Miracle (23 page)

Nurse Parchtry turned to Lady Charlotte. “I was wondering—it
is
Christmas Eve, and I am such a fan of Inspector Touffét’s—if I might eat downstairs tonight instead of having a tray.”

Lady Charlotte glanced uncertainly at the partition. “I don’t know….”

“Lord Alastair always goes to sleep after he’s had his cocoa,” Nurse Parchtry said, gesturing toward the tray, “and I did so want to hear Inspector Touffét recount some of his celebrated cases. And Lord Alastair’s been very good today.”

There was a splat, and I looked over at the partition. A large blob of greenish mush was trickling down the center of the glass, and behind it, holding the plastic bowl it had come out of, was Lord Alastair.

If I had been shocked by the sight of a talking gorilla, I was completely overwhelmed by the sight of Lord Alastair, computer genius and billionaire, dressed in wrinkled pajamas, his white hair matted with the greenish stuff he’d just thrown. He was barefoot, and his teeth were bared in a cunning grin.

“Good Lord,” I said, and next to me, Rutgers murmured disbelievingly, “Al?”

Lord Alastair stepped back, hunching his shoulders, and I wondered if we had frightened him, but he was still grinning. He reared back and spat at us.

“Oh,
Father,”
Lady Charlotte said, and he grinned evilly at her and began smearing the spittle into the tapioca and the brown streaks, as if he were fingerpainting.

“Oh, dear,” Nurse Parchtry said, “and you were so good this morning.” She pulled a bunch of keys out of her pocket, hastily unlocked a door next to the partition, and disappeared. She reappeared inside a moment later with a wet towel and began wiping Lord Alastair’s hands.

I watched, horrified, afraid he was going to spit on her next, but he only struggled to free his hands, slapping weakly
at her like a naughty child and shouting a string of garbled obscenities.

Beside me, Rutgers seemed hypnotized. “How long has he been like this?”

“It’s gotten gradually worse,” Lady Charlotte said. “Ten years.”

Nurse Parchtry had Lord Alastair’s hands clean and was combing his hair. “You must look nice for your guests,” she said, her voice faint but clear through the glass. “Inspector Touffét’s here, the famous detective.”

She brought him over to the partition, holding his left wrist in a firm grasp. “Lord Alastair, I’d like you to meet Inspector Touffét.”

Touffét stepped up to the glass and bowed. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Inspector Touffét’s come to solve a mystery for us, Father,” Lady Charlotte said.

“Yes,” Touffét said, “I am interested to know more of this mystery.”

There was a knock at the door behind us. “Shall I?” I asked Lady Charlotte.

“Please,” she said, and I unlocked and opened it. It was Heidi, bearing a tray with a toddler’s lidded cup and a plate of graham biscuits on it.

I stepped back so she could enter, and as soon as she did, Lord Alastair exploded. His left arm came up sharply, clipping Nurse Parchtry on the chin, and she reeled back, cradling her jaw. He began pounding on the glass with both hands and hooting wildly. Heidi watched him, clutching the tray, her eyes wide with fright.

“Oh, dear,” Lady Charlotte said. “Heidi, set the tray down on the counter.”

Heidi did, her eyes still on Lord Alastair, then bobbed a curtsey and ran awkwardly out on all fours. Lord Alastair continued pounding for a moment and then walked over to the plastic bowl, sat down on the floor, and began licking the inside of the bowl.

Rutgers shook his head sadly. “Ten years,” he murmured.

Nurse Parchtry disappeared and then reappeared at the door, her jaw and cheek scarlet.

“He doesn’t like Heidi,” she said unnecessarily. “Or D’Artagnan.” She put her hand wincingly up to her cheek. “He threw the rocking chair the last time D’Artagnan brought in his lunch.”

“I think you’d best put some ice on that,” Lady Charlotte said. “And with Father so upset, I think perhaps you’d better eat up here tonight.”

“Oh, no!” Nurse Parchtry said desperately. “He’ll quiet down now. He always does after—”

There was a banging on the door, and Touffét moved to open it. James burst in, clutching his thumb. “You will not believe what that monster just did!”

I wheeled and looked at the partition, thinking Lord Alastair must have gotten out somehow, but he was still sitting in the middle of the floor. He’d put the bowl on his head.

“He grabbed my hand and tried to tear it off. Look!” He thrust it at Lady Charlotte. “I think it’s broken!”

