Devoted Page 6

  Moving from the living room to the hall to the dining room, she called for him, but when he didn’t come at once, she stopped seeking him. She remembered how pitiable his whimpering sounded the previous night, when Dorothy passed. He was a keenly sensitive boy. He knew Rosa was here, and when he was ready for company in his mourning, he would come to her.

  Now she found herself in front of the study door, across the hall from the library. During the eighteen months that she lived and worked in this splendid house, the study door was always locked. Mrs. Champlain, who came in to clean house three days a week, never set foot in the study. Dorothy dusted and swept that room herself until the last six weeks of her life, when she no longer had the energy for the job.

  Of course I trust Mrs. Champlain and you entirely, Rosa dear, but that room is my most private place, where I keep all my deepest, darkest secrets. You may think I’m a foolish old lady who’s lived a pampered life, with no secrets darker than having shoplifted a tube of lipstick when I was sixteen, but I assure you that I once had a wild side. And if you don’t believe that’s true, at least give me the courtesy of assuming there’s a one percent chance I might not always have been as boring as I am now. Treat the study as if we’re in a Daphne du Maurier novel, as if this house is an alternate-universe version of Manderley, and I am keeping either the murdered and mummified corpse of Rebecca or Mrs. Danvers—or both!—behind that locked door, to spare myself from a long prison sentence.

  From a pocket of her slacks, Rosa now withdrew the key to the study door. Dorothy had given it to her the previous afternoon, ten hours before the crisis came, and instructed that it be used within a day of her passing. Rosa had not been told what she would find in the room, other than a computer on which were stored video files that she must watch.

  Although she knew there would be no dead bodies, mummified or otherwise, she hesitated. If indeed there were secrets in this room, and if they might alter her opinion of Dorothy, Rosa Leon didn’t want to know them. In the lonely struggle that had been her life to date, she had met few people she admired, none more so than Dorothy. In the unlikely event there had been a dark side to Arthur Hummel’s widow, some ugliness of spirit, that discovery would pierce Rosa hardly less than if an archer put an arrow through her breast.

  Yet she had promised to view the files on the computer and do what her heart told her was the right thing. A promise made must be a promise kept.

  Rosa unlocked the door and went into the study.

  The large room measured perhaps twenty-six feet by thirty, with tall windows offering a view of the fabled lake through descending ranks of pines.

  To the right stood an antique Biedermeier desk that was large for furniture of that period. Behind the desk, a wall-length work area had been built to match the desk. On it waited a computer, printer, scanner, and other equipment.

  In the center of the room were a Biedermeier sofa and two Art Deco armchairs ordered around a large coffee table fashioned from a Chinese kang bed, on which stood an arrangement of antique Japanese bronze vases. Dorothy and Arthur had eclectic tastes and a talent for making a variety of periods and styles work together.

  The most unusual thing was the alphabet painted on the wall to the left, twenty-six one-foot-tall black letters stenciled on a white background, plus a series of punctuation marks. There were also symbols: & and % and + and = among them. On the floor in front of that wall stood a low contraption for which she could not discern a purpose.

  Rosa went around behind the desk and sat in the office chair and swiveled to face the computer. She switched it on.

  During the weeks that Dorothy lacked the strength to clean the study, a light dust settled on everything, but the system worked.

  Dorothy’s password was Lovearthur.

  There was a separate file of videos. They were numbered.

  Rosa clicked on the first one, and when it began to roll, she was surprised to see a healthier Dorothy than the woman she had more recently been caring for. Dorothy appeared as she had been maybe ten months or a year earlier, sitting behind her desk.

  Directly addressing the camera, she said, “Rosa Rachel Leon, you precious girl, I was fortunate to find you in my hour of need, and not merely because you have been giving me excellent care. I’m fortunate also because you’re honest, ethical, and blessed with genuine sympathy, with humility in a world of pride and selfishness. Furthermore, you’re far more intelligent than you believe.”

  A blush warmed Rosa’s face, as if she were receiving this praise in the company of the living woman, and tears formed again. She plucked a Kleenex from a box to blot away her blurred vision.

  “Within forty-eight hours of my death, Roger Austin will come to see you. As you know, he’s my attorney. He will inform you that I have made you my sole heir.”

  This was news to Rosa, and she found herself shaking her head as if this must be a dream, as if she must deny what Dorothy said in order to avoid bitter disappointment when she woke.

  “The law forbids a caregiver in a hospice situation to inherit from a patient. That’s why, after five months in my employ, when I had come to know your heart, we changed your title to Executive Companion and did so with such ironclad legal process that my will can’t be undone. Anyway, I’ve no relative to contest it.”

  Rosa found herself so nervous that she wanted to move, work off a sudden frantic energy. But she was so weak-kneed when she got up from the chair that her legs failed her. At once she sat down again.

  “After taxes,” Dorothy continued, “you’ll receive this house and all its contents plus liquid assets in the amount of twelve million dollars.”

  “I don’t deserve this,” Rosa declared, as if the woman on the screen could hear her and be persuaded. “I was only with you for eighteen months.”

