Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

stronger. Unfortunately, so was the pain.
    Suddenly I was flushed with heat. All I wanted to do was hang out the window and get some air, but Avi kept on working.
    “Did you ever notice how clumsy people can be?” he asked, leaving me with all my weight on my right leg.
    “When your step is empty, no weight at all in it,” he said, taking the same posture he had left me in sometime back in the Iron Age, “you are steady before shifting your weight.”
    He flexed his knee, lifting his left foot off the ground. Then he placed his foot back down, heel, toe, and shifted his weight forward, as slowly as honey oozing off a spoon.
    “Remember that t’ai chi is a martial art, Rachel. You must always be connected to the earth, both figuratively and literally. You do not want your opponent to be able to push you over.”
    It was long past dark, but neither of us stopped to put on the lights. Lit by the bright light of the moon shining in through the big windows, reflecting in the mirrors, and shining on our faces, we continued to practice, mostly in silence.
    “Okay, shake out your legs,” Avi finally said.
    We stood quietly for a moment, neither of us speaking. Something was bothering me, jabbing away at the edge of my consciousness. I turned and looked at the windows. Then I looked into Avram’s face.
    “Which one?” I asked.
    “The second from the left,” he said. He turned and walked back to his office, leaving me alone.
    I walked over, unlatched the window, and pushed it out, letting the cold, damp night air hit me in the face.
    The street looked very far away, and just looking down made my knees turn to water.
    The door had been locked, I thought, but the chain hadn’t been latched.
    I felt a wave of nausea as I pictured Lisa looking down, just as I was doing, then climbing onto the sill and falling into nothing.
    I thought about the second curious thing in Lisa’s calendar. All those appointments. All those plans. The days after her death were filled with things to do.
    No handprint on her back, Marty had said.
    Most jumpers were men, I thought, looking down. Female suicides usually used carbon monoxide or some other form of poison, not something that would disfigure them, like a gunshot wound. Or defenestration. Vanity at play, right up to the very end.
    I thought about all Lisa’s pretty things, about those roses, dozens of bouquets, hanging upside down from her ceiling.
    I thought about her pretty face.
    I thought, No way did Lisa Jacobs jump out of this window.
    There was a reason none of this made sense. Lisa Jacobs hadn’t killed herself. Someone had done it for her.
    I leaned out and looked down.
    Then, quickly, I straightened up and stepped back, bumping into Avram . He leaned past me, pulled the window shut, and latched it.
    In those black cotton shoes, he had been so silent I hadn’t heard him approach me.
    I began to shiver. I had stood in front of an open window in a dark room in the middle of the night with a stranger behind me, a man strong enough to lift me and toss me out the window as if I were a sack of trash he was tossing into a Dumpster.
    His hands were trembling.
    So were mine.
    When he moved, I felt myself jump.
    He reached into the pocket of his soft cotton pants.
    “Will you lock up after you change your shoes? I must go now.”
    “Of course.”
    He handed me a set of keys.
    “Tomorrow, five o’clock?”
    I nodded.
    “Good,” he said. “I’ll have a surprise for you.”
    My heart was pounding so hard I thought I might have a surprise for him too, another of his protégées dead in the middle of the night, this one right in the studio, of a fear-induced heart attack.
    But he never noticed anything.
    He grabbed his jacket from a hook near the door, and in a moment he was gone.
    I was going to leave, too. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. But then I noticed the door to the office. It was ajar.
    I walked inside and sat in Avi’s chair, putting the keys he’d given me down and placing my hands on the smooth surface of his ruddy teak desk. The computer was to my left, the files to my right. The bookcase behind me covered the entire wall. On the wall to my left, in a simple oak frame, was a photo of Lisa frozen in the middle of doing Cloud Hands. I hesitated for only the briefest moment before turning on the computer.
    “Insatiable curiosity,” Frank Petrie used to say, “ it’s what makes you broads so damn good at the job.”
    I slid the chair closer,