Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

loss, it’s getting to the kids.”
    “His children?” I asked.
    “No. He never had children of his own. I mean the people we take care of at Harbor View, the kids. Well, none of them are really kids. The youngest, Charlotte, turned twenty in April. On the ninth. The oldest, the Weissman twins, are ninety-two. Dora’s eleven minutes older than Cora and never lets her forget who came first.”
    What did she want? I wondered. Was I supposed to go undercover as a bike messenger, ride around in spandex shorts, a canvas bag full of padded envelopes on my back, listen to rumors, hunt this guy down? I was the wrong sex, the wrong color, the wrongest possible person for the job. If that’s what she had in mind.
    Or was she thinking the accident had been caused by some little Asian guy, delivering someone’s egg foo yung? Rain or shine, day and night, the streets were full of diminutive men on bicycles delivering for the Chinese restaurants, keeping the folks in the Village from starving to death. Maybe Charlie Chan could do the job, but not Rachel Kaminsky Alexander.
    Or was it someone out exercising, looking for a place to get by the never-ending reconstruction of the Westside Highway so he could ride along the Hudson, catch a breeze or two? This I could do, but toward what end? I’d never find out, no way. There’d be no connection, no bridge from the doer to the done.
    “We always call them that,” Venus said, “the kids, because, well, they can’t take care of themselves, can’t live on their own. Some of them you can talk to, though at times it makes you feel like you need residential care. Some of them talk back, say a few words when they feel like it. Some don’t talk at all.”
    Venus shook her head, the clumps of hair twirling one way, then the other, finally landing on her shoulders.
    Jackson’s been with us nine years. All he does is paint. We don’t even know his name.”
    “But—”
    “We call him Jackson because of the way he paints. Well, paints. He dribbles it, you know, like Jackson Pollock. Only not quite that good.” Venus smiled for the first time. “Don’t get me started on my kids,” she said. “I love them to pieces, and I’ll bore the hell out of you.”
    Her eyes teared up, and she wiped them with the heels of her hands, then flapped a hand at me and let it land, finally, on her chest. She closed her eyes for a moment before continuing.
    “Here’s the irony of the situation. I was going to call you anyway. After Lady disappeared, the whole joint was a disaster, no one eating, no one sleeping, it was something awful. Lady was our resident therapy dog.” Venus looked down at Dashiell, then back up at me. “Eli Kagan, he’s the other owner, our shrink, he saw this show on PBS about pet-facilitated therapy and felt that instead of having a volunteer come in once a week, we should have a full-time dog of our own. If it helped, he said, how could we limit it to an hour or two a week?
    “I began the search for the right dog, and within two weeks I found her, a female puli.” Venus lifted up a handful of her hair and smiled. “The kids love to touch my hair. It fascinates them. I thought a puli would be a good choice for them. She was one year old and had actually done a little visiting, at a local nursing home. She was perfect for us. She loved everyone and was patient, more than most humans. Of course, her owner loved her, she wasn’t looking to give her up. But she had eleven of them and lived in a three-dog town. Her neighbors had gone to the zoning board more than once. Even if she let them out three at a time, figuring a puli is a puli is a puli, the neighbors weren’t fooled. It’s not that they knew one from another. It’s that one day the snoop next door saw two dogs in the window when three were in the yard.”
    Venus checked her watch.
    “So we lucked out, because she said if she couldn’t keep her, she couldn’t think of a more appropriate place for her, and the next day Ragmop’s Lady Day came to live at Harbor View.”
    “That’s some name for a Hungarian dog.”
    ‘Tell me about it,” Venus said. “Rachel, I know you’ve done pet therapy with Dashiell, so I don’t have to tell you what happened. It was fantastic.”
    I nodded.
    “It was one of those small miracles you pray for in a place like this. That was a year ago. Then two weeks ago, Lady vanished. I left one day after work, she was there. I came in the morning, she was gone.”
    “Had