Devoted Read online

  Always he had hummed with a dark energy, the memory of which came back to her now by degrees. He had wanted one thing from her, and like a puppet master, he pulled strings with such finesse that, in her youth and naivete, she had not at first felt him tugging on them. When she began to see through him, he tried using another girl as a weapon. What had her name been? Clarissa? Yes. He’d used the threat of Clarissa’s sexual availability to manipulate Megan, and she’d let him manipulate her right out of his life.

  Where she intended to remain.

  She went to the kitchen, looking for Verna Brickit.

  13

  When thirst troubled Kipp, finding water to drink required little effort.

  Lake Tahoe was among the deepest and purest lakes in the world, and drinking from the streams that fed it involved no serious risks.

  The water was cool and clean.

  He paused in his drinking to watch torsional fish, their fins wimpling as they swam through the sun-pierced pools in which the descending stream periodically gathered itself.

  Hunger proved a greater problem.

  As a canine, he was a hunter by nature. But he’d never actually hunted.

  Except when Dorothy had played hide the ball and he’d been tasked with finding it. He’d found the ball a thousand times, but he’d never eaten it.

  The meadows were full of rabbits nibbling grass in the sun. When they spotted Kipp, most of them either tensed and froze and pretended invisibility or raced away in terror.

  A few rabbits regarded him warily, then continued eating as though they perceived his weakness.

  Kipp was physically strong, seventy pounds of muscle and bone. He was mentally strong, too.

  But emotionally . . . compassion remained at odds with instinct.

  Nature’s way was for the sharp of teeth to feed on those whose teeth were blunt, for the strong to rule the weak.

  But he was a dog with the high-order intelligence of a human being, neither canine nor human.

  Intelligence gave rise to culture, culture to ethics.

  Although he was in the form of a dog, he was in spirit both a dog and a human being. This had been done to him before his birth.

  He had been as a child to Dorothy. His culture and ethics were hers, were human.

  Some human beings could kill their own kind in anger, for gain, and even just for the thrill of it.

  Neither Dorothy nor Kipp were that decadent.

  Most human beings could kill in self-defense, and so could Kipp, child of Dorothy.

  But rabbits were no threat to him. Neither were squirrels or field mice.

  He passed through meadows and woodlets alive with lunch and dinner, and his hunger grew.

  It would seem that, starving, he could kill anything blunt of teeth to save himself. After all, rabbits and squirrels were neither canine nor human.

  They were not his kind. Nature meant for him to have them as he needed. They were prey.

  This was where, in his present circumstances, the blessing of human-level intelligence became almost a curse. He knew compassion.

  Mercy. Pity.

  Those are burdensome qualities.

  Compassion. Mercy. Pity.

  At moments like this, smell became a philosophical issue.

  The sense of smell was central to a dog’s life, as much as twenty thousand times greater than that of a human being. His nose had forty-four muscles, as compared to four in the human nose.

  His sense of smell alone brought him more information than all five human senses combined. In this case, too much information.

  Among the lower animals, every creature found joy in the fact of living. Kipp could smell their abiding joy as pungently as he could detect the odor of their droppings, musk, breath, and warm blood.

  Compassion and mercy and pity versus the survival instinct.

  Human beings resolved the problem—sort of—by putting distance between themselves and the source of some of their life-sustaining fare by establishing slaughterhouses and the profession of butcher.

  Kipp had no credit card to pay a butcher.

  This moment in which he found himself was called a “crisis of conscience.”

  His hunger grew.

  Being entirely in the form of a dog, and half a dog in spirit, he didn’t drive forward relentlessly toward the boy whom he’d set out to find or toward the satisfaction of his appetite.

  He was distracted by a dog’s need to frolic.

  A small swarm of butterflies captured his imagination. He didn’t try to bite them, but capered after those bright wonders, marveling at their effortless air dance.

  Perhaps a half mile later, a foil balloon, partly deflated but still buoyant with helium, floated over a field he was crossing.

  The word Happy was clearly printed on it in red.

  He gave chase.

  The second line of letters, crinkled in and out of the deep creases in the material, seemed to spell Birthday.

  He had seen such balloons before. Nevertheless, this one struck him as irresistibly strange because of its dislocation.

  The bright, mirrored Mylar drifting across this isolated meadow enchanted him. It seemed to mean something.

  Kipp pursued it, leaping to bite at the long red ribbon that trailed from it. His teeth closed on empty air, and in frustration he leaped higher the next time, higher still.

  Just as he chastised himself for succumbing too completely to his inner puppy, the balloon proved to have meaning, after all.

  He came upon a fluttering bird lying on bare ground. One wing was broken.

  In fright, the creature rolled its eyes and worked its beak without making a sound. Terror and pain robbed it of song.

  Nothing could be done for the bird. Its fate was to be taken by a hawk or a fox or something else, and eaten alive.

  Kipp considered it for a minute.

  He thought, I’m sorry, little one.

  With one forepaw, he stepped on it, bore down with all his weight, and broke its neck.

  When humans went to a theater to see a tragedy, it was a play in which some great person fell from a height, destroyed by fate or a character flaw.

