Lady Vanishes (12 page)

I heard music coming from across the lobby—Samuel trying for business as usual.

“I shouldn’t keep you any longer, Rachel.” He opened the door. “We don’t want to hold up Samuel’s class.”

For a moment I stayed where I was, though clearly I’d been dismissed. I was wondering about the crime scene and how far Nathan might go to protect one of his charges.

But was it a crime scene if the person who caused the damage didn’t understand the consequences of what he was doing?

And then there was another question. This one came from Nathan. He put a hand on my shoulder and turned me so that I was looking right at him.

“What would you have us do, Rachel?”

This time I knew the answer.

“Whatever’s necessary,” I said. Then I headed across the lobby with my dog at my side.

After Samuel’s class, Charlotte was still looking unusually stressed, so I sat with her and gave her time with Dashiell. When I said good-bye and got up to leave, she got up too, following me out of the dining room, holding my hand as if we were going for a walk with Dashiell, the way we’d done the first day I was here.

I was about to tell her that I couldn’t take her for a walk when I decided I couldn’t do that. If she wanted one that badly, I’d take her out, maybe just go around the block with her, but I wouldn’t say no to her.

Getting with the program, I thought; everything for the kids.

I looked at Charlotte, clinging to my hand, not reaching for Dashiell’s leash, not going upstairs for her gloves and earmuffs, but sucking her fingers and not walking toward the front door, but pulling me to the door to Venus’s office.

I was sure it hadn’t been cleaned up yet, but Charlotte
was twisting the doorknob, then banging on it, starting to moan. Whatever it was she wanted, it was urgent.

There was no one in the lobby. I quickly took out Venus’s key ring and unlocked the door to her office, stepping inside with Charlotte and Dashiell and letting the door close and lock. I stood in the way of the blood stain, dry and brown now, so that Charlotte would have to walk to the other side of the desk, the side where Eli had been standing.

In fact, Charlotte never looked at the side of the room where the blood was. Nor did she go to the other side of the desk.

Against the wall were three chairs. On the farthest one there was a pad, just like the one I’d found in the garden. She picked it up, bent down, and looked under the chair. There she retrieved a box of colored pencils, just like the ones I’d seen her sharpening in the dining room.

When she had her things, I expected her to turn around and leave the office.

But she didn’t.

She sat on the chair, opened the pad, and began to draw.

That’s when I heard Dashiell sneeze. A team player, he had followed Charlotte, had stood next to her, had even put his big head under the chair when she did, helping her look for he didn’t know what, his tail wagging. Now he was headed for the other side of the desk, the part of the room I was trying to avoid. When I put my leg out to stop him, he glanced up at me, confused.

I looked back at Charlotte, working on her picture as if the only thing that counted was now, as if nothing at all had happened in this room earlier in the day.

When, I wondered, had she left the pad and pencils here?

But when I looked at the pad, I stopped wondering. She was drawing what she saw—Dashiell, his strong white body,
the patch over his right eye, careful with her lines and colors, the way she’d been when she drew the tree and started to draw the squirrel, the model who got away.

I watched her put down the charcoal gray pencil she’d used to color Dashiell’s patch, careful to place it point to the top of the box, like all the others. Then she took another pencil, a red one this time, and began to color the rug behind Dashiell. Only the rug was blue, a pale Wedgwood. Except for the place where Venus had fallen and bled, the place behind where the dog in the picture now stood.

From where Charlotte was sitting, she couldn’t see that part of the rug, the part I’d blocked her view of on our way in.

It wasn’t only David who had been here. Charlotte had been here, too.

And that squirrel hadn’t gotten away before the artist finished his portrait. Clearly Charlotte could draw from memory. So it must have been the artist who was called away, perhaps for lunch, leaving the portrait undone.

Dashiell sneezed again. Frustrated because I wouldn’t let him examine what he felt needed his canine attention, he began to search for something else. He turned around and put his paws up on Venus’s desk, trolling, his breathing audible now, his head moving from side to side, his nose telling him what he needed to know, then turning to look at me, then back at the desk, whining now to get me to look, see why his nose was twitching the way it was, find out for myself, the way he was telling me to, what was so interesting on Venus’s desk.

