Lady Vanishes (17 page)

“You mean they socialized with Dr. Kagan?”

“Not often. Just for the holidays, birthday parties, special occasions, like family. The boys called them Uncle Harry and Aunt Marilyn, just as if they were blood relations.”

“And recently?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. I’ve been here since the boys grew up and moved out on their own.”

“Where do they live, the boys?”

“Oh, still in Brooklyn,” she said, sitting down on the bed. I sat next to her. “It’s too pricey around here. Did you see the signs on those new buildings going up? Everything’s a luxury building now, and I wonder where they find all those folk with so much money to spend on housing, half a million dollars and more, just for a place to live. Must be all those Wall Streeters, young people that make more money than they know what to do with. No, the boys still live in Brooklyn, just like their father. Why, it’s only three-quarters of an hour or so on the subway. Half a million dollars. My word.”

“They’re sensible.”

“Indeed they are.”

I slipped the necklace back into my pocket and tossed the wet tissue into Molly’s wastebasket.

“Molly, were you here the day Harry got hit by the bicycle?”

“I’m always here, Rachel. Well, most always. But I didn’t see the accident, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I was wondering something else. I was wondering who
else might have been around during the day, you know, before the accident.”

“The boys were both in. In fact, the others were here, too, come to think of it.”

“Which others?”

“Marilyn’s sister, Mrs. Poole, and her son and daughter. They’d come to see Mr. Dietrich about something.”

“Did you overhear any of what they were talking about?”

“Oh, I don’t go around repeating—”

“I wouldn’t tell a soul,” I whispered.

“I mind my own business,” she said, drawing her robe tighter. “I wouldn’t know what they were yelling about.”

“They were yelling?”

Molly leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Both times it was coming from Mr. Dietrich’s office.”

“Go on.”

“Well, the first time was after lunch. Charlotte had brought her gloves and earmuffs down with her. She was just dying for a little walk. It cheers her so. So I’d gone to tell Venus that I was taking her out. She asked us to do that, to always let her know when we were leaving the building with one of the kids. But when I knocked, she wasn’t there. It was Mrs. Poole’s voice I heard that time, from all the way down the other end of the lobby.”

“And what did she say?”

“She didn’t
say
anything. She was shouting. All I heard was, ‘Well, she was
my
sister. I’m sure she meant—’” She stopped in midsentence.

“That’s all?”

“Mr. Dietrich interrupted her.”

“How?”

“By bellowing, ‘How would
you
know what she intended?’”

“And then?”

“Well, that was all. You certainly don’t think I stayed around to hear more?”

I shook my head.

“Of course not. Anyways, nothing else was said for a while.”

I looked at her.

“I was merely making sure the child’s earmuffs were on properly. If they don’t cover her ears, they can’t do her a bit of good, can they?”

“And there was another time that day? Was that also Mrs. Poole?”

“I’d gone to fetch David away from the front door. And again there was shouting coming from Mr. Dietrich’s office. It’s not like I was trying to hear what they were saying. It’s just that—”

“What?”

“Well, he was so loud. You couldn’t help hearing him. It even made David more tense. It was lucky I’d come to take him upstairs before dinner.”

“Who? Who was so loud?

“Mr. Dietrich. And he was normally so soft-spoken, that one. He hardly ever raised his voice.”

“What did you hear that time?”

“Well, on the way to get David, I heard him say, ‘It’s out of the question.’ It sounded like something fell when he said it.”

“Could he have hit the desk with his fist?” I asked, thinking about the thick carpet in Harry’s office, which would deaden the sound of something falling.

“Yes—it could have been that.”

“Was that all you heard?”

Molly shook her head. “When I was passing the office with the lad, I heard him shout again. ‘Not even when hell
freezes over and gets as cold as your calculating little heart,’ is what he said that time.”

“And who was in there?”

“I don’t know, Rachel. I didn’t stay around to find out. I wanted to get David away from the shouting as fast as I could. I took the elevator, so I never heard another word. His loss must be even more painful for them.”

“For whom?”

“Why, for the two he fought with on the last day of his life. They’ll never get the chance to make up.”

“Are you sure it was two different people, Molly? Couldn’t Mr. Dietrich have been fighting with Mrs. Poole again, or still, the second time?”

“Oh, they’d gone by then, those three.”

“You saw them leave?”

“Couldn’t help it. When I was coming back in with Charlotte, she nearly knocked the two of us over, rushing out the front door with those two spoiled brats of hers. And not a word of apology from herself, not to me and not to Charlotte neither.”

“And you didn’t see anyone come out of Harry’s office the second time you heard the shouting?”

“No,” she said. “I was up with David.”

I stood up to go. “Thanks for last night, Molly. You were right. That was no time to be walking around outside.”

But Molly wasn’t listening to me.

“It could have been anyone,” she said. “He might have even been on the phone, for all I know.” She reached up and wiped her eyes. “It was the last I heard of him,” she said, tears running down her old face. “An hour later, there was that terrible accident, and he was gone and now I canna’ take back the awful thing
I
said to him.”

“What awful thing?”

She flapped her hand at me.

“You’ll feel better if you tell someone.”

“It was about the phones, Rachel. He put in some sort of device, he told me, that would track the outgoing calls.”

“
Harry
did that? Why?”

“Cheapness,” she shouted. “He said I had free room and board and plenty of money besides, and he wasn’t going to have me calling my relatives in Ireland on his nickel. He was obsessed about it, the phone and the electric. You could break your neck walking around in the dark so he could save a penny, running around shutting off lights the way he did.”

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.”

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.