Mercy (2 page)

Clann was the Scottish Gaelic word for children, and a clan was made up of re latives, some more distant than others, who happened to live on a given piece of land. The clan chief, or laird, had the power of life and death over his tenants and tacksmen, but the authority wasn't quite as one-sided as a king's

. After all, the chief's subjects were his brothers and nephews and cousins, and the trust and respect they offered up to him came at the price of his pro tection and his promise to care for them.

Cameron MacDonald of Wheelock, Massachusetts, had been named for his great

-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a legendary soldier who had fought i n the battle of Culloden, where the English routed the Highlanders. Camero n had heard the story over and over asi a boy: When his namesake realized that Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highland army didn't stand a chance against t he English soldiers, he tried to save his clansmen from being killed in ba ttle. He secured their honorable discharges by promising, in exchange, his own remarkable skill in a fight to the death against the British. But he hadn't died, as he had expected. And after Culloden, when the victorious E

nglish came through Scotland burning towns and slaughtering livestock and raping village women, the first Cameron MacDonald realized he had to again save his clan.

Jodi Picoult

So while he went to jail as a Jacobite prisoner, he arranged for the famili es of Carrymuir to leave, one by one, on packets bound for the American col onies. Which explained why, when most Scots were being hanged or sold as in dentured servants to the West Indies, this small sect of Clan MacDonald rem ained intact and resettled in the wilderness of Massachusetts. They found a spot that looked like home, with a brace of rolling mountains and a narrow body of water that was more of a pond than a lake, and sent wo rd back to Scotland about this place. Wee loch, they wrote. It's set by a w ee loch.

And eventually, the laird and his family came over too, leaving a trusted u ncle to watch over the land in Scotland. They traded the comfortable kilt f or trousers; they proudly flew the Stars and Stripes; they accepted the Ame ricanized name of the town. And as a natural extension of inbred responsibi lity, the man who was the figurehead of the Clan MacDonald also became Whee lock's police chief.

In 1995, that position belonged to Cameron MacDonald II, having been handed down from his great-grandfather to his grandfather to his father, passing al ong the same line of succession as the honorary title of clan chief. He'd be the ffrst to tell you that things had changed. Obviously, although he was c onsidered the chief of a clan and duly noted in the Scottish records, he was no longer directly responsible for the welfare of the townspeople. At least three-quarters of the town had never even seen the lands in Scotland that t echnically belonged to them. Hardly anyone spoke with a burr; fewer still kn ew more than a smattering of Gaelic.

On the other hand, old habits died hard. There was no tarnished silver bowl or royal edict that proved that Wheelock was MacDonald land, but it was thei rs just the same, in the way that their ancestors had laid claim to that nar row pass in the Scottish Highlands. It was land, quite simply, they'd lived on forever.

At age thirty-five, Cameron MacDonald knew he would stay in Wheelock for the rest of his life; that he would be the police chief until he died and passe d the office to his firstborn son. He knew these were things he did not have a choice about, no more than he had a choice about tossing off the choking obligation of being the current laird. Sometimes, in the very still parts of the night, he

would tell himself that an honorary title did not mean today what it meant t wo hundred and fifty years ago. He'd reason that if he picked up his wife an d moved to Phoenix for the climate, everyone would take it in stride. Then he would remember how Darcy MacDonald, his third cousin's daughter, ha d tripped right on Main Street when Cam was no more than three feet away, t alking to the town barber. She'd had seventeen stitches in her knee because he hadn't moved quite fast enough, or been in the right place at the right time. In fact, some days he felt that every arrest, every conviction, was a reflection of something he'd done wrong as a leader.

He'd press up against the soft, snoring curl of his wife, Allie, because she w as as solid as any truth he could spin. And he'd try to push himself back into sleep, but his dreams were always of chains, link after link after link, whic h stretched across the vast Atlantic.

"I TT/'hen Allie Gordon was in high school, she was not the most W popula r girl in her class. She was nowhere even close. That honor belonged to V

erona MacBean, with her cotton-candy puff of hair and her Cover Girl masc ara and her pink mohair sweater molded like skin to what the boys referre d to as the Hoosac Ridge.

