Mercy (8 page)

d still be the police chief."

Allie nodded, briefly imagining Cam's own hand locking her into the small, d ark cement cell in the center of town. "Yes," she said, "but you'd also stil l be my husband."

That was Cam's breaking point. He bolted upright, knocking the chair behind him onto the floor. "This is not what I came home for. This is not what I need from you."

A switch snapped in Allie. She dropped the dish towel and closed the refrig erator door and moved right in front of Cam, pushing past his frustration a nd anger to wrap her arms around him. "No, of course not." Cam let Allie guide him to the chair and gently press him into it again. He clenched his fists and closed his eyes, wishing he could be anywhere else bu t in Wheelock, Massachusetts. Instinctively, his mind began to picture his f avorite places. He envisioned a white elephant in Thailand, splashed with a bucket of water to turn a dusky gray; the shutters of nine hundred shops fla pping

51

open in Cairo's souk; the pink stone cathedrals of Mexico City. Something brushed across his leg and he jumped a foot.

"Excuse me," said a voice, and Cam opened his eyes to see the woman who h ad been sleeping on the couch the night before.

"Oh, Mia," Allie said, turning around with a smile. "Was there enough hot w ater?"

Mia nodded. She was staring at Cam, seeing him as he had looked when he'd s tepped into the living room and stretched toward the rafters like a sleek a nd stunning mountain cat. She stuck out her hand. "Hi," she said. "I don't think we've really met."

Allie stepped behind Cam and placed her arm around his waist. "You're righ t. We got sidetracked yesterday. Cam, this is Mia Townsend, my new assista nt. Mia, this is--"

"The police chief of Wheelock," Mia interrupted, a smile lighting her eyes. She gripped Cam's hand firmly.

"Assistant?" Cam was speaking to Allie, but he kept his gaze trained on Mia, even as she pulled her hand away and bent over the bowl of cereal that Alli e, like a mother, had placed in front of her.

"Well," Allie said, "there's just something about her. Wait till you see what she can do."

There's just something about her. Cam swallowed, reaching up to find Allies hand on his shoulder. It was warm and small and smooth and he knew all its knobs and textures. It felt completely different than Mia's hand had, mome nts before. "I can't imagine it being any better than your stuff," Cam said.

"Oh, just wait."

Cam shifted his weight. This stranger had come to Wheelock and in a single day had charmed Allie, had infiltrated her way into his own house. He insti nctively tensed, realizing that every time he'd been in the vicinity of the woman, he'd felt a nervous energy, a hunch that she wasn't quite comfortab le in her own skin. And a niggling sense that he had spoken to her, or seen her, or been somewhere near her before.

Suddenly Mia jumped to her feet. "My cat," she explained. "I think I left h im in the bathroom." She darted her eyes overhead. "He's probably clawed yo ur shower curtain to shreds."

Allie laughed. "Eat your breakfast. I'll get the cat." i Jodi Picoult

Mia remained standing several seconds after Allie had left the room. Then s he smiled hesitantly at Cam and sat down.

Cam watched her pour milk into the cereal. She scooped the corn flakes up to ward the back of the bowl, the way he'd seen the English eat soup. "What's t he cat's name?" he said, willing to call a truce.

"Kafka."

Mia did not look up.

"Kafka?" Cam pressed, amused.

She nodded. "He'd rather be anything but a cat."

"And how do you know that?" In spite of himself, Cam found that he was le aning forward.

Mia's dark blue eyes locked tight on his. "When we lived in India, he though t he was a cow. He crossed streets in front of cars and learned how to moo. In Paris he tracked a finch onto a win-dowsill and leaped off, thinking he c ould fly." She lifted a shoulder. "With him, you never really know what's go ing to happen."

"No," Cam said. He could smell her now, clean like rain, not at all like th e Zest in the shower upstairs. His thoughts of Jamie MacDonald were gone; a ll he could see was Mia running through the streets of places he'd imagined his entire life. "You lived in India? In Paris?" When she did not answer, he leaned a little closer. If he moved his thumb, he would brush her wrist. He wanted to ask the question that had been dancing at the back of his min d since yesterday. "Do I know you?" he whispered. Mia could hear Allie's footsteps coming down the stairs, and the healthy me w of Kafka in her arms. She turned away from Cam, stayed silent. Yes, she s aid to herself, / think maybe you do.

