Read Online Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much by Carol Lea Benjamin - Free Book Online Page A

energy moving up my spine, over my head, spilling down my chest, connecting me to the earth beneath my feet and the universe above and beyond.
    “Better,” he said, stroking one side of his beard and then the other with the back of his hand, like a cat cleaning its whiskers.
    But the moment I stopped moving, all my confidence fled. I felt only the enormous weight of my ignorance. It was a familiar feeling.
    The work I do is like driving in heavy fog. Sometimes it clings to the windshield, and you can’t see an inch in front of you. At best it rolls a foot or two away, or lifts for a moment and allows a tantalizing glimpse of the road ahead before closing in all over again. Most of the time I feel as if I were driving blind.
    I slipped off Lisa’s shoes and put on her sneakers. When I looked up, Avi was holding Ch’an’s thick, black leather leash.
    “Come in the morning Monday. We have a staff meeting. You can meet the others. Maybe they will answer some questions for you. And leave your boy at home. Only bring Ch’an with you.”
    I began to shake my head.
    “Can’t you do this one thing for me?”
    He didn’t wait for an answer. The master was used to obedience.
    “Lisa—”
    “Yeah. I know,” I said. “Lisa never took the elevator. She always took the stairs. And I do, too. But this I can’t do for you.”
    “But Lisa always brought Ch’an to school with her.”
    “Lisa always brought her dog to school. And I—”
    But he wasn’t listening. He was looking toward the big windows.
    “Even on the night she died,” I said.
    He nodded.
    “I was asleep when the police called me. They said there was an emergency and asked if I could come right away with the keys. They didn’t say what it was. They didn’t tell me what had happened here. I thought a pipe was leaking. I had no idea.
    “There were so many people here, so many. I could see them from down the block. I got confused. I couldn’t understand why. A fire, I thought. There must have been a fire.
    “Then I saw.
    “She was lying on the street, under a yellow tarp. I could see one of her hands, the palm up”—he turned his hand to show me—“sticking out from under the plastic.
    “They asked me to look. They asked if I could identify her. One of the detectives slipped his hand around my upper arm and another one drew the tarp back, uncovering her face, her beautiful face.”
    Avi shook his head and began to cry. He took a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.
    “We walked up the stairs,” he continued. ‘The door was locked, of course. Lisa wouldn’t have left it open when she was here alone late at night, even with Ch’an to protect her. I unlocked the door, and one of the two detectives who came up to the studio took my arm and pulled me aside. The other drew his gun, he shouted ‘Police’ and waited, but there was no sound, nothing. We stayed in the hall and he went in.
    “For a moment I was just blank, just seeing the hand, turned up, like so, as if to catch rain. Then I remembered Ch’an and was polluted by the fear that the detective would be frightened of her and shoot.
    “ ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I called out to him. ‘Don’t shoot the dog.’ “The second one opened the door wide, and we both stepped in. The room was dark, the way we worked last night, you and I, the studio lit only by the moon. It was empty.
    “The first detective was just walking into the office, and I heard him gasp. I thought to myself, God, no, someone else is lying dead on the floor.
    “We went to the doorway to see, myself and the other detective. But it was Ch’an who had startled him. That’s all it was. She was lying on her mat, her head up, her front paws crossed, one over the other, looking at us, as if nothing at all had happened.” He put a hand on his chest and rubbed it, as if by doing so he could erase his grief. “What about the note, Avi ? Where was the note?”
    “It was on the desk, in front of the