how long it took.

I resisted my growing emotions for him, frightened of walking into a rebound relationship that would only end in sorrow, but I slowly came to understand that I loved Lance deeply, more passionately than I had ever loved his brother. Our first real date followed the night I hobbled across the stage to collect my PhD a few minutes after he collected his.

In the years since we moved in together, Lance had resumed conversations with his brother, clipped discussions that rarely lasted more than a few minutes. They had never completely lost contact. But Alex did not call the house, only Lance’s cell. And from what little I overheard, most of their talk centered around their parents.

Mostly, I left the room and tried not to think at all when Alex called. But now, his face was impossible to drive out of my mind.

Mama turned on Lance. “That horrible brother of yours,” she began. She clutched her ladle so hard her whole arm shook. And then Nana eased it out of her fingers so Mama could sit down.

I hastened to say, “But Alex wasn’t anywhere near the center today, so don’t worry.”

“Yes he was,” Lance cut in. He took my arm as he spoke, cradling and supporting it, holding on to me in case I fell.

“What?” I nearly spilled my own soup jerking my arm away.

“He came out to talk about Mom. He wanted to see me in person. I guess he got there right after we left, but Art put him to work.”

“He was
there
?” I demanded. “He could have . . .”

“I don’t
think
so.” Lance was clearly choosing his words carefully. “Trudy says Art swore her and Darnell to secrecy, then lied and told Alex we would be right back after we got the license. Art meant well. He couldn’t possibly understand how serious this is with Mom. Anyway, Alex got sick of waiting, and after he’d helped with primate lunch, he went home. He was long gone from the sanctuary by the time Art went missing.”

“He would have been furious when he found out we weren’t coming back!” I said, backing further away from my fiancé. “What if he didn’t leave at all? What if he drove down the lane and waited?”

Lance shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said again. “But I guess we might see that on the security video. If he did wait, and Art stumbled around . . . it still doesn’t make sense, though. I was
with
Bub at our place when Trudy called. And Bub’s got other stuff on his mind right now. I don’t think so.”

“Where was the branch?” I demanded, trying now to concentrate on that. If I thought about the branch, then I wouldn’t think about Alex. But instead of distracting me, thinking about the branch made it worse. Alex had always been one for using whatever was on hand.

“I don’t know,” Lance said.

“So has anybody actually seen it? How do they know?” What if it wasn’t a branch? Had I looked the way Art had? So bloody that I was barely recognizable? Hard to say. Most of the damage had been done to my shoulder, back, and skull. Alex had purpled the left side of my face, but I’d managed to shield those bones from breakage.

“Trudy overheard the police radios,” Lance said. Then he crossed his arms and sat back down to his own cold meal. Trudy was a dispatcher for the sheriff’s office who volunteered at the sanctuary before Art charmed her away from that job with promises of an underpaid internship. He persuaded her to go back to school and get a completely different degree by offering her less money and the nosebleed insurance that Ironweed gave its grad students. She jumped at the chance. Never having liked police work, she wasn’t a hard sell. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered if she had loved it. Art could coax anybody. His love for his work made the listener want to share it. And it was good now that Trudy knew most of the force, a little bit of police procedure, and every single code that squawked out of the police radios.

If she said the police found a branch, and the police thought someone used the branch to beat Art, then what she said was certainly the case. “Oh God,” I said. I wished I hadn’t jerked away from Lance. I wished Mama hadn’t sat down beside the soup. In spite of all my efforts, all I could think about was fists. Alex’s fists. And the telephone base.

Lance might not think his brother had killed Art, but the coincidence seemed too great for me. It pulled me back a decade, and suddenly I couldn’t stand up any longer as memory took away the strength in my legs and made me sit down. Lance moved nearer as I started crying again.

I leaned into my fiancé, trying to get myself under control. Lance pulled me in close, stroking my back and saying, “It’s going to be OK,” over and over, until my ragged tears wound down.

