Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

long that the artist had lost the point on her pencil. Pretty indeed. “Is that Lady?” I asked her.
    I heard the sound before Charlotte began to move, a deep moan, loud enough to startle me. But it didn’t seem to upset Jackson. Jackson, hell, he’d heard it all and worse. He just kept dipping and dripping as Charlotte balled her hands into fists and began to pound her chest, the sound she made, a sound of grief, getting louder all the time.
    I looked around for Dashiell, thinking maybe he could help. But he wasn’t near the table. Then I saw him. He was at the far end of the yard, where Jackson had buried the bookend. He wasn’t digging though. He was standing there wagging his tail in a way that meant he wanted permission to dig, permission he knew would be difficult, if not impossible, to come by.
    I whistled him over, moving around the table to where Charlotte sat. Going against what I’d always been told, I put my arms around Charlotte and pulled her close, but this time, it didn’t work. She pulled away and, her back to me, kept punching herself in the chest.
    When Dashiell came, he laid his head on her lap as if he were dropping a sack of potatoes that had suddenly become too heavy to hold. He sighed, too, the sound of the Hindenburg losing air. This was a dog who did nothing in a small way.
    In a moment Charlotte stopped hitting herself. Her arms stayed bent, as if she were about to punch Dashiell, her hands clenched tight. Then the moaning stopped, but she didn’t reach out for Dashiell. Nor did she go back to her drawing, even when I put the pad back the right way, just as she had had it.
    Sitting quietly next to her, I looked back at her drawing, the black lines going every which way, the puli’s cords not orderly like the cords of a show dog but snarled up against each other and sticking out in all directions.
    Except one.
    One was way too long. It hung down to the ground, then snaked along to the right of the dog.
    Of course. It wasn’t a cord. It was a leash.
    And just like that, I knew what had happened to Lady.

Chapter 31
    I Got Something for You, Kid

    As soon as Charlotte had calmed down, I called to Dash and went back inside, heading for Venus’s office. I unlocked the door, let him in, then closed the door behind us, merely turning around to see what I was after. But it was gone. Instead, there was a piece of the door exposed where it had been, smack in the middle of all the other art Venus had taped there, the way proud mothers put their kids’ pictures up on the refrigerator.
    I looked down. It had fallen off before. Nothing.
    But I wasn’t ready to give up. I looked on Venus’s desk. Homer had put fresh flowers there. There was another vase with greens on the top of the storage cabinet beneath the book shelves. But the drawing I was after wasn’t there.
    Then I saw it. It was on top of one of the file cabinets in a wire basket, lying on top of whatever Venus had put there to deal with later. It had probably fallen off again, and Homer, too harried to tape it back on the door, or planning to do it later, had dropped it there so that it wouldn’t get stepped on.
    I picked it up and looked at that funny ground line. Only that’s not what it was. It was a leash. And had I been able to see all the way to the other end, I would have seen Lady. But, of course, I didn’t, because there was another funny-looking line in the picture. This one came down on the right side of the drawing. It was part of the doorway, and Lady was already outside—not in the garden where she usually went, off leash, but out on West Street, headed for God knows where.
    At least now I knew who to ask: the man in the portrait, Samuel Kagan, listening to his music as he stole the dog who had stolen the hearts of all the kids and most of the staff.
    I checked my watch. He’d be here after lunch. In fact, I was due here then, too, for a second round of ring-around-the-rosy, with me and Dashiell in the lead. I had a couple of hours, and more than enough to do to fill them.
    On the way home, we cut across on Greenwich Street to Tenth, stopped at Action Pharmacy for shampoo and toothpaste—if I remembered correctly, I was running low—and crossed Hudson, heading past the Blind Tiger Ale House toward home.
    I fed Dashiell, took my purchase upstairs, and while the tub was filling, put Venus’s necklace in the top desk drawer for safekeeping and then checked my answering machine. There were four messages.
    The