Lady Vanishes Read online

  “Then he picked a spot.”

  “Where?”

  “Provence, in Soho. Do you know it?”

  I nodded.

  “I wondered at the choice.”

  “A very romantic place,” I said.

  Venus nodded.

  “A place for lovers,” she said. “That’s what he said. We’ve never met, I said. You don’t know me. I do, he said. And I know I love you.

  “Rachel, this was so extraordinary. We hadn’t switched from the internet to the phone. I’d never heard his voice. There was so much I didn’t know about him. But I felt it, too. My heart would race before logging on to read his letters every night. I felt exactly the way you do when your lover walks into a room. Only this room, it was a computer screen. It was black words on a white screen. No smell. No catching your breath because you see a wrist sticking out of the white cuff of a shirt and it makes you crazy. Nothing like that, like what you’re used to.”

  I began to laugh. “I know what you mean,” I said. “All that longing, it can—”

  “But there was none of that.”

  She hit the cool-down button, going from a run to a walk.

  “You must have been scared.”

  “I was. And I wasn’t. Both sides powerfully strong.”

  Venus shook her head, smiling at the memory.

  “And?” I said, afraid she’d cut and run without telling me what I was dying to hear, so absorbed in her story, as if it were a girlfriend thing, forgetting for the moment why I was here and what this was all about.

  “Finally, after so many months, after sharing so much, I was going to meet him. Well, maybe that’s the wrong word, Rachel. I’d met him long before. But now, I was going to see him, this man who made my heart pound, this man I didn’t know any of the normal, ordinary things about, the way you do when it’s a more traditional sort of thing.

  “I didn’t know how I’d feel. Or how he would. Trust me, I was scared. There was so much at stake, Rachel. If it was no good, I’d lose my best friend.

  “But I was excited, too. I couldn’t wait.

  “What never occurred to me at the time was that we might already know each other.”

  “And did you?”

  Venus nodded.

  “Can you imagine my surprise when I got there, carrying a red rose, as we’d planned, asked for his table, and saw who it was?”

  Venus stopped the belt. She turned to face me.

  “Who?” I asked, stepping off on the edges and stopping my belt.

  She didn’t answer, thinking over if she should tell.

  “Who?” Sounding like an owl.

  “Why, it was Harry,” she said.

  As if I should have known.

  “Harry Dietrich?”

  Venus nodded.

  “Harry Dietrich,” she repeated.

  “But he was seventy-four,” I blurted out. She couldn’t have been more than forty, forty-two at most.

  “And ugly,” Venus said. “Homely as a toad. But I loved him to pieces.” Venus swiped at her eyes, then took a deep breath. “And he loved me.”

  “What did he say when he saw it was you?”

  “He stood and took my hand, turning it over and kissing the palm. Then he pulled out a chair for me and said, ‘Sit down, darling, we have so much to talk about.’”

  “As if he knew?”

  “As if he’d won the lottery.”

  “And then?”

  She seemed lost in thought.

  “Rachel, the funeral is at ten, at the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West. You’ll be there? You won’t forget?”

  I nodded.

  “But—”

  “I’m sorry to run like this. I have to see the lawyer. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Rachel. You do understand, I couldn’t have just blurted this out to you. What would you have thought?”

  “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  “Oh,” she said, “count on it.”

  What was she doing, taking her time to build up some trust in me before she blurted out the rest, not unlike the kids in her actions?

  But according to Venus, we didn’t have time to build trust. We needed a leap of faith, if we were going to find out what we needed to know by Friday.

  “Venus—”

  “I’m going to be late.”

  “Just a quick question,” I told her, not taking no for an answer this time. “I was told it was you who called nine-one-one. How did you know something was wrong, that Harry had been hurt?”

  “Molly told me. She said Cora was arguing with Dora in the dining room and that when she’d had enough, she’d turned her back to her, which meant she was then facing the window. She began to bang on the glass, Molly said, and when Molly rushed over to tell her to stop, that she might break the window and hurt herself, she said she was trying to wake up Harry, that he’d taken off his shoes and was taking a nap on the sidewalk and that that wasn’t right. He ought to be in his bed, she told Molly. That’s the rule. Molly looked out, saw Harry out there, and came running to tell me.”

  “Had Cora seen the accident happen?”

  “Not that I could tell. I think she must have looked out minutes afterward. You have to understand, Rachel, with this population, there’s no way of knowing things like that. I’ve got to go now. I really do.”

  I would talk to Cora myself. But if Venus couldn’t find out anything right after the fact, there wasn’t much chance I’d get a straight story days later.

  I watched her walk toward the locker room. When she was out of sight, no one around except Eloise, the gym cat, sitting on the back of the couch watching Dashiell sleep, I turned my belt back on, stepping on and again slowly increasing the speed, as if staying where I was would help me figure out what to do next.

  I have to see the lawyer, she’d said.

  What lawyer?

  Harry’s lawyer, I thought, no doubt about it.

  I let that sit, feeling the weight of it.

