Mercy (19 page)

Maggie lifted her eyebrows. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?" He walked to the chair and crouched in front of her, grasping her hands. "T

o me, you're the perfect image of a woman. So what's the matter with clonin g you?"

It was 1993, and Jamie was doing a body scan of his wife to use as the model for an architectural firm's VR program. Their contract to build an elementa ry school in a rich New York suburb led them to ask for this particular appl ication: a walk-through in which a user could be made child-size, and thus s ee if there were sharp edges at eye level, or cubbies too high to reach. But they'd also asked for a grown-up prototype, so that teachers might be able to assess the best spots for storage and educational aids, as well as the po tential for hazards. Since they hadn't specified the sex of the prototype, J

amie was giving them a male and a female model. The user would be able to te xture-map his or her own face over the model's digitized one.

"Who'd you use as the perfect man?" Maggie asked.

"Rod."

She laughed. "Rod? How come you didn't scan yourself?" Jamie grinned. "Flattering as that might seem, I'm too tall. Rod's just under six feet, which fits in more as average."

"Ah," Maggie said. "So I'm not the perfect woman. I'm just average."

"Your words. Not mine." He pushed several buttons on a keyboard, and the pal e green lasers that would translate the physical points of Maggie's body to the computer shimmered and waved into a direct, striking line that ran down the center of her face. "Sit still," he said. "Here we go." He watched the beam of light pass over his wife's body, sliding over the curv e of her breast and the valley of her stomach to her

arm and the angle of her elbow. The laser rotated on its axis, glowing betwe en her shoulder blades.

Jamie turned his attention to the computer screen. As if it were a Polaroid, an image of Maggie was coming into focus by bits and pieces. Her eyes blink ed blindly out from the inside of the screen, her hands materialized to rest at her sides. Her legs, eerily foreshortened at the knees for a few moments

, sprang into view in a dotting of color. "Okay," he said, "now stand up." He wanted to make sure that the coordinates matched, while the lasers wer e still working. "Raise your right arm," Jamie ordered, and when Maggie d id so, her computer image repeated the motion. "Touch your waist. Turn ar ound." Every move she made, her prototype did as well. There was nothing missing.

He watched on the screen as Maggie lifted her hands to her hair and skimmed them down her body. Jamie cupped his hand against the computer screen; she w as small enough to stand in his palm, to carry around in his pocket, to set on a shelf like an object of rare and priceless beauty. "How is it?" she ask ed, her mute lips on the screen puckering with silent words, looking for all the world like a kiss.

Jamie stared at Maggie's body on the screen, young and firm and healthy no matter how many times the program was switched on, no matter how old they a ll got in real life. "Perfect," he said.

""~*lory in the Flower had been decorated to look like someone's V_7" livin g room on a rainy autumn afternoon. Instead of having tables spread with dr ied flower arrangements and herbal wreaths, Allie had set two enormous over stuffed sofas in the center of the shop. There was a coffee table sporting a fresh arrangement every day, as well as magazines and a small tea service

. The only indication that one was in a flower shop came from the unexpecte d details: the ivy trailing over the fat arm and leg of the couch, the bowl of rose petals that stood beside the cream and sugar, the lampshade overhe ad, which was fashioned entirely out of dried primroses and statice in luxu riant jewel tones.

In the back of the store, behind the sofas, was the cooler and the workbench where Allie did most of her arrangements, set under the spill of sun from a skylight. Behind a Chinese screen was the storeroom, as well as shelves stu ffed with metallic foil and fabric, a

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palette of ribbons, birdcages, baskets, and brocade hatboxes that were all us ed as containers.

Mia walked to the cooler first and placed her lunch--yogurt--next to a large black bucket of persimmon roses. Then she shrugged out of her coat and set it on the desk chair in the storeroom. Absently, her eyes scanned the tools of the trade: rubber bands, green wire, scissors, Pokon leafshine, Floratape

, and huge boxes of Spanish moss and Oasis.