And today, fifteen years out of nowhere, Verona MacBean herself stepped int o Glory in the Flower and ordered three large centerpieces for a library lu ncheon to be given in her name.

"Verona!" Allie had immediately recalled the name. There was something disc oncerting about seeing her classmate dressed in a severe beige suit, her ha ir scraped into a knot at the back of her head, her cheeks flat beneath a s heer layer of foundation. "What brings you to town?" Verona had made a little clicking noise with the back of her teeth. "Allie," sh e said, her voice just as thin and breathy as it had been in high school, "don'

t tell me you're still here!"

It was not meant as an insult, it never was, so Allie simply shrugged. "Well

," she said, drawing out her words and savoring them like a fine French deli cacy, "since Cam's here to stay ..." She let her voice trail off at the end, peeking up at Verona from the order form she was filling out. Then she star ed her in the face. "You did hear about Cam and me, didn't you?" Jodi Picoult

Verona had walked over to the refrigerated case, as if inspecting the qualit y of the flowers she had already commissioned. "Yes," she said. "I seem to r ecall something about that."

A few minutes later Verona had left, specifying the exact time for the cent erpieces to arrive (it was an author's luncheon; it wouldn't do to have wil ted roses for an author who, as she put it, was just coming into bloom). Al lie had walked to the back room of the flower shop, where she kept her foam and moss and desiccants, her raffia and wire. She stood in front of the ti ny mirror over the bathroom sink, assessing her complexion. Then, rummaging through a bookshelf, she found her high school yearbook--kept solely for p utting together names and faces that walked into the shop. She let the book fall open to Verona's page. It was much easier to believe that she, Allie, had grown older and wiser, while Verona MacBean, in glossy black and white

, was trapped in time. It did not matter that Verona had gone on to Harvard and then to Yale, that her first book--philosophy--was the talk of the tow n. It only mattered that in the long run, Allie Gordon had married Cameron MacDonald, which no one in Whee-lock would have guessed on a long shot. On the other hand, it was no great surprise when Verona MacBean became Cam eron MacDonald's steady girlfriend in the fall of 1977, although Cameron w as a high school senior and Verona was a freshman. They were both undeniab ly beautiful, Verona in a collectible doll sort of way, and Cam towering o ver nearly everyone else in the school, his wide, strong shoulders and bri ght shock of hair always easy to spot.

Allie fell in love with his hair first. She used to sit in the school library bent over a slim volume of Plath's poetry, waiting for him to come through t he double glass doors that blocked off the bustle of the hall. He came in eve ry day during the period she worked at the counter checking out books for the grateful, understaffed librarian. She'd straighten the shelves behind the sp ot where he sat down, imagining her fingers weaving through that hair, separa ting it so the strands that looked like fire prismed off into reds and rangy yellows. At the end of the class period, she would pick up the books he'd lef t behind and tuck them back in their Dewey decimal places, trying to hold on to the heat Cam's hands had placed on the protective plastic covers. 13

The truth was that Cameron MacDonald did not know Allie Gordon existed for most of the time they had lived in the same town. She was far too quiet, to o plain to attract his attention. There was only one incident in high schoo l where Cam had ever truly come in contact with her: during a blood drive, they had been lying beside each other on the donor tables, and when she sat up and hopped from the stretcher to get her promised juice and cookies, th e world spun and went black. She awakened in Cam's arms; he'd jumped off hi s own table to catch her as she fell, unintentionally ripping the intraveno us from the crook of his elbow so that when Allie went home that afternoon, she realized that Cam's blood spotted the back of her blouse. Allie had trouble convincing herself that the reason they had gotten marrie d years later did not have to do with the fact that after college, they wer e two of the few who had come back to Wheelock. Cam had returned because it was expected of him, Allie because there was nowhere else she really wante d to be.

If she stood on the bottom ledge of the refrigeration unit for the fresh flo wers and craned her neck in a certain way out the window, she could see Cam'

s office at the police station, even make out his shadowy form hunched over his desk. It was the reason she'd chosen this particular real estate space w hen she opened the flower shop eight years ago.