  It was time to find out who might stand to gain from Harry Dietrich’s demise, I thought, hoping Venus White would not be on that list, knowing she would be, right at the top, her life in danger because of it.

  CHAPTER 11

  I Wanted To Shake Her

  I wanted to shake her, push her back onto a chair, stand over her, one finger poking at her chest, demand that she tell me the rest of it, now—this exasperating woman, building me up for each piece of her autobiography so I wouldn’t think ill of her. What did that have to do with anything anyway?

  What did she think—that if she told me everything at once, I wouldn’t understand?

  Or was it that I would?

  She was going to see Harry’s lawyer. Shouldn’t I be in the locker room, too, cleaning up, telling her, like it or not, I was going with her, that she wasn’t letting me do my job, that, no two ways about it, I had to find out what the lawyer had to say, I had to know once and for all what the rest of the story was, whatever was keeping her up nights, scaring the hell out of her?

  But if I did go with her, would the lawyer talk? Who the hell was I that Harry’s lawyer should talk to me? And what made me think Venus would let me rush this, find out what I needed to know faster than she was willing to eke it out?

  There had to be another way, I thought, going over everything she’d said, starting with her first phone call.

  She had whispered the night she’d called me, then she’d talked too loud, purposely feeding information to whoever was there. But when I was outside her office door with Charlotte, I could hear her on the phone, talking about something personal, saying she was scared. Why wasn’t she worrying about anyone overhearing her then?

  She’d called me around midnight, said she was staying over.

  Was it the night man she suspected? He’d been there when the dog disappeared, hadn’t he?

  And he wasn’t there, at least not inside the facility, when Harry was killed by a bicycle.

  I turned and looked at the big round c
lock on the wall. He’d be there in a few hours. Lonely work, staying up all night taking care of disabled people, people who get spooked easily, can’t tell you what’s wrong. Maybe he could use a little company to make the time go by. Before he knew it it would be morning, time to go home, and what? Feed his puli?

  And where were all the other players? Where were the sister-in-law and her son and daughter, people who stood to inherit a bundle when the old man died? It wasn’t at all like relatives to lie back and wait, act casual when there was a fortune at stake. It was more like a feeding frenzy, the sharks smelling blood and moving in close to make sure they had a shot at the biggest portion.

  After my father died, some second cousins we used to see once or twice a year, if that often, came to the house, one saying that since my mother only had girls, my father’s watch should go to him, that Abe, he was sure, would have wanted it that way—as if my father, who hadn’t known the clock was running down when he was still so young, had nothing better to concern himself with than wondering to whom he should leave his few worldly possessions. And the books, his mother said, a dumpy woman with a doughy face, my cousin Abe would have wanted us to have his books.

  My mother, sitting on the couch, a Kleenex crushed in one hand, lifted her face and looked at the cousins, then stood and quietly walked to the door, opening it for them.

  “Abe’s things are staying right here where they belong, with his family,” she said, showing them out. “We’re not dead yet,” she called after them. “Not by a long shot.”

  A watch. Some books. What would it have been had there been money, the kind of millions Harry Dietrich had to have had to pour millions into Harbor View over the years?

  And what of that? Was money set aside to keep the home going? Eli Kagan must have thought so. He’d told the Times that Harbor View would operate as always. With Harry gone, would he be managing those millions? And if not, who would?

  Beyond the uptown traffic they were building a median to be filled with plants, trying to make the new road more palatable, prettying it up so the quiet community to the east of the roadway would be less offended by the constant rush of traffic—a neighborhood of townhouses built one hundred and fifty years before, wrought iron boot scrapers still in place at the foot of the stoop that took you up to the grand parlor floors, so that you wouldn’t track in mud from the unpaved roads. There were still cobblestone streets in the Village, and carriage houses, now converted into homes, like my own, cottages entered through passageways just wide enough for a horse and wagon to pass.

  Venus was leaving the gym, wearing a white linen suit, a peach-colored shell underneath. As she passed the windows where the treadmills were, I could see that the heart was tucked away again, which made me think of something else; the way she’d put her hand on her chest at the gallery, squeezed her eyes closed, and taken a minute to collect her feelings before continuing. It was the necklace she was touching, feeling it through her shirt, getting comfort from it, the necklace Harry had given her, which she didn’t want anyone at work to see.

  I looked across at the Jersey skyline. Two towers were going up, the window openings still without glass, like dark open mouths. I thought about how quickly the world was changing now, how slowly things seemed to move when I was a kid, the time between my seventh and eighth birthday taking ten times as long as the time between my thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth.

  How had time moved for Venus and Harry that first moment, when they understood who it was they’d each been writing to, someone they each had known for years, but in a very different way?

  He was easily old enough to be her father, and as Venus had said, he wasn’t an attractive man. He had one of those faces, if it were sculpted out of clay, that looked as if someone had placed a hand on top of the head and leaned a little too hard, scrunching everything into a permanent scowl.

  Harry, the money man, watching figures all his life.

  But kind to his dying wife.

