Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

cliff, a perfect strawberry. He plucked it and ate it. It was delicious.”
    He smiled, then shut off the light in the studio.
    If the man had something to say, why couldn’t he just say it?
    “You’ll be safe walking home,” he said. Again, a question that wasn’t one.
    “I have Dashiell,” I told him.
    I slipped into my own shoes and put Lisa’s carefully back where
    they had been, toes pointing to the wall. Everyone else’s shoes were relegated to the hall. Only Lisa’s shoes had a place of their own inside.
    “Tomorrow night classes end at ten. Come at ten thirty. Bring your boy.”
    “Look,” I said, standing in the doorway, “this was interesting, tonight’s work. But I didn’t come here to learn t’ai chi. I came—”
    “First the t’ai chi. Then the questions. And Rachel, next time, don’t take the elevator. Walk. It’s good for your legs.”
    Meditation in motion. That’s what one of Lisa’s books had said t’ai chi was, a kind of Zen for people with ants in their pants. Okay. I had done it. Now what? Where was the brand-new world Zen was supposed to give me? Except for the pain in my knees, nothing had changed.
    All the way home everything looked the same, homeless people sleeping in doorways, trash swirling about like tumbleweed when the wind blew, transvestites heading home after a long night, their false laughter echoing in the empty streets.
    Where with each step was my connection to the earth? Where with each breath was my connection to the sky?
    I unlocked the gate and followed Dashiell down the narrow passageway that led to the garden in which my cottage sat.
    Where, I wondered , were the answers to all my questions? Where, in fact, were the questions?
    I unlocked the cottage door, but I didn’t go inside. Instead I sat on the cold steps in the skeletonlike shadow of the big oak tree, waiting unsuccessfully for enlightenment.

I Wondered If It Might Have Been Lisa

    THE NINTH LAW of private investigation says, Keep moving. This advice is meant to aid the operative during those unfortunate times when he or she is being shot at by one or more disreputable persons, but as a law to live by, it can’t be beat. I had learned the wisdom behind it back when I was training disreputable dogs.
    Keep an aggressive dog still while you berate him for his rotten nature and unacceptable behavior, and he’ll have nothing better to do than figure out precisely which of your many body parts might be the most succulent. But keep a bully moving by walking fast, changing directions, appearing to all but ignore him, and your unpredictability will consume his mind. It’s as effective as if he were a balloon and you had a pin.
    Keep moving. It gives you a much better chance of keeping yourself intact, whether it’s bullets or teeth coming in your direction.
    Unfortunately, when I got up late on Thursday morning, moving seemed all but out of the question. I could barely lift my arms or swing my legs off the bed. With a gait so stiff that if I were a dog the word euthanasia would come to my owner’s mind, I finally made it to the bathroom and into a hot bath. And much as I would have liked to stay there all day, I decided to obey law number nine. It was time to check out the boyfriend. His phone number was in Lisa’s address book. But before I called, I looked through her appointment calendar and found two most curious things.
    I reached Paul Wilcox at work. He listened politely to my request and said that if I could come by at one thirty, he could talk to me about my cousin Lisa.
    Okay, I do sometimes stretch the truth a bit, but only in order to get the job done. I learned the hard way that revealing my occupation has a silencing effect on people, even those whose worst crime has been finding a quarter in a pay phone and failing to return it to the phone company.
    I had time before my appointment, and time was what Dashiell needed. I cleaned and medicated his ear, then headed for the dog run at Washington Square Park . Dashiell needed to spend part of every day just being a dog, and I needed to spend part of every day watching him do exactly that.
    It would be nice to imagine the dog run as a fenced outdoor area where dogs can safely run around and play in the fresh air. But this was New York City . There is no fresh air.
    As for safety, just as in playgrounds reserved for human children, there’s a microcosm of life, and life, my mother would be quick to point out were she here, is lots of