Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

lips were shaking, her hands, too.
    “Tell me what happened, Marsha.”
    “Lisa came to visit us, at the holidays, for Hannukah , in December, and she told us she was going to go to China .”
    I reached for her hands.
    “Not to visit,” Marsha said, her voice cracking. “To live.”
    When I’d first seen the envelope from a travel agent, I had assumed it was like the ones I get, junk mail, a brochure touting a guided tour to Africa or a discount trip to Rome with Mr. Italy . I’d assumed, even though the fifth law of investigative work is, Don’t jump to conclusions. I’d also assumed all those letters from real estate brokers were like the ones my landlords always got, letters that started, “Dear Owner, If you’ve been thinking of selling your apartment, if you’ve ever wondered what it would be worth in today’s seller’s market...” But one of them had been a countersigned contract to sell the condo Lisa’s father had bought for her so that she could walk to work.
    “This didn’t make her father very happy, did it?”
    “He was wild. Just like the first time. Saying the same things. Only now Lisa was a woman, not a child. She didn’t need his permission, his approval. Perhaps that’s what she wanted, for her father to approve of her decision, to give her emotional support. But that is not what happened.”
    Her head was down, the scarf covering part of her face; her arms clutched each other, and she rocked as she spoke.
    “She, too, flew into a rage. ‘Daddy,’ she said to him, ‘I’m a grownup now. This time you can’t force me to do what you want me to.’ ‘It’s for your own good,’ he said, just like before, when she was a student, a young girl, ‘for your protection.’ She jumped up from where she was sitting, Rachel. ‘This time I’m going,’ she said, cold, like the inside of a refrigerator. And she was gone. Out of the house. I thought we wouldn’t hear from her or see her for a long time. Or ever. I thought she might just go, and never write us. But she called, she pleaded, she explained, she wanted so much for David to let her go with his blessing. She was not so grownup that she didn’t still need this from her father.”
    “What did you say to Lisa?”
    “I gave her my approval. Of course, I thought my heart would break, that if she went to China , that would be the worst tragedy that could occur to me, to have Lisa so far away. What did I know then about tragedy?”
    She looked away for a moment, toward the shore where gulls were landing and taking off and Dashiell was constructing a long, curvy trench, shoveling the sand with his big front paws and backing up as he dug. When she turned back to me, her cheeks were flushed, her eyelashes wet with tears.
    “ ‘David ,’ I told him, ‘you have to let her go. She’s not a child.’ When we were alone, he wouldn’t talk to me, not about this, but I said to him, ‘David, if you let her go, you will still have her. And if you don’t, if you make her defy you in this, you will lose her.’ ”
    “What did he say when you told him that?”
    “He said, ‘How could she do this to me?’ You see where it is, was, between them?”
    I nodded.
    “It didn’t get resolved?” I asked , thinking of the sad way things can be in families.
    Marsha shook her head.
    “And that’s why you thought the letter was written to you, or to David?”
    “Yes. I feel my daughter was tom in half, wanting so much to study in China , to live there. And wanting so much to please her father. To have his love. I believe we did this to her, Rachel, this terrible thing. That the apology she wrote was for hurting her father so much. I don’t think Lisa could do that. She was never able to defy her father. So, I think, perhaps she changed her mind, but that made her so unhappy—”
    “And you hired me—?”
    “We were hoping,” she said very slowly, “that you would find out—”
    “Something else,” I said. “Another reason for this tragedy.”
    “Another reason,” she repeated. “So that we could begin to make peace with this one day.” She looked back toward the ocean where Dash was now racing back and forth where the waves hit the sand.
    More than anything, I wanted to help. But what could I say—that the note may have been written to her and David, but that I didn’t believe it was a suicide note? That I felt this, I didn’t feel that, or I thought this happened, or this didn’t happen. Not knowing how to comfort