  Dorothy had paused in the video, as if she’d known Rosa would at this point talk back to her benefactor. Her smile was impish.

  “How I wish I could be there to see you now, girl. I know you will feel overwhelmed, maybe even afraid at first. Fear not. Roger Austin and my accountant, Shiela Goldman, are good people. They will give you reliable investment advice. And in time, if I know you—and I do know you—you’ll grow wise enough to handle it all yourself.”

  “Never,” Rosa said, with a tremor in her voice.

  “Yes, you will,” Dorothy insisted with another smile. “And now to an even bigger surprise. Much bigger. Excuse a bit of crudity, child, but this one will knock you on your ass. Are you ready?”

  “No.”

  Her arms on the desk, leaning forward, closer to the camera, Dorothy lowered her voice and spoke with a profound seriousness that mesmerized Rosa. “You know Kipp is a smart dog. But he’s enormously smarter than you realize. He’s a mystery, a wonder—and out there in the world are others like him. They call themselves ‘the Mysterium.’ I can only assume he’s the product of genetic engineering. Somewhere in his lineage must be laboratory dogs that were products of radical experimentation and perhaps escaped. Dear Rosa, he is as intelligent as we are, and he is a treasure who must be protected. You must be his guardian now. And after you see the videos that follow, after you watch dear Kipp communicating with me using the alphabet on the study wall, you’ll not only believe me, but you will, I’m sure, feel that you’ve found your life’s calling.”

  Rosa swiveled in the chair to look at the foot-high black letters on the farther wall.

  Behind her, Dorothy said, “Since I was just a little girl, which was a very long time ago, I’ve had this strange feeling down in the deepest and most secret place in my heart. I think you’ve had the same strange feeling and, just like me, you’ve felt you’d be a fool to speak of it.”

  A pleasant chill craped the nape of Rosa’s neck. She looked through the big windows at the descending forest, the lake beyond: a mystical scene in the waning light, the water like a mysterious loch in another land, where something lived that spawned a legend.

  “All my life, Rosa, I’ve felt that there’s hidden magic in the world, that life is more than what our five senses can reveal to us. I’ve believed miracles really happen and that one day a miracle would happen to me.”

  Even a girl raised in poverty and without love could entertain such a feeling. Perhaps it was especially true of a girl raised in poverty and without love, who had no hope other than what she spun from her imagination.

  “Life crushes that secret feeling out of us if we let it,” Dorothy continued. “But I never allowed it to crush that feeling in me, Rosa, and one day the miracle came to me on four paws.”

  16

  He was a lucky dog.

  Children ran and jumped and capered throughout the campground. Little kids and older kids both enjoyed sneaking food to dogs.

  As further proof of his luck, he seemed to be the only dog here for the children to feed. Kids tossed balls and skimmed Frisbees through the air, but nothing on four feet joined in the play.

  Not everyone had begun cooking yet. A little early for dinner.

  But at least two men stood ready at their portable barbecues. The scent of hot charcoal graced the air.

  One of the cooks was marinating steaks in a deep pan. He had just begun to light his charcoal.

  He was lean and deeply tanned, with his hair slicked back.

  On his T-shirt blazed the words Fork Off, under an image of a fork with three tines. Two tines were bent down. Only the middle one was straight.

  This guy did not appear friendly. He smelled of envy and anger.

  The second man had thick hamburger patties sizzling on a gas griddle and frankfurters swelling-sweating-charring on the grill.

  Kipp took up a position where the action was, next to the grill master with the lesser meats.

  He sat, sweeping the ground with his tail, pendant ears pricked as much as their nature allowed, head cocked. Being cute.

  Kipp had few peers at this, even if he did say so himself.

  Dogs were incapable of bragging, but they were also incapable of false modesty. Things are what they are, and that’s that.

  The grill master was a person who talked to animals. He was no Doctor Dolittle. He didn’t hold a dialogue. But he seemed nice.

  He smelled of kindness, and he wasn’t wearing a rude T-shirt.

  He called Kipp “buddy.” He said, “I had one like you when I was a kid.”

  Instead of swishing his tail, Kipp thumped it on the ground.

  “Are you lost, buddy?”

  Kipp stopped thumping his tail.

  Being lost made him more sympathetic, more likely to be fed.

  In fact, however, he wasn’t lost. He knew where he was going. The murmuring boy on the Wire drew him.

  If he whined and did movie-dog shtick to suggest he was lost, that would be lying.

  Those in the Mysterium did not lie to human beings who smelled of kindness. This wasn’t exactly a commandment, but it was a serious protocol.

  Deceiving people who smelled of anger or envy—or worse—was justified because they were dangerous. Deceiving them could be a matter of survival.

  “Are you hungry, fella?”

  Kipp thumped his tail against the ground, harder than before.

  Without being deceived by a whine, the man who smelled of kindness evidently decided that before him sat a lost and hungry dog. “I’ve got something for you.”

  With tongs, he put a big, mostly cooked hamburger patty on a paper plate. He put a fat frankfurter beside it.

