Lady Vanishes (7 page)

I got to the gym before Venus, tied Dash to the bench, and signed in. Serge put down his newspaper and went for the green water basin.

I took the corner treadmill, putting the power on, starting the belt, and slowly increasing the speed. In front of me, outside the window, which was covered with a taupe shade to keep the sun from blinding anyone working out, the orange-and-white striped barrels that blocked off areas of construction, yellow tape strung between them, kept traffic off the newly paved lane closest to the broken sidewalk. The men in their orange hard hats and vests we had seen on our way to the pier had gone home by now, construction work starting and ending earlier than the average workday. How else could they make all that noise, jackhammers, earthmovers, and cranes clanging away when the rest of the world is still trying to sleep?

I hadn’t seen Venus arrive, coming from the north, sign
ing in, and going straight to the ladies’ locker room, then appearing on the treadmill to my right. I had questions about the kids—David, Jackson, Charlotte, and the twins—and I wanted to know who had made all those pictures of the tree, the one with the unfinished squirrel. But I didn’t know how long she’d have today, and I needed to hear her story, find out why she thought her life was in danger, figure out what to do if it was.

“Did you keep writing him?” I asked, as if she’d told me a minute, not a day, ago that the man she’d met on-line was married.

“I did,” she said, fiddling with the buttons on her treadmill.

I looked out the window, the hook hanging from the crane parked across the highway dark and ominous looking against the sky. What was the hook here, I wondered, wasting time caring about a man who was married to someone else?

“She was ill, he said.”

Uh-huh, I thought. Companion piece to “My wife doesn’t understand me,” or, more nineties, “We have an arrangement.”

“She had cancer. There had been a remission. But after four and a half years, the disease came back. It had gone from the breast to the bone, and she was dying.”

“Oh,” I said.

“When she was in the hospital, he was there every day. He went in the morning, early. Then after work, he went back. He spent the evening with her. Sometimes he sat quietly by the bed, holding her hand. Sometimes he’d read to her. He’d tell me what he was reading, and I’d get the book. I’d read it, too.”

I turned to look at her, dreadlocks loose today, hanging
around her pretty face, her big eyes shining as she told about this man she loved, this married man who was so tender when his wife was dying.

Or so he wrote.

“For months, I read the books he read to his wife, listened to each new symptom, knew the names of the medications she was on, stayed up late, writing him, giving him letters for company when he was lonely.”

“Did he talk about an autistic kid?”

She shook her head, the curls swinging one way, then the other.

“Did you talk about your kids?”

She shook her head again.

“It was understood, because of how we met, that autism affected his life and mine. But how, I didn’t tell him. He didn’t say either. We had the autism chat line for that. This was about our own feelings, not about anyone’s kid. This was to feel ordinary, like other human beings.”

I nodded, watching the light on the river, the peaks of water silver, the water moving on, toward the Statue of Liberty, south to where the ocean was.

“She died last winter, a week before Christmas.”

Venus increased the speed on her treadmill, starting to run.

I took a sip of water, going fast enough walking, my T-shirt soaked even before I got here. I could see Dashiell through the open arch, see his back as he lay on the cool floor, fast asleep, his head pressed against the water basin.

“A few weeks after that, he began to talk about us meeting.”

“He was local? Close enough so that you could see each other?”

“He was. That’s the strangest thing, isn’t it? He could have been anywhere, in Iowa, Alaska, New Zealand, any
where at all. But he was right here, in Manhattan. Sometimes you think something was meant to be. But then—”

Venus looked at her watch.

“I don’t have a lot of time.”

“Another meeting?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t going to say.

“So did you get together?”

“We negotiated for a month.”

When she smiled, I realized I’d only seen her smile once before. Whether she was in danger or not, she surely believed she was, a haunted look on her pretty face.

“Then he picked a spot.”

“Where?”

“Provence, in Soho. Do you know it?”

I nodded.

“I wondered at the choice.”

“A very romantic place,” I said.

Venus nodded.

“A place for lovers,” she said. “That’s what he said. We’ve never met, I said. You don’t know me. I do, he said. And I know I love you.

“Rachel, this was so extraordinary. We hadn’t switched from the internet to the phone. I’d never heard his voice. There was so much I didn’t know about him. But I felt it, too. My heart would race before logging on to read his letters every night. I felt exactly the way you do when your lover walks into a room. Only this room, it was a computer screen. It was black words on a white screen. No smell. No catching your breath because you see a wrist sticking out of the white cuff of a shirt and it makes you crazy. Nothing like that, like what you’re used to.”

I began to laugh. “I know what you mean,” I said. “All that longing, it can—”

“But there was none of that.”

She hit the cool-down button, going from a run to a walk.

“You must have been scared.”

“I was. And I wasn’t. Both sides powerfully strong.”

Venus shook her head, smiling at the memory.

