The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Read Free Page A

because she was still grieving for her mother. Partially, it was because she had finally passed the seventh grade the day after her fifteenth birthday. Schoolwork was simply not a priority for her mother and the other criminals who had provided most of what passed for her care. But much of Natasha’s condition resulted from her inability to accept that she was a victim rather than a perpetrator. She still apologized out loud to her grandparents in her sleep and took responsibility for everything that went wrong in her vicinity.
    Her therapist had been helping to ease her fears of socialization with amazing speed. She
wanted
friends, after all, and her sweet personality made it easy for her to keep them. But she hadn’t known how to make them.
    Her other problems were taking more time to deal with. When she was in the ring, she had gone to extreme lengths to dull the pain of exploitation. She had come to Gert and Stan the year before with a cigarette addiction and an unhealthy taste for whiskey. They had cured her of the cigarettes, and they thought they had rescued her from the alcohol. But Lance and I quickly figured out otherwise. She was still self-medicating.
    After she’d watched me throw away a cabinet full of perfectly good liquor, Natasha complained, “I only drank a finger! I needed something to stop spazzing out so bad.” Her “finger” was nearly half the bottle of whiskey. “I want to go home so hard I could throw up, and every time I see Gram’s face half frozen, I feel so
guilty.
”
    “Gert and Stan don’t blame you for what happened to them. This isn’t your fault.”
    “Your saying that doesn’t make it true.” That was when we took up her psychiatrist’s refrain and pressured her into trusting the anti-anxiety meds over her nonpharmaceutical varieties. We also emptied the house of liquor to ensure the behavior’s cessation.
    Until she moved in with us, Natasha had been largely a stranger. We knew her grandparents better. Gary had passed easily for an uptight graduate student with a few decision-making problems to work out of his research plans. Only after he murdered Art and nearly killed all the rest of us did we learn Gary was harming not only Natasha, but also the apes and monkeys at our primate center by putting them in his pornographic photos and films.
    Again, the phone stopped. “Dr. Rue,” Lance said to me, “I believe we are moved in.”
    “Dr. Lakeland, I think you’re right.” Other than the detritus of boxes scattered around the living room and the trash can full of pizza boxes and paper plates, we had now unpacked everything. It helped to live so economically.
    “A celebration!” He reached for the stemware I’d so recently put away and I went for the bottle of champagne that was the only alcohol in the house.
    “A toast!” I held up my glass and looked around our new home, with its four bedrooms and basement of unseemly proportions. “To excess and holding down two jobs to achieve the American Dream.” Not that we were technically carrying a mortgage for the house, but we had agreed between ourselves to set aside money as if we were, so we could argue appropriateness with Stan at a more suitable time. If we were going to live here, we were going to offer at least something like market value.
    “Indeed. May our return to teaching this semester be as simple as hiring graduate students to move our boxes proved to be.” We toasted and drank, but didn’t get to enjoy so much as an entire glass of the bubbly.
    On the counter, the phone buzzed again. “Really?” I sipped my champagne and picked up the offending device.
    “Turn it off.” Lance flopped on the couch with an arm crooked for me to sit in. “Her friends need to learn to call at reasonable hours.”
    No name displayed with the number on the caller ID panel. “It’s not in her contacts list. And it’s a Columbus number. Six-one-four area code.”
    Lance sat up and lowered his arm. Columbus could mean