  Kipp had watched comedies and tragedies on TV with Dorothy.

  A bird could have no character flaw. And yet birds, like all the little animals, had their roles in tragedies every day.

  In this beautiful but hard world, fate spared no species.

  This bird was plump. There was a satisfaction of flesh under the feathers.

  Kipp turned away, leaving the bird untouched. He had no taste for tragedy.

  Less than a mile later, an aroma came to him that was familiar and delicious. Hamburgers on a grill.

  And not just hamburgers. Also frankfurters.

  Drawn by the smells, he raced toward a wall of trees, through an evergreen woods, and out into a campground with a mix of tents and small motor homes.

  People. Adults and children.

  He had a thousand wiles and stratagems by which to charm them. He would be fed.

  In his hunger, he forgot for the moment that not all people were good. If even a hundred of them were kind, there would be one whose every intention was wicked.

  14

  Shacket calls her from a motel parking lot on the outskirts of Truckee, California, north of Lake Tahoe, and he pours his heart out to her, confesses having made a mistake by not romancing her better back in the day, offers her the world, the world in Costa Rica, and at first she seems pleased that he’s called. Judging by her tone, he thinks she regrets not letting him bang her, because if he, instead of backstabbing Jason, had knocked her up, there would be no Woody, no mentally disabled mute dragging her down day in and day out. He and Megan would have had a beautiful son, a good-looking and smart-as-hell kid they would have been proud of. So, yes, at first he thinks she wants him, she needs him, he’s got her.

  But then a superior tone comes into her voice, a snottiness he doesn’t like, doesn’t deserve, just can’t tolerate. I’m afraid you underestimate how a special-needs child changes your life. Does she think he’s stupid? How can he not know how some idiot mute would screw up her life? I’m afraid our time has passed, Lee. As if she has twenty guys worth a hundred million bucks beating on her door. As if she ever gave him the time, which she never did; their time never passed, because she never gave him the time, never gave him the chance to pin her down and show her what she was missing. What’s best for me is what’s best for Woody, and that’s not Costa Rica. Can she really think he doesn’t realize that she’s shoveling shit at him? Hell, he can smell it over the phone. What she’s really saying is that some pinhead kid who can’t even talk is more interesting than Lee Shacket, that a dead-end life in a backwater like Pinehaven is preferable to white beaches and the blue Caribbean and the good life if all of that comes with Lee Shacket.

  The angrier he gets with Megan, the hungrier he becomes. He’s hungrier than he’s ever been, inhumanly hungry. Five hours earlier, he stopped to eat in Bishop at this dump that some shit-for-brains critic rated three stars, and they couldn’t even make a hamburger the way he wanted. He sends it back twice, trying to make them understand what rare means. The third time, it’s still wrong, and the manager comes to the table, says, Sir, what you seem to be asking for is steak tartar as a burger, but I’m sorry to say we aren’t a restaurant that’s prepared to pull that off. There are health considerations with ground beef. Shacket wants to take his
knife and fork, slit open the bastard, show him exactly what rare means, but instead he orders two more burgers not one degree more well done than the medium-rare patty they’ve already served him. He eats all three burgers but only one bun, and none of the fries. He pays, but he doesn’t tip.

  On the way out, the waitress smiles at him and tells him to have a nice day, and he is reminded of his unbalanced mother, who refused the drugs prescribed for her condition, who could slap him hard enough to split his lip and pull his hair until he cried and then, with apparent sincerity, claim to love him more than life. In this moment, the waitress is Mother, and Shacket has a score to settle with her.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you look like that actress, Riley Keough?” he asks.

  This woman is twentysomething and shy enough to blush. “Oh, she’s gorgeous. I’m not gonna rush to a mirror and be disappointed.”

  “Good for you,” he says. “Because, fact is, that’s a lie. You have a face like a shithouse rat, and any guy who ever humps you will want to commit suicide afterward.”

  Her pleased expression collapses into hurt, into bewildered anger.

  “Have a nice day,” he says as he walks away.

  He has long known that cruelty is a kind of power, but until recently he has not embraced it as a weapon in his arsenal.

  Now, hours later, he needs to eat again. There’s a diner associated with the motor inn at which he’s parked, but he doesn’t want to go in there and get bad food, as he did at the other place. Besides, he’s too angry at Megan, the snarky bitch. She thinks she’s too good for him. Furious as he is, if he goes into the diner, he’ll take his anger out on a waitress or on someone else, and the food will stink, and there’ll be a scene. He’s got to remember that in spite of what his driver’s license says, he’s not really Nathan Palmer; he is Lee Shacket, the former CEO of Refine, and he’s on the run from what happened at the facility in Springville, Utah. He has changed his appearance, yes, all right, but it’s nonetheless a mistake to call attention to himself.

  He can eat something when he gets to Megan’s place. She’ll cook it the way he wants it. She’ll do everything the way he wants it. He now sees what his mistake was all those years ago. He was too nice to her, too considerate of her feelings. Niceness and consideration get you nowhere with an ice-queen bitch like Megan Grassley Bookman. He’ll give her what she deserves, what she wants but doesn’t know she wants, and when she’s begging for more, he’ll walk the hell out on her, leave her in shitty Pinehaven and go to Costa Rica.

