Lady Vanishes (14 page)

I watched the runners, the sun behind them turning them into dark shadows, arms sawing back and forth as they ran, someone going faster, too, disappearing for a moment behind one of the earthmovers, coming out on the other side, lickety-split, the way Dashiell liked to do it.

And someone running with a dog. I couldn’t see the dog, but one arm was stretched forward, the leash invisible from this distance, only implied by the position of the runner’s arm. I could imagine the dog, his tongue lolling out, his legs moving rhythmically, feeling his canine runner’s high, out
front and pulling. If they were racing, she was losing. He was first, top dog, loving every minute of it.

Top dog. Was that the issue at Harbor View, too? Hadn’t Harry Dietrich, until he was hit by a bicycle, been alpha?

For a moment, walking in place, I wondered about the others, how they felt about Harry’s position, and if there was someone, one of them, who might like to apply for that position his or herself, now that it was available.

If so, which one?

Slowing down the belt, for the moment unaware of the panorama before my eyes, seeing another in my imagination, I found myself wondering if this were yet another version of the game I’d been watching all my life.

Only this time it was being played by humans, not by dogs, and involved far more than teeing up or trying to look bigger than the other guy.

This time, it was deadly.

Homer, wearing huge yellow rubber gloves that went nearly to his skinny elbows, was mopping the lobby. He indicated the dining room with his head, never stopping the rhythmic motion as he did.

Sorry, I mouthed as Dashiell and I tracked up the wet floor.

But when I was standing right outside the dining room, the doors open just a crack, I heard something that made me pause. I grabbed Dashiell’s collar before he used his big head as a wedge to push open the doors.

When I turned around and looked to see if Homer was watching me, I saw that he had stopped too. The mop was still and Homer was staring, waiting to see what I was up to.

I could have checked my pockets, pretending I was looking for something.

Or bent down to tie my shoelace or fuss with Dashiell’s collar instead of just holding it.

But I did nothing, nothing but stand there and obviously eavesdrop, at first, with my back to the door, watching Homer watch me. Then I turned around so that I could hear better.

I heard the mop hitting the pail and the water running off it as Homer picked it up, then squeezed it out.

“You don’t mean
here?
”

The speaker petulant.

“Where else?” Eli. Sounding weary.

Silence. Perhaps a shrug.

“You mean you thought you’d do it from home, without any contact with this place at all?”

“You do have a phone, don’t you?”

“I think we’re jumping to conclusions here.” Nathan, trying to calm everyone down.

“What do you mean?” the first speaker said.

“I mean we have to see the provisions in the will, what is called for, what is set forth legally.”

“He was my
uncle,
” the petulant speaker said. “Who do you think he’d have control the investments, someone outside the family?”

Silence.

“And what sort of experience do you have that would make you think you could control the finances of a place you never—”

“I thought the purpose of this meeting was to discuss what’s best for the kids,” Samuel said. “It’s not a business meeting.”

“It might as well be,” Eli said. “It’s obvious, one way or another, there are going to be some radical changes here.”

“For one thing, there’s the nepotism of the staff.”

I wondered if Bailey was flipping his hair back as he spoke.

“What are you waiting for, Eli?” Arlene asked. “Harry’s dead. He can’t take care of income and expenses anymore. I believe that it was his intention that—”

Backing up, working from the front of the lobby to the rear, Homer was washing the floor behind me, leaving the patch where I stood snooping for later. When I turned to look at him, he looked away.

“We’ll work it out. We all have the same goal in mind,” Nathan said, “that things run smoothly here, with as little change as possible for the kids.”

I turned again, holding up my pointers to make a T before Homer got the chance to look away. He nodded, the mop never stopping.

When I heard some chairs scrape against the floor I backed up fast, taking Dashiell with me, so that it would appear we were just arriving. But we were still too close for comfort. When Arlene pulled open the double doors, she gasped, wrinkling up her expensive face.

“Oh, hi,” I said. “I was just coming for the staff meeting. It’s not over, is it?” I looked concerned and checked my watch.