It had taken her until yesterday to figure out Allie's system of organizing flowers. The cooler was not arranged by availability or popularity of flower s, or even by color, but by what the flowers were supposed to represent. She knew that once, bouquets had been sent as a message, not just as ornaments of beauty. When Mia had first become interested in floral arrangement, she'd been fascinated by this philosophy. Evidently, Allie was fascinated as well

. She'd bunched the flowers with positive qualities on the left side of the cooler, those with negative connotations on the right. So jasmine and lilac and camellias and passionflowers--representing grace, first love, perfection

, and faith--were gathered together in serviceable black florist's buckets. Acanthus, crocuses, thorn apples, and peonies were bunched in dishonor on th e other side, signifying artifice, abuse, deceit, and shame. It almost made Mia afraid to open the right door of the cooler, for fear that all the evil would seep into the world, like it had from Pandora's box. She jumped as the phone rang. "Hi," she said, "Glory in the Flower." She exp ected it to be Allie, checking up to make sure that Mia had arrived on time and had opened the store without any catastrophes, but even as she thought t his she realized it was not Allie's way. Allie would give her the benefit of the doubt, whether Mia deserved it or not.

"Oh, Antonio," she said, relaxing at the voice of one of her distributors. Sh e scanned the nails stuck into the shelf above her eyes at even intervals, ea ch marked with a day of the week and spearing various orders to be filled. "I need jacarandas and some tree fern." Allie had told her to order whatever sh e could from Antonio instead of from the other wholesalers; his prices were a little higher but his flowers were always fresh.

She haggled with him over the price of alstroemeria, finally Jodi Picoult

agreeing on $4.75 a bunch, and said that she would indeed like to see the Wa shington State purple tulips. Then she got off the phone and closed her eyes and listened.

The quiet had a noise; it pulsed through the air vents in the flower shop. And if she cracked the cooler a little, she knew she would be able to hear the wh istling silk of the roses as their pursed heads began to open. Mia turned toward the storefront. Allie had set her bonsai tree on a low tab le across the room, along with the seven other trees they had wired together in hopes of future sales. With a smile, she crossed the room and unwrapped the wire from Allie's tree, keeping it from cutting too deeply into the bark and listening to the sigh of the roots and the cambium at this freedom. "So rry," she said, carefully rewrapping the bronze wire. "I can't let you go ju st yet." She did the same to several other trees, snipping leaves and branch es where she thought Allie might have underestimated the future tree. Then s he sat down on the couch that faced the front of the shop. There were a hundred things to do; Allie had left her that god-awful list, after all, but Mia only wanted to close her eyes and think about Cam. She k new she had to send him word of where she was going to meet him for this dr ink, but she did not think it would be prudent to waltz into the police sta tion with the whole town watching. Not that what they were doing was at all out of sorts. A drink was just a drink. And Allie had asked Mia to watch o ver Cam.

She walked to the cooler and gathered in her hands a bunch of sad-eyed pans ies and delicate apple blossoms. She braided the stems around the branch an d tied them with a French-wired ribbon. Then, after hanging the Closed sign

, she ran down the street to the police station and tucked the tiny bouquet under the driver's-side windshield wiper of the unmarked cruiser she recog nized as Cam's.

Mia was out of breath by the time she arrived back at the flower shop, her pulse racing from more than the exertion. She sat back down on the couch, s taring at the mess of petals that shed made when she wrapped and wired the bouquet.

Somehow, she knew that Cam would figure it out.

Pansies meant, I'm thinking of you. And apples, since the days of Eve, had always meant temptation.

A Hie did not go directly to Jamie MacDonald's house. Instead, she drove to the office of Dr. Dascomb Wharton, the family practitioner who had taken c are of Maggie after she fell sick in 1993She found herself without an appointment, sitting on a cracked black Nauga hyde chair and reading a magazine that dated back to the Gulf War. From ti me to time, when she knew that the receptionist was watching, she would gl ance at her watch.

Two hours after she'd arrived at Dr. Wharton's, she was ushered through the winding corridors behind the reception desk and into his private office. The doctor was a tremendous, shaggy-haired man who seemed to have learned about the dangers of cholesterol too late. He was eating a calzone, dippin g it at regular intervals into a small vat of spaghetti sauce, when Allie pushed open the door. "Sit down, sit down," he bellowed. "You don't mind m e eating lunch while we chat?"

Allie shook her head. She had never seen anyone quite so large, except of course for the terribly sad cases on the Oprah show, and she wondered why the spindly-legged chair beneath the man's bottom did not simply give way. The doctor wiped his mouth with a napkin and smiled at her. What big teeth you have, Allie thought. She smiled back.

"What can I do for you, Mrs. MacDonald?"