  He’d been kind to Venus, too, paying attention to her concerns, listening to her dreams. He’d shared his thoughts and feelings with her, month after month. He’d been truthful with her, telling her he had a wife.

  Maybe not at first, but soon enough.

  You could hardly fault the man, wanting someone to talk to when his wife had been so sick.

  Could you?

  Besides all that, he was rich, richer than anyone else Venus had ever known.

  How long after that first glimpse did Venus think about the money?

  Looking at the river, the light sparkling on the water the way it did on Venus’s diamond necklace, I wondered about that, about their first meeting and what each of them was thinking when they saw the other for the first time, Harry sitting there waiting for her, Venus carrying a single red rose.

  I slowed down the belt and stretched out my legs. There was work to do, and for the moment, I was glad that Venus was going elsewhere and that I wasn’t going with her. I had the feeling I’d find out much more on my own. I touched the outside of my pocket to check for the keys she’d given me, then headed home with Dashiell to shower and change.

  CHAPTER 12

  All Fall Down

  I decided to get to Harbor View before the night man, though this was just guesswork. No one had told me exactly when he came on, nor who else might be there in the evening. Since it was likely there’d be more than one person around, on the way over I thought up a variety of excuses for my after-hours presence.

  When I unlocked the front door, I heard singing from the dining room. David was in the dining-room doorway, the way he had been when Samuel was doing dance therapy, maybe the closest he got to participating in anything, and little as it was, I was probably not the only one there to think this little bit of contact was a result of good care. There were places I’d been with Dashiell where nothing was too generous a term to describe what some of the residents did.

  I let Dashiell go to him first, tying his leash around my waist and waiting in the empty lobby, the floor freshly mopped, the doors to all three offices closed, and my guess, locked. I looked at the keys, still in my hand, five of them, wondering if the offices used the same key or separate ones and planning to find out if any of the keys I’d been given would get me where I needed to go.

  Dashiell stood next to David, all but touching him, wagging his tail from side to side in slow motion, waiting for a signal to hype up his schmooze. Apparently it came, because he suddenly leaned in, giving David just enough of his weight that had David moved, Dash would have, too.

  But David didn’t move. I watched his hands, to see if they’d relax the way they had earlier, but this time I saw something else. Now it appeared that David was moving his fingers in time to the singing.

  I felt something like a cool breeze on my skin, a fluttering in my chest. Some things did seem to get inside and touch this inscrutable man. If that were so, wasn’t it possible that something could get out, too?

  I walked up slowly, and not wanting to startle David, I sighed so that he would know I was behind him. If Eli Kagan wanted workers to knock on doors before entering residents’ rooms, this was the equivalent, as best as I could figure out.

  I stood, as last time, so that Dashiell was in the middle, never greeting David, nor looking directly at him. For a moment, I watched the singers. Only about half the people gathered were actually singing or humming, the rest sitting, staring at the remains of dessert or at nothing much at all.

  Samuel Kagan was leading the group. Dance therapy on Monday, singing on Tuesday, a man of many talents and endless dedication, I thought, watching him work. He appeared to be in his early forties. The zealous look on his face was not unlike the spaced-out look of the Moonies, the incandescent lights from above making his nude bean shine, all the more so since it was slick with sweat. He had a round face, a roundish nose, full lips, and a great broom of a mustache. He bounced on the balls of his feet, singing as loud and as clear as a human being could without shouting, his
short-fingered hands chopping the air forcefully as he conducted his little choir with such fervor, you’d think there was going to be a performance tomorrow.

  For a while I became so enthralled watching him, his short, chunky body, shirt soaked with sweat despite the air conditioning, energetically tapping his feet and moving around, that I forgot all about David. Then I remembered what had happened earlier; one way or another, I’d passed by him without seeing him. Some people do that, I thought; the opposite of the vibrant, little man leading the singing, energy swirling about him, they pull their energy in, so far that they become almost invisible, like prey animals who change their color to blend in with the environment, their only protection against the predators. I wondered if this was just the way David was, if he had been born like this, or if something had damaged him so severely that he needed to hide this way, thinking of what Venus said, how he tugged at her, how even as closed as he was, he’d taken her heart.

  I sat then, cross-legged on the floor. After a moment, David sat, leaving only Dashiell standing, but not for long. This time, based on their earlier communion, Dashiell slipped artfully down David’s leg, but not into a sit. Instead, he moved his body forward, so that when he finished sliding, he lay across David’s lap, gazing up at him with adoration.

  The song ended, and Samuel began to clap, those residents who could joining in. When that was that, he turned, noticed me, and came over.

  “Samuel Kagan,” he said, bending down to shake my hand, his eyebrows rising, asking my name.

  “Rachel Alexander,” I said, my eyebrows staying right where they were, “and Dashiell,” since he was too occupied to introduce himself.

  At the sound of his name, Dashiell lifted his head, sneezed, took a sniff, then sighed and laid his head back on David’s lap. Samuel squatted so that we’d be face to face, reaching out for my hand and giving it a squeeze. “I’m so glad you’ve joined the team,” he said, leaving my hand warm and damp.