Arlene frowned. She looked up from Dashiell. Now she seemed to be staring at my hair. So I studied hers. The humidity hadn’t bothered it. Perhaps it had been coated with polyurethane. I had the feeling the color wasn’t natural either, but that was just a guess. Only her hairdresser knew for sure.

Everything about her cost money, lots of it—more than she could afford, was my guess. But she didn’t look worried. Maybe she was expecting a windfall sometime soon. Then I found myself thinking that her sister must have left her something when she died. But probably not enough. When is it ever enough for people who care about things like that?
I wondered if she’d figured out some way to get more. One has to keep up appearances, doesn’t one?

Arlene was still frowning. Either trying to place me, or hoping I’d move the fuck out of her way.

“I was hired to do pet-facilitated therapy, after Lady disappeared,” I told her, instead of moving away.

“Of course you were.”

She smiled a Melba toast smile, guaranteed to break into several pieces if she dropped it.

I ignored the prettied-up surface and tried to see what was underneath. It was an old habit by now, something I’d done for years as a dog trainer, and now for years as a detective.

Janice, coming along behind her mother, just stared, more like a sullen adolescent than a grown woman. Bailey was checking the backs of his hands, which he found infinitely more interesting than me.

I stepped aside, and they walked out, Arlene heading for the front door with Bailey right behind her.

“I left my purse in Uncle Harry’s office,” Janice said, holding up her hand and snapping her fingers. Bailey reached into his pocket and flipped her a set of keys.

Turning toward the dining room, I heard the keys land on the floor.

“Don’t just
stand
there. Get those for her,” Arlene said.

I was pretty sure she was talking to Bailey, but I responded anyway. “Keys,” I told Dash, and he picked them up, bringing them to Bailey, sitting in front of him and wagging his tail, waiting for an atta-boy. Well, with this motley crew, he could just wait.

“What’s
this
supposed to be?” Bailey said, taking a step back.

Weren’t there any dogs on the Upper East Side?

“Oh,
please.
” Janice yanked the keys out of Dashiell’s mouth.

I turned to go into the dining room, but the Kagans were coming out.

“Am I too late?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Nathan said. “I left a message on your answering machine. We didn’t know where you were. Dad”—he looked at his father—“we’re all exhausted. We’ve decided not to have the staff meeting tonight. We’re”—he took a breath—“all on overload. I hope you can forgive—”

“Please, don’t give it a thought. As long as I’m here, is it okay for me to take Dashiell around for bedtime visits?”

“I wonder,” Eli said. Then he paused. “I hate to impose, but as long as you’re going to do that, Rachel, would you take Dashiell to see David? But ask Homer or Molly to go with you, please.”

I nodded. “Has there been any word from the hospital?” I asked, looking at Eli, and when he didn’t look at me, looking at Nathan, then Samuel.

“No change,” Eli finally said. “We’ll stop by on our way home.”

“Your doctor friend?”

“Yes?”

“Could he, would it be possible for me to go over really late with Dashiell, after I finish here?”

“Rachel, you need your rest, too. Look at you. Your eyes are all red. You look so—”

“I’d really like to go.”

“I’ll make sure it’s okay.”

“Why don’t you come with us now?” Samuel asked. “That would be okay, wouldn’t it, Dad?”

“I want to take Dashiell around first. I think that’s important,” I said, nodding for emphasis. “But thanks for asking.”

It was also a great time to check Eli’s office, since he was going over to St. Vincent’s and then home.

I turned to head back to the stairs and saw Janice. She’d found her purse. I couldn’t miss it against the gray suit.

There was something else I couldn’t miss as well. It wasn’t Harry’s office she was coming out of, brushing her hands against each other; it was Venus’s.

Arlene and Bailey were waiting at the front door. As Janice joined them, I saw Arlene’s eyebrows go up.

“It wasn’t there,” Janice said.

I didn’t get it. It was right in her hand. But no one elaborated for my benefit. They walked out into the heat, and a split second later, looking through the sidelight where David usually stood, I saw Arlene’s arm go up for a taxi, God forbid they should wear out their Gucci shoes walking to the subway.