Almost as soon as I’d regained my composure, my phone rang. Trudy. “Damn, I meant to call Lance,” she said. “I know you’re distraught right now, Noel, but we’ve got trouble. These cops have no idea what to do with our primates. I had to take a gun away from the spiders.”

“A what?”

“A service revolver. Spider monkey picked it straight up with its tail.”

“Oh dear Lord, a gun!” I said, envisioning the harm
that
could cause.

“A gun what?” Mama asked.

At the same time, Lance exclaimed, “Who has a gun?”

“The spiders got one,” I said.

“I got it back!” Trudy was quick to clarify. “And I don’t think it could have fired. That’s not our biggest problem, though.”

“It isn’t?”

“No,” she said. “They don’t understand that even if an orangutan
could
have taken a branch to Art like that, it
wouldn’t
have done so. And they can’t even be formally sure it was a branch that . . .” Her voice quavered, because she had as much trouble talking about what had happened as the rest of us.

Finally, she continued, “If they see the orangutan, they’re going to shoot it on sight.”

“We’re coming,” I said, and hung up.

There wasn’t anything we could do in the hospital, and there wasn’t any reason for us to malinger in the emergency waiting room, where we must have made a strange sight for the people coming in with broken arms and bloodied faces. There was a grieving room we could have gone to, but Rick’s wife and children had arrived and were there with him. And he was Art’s real family. All of it. He had been so kind to let us stay with him to say goodbye, but it seemed inappropriate to disturb such a sharp and private grief any further.

We didn’t need to be taking up any more room out here. Trudy needed us back at the sanctuary to save the animal that Art insisted had tried to save him. “Can you tell . . . um . . . my brother that there’s an emergency at the animal sanctuary?” I asked a nurse. “He wanted me to wait for him, but I can’t.”

It was true. Rick had said, “I think I need to talk to you,” in a choked voice as his wife came in. But whatever he might have needed to talk to us about would keep. I was
not
going to call him when he needed to be with his family and when we needed to get back to work.

As we left, Mama said, “I guess I’ll call the guests. Do you think Sophia could help me do that?”

Lance and I exchanged a glance. Mama thought the wedding was off. I embraced her tightly before I said a word. I was so grateful that she could recognize the depth of our tragedy, and that she was willing to throw over her perfect chart for a crisis. “Only the ones coming to the rehearsal dinner,” I said. “Can the rest of you walk through it without us tonight? I think we probably have the simplest jobs tomorrow.”

“Are you
sure
?” Mama asked.

It struck me, as it had when Lance asked me if I still wanted to marry him, that Mama wasn’t asking the smaller question. She didn’t only want to know if I wanted to get married tomorrow. She wanted to know if I wanted to get married at all. She remembered, still, every bit as painfully as I did, what happened the last time I was engaged.

“Yes,” I said. It came out choked, like I was talking around tears again. But really, it was the first time since the craft store that I hadn’t felt like crying.

She hugged me. “OK,” she said. “We’ll figure out something.” And Lance and I were off again in a race to the center.

“He could have done it, Lance,” I said, as we barreled along the same stretch of road for the third time in a day. I meant Alex, and Lance didn’t waste time pretending otherwise.

“Could have,” Lance said. “But I don’t think so.”

I began listing the strikes against Alex. “We have no idea when anybody decided Art was really missing in relation to when he left. Alex might have had time to . . .”

Lance interrupted me with a shake of his head. “I don’t think so,” he said yet again. “It’s not the timing. I’m with you there. But he’s . . . he’s not the same person we used to know, Noel. He’s changed. Really changed.” The truck wasn’t eating up the road like it had been on our last trip this way, but I was still amazed we didn’t find ourselves ticketed. Lance went on, “You’ll have to see him before you really believe me. But that’s not why I think he’s innocent.”

“What, then?” I tried to remember if I’d ever heard Lance actually defend his brother before. Ever. They hadn’t formally split until Alex battered me to within an inch of my life, but I didn’t think they were close before then. Other than the diminutive “Bub,” Lance had never showed any affection for Alex that I could remember, nor had Alex for Lance.

