Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

Samuel, then who?
    “I’m sorry, Marty. I thought—”
    “Hey, the dog’s okay, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Then something good came out of this, didn’t it?”
    “Yeah. Thanks for saying that,” I said.
    “Don’t mention it,” he told me.
    After I hung up, I’m not sure why, I went to the bathroom, got the tweezers, and, sitting at the desk, holding the necklace under the light, I closed the link on Venus’s chain, then slipped it around my neck, fastened the latch, and tucked it under my shirt, the heart that Harry had given Marilyn first and Venus second. I went into the bedroom and crawled under the covers, feeling the bed bounce twice as both dogs joined me a moment later.
    But I couldn’t sleep. At first, I was thinking about Samuel Kagan, who, when he couldn’t get positive attention from his father, had tried for some negative attention, confessing to crimes he didn’t commit just so his old man would take some notice of him.
    And then I stayed up even longer; whoever had killed Harry and tried to kill Venus was still running around loose. Time was running out, and I didn’t have a clue as to who that was.

Chapter 36
    I Took Out My Cell Phone

    I decided to take Lady back to Harbor View early, while I still could. With Venus in the hospital, I might not be welcome there once Samuel was released. Unless, of course, he decided to keep mum about the whole incident, saving my face along with his own.
    I took the dogs across West Street to give them a good walk along the river, picking at all the loose threads of the case as I headed uptown, Venus’s necklace hanging around my neck like a stone, reminding me that I didn’t know who tore it off her and why. Nor did I know how David got it, how Jackson got the bookend and why he had buried it, nor what those arguments were about on the last day of Harry’s life. I was about to make the list of what I didn’t know longer than the Saint Patrick’s Day parade when I saw something that momentarily stopped my ruminating.
    Someone skating toward me was waving. Since I didn’t recognize him, I turned around. There behind me was someone saluting. A second later, I began to laugh at the absurdity of what I thought. The person was waving back, his hand passing in and out of the position it would be in were he shading his eyes from the sun. Only he was facing north.
    Harry had been facing south. He could have been shading his eyes. He also could have been waving at his killer. Why not? Wasn’t it someone he knew? And then, as the bike got closer, with no signs of slowing down, his hand probably froze, so that someone glancing out the window could think he was saluting. Or shading his eyes.
    How easy it is to misinterpret what we see.
    The skaters met and now both headed north. I followed behind them, stopping to let the dogs sniff and explore or stop and play-bow to each other, untwisting the leashes as the dogs continually changed places, the dog on the left having to see what was on the right side, the dog on the right needing to check out the left.
    Instead of crossing the highway at Eleventh Street, the most direct route to Harbor View, I kept going. I wasn’t in any rush. Samuel wasn’t getting sprung for hours, and everyone else would probably be at the lawyer’s office, trying to figure out what might be involved in overturning Harry’s will, the lawyer shaking his head, telling them the rest of the bad news, that the will was airtight because Harry could leave whatever he wanted to his wife.
    When I got to Twelfth Street, across from Harbor View, everything changed again. Now I had something else to think about, seeing how lonely the old seaman’s hotel looked, the only occupied building on the block. In fact, in no time, it would be the only building standing on the block. That very morning, while I was taking a shower and feeding the dogs, a temporary wooden barrier had been set up around the aqua bar, and the wreckers were there, taking it down.
    I looked at Lady, who looked back at me, one eye showing, the other hidden by her dreadlocks, her mouth open, her small pink tongue out, her head cocked, as if to ask me what I wanted.
    Maybe her disappearance wasn’t how it all began.
    Since I didn’t have a pen and paper with me, I took out my cell phone and called home, waiting for the answering machine to pick up, then reading into the mouthpiece the information from the sign on the wooden barrier, including the phone number. Instead of