Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes by Carol Lea Benjamin

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