  “When these cool a bit, you can have them.”

  Kipp could whine now, because this was a whine of gratitude.

  The man stooped and examined Kipp’s collar and said, “No name. No phone number. Maybe you’ve been injected with a chip.”

  Kipp didn’t have a chip, but the clasp of his collar contained a GPS and a small lithium battery to power it.

  Dorothy hadn’t feared that he would run away. But she worried he might be dognapped.

  After flipping a few hamburger patties, the man cut into pieces the burger and frankfurter that he set aside for Kipp, to help the meat cool faster.

  A woman herded four children to a nearby picnic table. The two boys and two girls resembled her and the kind man. Their puppies.

  On the table were potato salad and potato chips and pasta salad and other things that smelled wonderful.

  The woman carried a platter of cooked patties and frankfurters to the table. The kids cheered and started building sandwiches.

  This was a happy place.

  The kind man put the paper plate on the ground, and the meat was cool enough, and Kipp ate it with pleasure.

  He did not whine for more. That would have been ungrateful.

  Besides, the children at the table were digging into the feast. All he had to do was hang around. More food would be forthcoming.

  Indeed, he had to be careful not to accept too much and make himself sick. All of it was delicious.

  The moment was lovely, with the food and all, with everyone in this family smelling right, smelling safe, no anger or envy or other more bitter scents arising from them.

  Then the Hater arrived behind Kipp, who smelled him too late.

  The Hater clipped a leash to Kipp’s collar and pulled it tight and said to the kind man, “Is this your dog?”

  “I suspect he’s lost. We thought we’d take him home with us.”

  “This is a dog-free campground,” the Hater declared. “He’s not allowed. I’m taking him with me.”

  He was wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt, like a uniform.

  “When we leave day after tomorrow,” the kind man said, “we’d be happy to take him with us.”

  “He won’t be here then,” the Hater said.

  He jerked hard on the leash to make Kipp understand that he was in control, and he headed across the campground toward the office at the entrance.

  Kipp went without a struggle. This was not a kind man. He might react to resistance with violence when they were out of sight.

  The stink of hatred was more intense and more frightening than any other smell, except for certain scents that identified different kinds of insane people.

  Sometimes a person smelled of hatred and insanity. This man reeked only of the former.

  Depending on what all he hated and how intensely he hated it, this might be a difficult man from whom to escape.

  Haters lived to hate, to exercise power over those they hated. They were obsessive about it. Focused. Relentless.

  The campground office was in a small log cabin at the end of the entry lane from the highway.

  Kipp did not want to go in there.

  His collar was too tight for him to slip out of it.

  He would not bite except in the most extreme circumstances. That was a protocol of the Mysterium. And it was only right.

  Maybe there would be someone else in the office, someone who was not as wicked as this man.

  They climbed the steps and went inside.

  No one else was there. Only Kipp and the Hater.

  17

  The day synchronizes with Lee Shacket’s mood, the sun fading behind gray shrouds as smooth as casket satin, the overcast slowly descending like a heavy lid. The late afternoon darkles into a long and sullen twilight.

  He leaves I-80 for a two-lane state route that rises and falls over nature’s wooded contours, cleaves flowering meadows, and for mile after mile offers isolated human habitats only here and there. Shadows gather among the trees in threatening convocations, and the late-summer wildflowers, once bright, seem now to smolder in the fields like fragments of some meteor superheated and shattered as it plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere.

  Shacket’s unrelenting hunger is not merely for food, but as well for justice, for transformation from the victim he has always been, for an undefined but amazing transcendence that he feels will be his. Pressure is building in him like superheated steam in a boiler, psychological pressure but also what seems to be some kind of powerful escalation of his physical abilities. Hour by hour, he feels stronger; his eyesight grows sharper, his hearing keener.

  What he feels has something to do with what happened at the Refine facility in Springville, Utah. Engaged in longevity research, seeking to greatly extend the human life span, the richly financed experiments were, at the insistence of Dorian Purcell, focused intensely on archaea, the third domain of animal life. The first domain is eukaryotes, which includes human beings and all other higher organisms. The second domain is bacteria. Microscopic archaea, which lack a nucleus, were long thought to be a kind of bacteria. But they have unique properties, not least of which is the ability to effectuate horizontal gene transfer. Parents pass their genes vertically to their offspring. Archaea pass genetic material horizontally, from one species to another. Their mysterious role in the development of life on Earth is only beginning to be understood, and perhaps it is madness to seek to harness them for the purpose of improving the human genome and extending the human life span.

  On the other hand, although Shacket had first thought of the events at the Springville facility as catastrophic, he is beginning to wonder if the opposite is true. Although he has perhaps breathed in hundreds of billions—even trillions—of programmed archaea that are carrying longevity-fostering genes from many species, perhaps it is a mistake to regard the breach of the organism-isolation labs as an existential crisis. One of the scientists in a position of high authority—or Dorian himself—evidently thought it was exactly that and triggered the security program to lock down the complex and eventually burn it to the ground.