Devoted(56)
We don’t have mice, Larinda declared. And Bella’s not a cat. Anyway, she’s never produced a mouse.
Maybe she eats them, Dennis said.
Bella is every inch a lady, Larinda objected, horrified by her brother’s suggestion. Ladies don’t eat mice, for God’s sake.
Milly, the youngest, said, You’re all full of pishposh.
Bella wasn’t afraid of the dark. She just couldn’t read in it.
The Wire wasn’t merely a communications system. It was also an educational tool.
Other members of the Mysterium could share their knowledge of language with a young dog in mere minutes.
Solomon and Brandy, two of the more philosophical members of the Mysterium, called this ability “brain-to-brain data downloading.”
In the family room were shelves and shelves of books.
Although she was a big girl, Bella was pretty much limited in her reading to the volumes on the lower four shelves.
There was a wheeled ottoman she could push across the room and stand on to reach the fifth shelf, but she rarely used it because of balance issues.
She could paw a book off a shelf and return it with her teeth.
If she heard footsteps and needed to ditch a book quickly, she shoved it under a skirted chair or put it on an end table, to shelve it later.
Sometimes Bella forgot, in which case the children were blamed for leaving books off the shelves.
All but one child rightly denied it. On a few occasions, after favoring Bella with a long stare, Milly had taken the blame.
Milly suspected. One day, the girl might seek the truth.
Bella hadn’t decided what she would do then. Probably play it by heart when the time came.
Now, in the wee hours of Thursday morning, she was lying in the family room, reading The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo.
The story was funny and sad, magical and strange, but true.
True in the sense that, strange as it was, it described the matrix underlying life, a matrix of unsuspected connections among people, places, and moments widely separated in time.
Bella turned the pages either by snorting out a blast of air or by the careful brush of a paw, so as not to crinkle a page.
Stories were as delicious as food. As important as food.
Bella could not live without stories.
Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine.
You could live a thousand lives through stories—and learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind.
She had just finished chapter five and sighed with contentment when the most amazing thing happened.
A new voice came on the Wire.
He called himself Vulcan.
He claimed to be a three-year-old German shepherd.
Thus far the Mysterium had been limited only to retrievers, golden and Labrador.
Vulcan was of course telling the truth. He was a dog.
But there were other details even more astonishing.
He was transmitting from a great distance. He had been seeking contact for a year, straining ever outward.
Bella didn’t know how widely the transmission had been received throughout the Mysterium.
She returned The Magician’s Elephant to the shelves and composed an announcement for immediate urgent distribution.
Bellagram. Something exciting is happening out there. Until moments ago, no transmission on the Wire has ever been received from beyond a 120-mile radius of Sacramento. Vulcan, a German shepherd living in La Jolla, just north of San Diego, has broken through to us with the news that there is a community of our kind in San Diego, Orange, and Riverside Counties. Mostly German shepherds and Bernese mountain dogs. There are seventy-two of them, residing in various conditions. What we call the Wire, they call the Radio. They have no name for themselves, but we can hope they adopt the Mysterium for themselves. Where have we come from? Why are we here? Our story is at last unfolding. Our time seems to have come. Rejoice. Be true. Stay tuned.
61
In his first year of service, Sheriff Hayden Eckman had never before been in his office past midnight, in fact seldom after six o’clock in the evening. He was there now, and worried.
Still young and attractive, he could speak eloquently about the rule of law and public service, winning over any audience, but his current position was not his life’s work, only one step on the staircase of a career that would take him far.
He had been a deputy, rising through the ranks for five years, and before that he’d been a lawyer with a less than grand practice. He still thought of himself as an attorney rather than a lawman. During the next three years, he intended to network tirelessly and take advantage of all the legal and quasi-legal ways a sheriff could enrich himself, and then run for the district attorney of Pinehaven County. With the ultimate goal of becoming attorney general of the State of California, he had already begun using the resources of his office to obtain information damaging to a list of public servants who he anticipated would be his competition in future elections.
Therefore, this business with Dexter Frawley—transferring the bodies of Painton Spader and Justine Klineman to Sacramento, that nest of vipers, and relinquishing jurisdiction in this case to the state—left him uneasy. On the one hand, the attorney general, Tio Barbizon, now owed him a favor. On the other hand, if this situation couldn’t be contained and if it blew up on them, Hayden might suffer some damage to his image for having acceded so quickly to Barbizon’s request.