Read Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes for Free Online Page B

wouldn’t have thought a nonprofit institution would pay its manager enough to live at the Archives, but she did have that lovely pin she was wearing at the gallery, and the clothes she wore didn’t look as if they came from Kmart.
    Thinking about Venus’s story, I pictured her at the gym, remembering the necklace she wore while she was working out. It must have been under her shirt at work, because I hadn’t seen it there; but at the gym, there’d be nothing to hide it under, not an ounce on her body she needed to cover up with a big shirt or loose pants, everything out there, looking terrific. Including that necklace.
    It looked like the heart Carder advertised every few weeks in the Times —the ad saying, Start something, or, Because she has your heart, something like that, the heart and chain sold separately, the whole shebang costing slightly more than my yearly nut for renting the little back cottage on Tenth Street I’ve lived in for four and a half years.
    It sure didn’t look like the kind of jewelry a woman would buy herself.
    If Venus had been so lonely, where had it come from— the married man she met on-line?
    And why was I hearing about him anyway? What did he have to do with a missing dog, a dead old guy, a bunch of witnesses who don’t speak and couldn’t tell you the time of day if they did, and this gorgeous, mysterious black woman who hires me because she thinks her life’s in danger, then won’t tell me why?

CHAPTER 6
    I Know a Lot of Stuff, He Said

    After showering, I gave Dashiell his dinner, then went back upstairs to my office and sat at my desk, now covered with the equipment my brother-in-law kept sending me so that “we could be a family again,” not understanding that a fax machine, a laptop, and a printer are not the route to this girl’s heart.
    Why was I still so angry? Lillian wasn’t. She was acting as if they were kids again, as if they had just fallen in love, as if they didn’t have two pimply, whiny, selfish teenagers, as if Ted hadn’t cheated on her with one of his models.
    I opened the laptop and turned it on, thinking about the case while it booted up, beeping and whistling to let me know how hard it was working on my behalf. Then I waited again while it dialed my internet provider, gurgling and flashing some more, making sure it had my attention.
    When the home page was there, wiggling annoyingly, promising free upgrades and all kinds of other things I didn’t want, I typed in “puli rescue” and hit the search button, waiting while the computer found what I was looking for.
    I left a message on the lost-and-found bulletin board of the closest group, hoping for some exposure, that someone checking my post might know where Lady was. Of course, there was no sense describing her, a thirty- to thirty-five-pound springy little black dog, cheerful, noisy, smart, easy to train, with dreadlocks. That wouldn’t exactly cut her out of the pack. But since she’d been a trained visiting dog even before she’d arrived at Harbor View, she probably knew some unusual commands. Those were the things I included—that she might do back-up and walk-up, commands sometimes used to position a dog close to a wheelchair. She might do paws-up on the knees of someone who wanted to pet her, and she wouldn’t get spooked by canes, walkers, or any other institutional equipment. She hadn’t been tattooed or microchipped. But she did answer to her name. Big deal. Lady is by far the most common name for a female dog, Ginger or Muffin only a distant second.
    I also read the lists posted at the puli rescue groups, paying careful attention to the dates. But none of the found dogs could be Lady. Of the three on the lists found after Lady had gone missing, two were males, and the bitch was old, ten or eleven, hard of hearing, her teeth worn down to little nubs.
    Downstairs, in the pile of newspapers on the far side of the couch, I found the two recent articles about Harry Dietrich, the small