Devoted(24)

He might have continued staring at Enter Your Password and brooding about good and evil, but a strange and disturbing thing happened. The three words vanished from the screen, and after a few seconds of blackness, two words in white letters appeared before him: You again.





19



In the study of the house above the lake, through a series of videos, the late Dorothy Hummel chronicled her wonder-filled time with Kipp. Rosa Leon, still in a pleasant state of shock occasioned by the news that she had inherited her employer’s estate, watched one after the other with fascination.

Speaking to the camera, Dorothy said that she had bought Kipp from a breeder when he was sixteen weeks old, a fast-growing ball of fur, full of spirit and curiosity. She’d had dogs before, all golden retrievers, and she knew how puppies usually were, so in just a few days, she realized that Kipp was different from others of his kind.

She fed him two meals a day, one at seven o’clock in the morning and one at three thirty in the afternoon. By the third day in her company, Kipp fell into the habit of coming to Dorothy five minutes before each feeding. He’d sit before her and gently, politely tap her foot with a forepaw. Dorothy said she’d previously had dogs with an intuitive sense of time, but little Kipp took it one step further a week into their relationship. Dorothy was curled up in an armchair, engrossed in a novel, and Kipp had no foot to tap. He wasn’t a barker, so when she failed to notice his impatient pacing, he went into the kitchen, leaped onto a chair, retrieved her wristwatch, which she’d taken off and left on the table, brought it to her in his mouth, and dropped it on her lap.



When Dorothy realized it was feeding time, Kipp’s act stunned her. She got up from the armchair and stood looking at him, and he returned her stare as if to say, What do you think about that?

She had always talked to dogs as if they understood her, and she didn’t feel the least bit foolish when she asked him if he knew the purpose of a watch. In answer, he went to the archway between the living room and the downstairs hall, and she followed him as he led her to the grandfather clock in the entrance foyer. Wristwatch and clock. He turned and padded along the hallway to the kitchen, with Dorothy close behind; she found him standing past the pantry door, gazing up at the wall clock.

Snatching her iPhone from the table, she had made a video that she later imported to her computer and that now replayed for Rosa. Dorothy asked Kipp to identify the refrigerator, and he went to it. She asked him to go to the sink, and he did. She asked him to go to the cooktop, to the back door, to the trash compactor, to the hall door, to the laundry room door, which he did, did, did, did, did, tail wagging the whole time.

The next day, Dorothy had bought a video camera.

As if he had second thoughts about revealing his extraordinary nature, Kipp refused to repeat his performance. He reacted to her entreaties with yawns and puzzled expressions, wandered away, found his nearest bed, and took a nap.



Over the next couple of weeks, however, Kipp discovered he was a dog who loved stories. He was unable to play dumb dog any longer.





20



You again.

As Woody considered those ominous words, his mouth flooded with saliva, as if maybe he was going to throw up, his heart pounded, and he felt as if the o in You was an eye that stared at him without blinking.

They couldn’t be looking at him. For one thing, he had a piece of painters’ tape over the camera in his computer. Besides, he had spoofed to them through multiple exchanges; and there was no way that they could track him to source in the short amount of time that he had been on their site today.

The two words blinked off the screen, and letters appeared from left to right, as if someone was texting him: Y-o-u a-r-e n-o-t . . .

Woody watched with growing horror as the message completed: You are not Alexander Gordius.

They couldn’t know all the exchanges through which he’d jumped to get there, couldn’t know his origin, not this fast, but they knew whose account he had hijacked to visit them.



Those words blinked off the screen, and four more appeared letter by letter: we will find you.

He bailed out of the site, dropped off the internet, switched off his computer. He wheeled his chair backward, crawled into the knee space of his workstation, and pulled the computer plugs, though that precaution seemed both unnecessary and pointless.

The security program at Tragedy evidently monitored the origin of each visitor to the site. And if someone visited but had no password to enter, the program apparently issued an alert to the effect that they might be the target of a fishing expedition by someone not on their client list. He had gone to the site twice before. Although months had passed between those contacts and his third visit today, their security system had been lying in wait for him.

Okay.

All right.

Stay cool. No reason to sweat it. No problemo. Zip, zero, nada. In such a short time, they can’t possibly have tracked him to source through a series of nine exchanges. Anyway, he had used a few other deceptions to cover his trail. And he would never, never, never go back there.

Sweat broke out on his brow, and nausea rolled through him. He needed something to settle his stomach. A Coca-Cola. That was all he needed, a Coca-Cola, and then he’d feel all right.





21



Kipp in the kingdom of the Hater.