“And?” I said, afraid she’d cut and run without telling me what I was dying to hear, so absorbed in her story, as if it were a girlfriend thing, forgetting for the moment why I was here and what this was all about.

“Finally, after so many months, after sharing so much, I was going to meet him. Well, maybe that’s the wrong word, Rachel. I’d met him long before. But now, I was going to
see
him, this man who made my heart pound, this man I didn’t know any of the normal, ordinary things about, the way you do when it’s a more traditional sort of thing.

“I didn’t know how I’d feel. Or how he would. Trust me, I was scared. There was so much at stake, Rachel. If it was no good, I’d lose my best friend.

“But I was excited, too. I couldn’t wait.

“What never occurred to me at the time was that we might already know each other.”

“And did you?”

Venus nodded.

“Can you imagine my surprise when I got there, carrying a red rose, as we’d planned, asked for his table, and saw who it was?”

Venus stopped the belt. She turned to face me.

“Who?” I asked, stepping off on the edges and stopping my belt.

She didn’t answer, thinking over if she should tell.

“Who?” Sounding like an owl.

“Why, it was Harry,” she said.

As if I should have known.

“Harry
Dietrich?
”

Venus nodded.

“Harry Dietrich,” she repeated.

“But he was seventy-four,” I blurted out. She couldn’t have been more than forty, forty-two at most.

“And
ug
ly,” Venus said. “Homely as a toad. But I loved him to pieces.” Venus swiped at her eyes, then took a deep breath. “And he loved me.”

“What did he say when he saw it was you?”

“He stood and took my hand, turning it over and kissing the palm. Then he pulled out a chair for me and said, ‘Sit down, darling, we have so much to talk about.’”

“As if he
knew?
”

“As if he’d won the lottery.”

“And then?”

She seemed lost in thought.

“Rachel, the funeral is at ten, at the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West. You’ll be there? You won’t forget?”

I nodded.

“But—”

“I’m sorry to run like this. I have to see the lawyer. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Rachel. You do understand, I couldn’t have just blurted this out to you. What would you have thought?”

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Oh,” she said, “count on it.”

What was she doing, taking her time to build up some trust in me before she blurted out the rest, not unlike the kids in her actions?

But according to Venus, we didn’t have time to build trust. We needed a leap of faith, if we were going to find out what we needed to know by Friday.

“Venus—”

“I’m going to be late.”

“Just a quick question,” I told her, not taking no for an answer this time. “I was told it was you who called nine-one-one. How did you know something was wrong, that Harry had been hurt?”

“Molly told me. She said Cora was arguing with Dora in the dining room and that when she’d had enough, she’d turned her back to her, which meant she was then facing the window. She began to bang on the glass, Molly said, and when Molly rushed over to tell her to stop, that she might break the window and hurt herself, she said she was trying to wake up Harry, that he’d taken off his shoes and was taking a nap on the sidewalk and that that wasn’t right. He ought to be in his bed, she told Molly. That’s the rule. Molly looked out, saw Harry out there, and came running to tell me.”

“Had Cora seen the accident happen?”

“Not that I could tell. I think she must have looked out minutes afterward. You have to understand, Rachel, with this population, there’s no way of knowing things like that. I’ve got to go now. I really do.”

I would talk to Cora myself. But if Venus couldn’t find out anything right after the fact, there wasn’t much chance I’d get a straight story days later.

I watched her walk toward the locker room. When she was out of sight, no one around except Eloise, the gym cat, sitting on the back of the couch watching Dashiell sleep, I turned my belt back on, stepping on and again slowly increasing the speed, as if staying where I was would help me figure out what to do next.

I have to see the lawyer, she’d said.

What
lawyer?

Harry’s lawyer, I thought, no doubt about it.

I let that sit, feeling the weight of it.

It was time to find out who might stand to gain from Harry Dietrich’s demise, I thought, hoping Venus White would not be on that list, knowing she would be, right at the top, her life in danger because of it.

I wanted to shake her, push her back onto a chair, stand over her, one finger poking at her chest, demand that she tell me the rest of it,
now
—this exasperating woman, building me up for each piece of her autobiography so I wouldn’t think ill of her. What did that have to do with anything anyway?

What did she think—that if she told me everything at once, I wouldn’t understand?

Or was it that I would?

She was going to see Harry’s lawyer. Shouldn’t I be in the locker room, too, cleaning up, telling her, like it or not, I was going with her, that she wasn’t letting me do my job, that, no two ways about it, I had to find out what the lawyer had to say, I had to know once and for all what the rest of the story was, whatever was keeping her up nights, scaring the hell out of her?

But if I did go with her, would the lawyer talk? Who the
hell was I that Harry’s lawyer should talk to me? And what made me think Venus would let me rush this, find out what I needed to know faster than she was willing to eke it out?

