Devoted(16)

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.

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.