She pulled up a tissue and blew her nose.
“I was furious, Rachel. The only one left in Ireland is my sister Mary. We haven’t spoken in thirty-two years. But it was the principle of the thing.” She bit her lip. “I called him an old skinflint, I did, and now—”
“But he was an old skinflint,” I told her, taking her in my arms.
If Harry had put in the bugs, then whoever killed him didn’t know about his marriage and the new will, didn’t know they’d done it all for nothing. It wouldn’t be until they read the will at his lawyer’s office that they would understand the changes that would be instituted because of Harry’s death.
“There’s one more thing,” she said.
I stepped back and looked at her.
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t see Mr. Dietrich get hit. But I may have seen him just before it happened.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Cora and Dora wanted to be near the window. Dora got there herself. Cora wanted me to wheel the chair for her. And I did. I know I baby her too much. Venus always tells me that. But I can’t seem to stop myself. Well, when I got her there, I looked out. There he was, Mr. Dietrich, just leaving the building, like this—” She put a hand over her eyes, as if she were saluting. “Perhaps he heard it, the bicycle, and turned around.”
“He was headed south, Molly. To Venus’s apartment.”
“Oh,” she said.
“After they married, Harry stayed there.”
Her lips were drawn up in a tight little pucker.
“They were husband and wife.”
“And here I was thinking he’d heard the bike coming, and when he turned, he had to put up his hand to shade his eyes, so he could see better.
“It would have been better if he had been going the other way. At least then, he wouldn’t have seen it coming. When my time comes,” she said, crossing herself as she spoke, “I don’t want to see a thing.”
CHAPTER 30
Is That Lady? I Asked Her
On my way out, I peeked into the garden. Jackson and Charlotte were there, sitting at the same table, both working intensely. I held the door open for Dashiell and let him lead the way.
It’s awkward figuring out what to say when you don’t expect a response. Working with Emily once, I thought I could sing a song, tell her my troubles, or read from the telephone book for all the good any of it would do me.
But every once in a while, she seemed to understand what I was saying. She’d follow some simple instructions or respond appropriately to what I had asked, her actions, not her words, serving as her answer. When I’d asked if she’d hug me good-bye, and to my astonishment, she did, it filled me with the belief that just because I couldn’t understand someone, that didn’t mean that nothing was going on there.
Just as the nurse had told me about Venus.
And just as I’d always felt about dogs, that there is far more consciousness, interpretation, and decision making going on there than most humans assume.
Jackson was doing what Jackson did, dipping his fingers in the green paint, then moving his hands in slow, graceful, swirly patterns over the paper. As I watched from the doorway, I saw that when he finished with the green, he waited for it to dry. While it did, he dipped his fingers into a cup of water and wiped them carefully on a paper towel, as if he were cleaning his brush between colors.
Charlotte wasn’t sharing materials with Jackson. She was using colored pencils, which she kept close to her and absolutely square with the tabletop. Still, I’d never seen either of them sit near each other, or anyone else for that matter. Had experiencing the trauma of seeing Venus get hit made them bond in their own inscrutable way?
I walked closer and took the seat next to Jackson. Neither of them looked up. Jackson’s paper had swirls of green on it, the color of the leaves in the garden right after it rained. Now he dipped his fingers in a second color, a bright red, the color of a kid’s wagon, or oxygenated blood. The green had dripped freely, running off his fingers in thin streams. He must have watered it down to speed it up. But the red paint was as thick as pudding, dropping rather than dripping off his fingers, forming clumps and thick lines across the page, pooling in one place where he held his hand still instead of moving it.
I looked across at Charlotte’s pad, her head bent so low it was inches from the paper, making it difficult for me to see what she was drawing.
I reached my hand across the table, but not so far that I’d be touching hers.
“That looks pretty,” I said. “May I see it?”
Charlotte’s pencil kept moving in a way that made me think she was coloring something in, leaving dense color in one small space. And she was. A moment later, she lifted her head, giving all her concentration to resharpening her pencil. It, too, was red. For a few seconds, like Charlotte, I gave all my attention to the curls of wood coming out of the side of the sharpener, light brown with a red rim, one long piece, reminding me of the way my mother peeled an apple. I used to think it was magic, the way the curling skin got longer and longer as the flesh of the apple was revealed, naked and pale, in the palm of her hand. Then she’d quarter it and hand me a piece, but it was that curl I always wanted, the part I didn’t understand.
I pulled Charlotte’s pad closer and turned it around. When I saw what she had drawn, I felt my breath catch up in my throat. This time it was a picture of a puli standing over an uneven circle of red, colored so densely and for so long that the artist had lost the point on her pencil. Pretty indeed. “Is that Lady?” I asked her.
I heard the sound before Charlotte began to move, a deep moan, loud enough to startle me. But it didn’t seem to upset Jackson. Jackson, hell, he’d heard it all and worse. He just kept dipping and dripping as Charlotte balled her hands into fists and began to pound her chest, the sound she made, a sound of grief, getting louder all the time.
