Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

if it weren’t fresh, why would Dashiell point it out to me? If the paint were old, it would mean nothing to him, no more than the finish on the desk or Venus’s blotter.
    That’s when I thought to check out the side of the desk, the place where Venus hit her head when David pushed her.
    No blood there. I even scraped the lip of the desk with a fingernail to make sure.
    What was Dashiell smelling up there?
    I looked back at Charlotte, coloring in the rest of the rug now, the part without the blood. She had added something while I was checking the desk: a pair of legs from the knee down, a pair of white Keds, speckled with paint. She’d colored the speckles green. There were some green streaks on the pants, too, as if someone with wet paint on his hands had bent over, hands on his knees, to look at something on the floor.
    I heard something in the lobby and looked toward the door, hoping no one was coming in here, holding my breath, my eyes on the door, as if by doing that, I could keep it from opening. Waiting, I looked at the drawings and paintings taped to the inside of Venus’s door—Jackson’s drips, a portrait of Venus done in colored pencil, just the way Charlotte was drawing now, and a bunch of black crayon marks going every which way I felt sure was a portrait of Lady. There was that other strange picture Dashiell had knocked off the other day, the one where someone seemed to have spoons sticking out of his head, a really odd portrait, done from the rear in a shaky hand, the artist using pencil, pressing hard enough to leave a rut in the paper, someone tense doing that picture.
    Someone tense, at Harbor View. Brilliant insight, I thought. Maybe I should go get me a Ph.D., publish in the Autistic Journal, make a name for myself.
    Charlotte was still coloring the rug. Were they all in here when Venus fell, she and David and Jackson?
    I thought about Cora, seeing Harry on the sidewalk— Harry, who had been knocked out of his shoes, knocked clear into the next world; Cora, who had nothing to say about what she saw, nothing, at least, that was useful or made sense.
    Could any of these three tell me what had happened here this afternoon?
    Maybe they could, but not in the usual way. Wasn’t that, in fact, what Charlotte was doing, telling me what had happened by drawing it?
    Her head was bent low over the pad, as if she were nearsighted, as she made the bloodstain redder, the color rich now, the way it must have looked when it was fresh. She seemed completely absorbed in the drawing, oblivious to me and Dash and even her surroundings.
    Watching her, I realized I was wrong. Dashiell had tried to communicate with me. He’d tried to show me what he’d discovered. But Charlotte’s drawing didn’t have anything to do with me. She was doing it for herself, recording something she had seen, never mind that she appended an image from the present, Dashiell, to one from earlier in the day.
    Was that a mistake?
    Or was Dashiell there to help her cope, to protect her?
    She had seen something confusing, something that frightened her. I watched her drawing, her fingers white against the pencil, getting the scene down on paper to try to make sense out of it.
    But whether or not I’d be able to make sense out of it, that was another story.

Chapter 21
    We Have Witnesses, I Could Tell Him

    By the time we left Harbor View and headed over to St. Vincent’s, it had cooled off a little, the sun not overhead anymore but tucked behind the buildings west of us. I bought a yogurt at one of the ubiquitous Korean grocery stores, sat on the stoop of a brownstone, and shared it with Dashiell, watching his big tongue cleaning off the little white plastic spoon until long after all traces of food had disappeared.
    We worked our way slowly through the revolving door and stopped at the reception desk, where a sand-colored woman with a profusion of bright gold hair and little flowers at the tip of each vermilion nail was talking on the phone. She pulled the receiver away from her hair and raised her eyebrows.
    “Venus White.”
    One long press-on nail slid down the list of names.
    “ICU.”
    A real New York conversation.
    She hadn’t looked over the counter, and Dash hadn’t done a paws-up, so I saved the story I had worked out on the way over for later. Only no one asked. St. Vincent’s had a visiting dog program, and everyone must have assumed Dashiell was part of it.
    Until I got to the ICU.
    The nurse was the color of a