This was a hard truth. The world was a beautiful place, but it was full of hard truths.
The live-in hospice-care nurse, Rosa Leon, attended to her in the bedroom where Dorothy had slept most nights of her long life.
Rosa smelled of life and strawberry-scented shampoo and the peppermint hard candies that she enjoyed.
In this room, Dorothy and her late husband, Arthur, had made love and conceived one child, Jack.
Arthur had been an accountant. He died at sixty-seven.
Jack had died in a war at the age of twenty-eight. His parents outlived him by decades.
Losing a child was the central tragedy of Dorothy’s life.
But she was proud of Jack, and resilient, and she carried on, living a life that mattered.
Kipp had never met Jack or Arthur. He knew them only because Dorothy had so often spoken of them.
Rosa sat in an armchair, reading a paperback, unaware that Death was en route.
At the moment, Dorothy slept, sedated and without pain.
Kipp suffered when Dorothy was in serious pain. He had lived with her only three years. But he loved her desperately.
It was his nature to love beyond reason.
Before the moment of her passing might come, he needed to steel himself, prepare to deal with the loss.
He went downstairs and out through his door and onto the deep back deck to get some fresh air.
The house stood about twenty feet above Lake Tahoe. A minimal tide lapped softly on the beach, and sharp-edged reflections of a scimitar moon shimmered across the rippled water.
A mild breeze brought a rich mélange of odors: pine trees, cedars, woodsmoke from a fireplace, forest mast, wild mushrooms, squirrels, raccoons, and much more.
Kipp was also aware of a strange continuous murmur. He’d only recently begun to hear it.
He’d first thought it might be tinnitus, with which he knew some people suffered, but it was not that.
He could almost hear words in that strange unremitting flow, which came from somewhere to the west. West by northwest.
After Dorothy died, Kipp would need to investigate, find the source of the sound. He was grateful to have an immediate purpose.
He descended from the deck to the yard to stare for a while at the stars, wondering.
Although he was exceedingly smart—only Dorothy knew how smart—he had no idea what it all meant.
Join the club. All the philosophers of history, much wiser than he, had failed to conceive a theory that satisfied everyone.
Shortly after he returned to Dorothy’s bedroom, she woke.
Seeing Rosa reading a novel, Dorothy spoke in a frail voice. “Rosie, dear, you should read aloud to Kipp.”
Humoring her patient, the nurse said, “Don’t you think Dickens is beyond his grade level?”
“Oh, not at all, not at all. He enjoyed Great Expectations when I read it to him, and he adored A Christmas Carol.”
Kipp stood bedside, gazing up at her, wagging his tail.
Dorothy patted the mattress, an invitation.
Kipp sprang onto the bed. Lying at her side, he rested his chin on her hip.
She put one hand on his burly head and gently stroked his pendant ears, his coat of golden fur.
Even with hateful Death on the doorstep, sweet bliss found an equal home with grief in Kipp’s heart.
4
The two-lane blacktop is a dark snake slithering through the moon-washed paleness of the Utah wastelands. In the nearly empty vastness, small clusters of lights glimmer here and there in the distance, like extraterrestrial pod craft that have descended from the mother ship on some nefarious mission.
Traveling south out of the Provo suburbs into ever-greater isolation, Lee Shacket dares not take Interstate 15. He uses less-busy state highways, undivided federal highways when he must, anxious to put as much distance as possible between himself and the events at the Springville facility.
If he has committed as much evil as any man in history, he has done it with the best intentions. He believes that those intentions matter more than the consequences of his actions. How could humanity have advanced from caves to orbiting space stations if all men and women were risk averse? Some seek knowledge and rise to challenges at whatever cost, and because of them, progress is made.
Anyway, all may be well in the end. The final result of the project is not yet known, only that it’s gone wrong in mid stage. Every scientific endeavor is marked by setbacks. Ultimately, failure can be the father of success if one learns from the errors made.
Initially, however, he is treating this failure as absolute.