Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

beneath the circles formed by my hands, I was seeing Dashiell, days earlier, lying at the base of the oak tree, giving his full attention to the ground beneath his paws. I froze in place, my mind spinning, struggling again for whatever was just beneath my consciousness, looking through the Tiger’s Eyes at the ground beneath me, giving it my full attention, as Dashiell had.
    And then it came to me.
    And when it did, it seemed so obvious, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.
    After class Janet invited me to come to sword class at seven. I told her yes, I’d come. I thanked her, nodded to Stewie , changed shoes, signaled to Dashiell, and, feeling Stewie’s keys in my jacket pocket, headed out the door.
    I went first to the Sixth, asking for Marty at the desk.
    “What’s up, kid? You think of something?”
    “Sort of. Marty, can I see the photos of Lisa Jacobs?”
    Marty raised his eyebrows. “At the scene?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    He looked at me for a moment without saying anything, then told me to follow him. We passed the maps in back, near the arrest processing room. One had the locations of robberies, each marked with a pushpin. These fanned out all over the Village. The second map was for narcotics arrests. All those pushpins, sixty or seventy of them, were jammed into one small space, Washington Square Park .
    I followed Marty up the stairs to the detectives’ squad room, where he sat me down at one of the empty desks. Two detectives were working at desks over near the windows, and Marty went over to talk to one of them. I saw him hook his thumb in my direction twice, and when the detective he was talking to leaned back so that he could look past Marty and see me, I decided to skip being a wiseass and just looked away instead. When Marty came back, he had a folder in his hand.
    “Is this going to jog your memory, so you’ll have something to share with us?” he asked, just a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.
    “It might,” I said. “I had a thought this morning.”
    “Congratulations,” he said.
    The other detective—mid-thirties, thin, red hair, freckles—was doing the looking now.
    “Well, more of a question than a thought,” I said, deciding to ignore both Howdy Doody and Marty’s tone. “I need to see the photos of Lisa. Okay?”
    “Since you’re in the middle of this now, and you’re doing this to help out, as any good citizen would, why not?”
    He laid the file on the desk and opened it. I leaned over the desk, took a good look, and winced. At first glance, except for the odd position of her legs and the fact that she was lying on the sidewalk and not in bed, Lisa Jacobs might have been asleep.
    But of course, she was not asleep. A small dark stain had seeped out on one side of her head. The way her hair fanned out, you could hardly see it
    Her arms looked relaxed. One hand, as Avi had mentioned, was turned up toward the sky, as if to see if it were raining. The other arm lay still, palm down, across her chest, as if she were thinking of turning over.
    She’d been wearing black leggings and a plain black sweater. You could see an inch of her white socks at her ankles. And beneath that, what I came to find out—whether or not she was wearing shoes. And she was—soft, low black suede oxfords with a leather sole, the sort of shoe Lisa Jacobs never would have worn walking, or running, across the pristine floor of the t’ai chi studio.
    Unless, perhaps, there were some emergency, some reason to get to the window as fast as she could, without a thought to anything else, even a custom she had abided by faithfully for all the years she’d worked at Bank Street T’ai Chi.
    “Lisa never would have walked across the studio with her street shoes on,” I said to Marty.
    “Rachel,” he said, as patient as if I were more than a little bit slow, “when someone decides to end it all, they don’t care about shit like that. You wanna tell me she was religiously neat, too, she never would have littered Bank Street ? You’re grasping at straws here. None of the rules count at this stage of the game,” he said, pointing to the picture of Lisa dead on the sidewalk beneath where she’d taught and studied.
    But I thought the rules you lived by did count up until the end. People folded their clothes neatly before a suicide. Or carefully buttoned up their uniforms and made sure their shoes were shined before eating their guns. What was the point of living your life with certain