At first, I didn’t see a thing.

And then I did. Green paint on top of Venus’s dictionary, the dictionary lying down because the bookend that usually held it up wasn’t there.

Was that what he’d wanted me to see, green paint? Jackson’s favorite color.

“Good boy,” I told him, touching the paint with one finger, finding it dry. It could have been there since early afternoon. Or for years, for all I knew. But if it weren’t fresh, why would Dashiell point it out to me? If the paint were old, it would mean nothing to him, no more than the finish on the desk or Venus’s blotter.

That’s when I thought to check out the side of the desk, the place where Venus hit her head when David pushed her.

No blood there. I even scraped the lip of the desk with a fingernail to make sure.

What was Dashiell smelling up there?

I looked back at Charlotte, coloring in the rest of the rug now, the part without the blood. She had added something while I was checking the desk: a pair of legs from the knee down, a pair of white Keds, speckled with paint. She’d colored the speckles green. There were some green streaks on the pants, too, as if someone with wet paint on his hands had bent over, hands on his knees, to look at something on the floor.

I heard something in the lobby and looked toward the door, hoping no one was coming in here, holding my breath, my eyes on the door, as if by doing that, I could keep it from opening. Waiting, I looked at the drawings and paintings taped to the inside of Venus’s door—Jackson’s drips, a portrait of Venus done in colored pencil, just the way Charlotte was drawing now, and a bunch of black crayon marks going every which way I felt sure was a portrait of Lady. There was that other strange picture Dashiell had knocked off the other day, the one where someone seemed to have spoons sticking out of his head, a really odd portrait, done from the
rear in a shaky hand, the artist using pencil, pressing hard enough to leave a rut in the paper, someone tense doing that picture.

Someone tense, at Harbor View. Brilliant insight, I thought. Maybe I should go get me a Ph.D., publish in the
Autistic Journal,
make a name for myself.

Charlotte was still coloring the rug. Were they all in here when Venus fell, she and David and Jackson?

I thought about Cora, seeing Harry on the sidewalk—Harry, who had been knocked out of his shoes, knocked clear into the next world; Cora, who had nothing to say about what she saw, nothing, at least, that was useful or made sense.

Could any of these three tell me what had happened here this afternoon?

Maybe they could, but not in the usual way. Wasn’t that, in fact, what Charlotte was doing, telling me what had happened by drawing it?

Her head was bent low over the pad, as if she were nearsighted, as she made the bloodstain redder, the color rich now, the way it must have looked when it was fresh. She seemed completely absorbed in the drawing, oblivious to me and Dash and even her surroundings.

Watching her, I realized I was wrong. Dashiell had tried to communicate with me. He’d tried to show me what he’d discovered. But Charlotte’s drawing didn’t have anything to do with me. She was doing it for herself, recording something she had seen, never mind that she appended an image from the present, Dashiell, to one from earlier in the day.

Was that a mistake?

Or was Dashiell there to help her cope, to protect her?

She had seen something confusing, something that fright
ened her. I watched her drawing, her fingers white against the pencil, getting the scene down on paper to try to make sense out of it.

But whether or not I’d be able to make sense out of it, that was another story.

By the time we left Harbor View and headed over to St. Vincent’s, it had cooled off a little, the sun not overhead anymore but tucked behind the buildings west of us. I bought a yogurt at one of the ubiquitous Korean grocery stores, sat on the stoop of a brownstone, and shared it with Dashiell, watching his big tongue cleaning off the little white plastic spoon until long after all traces of food had disappeared.

We worked our way slowly through the revolving door and stopped at the reception desk, where a sand-colored woman with a profusion of bright gold hair and little flowers at the tip of each vermilion nail was talking on the phone. She pulled the receiver away from her hair and raised her eyebrows.

“Venus White.”

One long press-on nail slid down the list of names.

“ICU.”

A real New York conversation.

She hadn’t looked over the counter, and Dash hadn’t done a paws-up, so I saved the story I had worked out on the way over for later. Only no one asked. St. Vincent’s had a visiting dog program, and everyone must have assumed Dashiell was part of it.

