Free The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Carol Lea Benjamin Page B

who wrote with such a regular hand, everything in balance, the proportions pleasing, she was tenacious, self-willed, powerful, a determined person. The writing, you see, shows a person’s hand.”
    I nodded.
    â€œShe was confident, more confident than vain. There are no flourishes, no embellishments, no hauteur. Do you know this word?”
    I nodded.
    â€œYoung people nowadays,” he said, “they have no vocabulary. They read only what is sprayed on walls. Do you own a dictionary, Rachel?”
    â€œYes, Rabbi.”
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œBut Rabbi Zuckerman, did she write all five letters? Did she write the last letter?”
    â€œDid she write the last letter? You think she did not?” he asked.
    â€œWhat 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—”
    â€œLook 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.”
    â€œThat’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—”
    â€œSo, forgery. Is that what you think?”
    â€œI—I don’t know any other way to explain the note.”
    â€œWhen 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.”
    â€œSo you can’t tell?”
    â€œCan 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?
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œHere’s something interesting,” he said,