The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (20 page)

Marguerite asked, “Didn’t you say you’d hardly seen him in the last few weeks?”

“Because of Sally and Gary’s graduating. Oh, I see. Maybe he was staying away on purpose.”

“It’s a thought,” she said.

“He may have known something about the animals to make him think he could walk up to the one. Although that’s still colossally stupid.”

Marguerite seemed to be more of the cops’ mind. She let me bounce ideas off of her all the way to my house, but she kept making me promise to take anything I figured out from my home office back to the police. Then, as she pulled into my driveway, she scolded, “Now we could hold the rehearsal without you last night. Lance’s college friends and the minister were very gracious about that, by the way. But you will
not
be married by proxy. The wedding is at six. You
must
be at Mama’s by five to shower, get your hair done, and get your dress on. Sooner is better.”

“All right,” I told her. “Thank you.” Then I hugged her quickly and got out of the van, before she could change her mind and speed away without dropping me off.

I’d hardly let myself in the front door before the crunch of Lance’s tires announced that he had arrived to join me. “Hey, you eat yet?” he greeted me.

I was still reasonably full from the shower, but I joined him while he put together a sandwich out of the refrigerator. I asked, “Did my parents ever tell you what they were up to?”

“You mean the shower? Yeah, when I went out to talk to your dad about the roses on my way out, he clued me in. So I guess we’ve got a bunch more stuff coming this way.”

“Yeah. Margie’s van is loaded up with it. They’ll bring it over tomorrow. She’s all on wedding setup today.”

“Anything useful?”

I said, “I don’t know. Some of it is nice. Mama and Daddy got us more of our plates and those stoneware mugs. And Marguerite framed us a fantastic print of chimps in the wild. But a lot of it . . . I don’t know what we’ll do with a Tiffany lamp or an expensive vase.”

“We could put flowers in it,” Lance said.

“How you get these ideas. I never would have thought that through.”

“And don’t forget we have five thousand dollars in casserole dishes to return.”

“Stolen casserole dishes.”

“Do you want to see them?”

“No. How were things out at the center this morning?” It felt abnormal. Here we were sitting at the table as if we didn’t have a wedding to attend in four hours or as if Art hadn’t been killed last night.

“The traps are all laid. Christian was right there helping us lay out additional pads this morning. Actually, he didn’t think I needed to be there at all.”

The hope was that the orangutans, who were clearly used to humans, would expect us to provide their meals. Even if they weren’t willing to come right up to the barn, they might settle down for an evening someplace easy for us to dart them. The big fellow had hitched a ride on Olivia’s fruit truck. He either knew or smelled that it meant food. So it was probable they would look for the sources of bedding humans might provide rather than trying to make their own.

It hadn’t worked last night, but nothing had been down on the ground then. Trudy and Darnell had rallied some of our most trusted volunteers to form a round-the-clock on-site crew, and they all went around in pairs. Nobody worked alone, and all of them, according to Lance, felt adamantly that we needed to be off getting married.

All we could do was hope the animals would get interested in the piles of fruit and blankets and come in. But other than that glimpse on video, nobody had heard a peep out of the second orangutan. Although the first one had sounded off several distinctive longcalls after its successful truck raid, it hadn’t been heard or seen for nearly a full day now. We would absolutely have known if the animal was still making longcalls. The sound is like a cross between a pig’s squeal and a man’s groan, and it carries for miles. There really was nothing left to do but wait and see whether we found them first or the police did. If it was us, Christian Baker was still on hand to make sure things ran smoothly. If it was the police, I didn’t hold out much hope that the animals would live.

Christian was a good man to have at the helm, and everyone was glad to see Lance off. They wouldn’t have been happy to know what he was going off to do. There wasn’t anything for us in Art’s office at the sanctuary. His computer hard drive had been claimed by the cops, and his files, which we knew by heart anyway, held no answers. We knew how to hack his e-mail, but doing so from the center seemed terribly unwise, and there was a chance that he had left us a clue in our own basement.

