After Samuel’s class, Charlotte was still looking unusually stressed, so I sat with her and gave her time with Dashiell. When I said good-bye and got up to leave, she got up too, following me out of the dining room, holding my hand as if we were going for a walk with Dashiell, the way we’d done the first day I was here.

I was about to tell her that I couldn’t take her for a walk when I decided I couldn’t do that. If she wanted one that badly, I’d take her out, maybe just go around the block with her, but I wouldn’t say no to her.

Getting with the program, I thought; everything for the kids.

I looked at Charlotte, clinging to my hand, not reaching for Dashiell’s leash, not going upstairs for her gloves and earmuffs, but sucking her fingers and not walking toward the front door, but pulling me to the door to Venus’s office.

I was sure it hadn’t been cleaned up yet, but Charlotte was twisting the doorknob, then banging on it, starting to moan. Whatever it was she wanted, it was urgent.

There was no one in the lobby. I quickly took out Venus’s key ring and unlocked the door to her office, stepping inside with Charlotte and Dashiell and letting the door close and lock. I stood in the way of the blood stain, dry and brown now, so that Charlotte would have to walk to the other side of the desk, the side where Eli had been standing.

In fact, Charlotte never looked at the side of the room where the blood was. Nor did she go to the other side of the desk.

Against the wall were three chairs. On the farthest one there was a pad, just like the one I’d found in the garden. She picked it up, bent down, and looked under the chair. There she retrieved a box of colored pencils, just like the ones I’d seen her sharpening in the dining room.

When she had her things, I expected her to turn around and leave the office.

But she didn’t.

She sat on the chair, opened the pad, and began to draw.

That’s when I heard Dashiell sneeze. A team player, he had followed Charlotte, had stood next to her, had even put his big head under the chair when she did, helping her look for he didn’t know what, his tail wagging. Now he was headed for the other side of the desk, the part of the room I was trying to avoid. When I put my leg out to stop him, he glanced up at me, confused.

I looked back at Charlotte, working on her picture as if the only thing that counted was now, as if nothing at all had happened in this room earlier in the day.

When, I wondered, had she left the pad and pencils here?

But when I looked at the pad, I stopped wondering. She was drawing what she saw—Dashiell, his strong white body, the patch over his right eye, careful with her lines and colors, the way she’d been when she drew the tree and started to draw the squirrel, the model who got away.

I watched her put down the charcoal gray pencil she’d used to color Dashiell’s patch, careful to place it point to the top of the box, like all the others. Then she took another pencil, a red one this time, and began to color the rug behind Dashiell. Only the rug was blue, a pale Wedgwood. Except for the place where Venus had fallen and bled, the place behind where the dog in the picture now stood.

From where Charlotte was sitting, she couldn’t see that part of the rug, the part I’d blocked her view of on our way in.

It wasn’t only David who had been here. Charlotte had been here, too.

And that squirrel hadn’t gotten away before the artist finished his portrait. Clearly Charlotte could draw from memory. So it must have been the artist who was called away, perhaps for lunch, leaving the portrait undone.

Dashiell sneezed again. Frustrated because I wouldn’t let him examine what he felt needed his canine attention, he began to search for something else. He turned around and put his paws up on Venus’s desk, trolling, his breathing audible now, his head moving from side to side, his nose telling him what he needed to know, then turning to look at me, then back at the desk, whining now to get me to look, see why his nose was twitching the way it was, find out for myself, the way he was telling me to, what was so interesting on Venus’s desk.

At first, I didn’t see a thing.

And then I did. Green paint on top of Venus’s dictionary, the dictionary lying down because the bookend that usually held it up wasn’t there.

Was that what he’d wanted me to see, green paint? Jackson’s favorite color.

“Good boy,” I told him, touching the paint with one finger, finding it dry. It could have been there since early afternoon. Or for years, for all I knew. But if it weren’t fresh, why would Dashiell point it out to me? If the paint were old, it would mean nothing to him, no more than the finish on the desk or Venus’s blotter.

That’s when I thought to check out the side of the desk, the place where Venus hit her head when David pushed her.

No blood there. I even scraped the lip of the desk with a fingernail to make sure.

What was Dashiell smelling up there?

I looked back at Charlotte, coloring in the rest of the rug now, the part without the blood. She had added something while I was checking the desk: a pair of legs from the knee down, a pair of white Keds, speckled with paint. She’d colored the speckles green. There were some green streaks on the pants, too, as if someone with wet paint on his hands had bent over, hands on his knees, to look at something on the floor.

I heard something in the lobby and looked toward the door, hoping no one was coming in here, holding my breath, my eyes on the door, as if by doing that, I could keep it from opening. Waiting, I looked at the drawings and paintings taped to the inside of Venus’s door—Jackson’s drips, a portrait of Venus done in colored pencil, just the way Charlotte was drawing now, and a bunch of black crayon marks going every which way I felt sure was a portrait of Lady. There was that other strange picture Dashiell had knocked off the other day, the one where someone seemed to have spoons sticking out of his head, a really odd portrait, done from the rear in a shaky hand, the artist using pencil, pressing hard enough to leave a rut in the paper, someone tense doing that picture.

Someone tense, at Harbor View. Brilliant insight, I thought. Maybe I should go get me a Ph.D., publish in the Autistic Journal, make a name for myself.

Charlotte was still coloring the rug. Were they all in here when Venus fell, she and David and Jackson?

I thought about Cora, seeing Harry on the sidewalk—Harry, who had been knocked out of his shoes, knocked clear into the next world; Cora, who had nothing to say about what she saw, nothing, at least, that was useful or made sense.

Could any of these three tell me what had happened here this afternoon?

Maybe they could, but not in the usual way. Wasn’t that, in fact, what Charlotte was doing, telling me what had happened by drawing it?

Her head was bent low over the pad, as if she were nearsighted, as she made the bloodstain redder, the color rich now, the way it must have looked when it was fresh. She seemed completely absorbed in the drawing, oblivious to me and Dash and even her surroundings.

Watching her, I realized I was wrong. Dashiell had tried to communicate with me. He’d tried to show me what he’d discovered. But Charlotte’s drawing didn’t have anything to do with me. She was doing it for herself, recording something she had seen, never mind that she appended an image from the present, Dashiell, to one from earlier in the day.

Was that a mistake?

Or was Dashiell there to help her cope, to protect her?

She had seen something confusing, something that frightened her. I watched her drawing, her fingers white against the pencil, getting the scene down on paper to try to make sense out of it.

But whether or not I’d be able to make sense out of it, that was another story.