FOUR

"ITTV'hen Cam walked into the police station later that morning, Vr his un cle Angus was sitting with Jamie MacDonald in the lockup, dressed in his b athrobe and playing a game of chess.

"For God's sake," he muttered, unlocking the cell. "Angus, what are you do ing in there?" He looked around for Casey MacRae, the patrolman he'd left guarding the prisoner.

"I told Casey I'd spell him," Angus said. "I havena seen wee Jamie since he was seven."

Cam threw his cap onto the booking counter. He glanced at Jamie MacDonal d. "Sleep well?"

"No," Jamie admitted. "Did you?"

Cam turned his back and began to leaf through the court book, praying he'd get Jamie MacDonald in front of a magistrate before lunchtime.

"What are you doing here, Angus?" Cam sighed. "And get out of the damn lock up. I can't let you in with a prisoner."

Angus tightened the sash of his bathrobe, grumbling, but stood from the ceme nt slab that doubled as a bed in the cell. "Young Cam, I dinna think that's any way to be speaking to your elders."

Cam hated it when his uncle called him that, as if he were still six years o ld, as if the old Cameron MacDonald hadn't been dead

Jodi Picoult

for two hundred years. He gestured at Angus's wet bedroom slippers. "You come here in your pajamas and get yourself locked up with a murderer, and you can't understand why I want to hire someone to take care of you duri ng the day?"

Angus stepped out of the lockup. "I dinna want some wee lassie telling me how to eat my parritch in the morning and washing my privates for me in th e bath." He tapped Cam on the shoulder. "I didna come to speak about that, anyway."

Cam sighed and began to swing the heavy cell door closed again. "We're goin g to court within the hour," he said to Jamie, matter-of-fact, and then he slammed it shut.

He turned around to find his uncle in his office, sitting behind the desk wi th his feet propped up. Cam shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on a hook o n the back of the door. "Sometimes I think I should have left you at Carrymu ir," he said.

"Sometimes I wish that ye had."

Cam sat down in the chair opposite his uncle and rested his elbows on the des k. "Angus, I know what you're about to say to me, and don't think I haven't t hought of it myself. But the fact is I've got a body lying across the street, and a signed confession that the man in that lockup killed her."

"Aye, well," Angus said, as if he hadn't heard a word Cam had said, "I was o n Culloden Field last night."

Perhaps because they were the very last words Cam had anticipated as a re sponse, he sat forward, speechless. Recovering, he shook his head. "You w ere where?"

"Culloden. Ye canna tell me that in spite of everything else ye've forgotten

, ye dinna remember that."

For a long time Cam had resisted sending Angus to a retirement home becaus e the closest one was over the mountains, a good forty-five minutes away. Moreover, someone who had grown up fenced in by nature would not take well to antiseptic-washed floors and Bingo in the cafeteria. But he was beginn ing to see that he had little choice. "Angus," Cam said gently, "this is 1

995."

"It may be at that, but all the same, I fought the English last night with P

rince Charlie." He settled forward, as if he could not believe that Cam was not quick enough to pick up what he had been trying to say. "Your great-grea t-great-great-great-grandfather isna happy. That's why Cameron's come to hau nt me."

55

Cam laid his head down on his desk. He'd humor the old man; he'd talk for five more minutes; then he'd usher him onto Main Street and drive his pris oner to the district courthouse on the other side of town. "Cameron MacDon ald has come to haunt you," he repeated.

"In a matter of words," Angus said. "It's a bit like I've crawled right into his wee brain." He paused, remembering. "He didna want to be on Culloden Mo or at all."

Cam did not lift his head, so his words were muffled by his sleeve. "He was an incredible soldier. He supported the Stuarts. Where else would he have been?"

"He would have rather been home with his kinsmen, I imagine." Cam's patience was wearing thin. "Angus, we all grew up with the story. Th e damn public school probably uses it as a primer instead of Dick and Jane

." He snapped his head up, reciting in a singsong, "Cameron MacDonald offe red his own life so everyone else could go back to Carrymuir."

"Aye," Angus said, pointing with one finger. "But do ye ken why he did it?

Why he was willing to die?"

In a flash of insight, Cam suddenly realized where this was heading. "Becau se he was their chief?" he said smugly, ready to launch into an explanation as to why Jamie MacDonald would still have to be arraigned.

"No," Angus said, "because he couldna stand to see the people he loved hur ting." He stood up and came around the desk, laying his thin, white hand o n Cam's back. "Dinna fash yourself, lad. You'll come up with something." A nd with a goodbye knock on the Flexon-covered bars of the lockup, he walke d out of the police station.