While Lance and I were talking, I realized someone had left me a voice mail at some point in the morning. I checked it briefly. The message said, “Hey, it’s Rick, Art’s nephew. I think . . . can you call me when you get a chance?” The message time was seven fifteen. Sometime during the breakfast-dress chaos, then.

I tried to return the call but landed in
his
voice mail and continued the game of telephone tag with, “I got your message. Give me a ring when you get a chance.” Of course, I said that as I headed down into our basement, the original cell phone dead zone. There were ten text messages that I did not check. Probably Rick as well. Anybody who knows me knows I don’t text. If it’s important, they call.

It might have stymied our cell phones, but the basement was fine for our computers. Our router worked pretty much anywhere in the house, and we kept the grant work in our home office. There was always something happening at the sanctuary, and our offices were right there in the barns, making administrative activities difficult. Art had joked for years about adding an admin building so we could get some paperwork done without driving ten miles away. But we ran on a shoestring. An administration building was not in our budget. So the ongoing and funded grant projects were in our basement and the rejected ones were in Art’s office at the college. If he’d left his records at the college, or if it wasn’t in e-mail, we weren’t likely to find anything. But we had to try.

We knew all of Art’s passwords, because they were all variations on the same thing: Pr1mat3. He used it at the center, at home, and at school, with sticky notes on the monitor to remind himself how many threes to put at the end and whether he was using a lowercase i or the number one that month. Only insecure if you knew the basic password or understood what “i, two threes in login” or “one, four threes in e-mail” might mean.

We did know, and we exploited it. But even before Lance navigated to Art’s e-mail, I found a file marked
Orangutan
in the big cabinet labeled
Research.
He wasn’t trying to hide anything at all, if one knew where to look and had time to bother. Which was much more like the man I knew than the one I’d seen yesterday. Marguerite really had a point about him staying away from us for more than the graduation. We had come here so many times when Art was alive. I couldn’t count the number of Saturdays we had spent working out grant proposals in the basement while something cooked up in the Crock-Pot. I spread the file out on the computer-free side of my desk, half waiting for the man himself to come clomping down the stairs with gourmet coffee and junk food to sustain us. But he did not come, and he never would again.

I tried not to think about this as I pored over pages of rejected grant proposals, all composed in the last nine months, all of them completely new to me. I had never seen any of this before, and here it sat in my own house. Art had been working on this for three quarters of a year without our knowledge, smuggling the paperwork into
our
file cabinet because we kept the open research files. We
could
have stumbled onto it at any time. But Art liked to joke what a paper suck our research really was. Other than the three or four files in current use, we rarely got into the back files.

Eight months.
An unheard-of length of time for him to keep an idea to himself. Although Art was perpetually engaged in fund-raising for us (and I tried not to think that Lance and I would have to do that alone now, or worse, that the board might find someone to replace Art and put that stranger in charge of our sanctuary), these proposals all related to an orangutan enclosure Art wanted to build. I tried to think. Had he been particularly cagey about his files? I didn’t think so. Unusually organized, yes. But closed off? Never. Not Art. For most of the last year, Lance and I would arrive home to find he had everything sitting out on the table ready for us. He had been planning this very quietly indeed. Except Art couldn’t ever be quiet. He would have told someone.

But who? Gary and Sally, perhaps? I made a mental note to call Sally back and see if she had any knowledge. Surely she would have mentioned it last night if Art had been talking to her about anything orangutan-related. But then, I’d delivered a piece of horrible news. Orangutans and grants might not have been at the forefront of her mind.

There wasn’t anything in the papers from the filing cabinet to suggest where the orangutans running around the sanctuary’s property might have come from, and I didn’t see anything to suggest a grant had come through. “Do you think he was making general plans but hadn’t gotten down to specifics yet?” I asked.

“No,” Lance said. He didn’t elaborate. We had been here nearly two hours, and I wasn’t sure how much longer we could spend on the project today. We still needed to get married, after all.

