Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

gas,” she told me.
    More than I needed to know.
    Homer was in Venus’s office, the door propped open with a wedge. My guess was, he’d saved the job he dreaded for last, and he didn’t want to be in there alone with the door closed. For a moment he didn’t hear me over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. When he noticed me, he looked startled, just staring at me, the vacuum still going. Then he reached under the handle and shut it off.
    “How’d you get stuck with this job?” I asked him.
    He shrugged. “Who else was going to do it? Anyways, couldn’t be done before, while Dr. K. was talking to the police. Couldn’t be done until they all left.”
    “Did the stain come out?” I asked. Some kind of white foam was covering where the blood had been.
    Homer shook his head. “I doubt it’ll ever come all the way clean,” he said. “I scrubbed it three times over. I been in here an hour. It’s all I’ve been doing, that and the vacuuming. Got to vacuum up that foam, then we’ll see.”
    He turned the vacuum back on and ran it over the spot where Venus had fallen, shaking his head when he was finished.
    “It’s still wet, but a rug this light, it’s going to show. Dr. K. won’t want that, won’t want the kids to see that. You never know what they understand.”
    “Will they replace the rug?” I asked him.
    “For now, at least, I thought I’d move the desk. If it’s just a couple of feet over, it’ll cover the spot nicely.”
    “Good idea,” I said. “Let me help you.”
    “Went straight down, right near it, I guess,” he said, looking at the desk.
    I looked at the desk, too.
    “If she’d been over there when she fainted, she’da been in the clear,” he said, looking at the space between the desk and the shelves. Another wishful thinker.
    “Have you seen her, Rachel?”
    “It’s not good,” I told him. “She hasn’t woken up.”
    He seemed not to hear me, reaching out and putting his hands under the lip of the desktop.
    “We’ll walk it back,” he said, “until it covers the stain. I want everything just so for when she gets back here. On three,” he said. Then he counted.
    When the desk was in place, he noticed the books lying down. Now he was looking for the bookend, bending to look under the desk, see if in all the excitement it had gotten knocked onto the floor, shaking his head when he stood up. Then he stepped over to the bookshelves and took a bookend that was there, a brass sailboat. He laid down the last few books there to hold the rest, and carefully propped up Venus’s reference books and wedged them in place with the bookend.
    “That’s better,” he said, straightening the blotter, moving the leather cup that held Venus’s pens an inch back. “Now what’s this?”
    We both peered over the desk at the dark spot that had been hidden by the out-of-place blotter. Homer took a cloth from his back pocket and spit on it. When he rubbed the spot, the stain vanished.
    “That’s better.”
    I reached for the cloth and turned it over, and we both stared at it, brownish red where it had cleaned the surface of Venus’s desk. Homer had a look of panic on his face.
    “The paramedic,” I said. “He was holding a compress on Venus’s head, and when he changed it—”
    “We ought to put some flowers here,” he said. “She likes that. Likes it cheerful for them. They all come here, you know, just to be near her.”
    He went back to the shelves, where there was an empty vase, and stood that on the other end of the desk.
    I wasn’t thinking about flowers. I was wondering where the missing bookend had gone.
    “I’ll go out into the garden and cut her some greens,” he said. “She hangs their pictures up on her door, too, everything to make them feel good. I wouldn’t want for her to come back and have the room looking bad.”
    “Let me, okay?”
    I walked around the desk and opened a couple of drawers, looking for a pair of scissors.
    “I’ll get the polish,” he said, looking over at the dull spot where the blood had been. “I’ll make her desk shine.” Dashiell followed me to the garden door, and I noticed no one had remembered to turn on the lights. The lights would attract insects, so I left them off, unlocking the door and letting Dashiell out first. There was a moon, and the pearly gray light it cast into the garden was sufficient for us to see.
    As soon as he was outside, Dashiell’s tail began to beat so hard that every few times it made a