She saw that he was in, not out on patrol, and decided now was as good a ti me as any to bring him his arrangement and tell him about Verona. She crawl ed down from the ledge, rubbing her hands against her knees to warm them up

, and closed the sliding glass door of the cooler. Absently, she ran her fi ngers over the sweet chestnut and barberry foliage that made up the greens in the piece she would bring over to Cam.

Allie knew the language of flowers--the idea that every bloom stands for som e quality of human nature. Bouquets sent from the shop for the arrival of a baby were stuffed with daisies, for innocence, and moss, for maternal love. Valentine's arrangements had roses, of course, but also lilies for purity, h eliotrope for devotion, and forget-me-nots for true love. To Cam, she often sent designs that were full of messages she knew he could not understand. Sh e eyed her latest work critically, nodding over the tulips Jodi Picoult

which made up the bulk of the piece. In Persia, a man would give a tulip to h is betrothed to show that as red as the flower was, he was on fire with love; as black as its center, his heart was smoldering like a coal. She filled out the vase with Michaelmas daisies, China asters, and fire th orn. And then, as she always did for Cam's arrangements, she added as many sprigs of purple clover as she could without making the lines of the flow ers seem overblown. Clover, which simply meant, Think of me. When she walked out the door to take the flowers to Cam, she did not bother to lock it. Very few people would try to rob the wife of the Wheelock poli ce chief.

Hannah was on the telephone when she walked through the door of the police station, but waved her toward Cam's closed office door to tell her he was n't in a meeting. "No," she was saying firmly. "We don't use psychics, but thank you."

Allie set the tall vase in the center of the main desk, where bookings were done, and then walked to Cameron's office. She gave a quick knock and push ed the door open with her shoulder before Cam could tell her to come in. He was asleep, his head pillowed on his arms on top of his desk. Smiling, Allie crept around behind his chair, running her fingers through the hair at the back of his neck. She bent close to his ear to whisper. "While jus tice sleeps," she teased.

Cameron came awake with a start, snapping his head up so abruptly he clipped Allie's chin. Allie staggered back, seeing black for a moment, until Cam gr abbed her and pulled her down onto his lap. "Jesus, Allie," he said. "You sc ared the hell out of me." Allie rubbed her jaw, testing it gingerly by setti ng her teeth. Cam's fingers came up to brush her throat. "You okay?" Allie smiled. "I brought you your flowers."

Cam rubbed his hand down his face. "I told you you don't have to do that."

"I like to."

Cam snorted. "This is a police station, not a hotel lobby," he pointed out. " People who are arrested aren't much interested in interior design. They don't even notice."

"But you do," Allie pressed.

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Cam looked up at her wide brown eyes; her hands, gripping each other. "Sure,

" he said softly. "Sure I do."

He glanced out the open doorway to the front desk where Allie's latest arran gement stood. She was an artist; he told her that often. The mixtures of red s and blues, of stark lines and soft curves, and the overall whimsy of her f loral designs gave her creations a comfort and an ease that did not exist in Allie herself. Once he had peeked at her personal journal when she was at w ork, hoping to find a layer to his wife that she didn't have the courage to reveal. But there had been no racy thoughts or dreamy recollections, just a review of how she had acted and what she had said to Cam, and then notes on what she might have done differently.

Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, sweating, worried that after years of marriage to Allie he, too, would wind up editing his life, instead of simply living it.

"Guess who came into the store today." Allie moved off his lap to sit on the corner of the desk, swinging one leg.

"Am I supposed to go through everyone in the town?" Cam asked.

"Verona MacBean." Allie frowned. "Well, I don't know if it's MacBean anymor e, but she's here, all the same. She's a famous writer now. They're doing s ome hotshot lunch for her at the library."

"Verona MacBean," Cam said, grinning. He tipped his chair onto its two r ear legs. "Good old Verona MacBean."

"Oh, cut it out," Allie said, lightly kicking him in the leg. "She's pinched and pruny and her boobs don't look nearly as big now as they did when she was sixteen."

"Probably grew into them."