Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

embellishments, no hauteur. Do you know this word?”
    I nodded.
    “Young people nowadays,” he said, “they have no vocabulary. They read only what is sprayed on walls. Do you own a dictionary, Rachel?”
    “Yes, Rabbi.”
    “That’s good,” he said. He looked back at the letters. “I don’t believe this was an empty person with an insatiable craving for attention. No, no, no, a focused person, a strong person, but a self-centered person too, someone who put herself first. A disciplined person, the writing up and down, up and down. Vertical. A thinking person .“
    “But Rabbi Zuckerman, did she write all five letters? Did she write the last letter?”
    “Did she write the last letter? You think she did not?” he asked. “What I think is that she did not kill herself, Rabbi. I think someone else did that. I can’t buy suicide. It makes no sense. There was no history of depression—”
    “Look here, Rachel, in these letters, the lines are straight or sometimes they rise ever so slightly, up, up, up, like so,” he said, pointing, “and so and so, showing optimism, not depression. Depression makes the lines go down, sometimes off the page, as if the person were too weary of spirit to notice their writing had walked off the paper. Not your Lisa.”
    “That’s what I mean. Her home is serene and lovely. She loved her work. Her parents doted on her. It doesn’t seem she could have, would have killed herself. It—”
    “So, forgery. Is that what you think?”
    “I—I don’t know any other way to explain the note.”
    “When someone forges another’s writing, Rachel, they tend to pay attention to the obvious, in this case, the L in Lisa, the loops, the flourishes. But Lisa did not embellish. Her writing is small, neat, and simple. The forger tends to forget the smaller items, the little letters in between, and these areas can give him away. But we have so little to go on here. Three words.”
    “So you can’t tell?”
    “Can I tell? Can I tell?”
    I watched quietly as he studied one of the letters again, his nose nearly touching the page. He was so focused, nearly obsessive in the attention he paid to each letter. Yet he was clearly sensitive, too, not the kind of man who would ignore the needs of his guests, even when one of them was a dog. He was old, but he was strong, the way a tree is, able to sway in the wind and not break. You could see that when he moved. But he was also soft. You could see that in his eyes, his yin and yang in perfect balance.
    For a moment I pictured myself living here, making gefilte fish every Friday morning, going to the mikveh once a month. Was there a message here?
    “The last letter was written more quickly than the other four,” he said. “Forgery is almost always written slowly, deliberately.” He stood and began to pace. “Even if the forger practiced Lisa’s writing , one does not dash off a note in someone else’s handwriting. When copying, one takes his time.” He leaned over the table now. “Not only does the L look like Lisa’s writing, Rachel, but the I in I'm sorry looks as if she wrote it. And the small i , see how straight, how precise, now look in her other letters, see, the same, the same, and here, the same.” The rabbi fished in his jacket pocket, came up with a magnifying loupe in a green leather case, and took his chair again, sighing as he sat. He held it over the suicide note, moving it slowly over each letter in each word.
    “Here’s something interesting,” he said, holding the paper right up to his face again. “Look at the periods in her older letters.”
    I took the loupe and slid it over the letters. Magnified, Lisa’s periods were tiny dashes that turned up at the end. I picked up the xerox of the suicide note. Again, a tiny dash that with the naked eye looked like a dot. A dash that had an upward movement, that told you the direction her pen was lifted off the paper. The same, the same, the same.
    “And her s,” he said, “in ‘sorry’ and in ‘Lisa.’ ”
    “The same, the same,” I said.
    He nodded.
    “I don’t get it. She couldn’t have killed herself. I feel it so strongly.”
    “No one is saying she did, Rachel. We are just seeing that it seems she wrote, ‘I’m sorry. Lisa.’ ”
    “Oh, God,” I said.
    The rabbi nodded and began to hum.
    “She wrote the note. But not necessarily for the purpose everyone assumed.”
    “She wrote the note,” he repeated. “But unfortunately, the only person