Eli had gone to get his briefcase. When he returned with it, both sons followed their father out. Watching them leave, I wondered if I’d made a mistake, not going with them. Couldn’t one of them kick out the plug of the ventilator or screw up the IV line? But then I remembered Nurse Frostee and all those monitors at her station, and I knew that Venus was safe. At least for now.

Walking up the stairs, figuring I’d start at the top and work my way down, see who was in the mood for a little visit, I began to think about David. Nathan said they had to protect him. And Venus had told me he did get violent sometimes. She’d told me to be careful.

Still, in view of all the other things that had happened here, I wasn’t buying the story. It was too convenient, having someone to blame who couldn’t defend himself, a scapegoat whose apparent guilt would allow the whole incident to evade police scrutiny.

It was, in fact, if it weren’t true, a brilliant ploy. Now all I had to do was determine which one of the players was smart enough, and greedy enough for power, to have figured it out.

And cold enough to have acted upon it.

I started with Charlotte, singing her to sleep with Dashiell occasionally howling along, his subtle way of telling me to keep my day job. The princess was so taken with Dashiell she removed her crown and tried it on him. But I had to call a halt to her fun when she tried to secure it with bobby pins. I passed David’s door without knocking. I’d visit him later, with Homer. We visited the guy we’d seen carrying his shoe around. He laughed when Dashiell kissed him. He seemed to be an awfully nice man who’d simply lost his way as he got old.

Some of the old people seemed to get sweeter as they got more senile, going back to childhood and, in doing so, shedding all the burdens that come with being an adult. A few, like Cora and Dora, perhaps because they were a pair, stayed peppery. Still, what you saw in either case was pretty much what you got. Those with autism were infinitely more complex and unpredictable.

We stopped in on a man who appeared to be in his thirties. Or forties. He said his name was Richard. But then he asked if Dashiell’s name was Richard. I thought of telling him it wasn’t, but didn’t bother. By then, Dashiell had hopped up on the bed, and for a while both Richards, cheek to cheek, communed. When I told him we had to go, he reached for my hand and patted it. I promised I’d come by again as soon as I could.

Dora wanted to see the dog, but Cora didn’t.

“I have gas,” she told me.

More than I needed to know.

Homer was in Venus’s office, the door propped open with a wedge. My guess was, he’d saved the job he dreaded for last, and he didn’t want to be in there alone with the door closed. For a moment he didn’t hear me over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. When he noticed me, he looked startled, just staring at me, the vacuum still going. Then he reached under the handle and shut it off.

“How’d you get stuck with this job?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Who else was going to do it? Anyways, couldn’t be done before, while Dr. K. was talking to the police. Couldn’t be done until they all left.”

“Did the stain come out?” I asked. Some kind of white foam was covering where the blood had been.

Homer shook his head. “I doubt it’ll ever come all the way clean,” he said. “I scrubbed it three times over. I been in here an hour. It’s all I’ve been doing, that and the vacuuming. Got to vacuum up that foam, then we’ll see.”

He turned the vacuum back on and ran it over the spot where Venus had fallen, shaking his head when he was finished.

“It’s still wet, but a rug this light, it’s going to show. Dr. K. won’t want that, won’t want the kids to see that. You never know what they understand.”

“Will they replace the rug?” I asked him.

“For now, at least, I thought I’d move the desk. If it’s just a couple of feet over, it’ll cover the spot nicely.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Let me help you.”

“Went straight down, right near it, I guess,” he said, looking at the desk.

I looked at the desk, too.

“If she’d been over there when she fainted, she’da been in the clear,” he said, looking at the space between the desk and the shelves. Another wishful thinker.

“Have you seen her, Rachel?”

“It’s not good,” I told him. “She hasn’t woken up.”

He seemed not to hear me, reaching out and putting his hands under the lip of the desktop.

“We’ll walk it back,” he said, “until it covers the stain. I want everything just so for when she gets back here. On three,” he said. Then he counted.

When the desk was in place, he noticed the books lying down. Now he was looking for the bookend, bending to look under the desk, see if in all the excitement it had gotten knocked onto the floor, shaking his head when he stood up. Then he stepped over to the bookshelves and took a bookend that was there, a brass sailboat. He laid down the last few books there to hold the rest, and carefully propped up Venus’s reference books and wedged them in place with the bookend.

