Read Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes for Free Online

so much more than we’d had before. Why rush? Why be greedy when you already feel rich?”
    “Weren’t you concerned?” I asked. “Meeting on the net, you wouldn’t know anything for sure. You wouldn’t know who he really was.”
    “Who he was? Of course I knew that. I knew he was kind, intelligent, sad, but funny too. I knew he was warm. I knew he cared about me and that I cared about him. What else did I have to know?”
    Lots, I thought. But I didn’t say so.
    “I know what you’re saying, Rachel—that he could be a kid, fooling around, or a con artist, about to lay a big story on me and ask for money, or an old lady in a wheelchair, passing the time away on her computer; that nothing I knew was real, that I could get myself one big hurt doing this. But in a short time, I knew that there was nothing I could find out about this man that would change what I felt for him. Not one thing.
    “And shortly after I knew I felt that way, that’s when he told me he was married.”
    Fortune, a Jewish proverb says, is a wheel that turns with great speed.
    But Venus didn’t look upset. She unscrewed the top of her water bottle and took a long drink. Then she hit the cooldown button on her treadmill.
    “I have a meeting.” Very businesslike now.
    She stopped the belt and shut off the power.
    “I have to get back. I’ll see you tomorrow, at two-thirty, then again here at five-thirty, and I’ll go on with this.”
    “Venus—” I said.
    But before I got the chance to ask anything else, she was off the treadmill and on her way to the ladies’ locker room, leaving me alone, the belt of my treadmill moving rapidly along, me getting nowhere, fast.

CHAPTER 5
    I Left My Number, Just in Case

    I didn’t go directly home from Serge’s. First I crossed back over the highway, walked uptown to the Gansevoort Street dog run, a private, locked run for members only, and looked through the chain link fence at the dogs playing ball to see if there were any pulis there. If I wanted to hide a purebred dog, I’d hide it in plain sight, especially a breed like the puli—cords hanging over their faces, most of them black, except to their owners, they all look pretty much alike.
    But there were no pulis there, only the more popular breeds—two Goldens, a chocolate lab, even more popular now that President Clinton had one, a Dalmatian, two mixed breeds, and a border collie, crouching, her eye on the ball she was waiting for her owner to throw, as intense as if she were herding sheep.
    I waited for the toss.
    “Get it, Mavis,” the woman said, the dog halfway there before the words were out.
    We crossed the highway at Gansevoort Street, heading for Beasty Feast on Hudson. If someone were bringing a puli in, or having food delivered for one, they would know it. That is, if Lady were still in the Village and if her new owner spared no expense, feeding her premium dog food in lieu of a supermarket brand.
    The woman who ran the store began to shake her head.
    “No one came in with a puli in the last few weeks.”
    The delivery man shook his head, too.
    “No deliveries for pulis.” He scratched the tip of his nose with one finger. “There’s a new Tibetan terrier on Jane Street. Cute as a button. And Jack Russells, you’re looking for a Jack Russell, I can give you twenty addresses.”
    I left my card, just in case.
    I tried their other stores, too—the one on Washington Street near Charles and the one all the way over on Bleecker, near Sixth Avenue.
    If I was going to meet Venus at the gym every day, I needed new shoes. The ones I was wearing let me feel every crack in the sidewalk. I walked around the comer to Sixth Avenue and dropped an obscene amount of money on a pair of cross trainers that made me feel as if I were walking on marshmallows.
    The salesman, a skinny old guy, his mustache wiggling as he slowly enunciated each word, cradled one of my pathetic-looking old sneakers in one hand.
    “There are only so many miles in a