I looked around for Dashiell, thinking maybe he could help. But he wasn’t near the table. Then I saw him. He was at the far end of the yard, where Jackson had buried the bookend. He wasn’t digging though. He was standing there wagging his tail in a way that meant he wanted permission to dig, permission he knew would be difficult, if not impossible, to come by.
I whistled him over, moving around the table to where Charlotte sat. Going against what I’d always been told, I put my arms around Charlotte and pulled her close, but this time, it didn’t work. She pulled away and, her back to me, kept punching herself in the chest.
When Dashiell came, he laid his head on her lap as if he were dropping a sack of potatoes that had suddenly become too heavy to hold. He sighed, too, the sound of the Hindenburg losing air. This was a dog who did nothing in a small way.
In a moment Charlotte stopped hitting herself. Her arms stayed bent, as if she were about to punch Dashiell, her hands clenched tight. Then the moaning stopped, but she didn’t reach out for Dashiell. Nor did she go back to her drawing, even when I put the pad back the right way, just as she had had it.
Sitting quietly next to her, I looked back at her drawing, the black lines going every which way, the puli’s cords not orderly like the cords of a show dog but snarled up against each other and sticking out in all directions.
Except one.
One was way too long. It hung down to the ground, then snaked along to the right of the dog.
Of course. It wasn’t a cord. It was a leash.
And just like that, I knew what had happened to Lady.
CHAPTER 31
I Got Something for You, Kid
As soon as Charlotte had calmed down, I called to Dash and went back inside, heading for Venus’s office. I unlocked the door, let him in, then closed the door behind us, merely turning around to see what I was after. But it was gone. Instead, there was a piece of the door exposed where it had been, smack in the middle of all the other art Venus had taped there, the way proud mothers put their kids’ pictures up on the refrigerator.
I looked down. I
t had fallen off before. Nothing.
But I wasn’t ready to give up. I looked on Venus’s desk. Homer had put fresh flowers there. There was another vase with greens on the top of the storage cabinet beneath the book shelves. But the drawing I was after wasn’t there.
Then I saw it. It was on top of one of the file cabinets in a wire basket, lying on top of whatever Venus had put there to deal with later. It had probably fallen off again, and Homer, too harried to tape it back on the door, or planning to do it later, had dropped it there so that it wouldn’t get stepped on.
I picked it up and looked at that funny ground line. Only that’s not what it was. It was a leash. And had I been able to see all the way to the other end, I would have seen Lady. But, of course, I didn’t, because there was another funny-looking line in the picture. This one came down on the right side of the drawing. It was part of the doorway, and Lady was already outside—not in the garden where she usually went, off leash, but out on West Street, headed for God knows where.
At least now I knew who to ask: the man in the portrait, Samuel Kagan, listening to his music as he stole the dog who had stolen the hearts of all the kids and most of the staff.
I checked my watch. He’d be here after lunch. In fact, I was due here then, too, for a second round of ring-around-the-rosy, with me and Dashiell in the lead. I had a couple of hours, and more than enough to do to fill them.
On the way home, we cut across on Greenwich Street to Tenth, stopped at Action Pharmacy for shampoo and toothpaste—if I remembered correctly, I was running low—and crossed Hudson, heading past the Blind Tiger Ale House toward home.
I fed Dashiell, took my purchase upstairs, and while the tub was filling, put Venus’s necklace in the top desk drawer for safekeeping and then checked my answering machine. There were four messages.
The first was from Nathan, telling me that the staff meeting had been canceled.
The second was from Marty Shapiro, telling me to drop in and see him when I had a free minute.
The third was from my sister. It didn’t say much of anything. Typical, I thought. She was acting like a smitten teen. I wondered how long that would last.
The last call was from Chip. I erased the first three and saved that one, playing it again as I got dressed just to hear his voice.
I made some phone calls, took some notes, then stopped at the Sixth on my way back to Harbor View. When I opened the door to the bomb squad, Marty got up and joined me in the hall rather than asking me in.
“I got something for you, kid,” he said.
“Really? Great. What is it?”
“It’s about the bike.”
“Yeah?”
“We found it.”
“No kidding? How?”
“Perspicacious detective work. You impressed?”
“You bet. Both with the fancy footwork and your astonishing use of the English language.”
“I thought you would be.”
I was ready to punch him.
“So?”
“Here’s the thing. The driver of said vehicle doesn’t have an astonishing use of the language. In fact, he probably only has enough use of it to make change.”
“No joke.”
“Which means—”
I bit my tongue.
“That someone borrowed said murder weapon whilst a hungry family was paying for their egg foo yung.”
“Brilliant. But does that mean you can’t tie the thief to the bike, because of all the time that elapsed and the number of people using it?”
“The lab is still trying, but the bike was out on the street all this time, including in the rain.”
“Still, it’s remarkable—”
“Footwork.”
“This is true.”
“You come up with anything on your end?”
“I might know who took the dog.”
“It figures,” he said. “So, hey, you’ll be sure to keep us posted on that, kid, right? The captain, he’s dying to know what happened to the dog. It’s way up there on his list of concerns.”