I couldn’t see any telltale redness like that on Nurse Parchtry’s jaw.

“The brute tried to kill me!” he said.

“What brute?” Lady Charlotte asked.

“What brute?
That
ape
of yours! I was walking down the corridor, and he suddenly reached out and grabbed me.”

He turned to us. “I’ve tried to tell my sister her apes are dangerous, but she won’t listen!”

“I thought that gorillas had very gentle natures,” Rutgers said.

“That’s what the so-called scientists at my sister’s Institute say, that they’re all harmless as kittens, that they wouldn’t hurt a fly! Well, what about this?” he said, shaking his hand at us again. “When we’re all murdered in our beds some morning, don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

He stormed out, but his ragings had roused Lord Alastair, who was pounding on the glass again.

“He’ll go to sleep as soon as he’s had his cocoa,” Nurse Parchtry said pleadingly. “He always does, and today he didn’t
have a nap. And I’d have the monitor with me. I’d be able to hear him if he woke up. And it’s Christmas Eve!”

“All right,” Lady Charlotte said, relenting. “But if he wakes up, you’ll have to come straight back up here.”

“I will, I promise,” she said, as giddily as if she were Cinderella promising to leave the ball by midnight. “Oh, this will be such fun!”

“It’s hardly
my
idea of fun,” I told Touffét as we were going down for dinner. “I’d much rather be at my sister’s. And I’ll wager Lady Charlotte would rather be, too. It’s obvious why she prefers apes, with a father and a brother like that.”

“The father is a millionaire,” Touffét said thoughtfully. “Is that not so?”

“Billionaire,” I said.

“Ah. I wonder who is it that inherits his estate when he dies? I wonder also what makes Nurse Parchtry stay with such a disagreeable patient?” He rubbed his hands, obviously enjoying himself. “So many mysteries. And perhaps there will be more at dinner.”

There were, the first one being whether Lady Charlotte was even aware it was Christmas. There were no decorations on the table, no holly or pine garlands decking the dining room, and no heat. Leda, who had changed into a fetching little strapless dress, was shivering with cold.

And the dinner was utterly ordinary, no boar’s head, no goose, no turkey, only some underseasoned cod and some overdone beef, all served by D’Artagnan, in new gloves, and Heidi. Hardly a festive holiday feast.

Lady Charlotte didn’t appear to notice. She was well launched on the subject of primate intelligence, apparently grateful that her brother, James, hadn’t come down to dinner. Nurse Parchtry wasn’t there either. Apparently her patient hadn’t gone off to sleep as easily as she’d hoped.

“One of the prejudices we’re working to overcome is that primate behavior is instinctive,” Lady Charlotte said. “We’ve done research that demonstrates conclusively their behavior is
intentional. Primates are capable of conscious thought, of planning, and learning from experience, and of having insights.”

Just after the soup course (tinned), Nurse Parchtry hurried in and sat down between Leda and me. She had changed out of her uniform into a gray chiffon thing with floating draperies, and she was all smiles.

“He’s finally asleep,” she said breathlessly, setting a white plastic box on the table. A series of wheezes and gasping noises came from it. “It’s a baby monitor. So I can hear Lord Alastair if he wakes up.”

How nice, I thought. Midway through dinner we shall be treated to a stream of animal screams and obscenities.

“What is it that Lord Alastair suffers from?” I asked.

“Dementia,” she said, “and hatefulness, neither one of which is fatal, unfortunately. He could live for years. Thank you, Heidi,” she said, as the chimpanzee set a plate of fish in front of her. “Isn’t this exciting, Heidi, having Inspector Touffét here?”

Heidi nodded.

“Heidi and I are both mystery fans. We’ve been reading
The Case of the Crushed Skull
, haven’t we?”

Heidi nodded again and signed something to Nurse Parchtry.

“She says she thinks the vicar did it,” she said. She signed rapidly to Heidi. “I think it was the ex-wife. Which of us is right, Colonel Bridlings?”

Neither, as a matter of fact, though I had to give Heidi credit.
I
had thought it was the vicar, too. “I don’t want to spoil the ending,” I said, and Heidi bobbed her head in approval.

“He was always a dreadful man,” Nurse Parchtry said, returning to the topic of Lord Alastair. “And, unfortunately, his son’s just like him.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Which is why he left everything to him in his will, I suppose. A pity. He’ll only gamble it away.”

“He gambles?” I said.

