Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

eye? Well, there’s an exhibition of his work over at the gallery across the street from Florent, on Gansevoort Street. Do you know it? I’m going tomorrow, about noon,” she’d said, for whomever she thought was listening. “Can you meet me? We can look at it together.”
    She whispered again. “Noon, tomorrow, the Gansevoort Gallery.”
    Why was someone at Harbor View calling a detective? If she were calling for pet therapy, she wouldn’t have been whispering. She simply would have asked. And she wouldn’t have called so late at night.
    I looked down at Dashiell. Lying near the bottom step, he was asleep again, his big head leaning against the side of my foot, the way he’d always slept leaning on Emily, an autistic eleven-year-old we’d worked with at a small Brooklyn shelter. I would sit next to her and hand her crayons, and she would copy pictures out of old magazines, Dashiell snoring under the table, using her foot as a pillow. Without his presence she wouldn’t have sat there, wouldn’t have drawn those pictures and colored them in so carefully, wouldn’t have let me sit so close or touch her once in a while.
    I remembered the last visit we’d made, right before her parents had moved her to an institution upstate: how she’d stood in the window of the little front room where I hung my coat, watching me leave with Dashiell, how she’d put her hand up on the cold windowpane, as if to wave good-bye, as if she understood that she was never going to see us again, how when I’d lifted my hand to wave back to her, the tears rolling down my cheeks, her face had remained expressionless and her hand had- stayed where it was, an aura of moisture surrounding it, the tips of her fingers white against the glass.

CHAPTER 2
    What Did She Want? I Wondered

    At noon, I pointed my finger at the bell for the Gansevoort Gallery, and Dashiell did a paws-up, one big foot smacking the bell dead center. A moment later we were buzzed in.
    It was easy to spot Venus. She was the only one there. She was leaning over a round, glass-topped display table, dreadlocks covering her face like a beaded curtain. I picked up the price list and moseyed toward the back of the gallery.
    Venus glanced up as I approached.
    I began to look at the jewelry too, graceful silver pieces, mobiles and stabiles to be worn instead of exhibited on pedestals. Venus walked around the table and began to look at the pieces near me.
    “What are they asking for that one?” She pointed to an elaborate necklace, a rigid, graceful arc of silver that would circle the neck, a green stone surrounded by delicate silver leaves dangling down from the center.
    When I opened the book, she took a step closer, as if to read the price over my shoulder.
    “Thirty-five hundred,” she said. “I wonder what my pin is worth.”
    The pin was on her lapel, a free-form bow with a tiger’s eye on one side and a matching hole cut out on the other, the white linen of her jacket showing through.
    “It’s lovely,” I told her, turning back to the display of necklaces, watching her out of the comer of my eye.
    “I couldn’t speak last night,” she said softly, even though there was no one near us, the manager off in the other room. “I was calling from work. It’s been chaotic, and I’ve been staying over, to keep an eye on things, be there if I’m needed. You never know who might be outside your door, listening.”
    I looked through the Plexiglas shield at pins and earrings, each sitting on a round red circle attached to a tall pole, like the leaves of a surrealistic tree.
    “One of the owners died two days ago,” she said, her voice a monotone, as if she were reading from the newspaper. “He was on his way home. He’d barely stepped out of the door when he was hit by a bicycle, riding on the sidewalk. It plowed right into him and killed him.”
    “One of those freak accidents you hear about,” I said, remembering the coverage on the news Saturday night, thinking, good lord, what next, a hit-and-run on the sidewalk. And on Sunday morning, when Dashiell brought in the Times, there was a small article in the Metro section, saying the police didn’t know who it was, riding where people walk, going so fast he couldn’t stop, hitting this old man on his way home from work.
    “Only this isn’t something that happened to a stranger,” Venus said. “This is the man I’ve worked for for fourteen years. And try as we may, keeping up as usual, the grief, the