“That’s better,” he said, straightening the blotter, moving the leather cup that held Venus’s pens an inch back. “Now what’s this?”

We both peered over the desk at the dark spot that had been hidden by the out-of-place blotter. Homer took a cloth from his back pocket and spit on it. When he rubbed the spot, the stain vanished.

“That’s better.”

I reached for the cloth and turned it over, and we both stared at it, brownish red where it had cleaned the surface of Venus’s desk. Homer had a look of panic on his face.

“The paramedic,” I said. “He was holding a compress on Venus’s head, and when he changed it—”

“We ought to put some flowers here,” he said. “She likes that. Likes it cheerful for them. They all come here, you know, just to be near her.”

He went back to the shelves, where there was an empty vase, and stood that on the other end of the desk.

I wasn’t thinking about flowers. I was wondering where the missing bookend had gone.

“I’ll go out into the garden and cut her some greens,” he said. “She hangs their pictures up on her door, too, everything to make them feel good. I wouldn’t want for her to come back and have the room looking bad.”

“Let me, okay?”

I walked around the desk and opened a couple of drawers, looking for a pair of scissors.

“I’ll get the polish,” he said, looking over at the dull spot where the blood had been. “I’ll make her desk shine.”

Dashiell followed me to the garden door, and I noticed no one had remembered to turn on the lights. The lights would attract insects, so I left them off, unlocking the door and letting Dashiell out first. There was a moon, and the pearly gray light it cast into the garden was sufficient for us to see.

As soon as he was outside, Dashiell’s tail began to beat so hard that every few times it made a complete circle. It wasn’t just that he was out, which for a dog, except when it’s raining, is always preferable to being in. It was more than that.

He headed right for the back of the garden, to the southwest corner. Not knowing why, I followed him to find out.

It was Jackson, not stretching skyward and being a tree. He was folded into himself, looking more like a stone, looking unbelievably small for such a tall man. Sitting on the ground, knees bent, head bowed so that I couldn’t see his face, arms limp at his sides, his hands encrusted with dirt, lying palms-up on the bricks that covered the garden floor, he was immobile, not even looking up when Dashiell wedged his big head next to his face and began to lick his cheek.

I crouched in front of him, putting the scissors down on the brick ledge.

“Jackson?”

There was no reply.

When I reached forward and lifted his chin, I saw that he was crying.

I leaned forward onto my knees and put my arms around him, and Jackson let me hold him, arms still at his side, his head leaning on my shoulder. I rocked him gently for the longest time. When I pulled back to see if he’d lift his head and look at me, I noticed that Dashiell was no longer there.

It was the noise of his tags that made me look. And another sound—his nails scraping against something hard. Dash was at the center of the back wall, in a space between two round pots of flowers, digging at the bricks.

“Leave it,” I told him, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I let go of Jackson and went over to Dashiell to stop him.

Looking down, I saw that the dirt all around where he was trying unsuccessfully to dig up the bricks was darker and looser than the compact, sandy-looking dirt a foot or so away. I crouched and quite easily lifted up a brick, then a second one, setting them off to the side.

Dashiell pushed his way in now that there was an opening and dug some more, the dirt flying backward as he
worked. Two more bricks came loose. With that, he dug at the dirt, and I could see his nostrils moving, taking in the scents coming up from the ground.

“Back,” I told him.

This time he paid lip service to my command. He took the smallest possible step back. His forehead squinched with concern, his head hanging over the hole, Dashiell was pressed against my side, his eyes on the ground.

I brushed away the dirt with my hands and felt something hard and smooth in the hole, grasping it with my fingers and pulling it up. It was Venus’s missing bookend, and even in the moonlight I could see two things: the brownish red dried blood on its base, and the green paint at the top.

When I turned back to where Jackson had been, he wasn’t there. Concerned, I stood, bumping into him. He had been standing right behind me. I hadn’t heard him, but there he was, practically on top of me and tall as a tree.

With one hand, he was reaching out for what I was holding.

In the other, he held the scissors.