The art of bonsai, Mia told Allie, had to be fashioned in harmony with nature

, in a desire to dominate it and to re-create it, although on a different sca le. She told her its history in China, then Japan; how the French were fascin ated by the power the bonsai artists had--being able to make such a towering, magnificent tree grow in such a tiny space. Allie watched carefully as Mia s ketched for her the different forms of the trees, single trunks curved to the left, cascading trees, upright ones, knotted ones, trees Jodi Picoult

that rooted to rocks. She repeated their Japanese names like mantras: Chok kan, Moyogi, Sabamiki.

They had bought some small Japanese maples at a nursery a half hour away, an d Allie was going to turn them into bonsai trees, like the one Mia had shown her yesterday. Mia had a complete set of tools for pruning trees: saws, sci ssors, clippers, branch cutters. "I'm a surgeon," she had said, and Allie ha d laughed until she realized that Mia was serious.

There weren't many rules. Mia cut back one of two opposite branches on the first trunk with a saw, which would produce alternate branches. She told Al lie to make the cuts clean, so the tree would heal quickly. She had her plu ck off the leaves.

"It looks bald," Allie said.

Mia stood back, assessing her work. "It'll grow. You don't want it to be bush y."

Wiring was the most difficult part. It was to spiral at an angle of 45 degre es, wound around the branches of the tree to train it in the direction you w anted it to grow. The wire would remain on for several months, but was unwou nd daily and repositioned to keep it from cutting into the tree. For a few minutes, Mia watched Allie work. It was easy to talk to her, to t each her, and to learn from her. She did not know if she really liked Allie

--really, truly liked her--or if Allie had become a fast friend simply beca use she was the first person Mia had met in Wheelock. Mia could remember ma king friends in sixth grade when she'd had to change schools and did not kn ow anyone--after a moment of solitary panic, she had laughed with the two g irls whose seats had flanked hers in homeroom. By the time they left ten mi nutes later, Mia had traded her small secrets, receiving in return the info rmation that Jenna was in love with Billy Geffawney and that Phyllis could swallow a hard-boiled egg whole. It was months later, with a knot of her re al friends woven tight around her like a winter cloak, that Mia realized ho w little she had in common with these first girls she'd latched onto, how s hallow and strange they seemed, how foolish she had been to doubt her futur e. For years she avoided them, thinking how much they knew about her, afrai d that a single desperate act of friendship might one day be used against her. 57

While Allie worked on her new bonsai, Mia unloaded her works-in-progress fro m the back of the rental car she'd driven to Wheelock. It had been parked ov ernight in front of the library. After several trips, Mia returned, breathle ss, holding a pile of terracotta plates and an army-green duffel bag. "Well,

" she said, glancing at the floor, which was littered now with gnarled trees and hunched trunks in a smattering of containers and pots. "I feel like we'

re in Kyoto."

"You've traveled a lot, haven't you?" Allie asked, twisting a length of copp er wire. "You're not from around here?"

Mia shook her head and began to carry the pots into the back room. "I'm fro m everywhere. I haven't stayed long enough in one place to really say I'm f rom 'around there.' "

"Were you an army brat?"

Mia stopped at the threshold of the door. "No. My parents still live in the house where I grew up." She set two of the containers down on Allies desk and then dragged the chair into the workspace of the flower shop. Absently she took the wire from Allie and corrected a loop around a branch. "Did you grow up in Wheelock?'

Allie nodded. "So did Cam." She smiled. "I think I've know him my entire li fe."

Mia did not find this unlikely; for a moment she could picture a toddling Al lie grasping at Cam's shirt to hold herself upright. "You were high school s weethearts?"

Allie shook her head. "No, in fact, those awful baskets you made for the lib rary luncheon are for a program being given in honor of Cam's old girlfriend

."

"I can honestly say you have better taste."

"That," Allie replied, "isn't saying much." She began to pinch the leaves o ff one side of the tree, as Mia had shown her earlier. Thin light filtered through the high windows to skitter on the wood floor. "I knew Cam in high school, but he didn't really know me or pay any attention to me. I mean, ev eryone knew Cam. He went to college in Scotland, and then he traveled aroun d a little, and he came back to Wheelock when his father died." Allie had explained to Mia the night before the strange chain of command th at stretched backward in Cam's family all the way to the Scottish Highlands