Mercy (4 page)

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arm. Then Cam steered Allie away from the truck. "You don't really want to do this," he said. "You could be implicated as a witness when he goes to tr ial."

"Oh, Cam," Allie whispered. "You're not really going to arrest him, are you

?"

Cam grabbed her upper arms. "He killed a woman, Allie."

"But he came to you for protection."

Cam snorted. "That's a little like locking the barn after the horse has run out.

"

Allie squared her shoulders. "I'd just listen to his story, if I were you. It's o bvious that he loved her."

Cam bowed his head. "Still," he said, "that isn't going to bring her back to lif e."

yames MacDonald glanced one last time at the still and lovely body of his wife in the front seat of his truck and remembered his wedding day eleven years earlier, during which everything had gone wrong.

Maggie had picked Memorial Day weekend, hoping to stand outside for the ce remony, but the balmy weather that was forecast had dissolved into torrent ial rain. Wanting privacy, they'd opted for a justice of the peace, and ha d made an appointment. But they showed up at the man's door only to be tol d by his wife that he'd come down with the stomach flu, and so Jamie had d riven from Cummington to the next town to the next, trying to find someone who hadn't gone away for the holiday and who would be willing to marry th em.

By the time Jamie and Maggie were standing in the front parlor of a justice of the peace in Great Barrington, the cuffs of Jamie's trousers were soaked from puddles and Maggie's bouquet of violets was limp over her fist. In the background, they could hear the splintered laughter of the justice's guests, who were having a free-for-all Memorial Day cookout in the warm, dry confin es of his garage. "We are gathered here," the justice of the peace said, "to

. . . Oh, shit."

Maggie's head had snapped up. Her hand, tucked inside Jamie's, shook a littl e.

Jamie realized then that she was waiting for him to ask, on her behalf, if there was a problem. Chauvinistic and old-world as it might have been, noth ing more clearly drove home to Jamie what

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it was going to mean to be a husband. He would be Maggie's mouthpiece. An d at other times, she might speak for him.

"Is something wrong?" he had asked.

The justice of the peace squinted over James's shoulder. "Witness," he said.

"Can't do it without one." He cupped his hands and yelled in the general di rection of the garage, until a sweaty, wild-eyed man appeared in the doorway holding a Coors. "Jesus," the man said. "You don't have to shout." He thrus t the can into the justice's hand.

"Not now, Tom," the justice said.

Tom frowned. "I thought you yelled for a beer."

"I yelled Come here."

"Excuse me," Jamie interrupted. "Could we get going again?" Tom was wearing a Chicago Bulls tank top and Lycra biking shorts that outl ined his belly. A loose, wet smile splayed across his face. "Hey," he said

, looking from Jamie to Maggie. "You getting hitched?" The justice asked him to just sit down in the corner and be quiet, and he'd p ut his name on the marriage license in a few minutes.

"No way," Tom said. He grabbed Maggie's free hand, scattering her violets, and yanked her away from Jamie. "You got to do a wedding right, or you don'

t do it at all." With a quick jerk he anchored Maggie to his side. "I'll gi ve you away, honey," he said. "We'll do a whole grand entrance." At that point Jamie did not want the man's name on his marriage license, muc h less his hands on his fiancee. But before he could object, Maggie smiled e asily. "That would be lovely," she said to Tom, although she was looking at Jamie. Let's just get it over with, her eyes seemed to be saying, so that we can laugh about it later.

Jamie thought of the women he had dated, their images shifting like smoke. Some had told him their plans for an elaborate marriage on the second or third date; one had even drawn him a sketch on a cocktail napkin of a wedd ing gown she'd had made up and stored in the back of her closet, just in c ase. Not one of the women he'd known in his past would have made it throug h this fiasco of a wedding without being reduced to tears. Not one of the women he'd known in his past could hold a candle to Maggie. He had never really asked her to marry him, he realized. They had simply b oth assumed that it was going to happen.

"Under the Boardwalk" was blaring from the garage as Mag-gie, on Tom's arm, began to walk across the small parlor. Her heels crushed the violets she'd dropped on the way out. Her perfume was overshadowed by the alcoholic cloud surrounding the man beside her. Next to Jamie, the just ice of the peace began to flip through his book, having lost his place. Maggie reached Jamie's side and slipped her arm through his. He could feel h er shaking, so he patted her hand gently. He would apologize to her for this

. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to her.

"We are gathered here . . ." the justice of the peace said.

"For the free beer," Tom finished.