There had to be another way, I thought, going over everything she’d said, starting with her first phone call.

She had whispered the night she’d called me, then she’d talked too loud, purposely feeding information to whoever was there. But when I was outside her office door with Charlotte, I could hear her on the phone, talking about something personal, saying she was scared. Why wasn’t she worrying about anyone overhearing her then?

She’d called me around midnight, said she was staying over.

Was it the night man she suspected? He’d been there when the dog disappeared, hadn’t he?

And he wasn’t there, at least not
inside
the facility, when Harry was killed by a bicycle.

I turned and looked at the big round clock on the wall. He’d be there in a few hours. Lonely work, staying up all night taking care of disabled people, people who get spooked easily, can’t tell you what’s wrong. Maybe he could use a little company to make the time go by. Before he knew it it would be morning, time to go home, and what? Feed his puli?

And where were all the other players? Where were the sister-in-law and her son and daughter, people who stood to inherit a bundle when the old man died? It wasn’t at all like relatives to lie back and wait, act casual when there was a fortune at stake. It was more like a feeding frenzy, the sharks smelling blood and moving in close to make sure they had a shot at the biggest portion.

After my father died, some second cousins we used to see once or twice a year, if that often, came to the house, one saying that since my mother only had girls, my father’s
watch should go to him, that Abe, he was sure, would have wanted it that way—as if my father, who hadn’t known the clock was running down when he was still so young, had nothing better to concern himself with than wondering to whom he should leave his few worldly possessions. And the books, his mother said, a dumpy woman with a doughy face, my cousin Abe would have wanted us to have his books.

My mother, sitting on the couch, a Kleenex crushed in one hand, lifted her face and looked at the cousins, then stood and quietly walked to the door, opening it for them.

“Abe’s things are staying right here where they belong, with his family,” she said, showing them out. “We’re not dead yet,” she called after them. “Not by a long shot.”

A watch. Some books. What would it have been had there been money, the kind of millions Harry Dietrich had to have had to pour millions into Harbor View over the years?

And what of that? Was money set aside to keep the home going? Eli Kagan must have thought so. He’d told the
Times
that Harbor View would operate as always. With Harry gone, would he be managing those millions? And if not, who would?

Beyond the uptown traffic they were building a median to be filled with plants, trying to make the new road more palatable, prettying it up so the quiet community to the east of the roadway would be less offended by the constant rush of traffic—a neighborhood of townhouses built one hundred and fifty years before, wrought iron boot scrapers still in place at the foot of the stoop that took you up to the grand parlor floors, so that you wouldn’t track in mud from the unpaved roads. There were still cobblestone streets in the Village, and carriage houses, now converted into homes, like my own, cottages entered through passageways just wide enough for a horse and wagon to pass.

Venus was leaving the gym, wearing a white linen suit, a peach-colored shell underneath. As she passed the windows where the treadmills were, I could see that the heart was tucked away again, which made me think of something else; the way she’d put her hand on her chest at the gallery, squeezed her eyes closed, and taken a minute to collect her feelings before continuing. It was the necklace she was touching, feeling it through her shirt, getting comfort from it, the necklace Harry had given her, which she didn’t want anyone at work to see.

I looked across at the Jersey skyline. Two towers were going up, the window openings still without glass, like dark open mouths. I thought about how quickly the world was changing now, how slowly things seemed to move when I was a kid, the time between my seventh and eighth birthday taking ten times as long as the time between my thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth.

How had time moved for Venus and Harry that first moment, when they understood who it was they’d each been writing to, someone they each had known for years, but in a very different way?

He was easily old enough to be her father, and as Venus had said, he wasn’t an attractive man. He had one of those faces, if it were sculpted out of clay, that looked as if someone had placed a hand on top of the head and leaned a little too hard, scrunching everything into a permanent scowl.

Harry, the money man, watching figures all his life.

But kind to his dying wife.

He’d been kind to Venus, too, paying attention to her concerns, listening to her dreams. He’d shared his thoughts and feelings with her, month after month. He’d been truthful with her, telling her he had a wife.

Maybe not at first, but soon enough.

You could hardly fault the man, wanting someone to talk to when his wife had been so sick.

Could you?

Besides all that, he was rich, richer than anyone else Venus had ever known.

How long after that first glimpse did Venus think about the money?

Looking at the river, the light sparkling on the water the way it did on Venus’s diamond necklace, I wondered about that, about their first meeting and what each of them was thinking when they saw the other for the first time, Harry sitting there waiting for her, Venus carrying a single red rose.

I slowed down the belt and stretched out my legs. There was work to do, and for the moment, I was glad that Venus was going elsewhere and that I wasn’t going with her. I had the feeling I’d find out much more on my own. I touched the outside of my pocket to check for the keys she’d given me, then headed home with Dashiell to shower and change.