“He’s horribly in debt,” she whispered. “I heard him on the phone only this morning, pleading with his tout. You see,
Lord Alastair arranged his money so it can’t be touched until his death, which I suppose is a good thing. Otherwise there’d be nothing left.” She shook her head. “It’s Lady Charlotte I feel sorry for.”

She leaned closer, her draperies drifting across my arm. “Did you know Lord Alastair stopped her from marrying her true love? She fell in love with one of his AI scientists, Phillip Davidson—Phillip was the one who got her interested in primate intelligence—and when Lord Alastair found out, he trumped up charges of industrial espionage against him, ruined his reputation, forced him to emigrate. Lady Charlotte never married.”

Touffét would be interested in knowing that, I thought. I glanced at him, but he was watching Mick Rutgers, who was listening to Lady Charlotte talk of her apes’ accomplishments.

“D’Artagnan has learned eight hundred words, and over fifty sentences,” she said. “We work for two hours a day on vocabulary.” She smiled at D’Artagnan, who was removing the fish course. “And for an hour on serving skills.”

Heidi began serving the roast beef. The snores and wheezes from the baby monitor subsided to a heavy, even breathing.

“Heidi and I work on her reading for two hours a day, and she reads on her own for another hour. Heidi,” Lady Charlotte said, stopping her as she set a plate of roast beef down in front of Leda. “Tell Inspector Touffét what your favorite case is.”

Heidi signed rapidly, grinning widely.

“The Case of the Cat’s Paw,”
Lady Charlotte translated.

Touffét looked pleased. “Ah, yes, a most satisfying case,” he said, and launched into an account of it.

“What’s a cat’s paw?” Leda whispered to me. “It’s not like a rabbit’s foot, is it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s when someone uses another person for their own ends. It comes from an old tale about a monkey who used a cat’s paw to pull chestnuts out of the fire.”

“That’s
cruel,”
Nurse Parchtry said.

“No crueler than keeping apes captive and dressing them up in human clothes,” Leda hissed.

“You don’t approve of Lady Charlotte’s work?” Nurse Parchtry said, shocked.

“N-no, of course I didn’t mean that,” Leda said, looking flustered. She took a forkful of roast beef and then laid it back down on her plate.

“Lady Charlotte has only the primates’ best interests at heart in all her work,” Nurse Parchtry said firmly. “She’s utterly devoted to them, and they’d do anything for her. She saved them, you know, from terrible fates. Heidi was being
experimented
on.”

Lady Charlotte had apparently heard the last part of that. “Experiments?” she said, interrupting Touffét in the middle of his case. “Primates are still being experimented on, in spite of our having proved they’re conscious creatures and can feel pain just as we do. Our research has shown that they can acquire knowledge, solve complex problems, use tools, and manipulate language. Everything that humans can do.”

“Not quite,” Sergeant Eustis said. “They can’t commit crimes or tell lies. Or cheat at cards.”

“As a matter of fact,” Mick Rutgers said, “primates can.”

“Cheat at cards?” Sergeant Eustis said. “Don’t tell me D’Artagnan plays poker, too?”

Everyone laughed.

“Various studies have shown that apes are capable of deception,” Rutgers said. “Apes in the wild frequently hide food and then retrieve it when the rest of the troop is asleep, and signing apes who have done something naughty will lie when asked whether they did it. Several times Lucy hid a key in her mouth and waited until her owners were gone, and then let herself out. Their ability to lie and deceive is proof of their capability for higher forms of thinking, since it involves determining what another creature thinks and how it can be fooled.”

Lady Charlotte was looking curiously at Rutgers. “You seem to know a great deal about primates, for a reporter,” she said.

“It was in the informational packet you sent,” he said.

“And you’re quite right, they are capable of deception,
” she said. “But they are also capable of affection, fear, grief, gentleness, and devotion. They are far better creatures than we are.”

“Is that why they attack people for no reason?” James said, coming in and sitting down next to his sister. He snapped his fingers, and Heidi hurried to bring him a plate of roast beef, looking frightened. “Is that why the University of Oklahoma had to shut down their research program after one of their apes bit the finger off a visiting surgeon? Because they’re better creatures?”

He snatched the plate away from Heidi. “Has my sister told you about Lucy yet? Poor Lucy, who got sent back to the jungle to be killed by poachers? Did she tell you why Lucy got sent back? Because she attacked her owner.” He smiled maliciously at Heidi. “That could happen to you, too, you know. And your friend D’Artagnan.”