Until I got to the ICU.

The nurse was the color of a Tootsie Roll and the size of a Mr. Frostee truck. I asked where I might find Venus. But she wasn’t answering me. She had something else on her mind. She was scowling, looking down at Dashiell.

“
He
can’t be in here,” she said. “How’d you get in here with him anyway?”

“He’s a—”

Then I surprised both of us. I began to choke up, tears running down my cheeks, no words coming out, though I know I was trying to tell her that Dashiell was a registered therapy dog.

“He’s a cool one, isn’t he? He won’t jump on the bed, will he?”

I shook my head.

“Therapy dog,” she read off his tag. She frowned at me. “You won’t let him near the IV?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Okay. Follow me.” She looked at Dashiell again. “You, too. And mind your manners, you hear?”

Venus was in one of those curtained cubicles, barely bigger than the bed and full of machines that looked as if they ought to be on a UFO.

She hasn’t awakened, the nurse told me as she slid the curtain back, they couldn’t be sure she would, and I had fifteen minutes.

Another New York conversation.

Who was I going to bother, I thought, sitting there and watching a machine breathing for Venus?

She must have thought the same thing when she looked at the expression on my face. She flapped her big hand at me. “You can sit awhile,” she said. But she was frowning again. “But pull yourself together,” she said, straightening out the part of the blanket that covered Venus’s feet. “Do you know what she’s picking up? No, you don’t. So wipe your eyes. We don’t need that kind of negative energy in this room.”

She waited.

“That’s better. Don’t you be afraid to hold her hand. She won’t break. You can touch her.” She nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Talking’s good, too. Not just any kind, something
interesting.
You can’t expect a person to want to listen if you’re boring them to death. You need to engage her mind,” she told me, pointing to her own temple. “Let me tell you something, honey, there’s a shitload we don’t know about what’s going on with this girl. You get my point?”

She wheeled around, her white shoes squeaking on the freshly mopped floor, parting the curtain and disappearing. I told Dashiell to lie down and reached for Venus’s hand.

“You should have seen Samuel’s class today,” I told her, “you would have loved it. The night I went back late, you know, to snoop, remember, I told you about that? Anyway, when I got to Harbor View, I worked out this game with Dashiell, a sort of ring-around-the-rosy thing. And this afternoon, Sammy and I taught it to the kids.

“Cora and Dora, instead of falling down, because of course they couldn’t do that, unless they were willing to risk breaking something, they bent their heads into their laps. Cora covered her eyes, too, as if she were playing peekaboo. Of course, Dora gave her hell for that one. Dora was having
herself one fine day. She could have passed for a chick in her early eighties, she was so with it today.

“I got to talk to Cora while I was showing her how to play and tried to get her to tell me what she saw the day Harry was killed. You were right, Venus. She didn’t say anything helpful. All she did was tell me about the naps she had to take with Dora when they were kids, how their mother would fly into a rage if they left their shoes on and dirtied the sheets. She spoke of it as if it were yesterday.

“But I had to give it a try, just in case. Sometimes the smallest clue, just a hint, can set you in the right direction, set you thinking the way you should be in order to get the answers you need. So you try everything. Just the way you do with the kids.”

You ring every bell, Marty said once, talking about the cops looking for a witness. If there’s the slimmest chance in the world of getting a piece of the puzzle, you go for it. You have to, he said. That’s the job.

“The princess kept losing her crown when she leaned forward, then putting it back on by herself.
That
was a sight to see. Molly finally found her a couple of bobby pins. I haven’t seen those things in years,” I said, remembering that my grandmother Sonya used gray ones, one on each side, and gray hairpins to hold her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Grandmothers don’t look like that anymore, bunned old ladies in orthopedic shoes and support hose. Now grandmothers go to the gym and pump iron. “I didn’t know they still made them, bobby pins,” I said, putting my free hand gently on her arm. “Did you?”

I waited for an answer.

“I’m here, honey,” I whispered.

There was no window, so for a while I watched the monitor and listened to the clicking of the ventilator.

