Mercy (26 page)

The last minutes of sunlight burned through the stained-glass, and then left i t curiously dull and flat. "I'm never going to get tired of looking at it," Al lie announced. "Maybe I'll have it set right into a window."

"There's an idea." Cam shoveled a forkful of potatoes into his mouth and tr ied to swallow. He knew he was not being fair to Allie--since she'd been go ne for the better part of a week, he should have been animated and interest ed and plying her with questions about her trip--but he could not put Mia f rom his mind. He was afraid to, thinking it would drive her even farther aw ay than she was right now.

He was going to find her before that happened.

"I think I'm going to take up investigative work," Allie said lightly, and Ca m blinked at her, wondering if she had been reading his mind. "I liked scouti ng around for Jamie." She set down her plate and stretched. "I'd tell you all about it, but"--she lowered her voice here--"it's classified." Then she laug hed. "I always wanted

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to say that. You know, like you're on a jury for a huge murder trial and yo u can't tell anyone what you know because you've been sworn to secrecy. Thi s is almost as good."

"So you think you'll be able to help the defense?"

"Oh, I think Jamie's going to walk," she said, with unshakable conviction. "I can't tell you who I met with, but it's clear that the people of Cummington th ink his arrest is a mistake."

"That's not enough to sway a jury," Cam pointed out.

"No," Allie agreed, "but we've got proof that'll make them think twice about Jamie's motive."

"His objective was to kill Maggie. He told me so." Allie snorted. "Sure, if you want to see it literally. But what if he wasn't himself?" Her eyes brightened, and in their reflection Cam could see the da ffodils of the stained-glass pane. "Can you imagine loving someone so much t hat you completely lose the voice of reason?" Her mouth quirked up at the co rners. "It's very romantic, I think."

No, Cam thought, it's a living hell. "I love you," he said thickly, "but I wou ldn't murder you."

Allie stared at him. "I don't suppose you would.' She was quiet, and when sh e spoke again, Cam had to strain forward to hear her. "But then, you and I a ren't at all like Maggie and Jamie."

Cam had nothing to say to that. He set his plate down on the floor and stretc hed his hands behind his head, reclining on his pillow. "Nothing like a littl e light dinner conversation," he mused.

Allie grinned. "What do you want to talk about, then?" Mia. Cam thought of the note in his back pocket, the keys he had yet to give to Allie. Maybe he would not tell her tonight. He'd let her get a good nigh t's sleep and then break the news to her that her latest assistant had left town without a backward glance. But he found himself pulling the keys out of his pocket and rolling to face Allie. "Mia asked me to give you these," he said. "She had to leave town."

Allie frowned. "Is everything all right?"

No. "I guess so. Family emergency."

"Did she say when she was coming back? Did she leave a number?" Cam fell onto his pillow. "She didn't say a hell of a lot of anything." 181

Allie lay down beside him, fitting her head into the crook of his arm. "I ho pe we didn't scare her away," she murmured.

Cam closed his eyes. He pictured Mia's curls, which stood out in a wild tumb le after he'd buried his hands in them, proof of his passion. Allies fingers slipped between the buttons of his shirt and began to stroke h is stomach.

He imagined the weight of Mia, damp and open on top of him as she cried out in the night.

Allie kissed his shoulder, her breath making a hot circle through the fabric. He altered his breathing so that it was even and deep. He managed to produc e a short snore.

Allie brushed her hand over his brow. "Tough week?" she whispered. She kis sed the corner of his mouth and gently pulled away from him to lie on her side of the bed. Cam kept his eyes closed, but he could feel the moment wh en Allies hand moved down between her own legs. The silverware on the empt y dinner plates trembled. Cam clenched his jaw, thinking that this hurt mo re than sleeping with Allie would have, and he forced himself to endure th e quiet rock of the mattress as she gave herself what he could not. TEN

Balmoral Beene had been named after the English royal family's castle in Ab erdeenshire; not because his parents were Scots or English or had ever even traveled across the Atlantic, but simply because his mother had seen a pic ture on a postcard and liked the way the word filled up her mouth, like a c heekful of rich sponge cake. It was almost poetic justice that he should wi nd up on the Rolodex of the Wheelock Police Department, quite possibly the only town in America where every resident was practically born knowing the name Balmoral. For that reason, or maybe in spite of it, he had taken to ca lling himself Bally several years before he became a private investigator-f or-hire.