  It’s maybe ninety miles to her place. He will be there before nightfall. They’ll have a reunion, talk about the old days, while he does to her what he didn’t have the nerve to do back in the day. I’m afraid our time has passed, Lee. She’ll learn different. He’ll turn back the clock. It’ll be their time again, all right. I’m afraid you underestimate how a special-needs child changes your life. He will show her what she really ought to be afraid of, the bitch. He’ll also show her that her changed life can be changed again, for the better, just by slitting the little mute bastard’s throat.

  He starts the engine and pilots the Dodge Demon out of the parking lot, onto I-80, heading west. In twenty-four miles, he will leave the interstate for State Route 20. For his entire life, he has been a target of injustice, used and discarded, set up to take the fall for someone else, set up by everyone from Dorian Purcell, to Jason Bookman, to hot Megan Grassley, but he’s not going to take it anymore. He feels a power growing in himself, a new Lee Shacket. He is becoming someone who cannot be denied, someone who doesn’t need to play by any rules, someone who always gets what he wants, someone unlike the world has ever seen before, something special, something.

  15

  Because she had not been merely a hired caregiver during the eighteen months that Dorothy had battled cancer, because she had come to love Dorothy almost as if she’d been her daughter, Rosa Leon felt obliged to be present during the cremation. She waited hours at the mortuary and received the urn while it was still warm from the ashes that it held.

  She took that bronze reliquary back to the grand old house and placed it on the mantel in the living room. During the next month, as she’d been instructed, she would continue to live in the guest suite and organize a memorial service to be catered on the premises by Dorothy’s favorite restaurant.

  It must not be a solemn affair, Rosa. I want a celebration. Old friends gathered to share good memories. Laughter, not tears. Upbeat music. An open bar, so they can raise a toast to me in my new life.

  In the absence of Dorothy, the lovely Victorian house, always a warm and cozy place in the past, felt cold and cavernous. Although Rosa had maintained professional composure throughout this sad day, as she stared at the urn on the mantel, she could not restrain her tears any longer.

  Dorothy Hummel had been the first experience of tenderness in Rosa’s hard life. Hector Leon, her father, a housepainter, had walked out on her and her mother, Helene, when Rosa was just three. By ten thousand slights and insults, Helene had let her daughter know that she was unwanted, the product of rape and forced marriage, though there was ample evidence that the claim of rape was untrue, that her parents had once loved each other, if only briefly. When she was sixteen, Rosa located her father and paid him a visit, seeking only some small measure of the affection that any father owed his child. Hector had none for her. He said Helene had been the biggest mistake of his life, that Rosa was the mistake of a mistake, and he forbade her to return. Judging by the disrepair of the old bungalow in which Hector lived, considering the whiskey with a beer chaser standing on his breakfast table at nine o’clock in the morning, he worked too little and drank too much. Perhaps not having him in Rosa’s life might be a blessing, but at the time, the rejection hurt.

  Throughout high school, she worked weekends in a restaurant, prepping vegetables for the cook and doing whatever scutwork was assigned to her. She received a scholarship to nursing school, paid what it didn’t cover out of her own savings, and found that she took pleasure in caring for those in ill health; she soon specialized in home-care patients. She had friends, though none that were close, because she was always working. She had met no men who respected her and one who so disrespected her that she had become wary of dating.

  Then at the age of thirty-four, she had taken the job with Dorothy and found herself in the very lap of kindness, a caregiver cared for. Her patient was also her nurse. Dorothy saw Rosa as an injured bird who had fallen from the nest before she learned to fly, and if anyone had ever been born to teach a broken spirit how to soar again, that anyone was Dorothy Hummel. Rosa had never read for pleasure, and Dorothy seemed to have read everything. Then Dorothy insisted that Rosa read aloud to her, and month by month she found the truth of life in literature, the truth and hope and a new way of living. After residing in this house a year and a half, Rosa’s heart grew stronger, and her sense of herself clarified.

  If Dorothy had lived another year and a half . . .

  But she had not. She was gone.

  Whatever healing Rosa still required was up to her to achieve.

  Blotting the tears from her eyes with a handkerchief, turning from the urn on the mantel, she thought, I still have Kipp to care for, and he’ll look after me just as he did Dorothy. We’ll heal each other, me and Kipp.

  The dog was like a child to Dorothy. The bond between them went deeper than mere pet and owner, terms that Dorothy disliked. I’m not his owner. I’m Kipp’s guardian, and he’s my guardian. There was something mysterious about their relationship; Dorothy often hinted as much. In fact, she said that when she was gone and Kipp became Rosa’s to care for, there would be a revelation of some kind. I might just haunt the place so that I can watch it happen!

  And where was Kipp now? He could come and go by his special door, but he never left the property. He must be somewhere in the house. Ordinarily, he would have come running to greet her, a huge grin on that great golden face, his eyes shining with delight. He must have found a place to curl up and grieve.