Now, he cleared his throat. “The reason isn’t a good thing.” He spoke slowly, crafting his thoughts before each word. This was how Lance talked when he was working through a puzzle. Crosswords and primate research alike received this treatment. It irked me for Alex to get that same level of respect. Then Lance said, “Let’s go about it this way. When did your dad’s first credit card go missing?”

“What has that got to do with your brother?”

“Work with me here,” Lance said.

“OK.” I tried to clear my mind and think, but it was nearly impossible. Finally, I said, “Months ago, I think.”

“It happened once, months ago. I mean recently.”

“Then I don’t know. And I don’t see why it matters.”

“I think,” he said, “and in retrospect I should have seen it, that it was the Friday after we picked up Mom from the airport and brought her to dinner at your folks’ place. Right before your first dress fitting.” He gave that a minute to sink in. “I’m pretty sure the excess charges started that night.”

“Lance, what are you telling me?”

He took a deep breath and said, “My mother has been stealing your father’s cards. Every time she sees him. And then she’s been taking your car and driving into Columbus to run them up.”

“She has
not
!” I said. “Her friends have been shuttling her. She’s only taken my car on one trip when I begged her to get my oil changed because I’m past due. That’s exactly the kind of ridiculous accusation Alex would make. I think he made this whole thing up, and the part about her wanting to wreck the house, too.”

“Noel, she admits it,” Lance told me.

“Of course she does,” I snapped. “She’s backing up her . . .”

“No!” he interrupted me. “She denied it until Alex showed me the odometer and the shopping bags. Unless the techs at the lube shop botched the distance to the next oil change, she’s put close to three hundred fifty miles on the car she’s claimed she wasn’t driving. And the whole guest room closet is full of what she’s bought.”

I sank back against the seat, flabbergasted. “So your mother has been stealing
my
father’s credit cards to do what? Why?”

Lance said, “Anything at all to drive the wedge. Anything at all.”

“She really hates me that much?” I asked.

Lance said, “I don’t know if it’s directed at you, or if she’s gone back around the crazy bend. Do you know what she bought?”

“No,” I said. “What? At this point, I don’t think anything would surprise me.” Mama had confided in me that there were, between the four cards, close to five thousand dollars in unauthorized charges.

“Casserole dishes.”

“And what else?”

“Nothing else,” he said. “Two hundred ninety-two casserole dishes. I had to count them.”

It was the final thing my brain couldn’t process that day. Marriage licenses, centerpieces, Art’s death, and my future mother-in-law plotting against me with casseroles. “My God, Lance. I wish I’d known this earlier. We could have floated some damned votives in those and skipped the whole centerpiece shopping trip.” And then we both laughed so hard that Lance had to pull over to the side of the road with tears streaming down his face.

“OK,” I finally said. “But how does that exonerate Alex? I will concede that she might have him distracted, but he’s the only person I know capable of the kind of violence it would take to . . . to . . .” My hysterical laughter threatened to turn ugly again, as my mind flashed to Art’s ruined face.

“It doesn’t,” Lance agreed. “Not entirely. But it makes me think we’re still looking for someone. He didn’t even stay at the center long enough for us to have gone out and returned. And I’ve got that from Trudy and Darnell both. He stayed for an hour, slogged around a couple of buckets, and left. He wanted to tell me about Mom in person, but he didn’t dare leave her alone for much longer than that.”

“That’s what he says.” I wasn’t letting the man who had nearly killed me off the hook so easily.

“It’s what he says, and I believe him,” Lance told me. “We need to see the security video.”

Now
that
was something we could agree on.

It was heading on toward sunset on the most insane, horrible day ever when Lance and I arrived once more at the Midwest Primate Sanctuary. Even the sign out front brought Art to mind. He had envisioned interconnected sanctuaries, not merely accredited affiliated institutions, but a nationwide primate rescue network. Midwest Primates was supposed to be the first, with five others to follow around the country. I didn’t know if his dream would ever come to fruition now.