As far as Cam knew, the department--meaning himself, his father, or his gr andfather--had never commissioned the help of Bally Beene. Sure, they got shorthanded, but whenever a case that big happened involving Wheelock, the re was always a battalion of state troopers the DA would loan to help with an investigation. Nevertheless, Bally's number remained in the Rolodex. Bally Beene had answered the phone himself, and had stalled over setting a t ime for an appointment, as if he was incredibly busy. But when Cam arrived a t his Great Barrington office at the decided hour, Bally was sitting back in his chair, his feet on his desk, filing his nails. "Hey," he said when Cam walked through the

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door, as if he'd known him his entire life. "You ever get a manicure?" Cam stopped, the door open behind him. "No," he said slowly.

"Damn me if it isn't the most relaxing thing in the world." He grinned at Ca m. "So how's your father?"

"Dead."

"I'd heard that," Bally admitted.

Then why did you ask? Cam thought. He looked around the tiny room, which was located above a bakery and as a consequence was laced with the most remarkable scents of cinnamon and fleshy dinner rolls and chocolate bab ka.

"The answer is no," Bally said. "You can't put on weight just breathing the s tuff in." He tossed his emery board into a trash can that had a picture of La rry Bird's smiling face and the exuberant green number 33 on its side. "Come in, close the door." He gestured to a chair in front of the desk. "Stay awhil e."

Cam tried to collect his thoughts enough to sound dispassionate while he c ommissioned this man to find a woman he hardly knew yet could not function without. He was startled by Bally's laugh. "Look at what you've turned in to. Your dad would have bust a gut with pride."

"Have we met?"

"Not really," Bally said. "Not quite." Cam shifted in his chair. "Maybe this is a good point for you to tell me why you're in the files at the Wheelock station. What did you do for us in the pa st?"

"I'm an investigator. I investigated."

"What case?"

Bally narrowed his eyes, and then sighed. "I don't give out information like that, but seeing as how the guy who hired me--your dad--is dead, I expect i t don't much matter." He smiled beautifully, revealing even, white teeth tha t looked odd and out of place among the crags and pits of his thin face. "I investigated you."

Cam blinked. "You investigated me?"

"That's what I said."

"For my father?"

He nodded.

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Cam shook his head, trying to sort the information. "Why?" Bally sighed. "Investigate probably ain't the best word. I sort of kept an ey e on you. When you were jet-setting all over the world." He grinned. "Never g ot myself over to Paris, not to mention Nepal. Shit, I ain't even been to Cal ifornia."

"My father paid you to follow me?"

"I didn't really follow you. I just kept tabs from here. You can do anything with a computer and a telephone line. I tracked where you got your money, w ho gave it to you, whose apartments you spent the night in." Bally paused. " It wasn't that he didn't trust you," he said. "It was just that he wanted to make sure you were safe."

Cam stared down at his hands, fisted in his lap. He wondered if his mother knew about this. He wondered what, in his character, had seemed so lacking that his father would feel a need to check up on him.

He was not certain at all that Bally Beene was the right man to find Mia. He was on the verge of standing up and leaving, when Bally's voice rang out again. "Before you think you made a mistake coming here," he said, "let me r emind you how good I am at being confidential. After all, it's been fifteen years since I started tailing you, and you didn't find out." Cam forced himself to relax. He took deep breaths of anisette, fresh yeast, and icing. "I need to find someone who has disappeared. This has nothing to do with police business."

"A personal matter," Bally said, flicking a pen out of his shirt pocket and beginning to scribble on the back of a Dunkin' Donuts napkin.

"Very personal."

"She steal something of yours?"

"No." Cam stopped. "How do you know it's a she?"

"Lucky guess," Bally said, not glancing up.

For the next hour, Cam answered so many questions about Mia that she began to take shape before his eyes, as if she were sitting perched on the desk b efore him. He stared at the pale V of skin that rose above her cotton sweat er, the willowy bow of her neck.

"No picture?"

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"Not one you can hold on to," Cam murmured, and at that, Bally looked at him curiously. "Never mind."

