Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

eating pasta. I swear, that dog prefers spaghetti to steak. “You wanna know, we got our eye on any suspects yet?“
    “Would be helpful.”
    I picked up a small pad and a ballpoint pen that had seen better days and wrote a number on it.
    “Fax me, okay?”
    I handed him the number.
    “This is your regular phone number,” he said.
    “Well, I don’t get enough faxes to justify the added expense of a dedicated line. Matter of fact, yours stands a good chance of being my first.”
    “So when did you catch up with current technology? Fax me!”
    “My brother-in-law bought me a fax machine, a laptop, and a printer. Until three weeks ago, the only web sites I was acquainted with were between my dog’s toes. Now, whew, I surf, I defrag, I download. I’m practically a techie.”
    “So what was the occasion for all this equipment giving?”
    “He thinks I don’t like him anymore.”
    Marty nodded. “Is he right?”
    “Nah.”
    Marty was staring, like I was his crib notes and the test was tomorrow.
    “Well, maybe he’s right. I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “He’s a charming man. It’s just that—”
    I stopped, wondering why I was making more of this than I should have. Like it was my business in the first place. “It’s just that?”
    “I don’t trust him.”
    A banker was missing, it said in the Times, a hundred and sixty-seven thousand missing along with him. Some restaurateur from the Bronx was charged with trying to run over his wife. And yet another mother had killed her children. How did anyone trust anyone?
    Marty put out his cigarette. “He cheated on your sister?“
    „He did.”
    “And does she still like him, Rachel?”
    “She does.”
    “But you can’t find it in your heart to—”
    I flapped my hand at him. “Don’t get me started, okay?” I headed for the door, my eyes welling up with tears I didn’t want Marty to see.
    “Hey. Thanks. I’ll watch for your fax.”
    The door closed. I leaned against it, looking up at the fake bomb, someone’s idea of a good thing, thinking about my brother-in-law, wondering, the same as Marty—if Lillian could forgive and forget, why couldn’t I?

Chapter 8
    How About a Little Trick Today?

    Cora was sitting on her bed, her bare feet dangling above the speckled green-and-gold linoleum floor, and for once, Dora wasn’t with her.
    “Oh, it’s my little relative,” she said, as soon as she saw me. Then she noticed Dashiell.
    “Who woves her mommy?” she asked him. “Lady does.” I gave Dashiell the hand signal for “find.” Venus had put a dog biscuit in the pockets of those she wanted me to visit, telling them Lady was coming this afternoon, never mind that this time around Lady wouldn’t be a little black bitch with dreadlocks, she’d be a big white pit bull with testicles, anatomically, rather than politically, correct.
    You stick to the reality they have to get, Venus had said— meals are eaten in the dining room; you can’t leave the building without an escort; even when you get very angry, you must not hit; that sort of stuff. The rest, poof, you let it go. Because they will anyway.
    Dashiell began to nuzzle the pocket with the biscuit. I watched Cora remember the biscuit, the biscuit becoming part of the trail of evidence that would connect her to what she’d been told twenty minutes earlier, help her hold onto the pieces of information she found difficult to grasp. I was interested to see that while she didn’t know one dog from another, she remembered the name of the other dog, giving it to this one, generalizing the way young kids do, designating every animal “doggie” until they learn otherwise.
    Cora smiled.
    “Is the baby hungry?”
    She slid the biscuit out of her pocket.
    Dashiell looked at it soulfully. Definitely a Patsy-winning performance.
    “She is hungry, she is,” said Cora, letting him slip the biscuit gently from her bent fingers.
    “My other daughter, Eileen,” she whispered, “now you don’t go telling on me I told you this, she’s taken all my things. I tried to get them back, but she has lawyers.” Cora’s eyes began to tear up.
    “Oh, she was the smart one,” she said, nodding. “She told me she’d keep everything safe for me. But where? I don’t know where anything is. My own daughter. Not a good girl like you. She never visits me.”
    I patted her dry old hand, the skin so thin you could almost see through it.
    “I signed documents,” she whispered. “I trusted