I looked up from the files strewn across our desk. Lance was scrolling down an e-mail message, one hand on the mouse and the other hand cupping his chin. “Damn,” he said. “Look at this.
Look at this.
” He jumped up out of the chair and stomped out into the hall. Faced with a choice between following him and finding out what had infuriated him, I opted for the latter.

I had to scroll around to read the message from the bottom up, in the order it had developed. When I did, I understood why Lance was steaming in the corridor. The chain started on an abrupt note, as if it were really the middle of a conversation, maybe a continuation of a phone call. And it suggested exactly what I had feared.

From:
Aldiss Carmichael [mailto:
[email protected]
]

To:
Hooper, Arthur J.

Sent:
March 18, 6:00 p.m.

Subject:
Help

    Sir I am sorry we have not met, but I need your help. I am sure you understand why I cannot take these animals to the zoo.

v/r

Ace

From:
“Hooper, Arthur J.” <
[email protected]
>

To:
Aldiss Carmichael <
[email protected]
>

Sent:
March 23, 8:00 a.m.

Subject:
RE: Help

Ace,

    I am sorry I did not reply at once. I see my sanctuary e-mails sooner, and you should contact me there. At the present time the Ohio Zoo is best equipped to help you in your situation. I repeat that I do not think they would arrest you, as you were uninvolved in the original crime. We do not yet have an enclosure to house orangutans, although I am steadily working toward that goal. I hope to be ready soon.

From:
Aldiss Carmichael [mailto:
[email protected]
]

To:
Hooper, Arthur J.

Sent:
March 23, 6:00 p.m.

Subject:
RE: RE: Help

    Respectfully sir what is your sanctuary address so I can send you mail there? I have done all I can. But the big guy is getting bored which is not good and the female may be pregnant I cannot tell. I can no longer afford for their upkeep and such and I beg you to help me. I cannot have an arrest on my record. I have done my best but the animals are neglected they need a better home and they will arrest me. If you cannot take them I do not know what I can do.

v/r

Ace

From:
“Hooper, Arthur J.” <
[email protected]
>

To:
Aldiss Carmichael <
[email protected]
>

Sent:
March 26, 8:00 a.m.

Subject:
RE: RE: RE: Help

Ace,

    What makes you think the female is pregnant? Does she have labial swelling? My academic duties are extremely consuming at this time. Boredom is not a good thing in a great ape, but it is not necessarily a sign of neglect. Can you wait until the middle of June? I will arrange for you to donate the animals anonymously to the primate sanctuary and secure their safe transport to Columbus myself.

From:
Aldiss Carmichael [mailto:
[email protected]
]

To:
Hooper, Arthur J.

Sent:
March 26, 6:00 p.m.

Subject:
RE: RE: RE: RE: Help

Sir,

    I will try to hang on. Please send your sanctuary email address.

v/r

Ace

I pulled myself away from the computer, breathless. “My
God,
he knew!” I said to Lance, who was still storming back and forth outside the door. “He
did
know.”

“How did
you
know,” Lance asked me, coming back to the doorway.

“It was after the shower. I was thinking about how my whole family duped me, and how even the people you know best will turn around and surprise you. And that made me think about how much Art liked surprises. And then I flashed on his face, when we all jumped into Darnell’s jeep.”

“Yeah,” Lance said. “I follow.”

“He didn’t look upset in the least. He looked exhilarated. And him saying, ‘You came too soon,’ ” I went on.

“Right,” Lance agreed. “I was furious that he thought our help was a bad thing, but now I get it.”

“It was such a strange thing to say. And it stuck with me. But he wasn’t talking to us.”

“No,” Lance said. “He was talking to this Aldiss guy.” On the phone, we had both thought it was the orangutan, but now I agreed with Lance. Art was saying that Ace had come too soon. Did it really matter? It meant Art, gentle Art, was complicit in a crime.