Bally would not promise him anything but said he'd try to find Mia. She'd le ave a paper trail of some kind--charge receipts, work applications, a driver

's license--and since she hadn't been running away per se, she probably woul d not bother to alter her name. He said he would call Cam, not at home, and refer to himself as Albert Prince.

"Prince Albert? Like Victoria's consort?" Cam said, laughing. Bally had shrugged. "Hey," he said. "Whatever." He walked Cam the three feet to the door, urging him to try the napoleons the bakery made on his way out. "It's funny. What goes around comes around

. The first case I did for your dad was to find some woman who ran away."

"Police?" Cam said, buttoning his coat.

"Personal. What did you call it? Oh, yeah--very personal." Cam looked up. The image he had of his father was crumbling in bits and pieces. The man had had him tailed through Europe and Africa and Russi a. The man had had some connection to a woman who had run away from him.

"Did you find her?"

Bally laughed. "If I didn't, you think your dad would have kept using me? Of course I found her."

Cam stared at Bally. He wouldn't know, of course, what Ian MacDonald had done after he'd handed him the address of this woman. Had he set her up in a house miles away from the one Cam had grown up in? Did he exist at home with Cam and his mother, but come to life with someone else?

"I wonder if he kept in touch with her," Cam said steadily. Bally lifted his eyebrows. "I would think so. She's your mother." The chimney of the house Cam had grown up in was covered from top to botto m with ivy, so recognizable from a distance that as a child Cam had believ ed it was a tall, furred, slumbering beast. He found Ellen in the backyard

, poised at the base of the chimney, holding a pricey pair of L-shaped cop per dowsing rods as she began to make her way slowly across the lawn. "Dig ging a new well?" Cam said, standing at the sliding door that led outside. Jodi Picoult

"Directing my inner vision," Ellen called out. Since Cam's father had died, she'd taken up the practice, joining the American Society of Dowsers and b ecoming so good at it that several years back, after locating accurately on a map the places where the Bosnian Serbs had been keeping their supply of missiles, she was named Dowser of the Year. She did it as a hobby now, find ing water lines for the people who bought property in Wheelock, determining the sex of unborn children, hunting for lost pieces of antiquarian jewelry

. "I think there's an electromagnetic field in the northwest corner here th at's bothering Pepper."

Pepper was the fourteen-year-old cairn terrier, who was not bothered by do orbells or grease fires or anything else Cam could think of. "How do you k now it's bugging him?"

Ellen smiled at her son over her shoulder. "He just ain't like he used to be." Cam rolled his eyes and walked casually across the lawn to watch his mother in action. She held the copper rods at waist level, like a pair of six-shoot ers, closing her eyes periodically when one of them twitched toward the othe r. As Cam got closer, the rods began to shake and cross. "Cam," Ellen chided

, "you're ruining this for me."

"Because I think it's a crock?"

Ellen sighed and transferred the rods so that they were both in one hand. "B

ecause you've got too much energy around you. It's all I can tap into when y ou're so close."

He crossed his arms over his chest, and not for the first time Ellen MacDon ald looked up at her son and remembered the day she had gone to spank him a nd realized he stood a foot taller than she. "What's the matter with you?" she asked.

"You tell me. You're the one with the sixth sense." Ellen smirked at him. "That's no challenge. Any halfwit can tell when you'r e angry, Cam. There's a big black cloud that follows you around." In spite of himself, Cam glanced over his shoulder. He turned back to the sweet rhythm of his mother's laughter. Why had she run away?

"I got some interesting news today. I met with a man named Balmoral Beene

."

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"Oh really?" Ellen said, starting back up to the house. "Do you want lunch or something?"

Cam followed her in. "Mom, you know who he is?"

"Of course, Cam." Ellen swiftly pulled a can of tuna from the shelf and open ed it for Pepper, who liked Starkist more than any tabby cat Cam had ever se en. "He's a PI your father used from time to time. Is there something going on at the station?"

Cam froze, realizing too late that bringing up Bally's name would of cours e make his mother ask what he needed a PI for in the first place. "Some ca se," he said noncommittally. "Bally told me Dad used him to check up on me when I was traveling."