Allie pulled a Polaroid photo of Jamie from the front pocket of her purse. It was certainly not a good picture; in fact, Cam had loaned it to her from the police file that had the copy of the arrest report. "I'm here on behalf of t his man," she said, offering the photograph to the doctor. "Do you know him?" Dr. Wharton pursed his lips. "Why, of course I know Jamie. But I know Magg ie better, being her doctor."

"Knew," Allie said, before she could think. The doctor stared at her. "She . .

. died a few days ago."

"Oh." Dr. Wharton looked nonplussed. "Oh, well, yes, that was to be expect ed."

Allie stuffed the photograph back into her purse. "She was very ill, then?" Jodi Picoult

Dr. Wharton leaned forward. "My dear, this is a matter of patient confidentia lity."

Allie nodded, having anticipated this. She withdrew a letter from Graham Mac Phee, on a piece of paper emblazoned with the legal firm's letterhead, and h anded it wordlessly to the doctor. "I see," he said, scanning the few lines.

"So Jamie did it."

"We've yet to go to court." She leaned forward. "That's why I'm in Cummin gton. I'm trying to find people who knew Maggie, who knew Jamie, who woul d think that this kind of charge is ridiculous."

Dr. Wharton stuffed the last of his calzone in his mouth and held up a finge r. When he swallowed, he rested back in his chair, tipping it precariously.

"What I will tell you, and any court that subpoenas me, is this: Maggie MacD

onald would not have lived out the year, in my opinion. Her breast cancer, d iagnosed two years ago, had spread to her bones, and finally to her brain. I t had not responded to chemotherapy or radiation, and the last time I treate d her it was because the tumor had infiltrated the optic nerve." He paused, as if trying to see how sharp Allie was. "The eye."

"What kind of tumor was it, originally?"

"Ductal carcinoma," Wharton replied. He rapped his fingers against the smoo th surface of his desk.

Allie looked away before asking the next question. She pictured Maggie laid out on the embalming table of the funeral home, her knees grotesquely bent into the air. "Was she in a lot of pain?"

The doctor made a strange sound through his nose. "Well, now, pain is a re lative thing. Some women breeze through childbirth, for example, and other s beg to be unconscious.'

"We aren't talking about having a baby."

"No," Dr. Wharton agreed. "We are not." He steepled his fingers and rested his chin on top of them. "I think Maggie MacDonald was in physical pain, yes," he conceded.

"But . . ." Allie prompted, hearing the qualification in his tone.

"But I don't think it was what hurt the most." Allie raised her eyebrows, a nd Dr. Wharton smiled so gently all the pockets of his face dimpled and fol ded into each other until he looked like an entirely different man. "I thin k what was killing Maggie was knowing that she would be leaving Jamie behin d."

Anyone who wondered why the town's flower shop was open late at night woul d suspect that Allie was working on a wedding. Sometimes it took two or th ree days to wire all the flowers in a bridal bouquet, and Allie often stay ed into the witching hours to get the painstaking work finished. So when C

am walked down the street from the station, passing several families en ro ute to dinner at the coffee shop, he did not turn away or try to hide. He simply tucked the limp knot of flowers into his coat pocket and smiled at Geordie MacDonald and Sarah Murray and said yes, the weather was getting c older much quicker than usual.

Mia had locked the door, so Cam had to knock. This took him by surprise; he was always yelling at Allie to lock the door, to which she simply replied sh e wasn't a target: if by any chance a thief ever did happen to set foot in W

heelock, he wouldn't pick a store that barely turned a profit. Cam had almos t succeeded in pushing that last thought of Allie out of his mind when Mia's small face appeared in one glass pane of the door.

She was wearing jeans that looked very soft, and a man's white shirt rolled up at the elbows. For one irrational moment Cam wanted to grab her shoulders and demand that she tell him whose shirt that was. But instead he smiled at her, and pulled the tiny bouquet out of his pocket. "I got your flowers." Her face was as pale as the collar of the shirt, but that only made her eyes stand out in relief. They were shining and sapphire; they reminded him of t he trappings of royalty. He unbuckled his gun belt and laid it gently across the counter by the cash register When he turned, she was standing two feet in front of him. "What makes you think," she asked quietly, "that I'm safe?" He sat down on one of Allie's couches, which he personally had lugged out of a cousin's pickup truck when Allie found them at a tag sale in a town over the mountains. Mia had set the fine bone china tea set on the low table, alo ng with a bigger vase full of the same flowers she'd tacked to his windshiel d.