“I promise I’ll call,” I told him. “Or even better, I’ll drop in. As soon as it’s confirmed.”
I still had at least an hour. I didn’t want to waste a minute of it. I walked down to Hudson Street and hailed a cab, telling the driver to take us to St. Vincent’s and not spare the horses, falling against Dashiell when, a few blocks later, he made a right on Twelfth Street, taking me at my word.
CHAPTER 32
They Say It’s Good Luck, He Said
Willy was first behind Dashiell and me, carrying the pillow from his bed. Charlotte was wearing her earmuffs, but not the red gloves. She had a piece of paper that might have been from her drawing pad crunched up in one hand. Cora and Dora were off to the side, sort of clapping to the music. And half a dozen other people were circling around, waiting for Dashiell to drop so that they could fling themselves to the floor, too.
Jackson, in the middle, had his arms stretched high, his red fingers wiggling like leaves of a Japanese maple blowing in the wind. Fortunately, Dashiell didn’t see him as a tree. He kept his cool and kept his mind on the game. Mouth open, tongue lolling out, concentrating on the words so that he wouldn’t miss his cue, he ambled slowly in a large circle, his tail wagging, his new friends trailing after him, as best they could.
He was a dog. It was all the same to him; cross-eyed, mute, lame, forgetful. He loved them all. When he got the word, he crashed loudly to the floor. Cora dropped her head as if she were praying. Dora covered her eyes. Willy, clever thing, placed his pillow carefully on the floor in front of him and lay down. Charlotte lay on her back. Staring at the ceiling, or at nothing, she smoothed out the drawing and let it rest on her chest as if it were protective armor. Who knows? Maybe it was. Jackson reached for the sky, and I noticed that the paint had dripped down his arms since I’d last looked. My friend Jackson was having a bad day.
After two rounds of Dashiell’s new game, he and I sat off to the side, and Cora and Dora joined the group. Samuel pulled the chairs in a circle for everyone else and started tossing a big, light ball from person to person, trying to get them to catch it and toss it back in time to the music he was playing.
Pretty ambitious, I thought, watching the ball hit Willy’s shoulder and land on the floor.
Dashiell and I had gotten to the ICU without a glitch. We looked familiar now. No one questioned where we were going. But when we walked in, I saw that the curtain around Venus’s bed was open, the bed stripped. Suddenly my mouth tasted sour, and the room seemed to be moving on its own.
“She’s awake.”
I’d turned to see Nurse Frostee standing right behind me.
“Down this hall, third door on your left. Pinch your cheeks first, woman, you’re as white as he is.”
She bent and scratched Dashiell’s head.
“Therapy dog,” she’d said. “There’s days I could use some of that myself, that and a good hot soak for my feet.”
So I took a few breaths and headed for Venus’s room, to see what she could remember.
“Two of them were sitting along the wall opposite the desk,” Venus had said, propped up in bed, her hair so black against the smooth white hospital sheets. “I’d just turned around to get Jackson a paper towel. David was standing at the window, looking up at the light coming in through the leaves of the tree out there.”
“What about Jackson? Could he have—”
“No.”
She stared right at me, defying me to accuse Jackson, to point the finger at any of her kids.
“Not Jackson. And not David either?”
“Rachel, David didn’t hit me. I was looking right at him.”
“Did you hear the door open?”
“No. I had the radio on for them and the air conditioner going.”
“But the door was locked?”
“I’m not sure. Sometimes when the kids are in with me, I unlock it. They have trouble opening it when it’s locked. But
I can’t say for sure.”
“When did they move you?” I asked. She had a room to herself now, a window with a view of Eleventh Street.
“This morning.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I’m so happy to see you’re doing better.”
Dashiell’s tail thumped against the floor.
I wanted to say something about Lady, but I didn’t. I decided to wait until I knew more—specifically, where she was now.
If she was, now.
“I have your necklace safely at home,” I told her, holding her hand, reluctant to leave.
She reached up and touched her neck.
“I guess it got twisted or something when you fell.” I didn’t think this was the time to tell her how I’d found it. “I have to go. Dashiell’s up for a heavy round of ring-around-the-rosy.”
She smiled.
“I’ll be back later.”
I turned to go, then turned around again.
“Venus, did the hospital inform Eli that you’re awake now?”
“The doctor said he was going to call right after his rounds, share the good news.”
I nodded. And on the way back to Harbor View, I’d called my old boss, Frank Petrie, to send someone over to sit with Venus, just in case whoever hit her was dissatisfied with the outcome of their efforts.
Samuel was still tossing the ball. This time it landed on Cora’s lap and, through no effort on her part, stayed there.
“Good job,” he told her, waiting in vain for her to toss it back.
Anyone else would have looked over at me and shrugged, giving it the old one-two, but having a little humor about how it wasn’t proceeding. Not Samuel. He kept at it, giving it everything he had, as if midway through the class some miracle might occur, and Willy and Charlotte and Jackson would be lobbing the ball back to him like pros, trying out for the Knicks or the Yankees in a week or two.
Lady Vanishes Page 19