“Even Charlotte learned the game. Here’s what she did—she got in behind Dashiell and aped everything he did. It worked perfectly, until he started licking the floor. I guess Homer missed a spot last night.

“Everyone who came gave it a try.

“Well, almost everyone.”

Three of them there, in Venus’s office, not just David.

Hey, I could tell Marty, we had a little incident over at Harbor View. Someone tried to kill the manager. And I have good news and bad news.

What’s the good news? he’d ask, that cop look on his face, like the shutters were tilted so he could look out, but you couldn’t look in.

We have witnesses, I could tell him. Three of them.

And what’s the bad news? he’d say.

We have witnesses. Three of them.

I stood up and leaned over the bed, looking to see what had been done with the head wound, but it was covered. I was wondering if they’d stitched it. Maybe I could ask the nurse on the way out.

But what difference would it make for me to know? It was Eli’s colleague in charge, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t he have done whatever was best for Venus?

I tapped my leg for Dashiell to stand, tapped the edge of the bed for him to place his head there, and then gently lifted Venus’s hand and laid it on top of Dashiell’s big head, maybe because if I were lying on a skinny bed in an intensive care unit, that’s what I would want.

I placed my hand on top of hers, watching her face to see if anything changed. Nothing did.

“I’ll come as often as I can,” I told her, “but I’m still doing what you hired me to do.”

I waited again.

“Your home phone’s not tapped,” I told her. “That’s good. At least whoever did this wasn’t able to check up on you at home.

“You know, they could be old, those bugs. They might not even be functional. You never know,” I told her, her eyes closed and still, not moving the way they do when you’re dreaming.

Dashiell pushed his head up, bouncing Venus’s hand, reminding her to pet him.

I began to think about Venus’s apartment, the sound of Dashiell’s nails on the stairs, the light coming in the window, Harry’s watch on the nightstand, part of their internet love affair printed out and waiting for me at home. The wedding band, the one she didn’t wear.

Then I remembered the necklace.

I stood, looked toward the end curtain, as if I thought Nurse Frostee might be watching, making sure I didn’t knock over the IV stand or accidentally kick out the plug of the ventilator. But no one was there. I could hear her, in fact, talking on the phone, sitting at the desk waiting for someone’s alarm to go off so she’d have something to do.

I leaned over Venus and pulled away the neck of her hospital gown. No necklace there, only abrasions on one side of her neck, as if someone had been too impatient to open the latch and had yanked it off, some narcissist who had to have what he or she wanted that very second.

I smoothed her gown, touched her face with my hand, then sat back in the chair, looking at Venus, then looking at the machinery that was keeping her going; one minute you’re fine, you’re living your life, the next minute you’re hanging on the brink because someone tried to take away the only valuable thing you have, the years ahead of you.

And your diamond necklace.

Now what would David want with
that?

What did the necklace even have to do with this?

Was this done because of the necklace? The damn thing was worth a small fortune.

Or had the necklace been an afterthought?

I needed to clear my head, and I knew just how to do it.

“I’ll be back later, Venus,” I told her, waiting again to see if there would be a reaction, anything at all, some tiny movement that would let me convince myself she’d heard me, that any minute she would open her eyes and be all right.

What did I think she’d do, wave good-bye? Blow me a kiss?

Is is, Frank Petrie used to say, trying to get me to act more like a detective, accept things the way they were, stop my wishful thinking; Medea changes her mind at the last minute and takes her kids to Disneyland; some clever engineer patches the hole in the
Titanic
and she sails safely to port, no souls lost at sea; Lady Macbeth discovers Purell and gets those pesky spots off her hands without even having to use water.

I opened the curtain for Dashiell, then watched him walk under another part of it. Standing half in and half out of Venus’s cubicle, I wondered if maybe, just this once, I might get my way; Venus would wake up, annoyed as hell, tell me who.

Who.
That was only part of it. She’d have to tell me
why,
too.

Yeah, right.

I looked back at the bed, nothing moving without the help of a machine.

I let the curtain close behind me, thinking, What if she did wake up, just as I wished, but when she did, she remembered nothing?

Oy, there’s the rub.