had to pay to have someone killed so that it looked like an accident or suicide or a terrorist attack. He didn’t have any money. His mom bought him what he needed. He couldn’t ask her to pay to have Dorian Purcell killed by a runaway truck or by a fall down a long flight of stairs. She might be sent to prison. She wouldn’t like it there.
Woody would be okay with going to prison himself; he didn’t mind being alone in a small room, with nothing to do but read and think. But of course they didn’t send eleven-year-old kids to the stir. Anyway, the murderers behind Tragedy probably wouldn’t kill Purcell even for a gajillion dollars. As far as Woody could tell, this murder-for-hire website catered exclusively to evil people who really, really, really wanted good people to die. If it had been the other way around, if their business model had been to wait for good people to pay for evil people to be killed, they probably wouldn’t have a lot of customers for their service. Good people didn’t solve their problems that way. Which was one reason why bad people got away with being bad for so long.
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