Maggie covered her mouth with her hand, and then burst into laughter. Her he ad tipped back so that Jamie could see the long, smooth line of her throat, and the spill of russet hair over her shoulders. There were tears in her eye s; Jamie thought it made them seem like jewels.

"Marriage," the justice recited sternly, "is not something to be entered into lightly and unadvisedly."

"I'm sorry," Maggie said, trying to compose herself. She tightened her hand on Jamie's and looked down at her shoes and snorted, then bit down on her lip.

The justice began to speak, but Jamie didn't listen. He had turned to face Maggie. Beyond her was not a glittering ballroom or the hallowed glass pane l of a church, but a weaving line of people doing the bunny hop and a barbe cue that belched out large drafts of smoke.

He realized that there was nowhere else on earth he would have rather been. Suddenly Jamie went cold. Maggie must have sensed it, because she dropped his hand and placed her palm against his cheek, whispering, "What is it?" He shook his head. He, who could have told Maggie anything, did not know ho w to put into words this feeling: Did you ever look down at yourself and re alize that finally you had it all? Did you ever feel that everything was so right in your life you'd have nowhere to go but downhill?

Misunderstanding, Maggie touched her fingers to his mouth. "I'm fine," she a ssured him. "This is fine."

He nodded once, a jerk of his head. He pushed away his thoughts and concen trated on the hope he'd been fed from his own wife's hand. As soon as Cam began to lead James MacDonald into the Wheelock Police Dep artment, the crowd outside began to disperse. At the front desk, he unloc ked the handcuffs and asked James to empty his pockets. He watched a hand ful of pennies, a packet of gum, and some lint fall onto the Formica, but nothing that would incriminate the man as a murderer.

Hannah was out to lunch, so the station was empty, silent except for the in termittent static and calls of the dispatcher on the radio. "Mr. MacDonald,

" Cam said, "why don't you come on in here?" He led the prisoner into the booking room and gestured to a chair. Then Cam s at down and pulled a custody report out of a file in the drawer, laying it fa cedown on the desk in front of him. He'd listen to what the guy had to say, b ut he'd bet his gun this was going to end in an arrest.

He looked up to find the man staring at him with a grin turning up the corn er of his mouth. "They say you look like him, you know," James said.

"Look like who?"

"Cameron MacDonald. The first one. The famous one." Cam made a big production of arranging the spill of pens and pencils on the desk. "I wouldn't know," he said. He took a deep breath. "Look, right now I'

m just the chief of police, and you've confessed to murder. So let's forget the other crap."

"I can't. I came to Wheelock on purpose, because you were here." Cam narrowed his eyes. "How exactly are you related to me?"

"Your grandfather is my great-uncle. Ask Angus, if you don't believe me. W

hat is he now, eighty? Eighty-two?"

"What he is is senile, at least most of the time," Cam admitted. His grea t-uncle Angus had been the keeper at Carrymuir during the years that Cam and his father had prospered in Wheelock. When Ian MacDonald died, Cam ha d flown to Scotland, brought his uncle Angus home with him, and signed Ca rrymuir over to the Scottish National Trust.

"Mr. MacDonald--"

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"Jamie." He leaned forward, as if he was about to confide a secret. "I was named for our own uncle Jamie," he said. "The one who was killed in the war

."

Cam's mouth fell open. No one talked about his uncle Jamie, the hero, becau se it used to make his grandmother weep. Jamie had been the firstborn son, the one who would have been clan chief if he hadn't been shot down over the Pacific in 1944. Cam's father, the second son, had taken the title by defa ult.

Cam swallowed, recovering. "Well, Jamie," he said. "Tell me what brought you to Wheelock."

He hesitated only a second. "I came here to kill my wife." Cam stared right into Jamie's eyes, almost the same color as his own--sea gre en, a MacDonald trait. He looked for a swift check of rage, a curl of remorse

, or God willing, the blaze of insanity. He saw none of those things. "Jamie,

" he said, rolling the custody report into the typewriter, "you have the righ t to remain silent."

Tamie MacDonald had made a career of creating alternative / worlds. He let young couples designing their first home walk through houses that had not yet been built; he gave paraplegic men a chance to walk again; he let med ical students do surgery on patients that did not suffer or bleed. As the president and founder of Techcellence, a conceptual-design computer compan y specializing in virtual reality, he had joined the cutting edge of a rad ical technological movement and had become a symbol for the entire field. Maggie, whose computer skills extended to booting up WordPerfect, used to say it was much simpler than that. "You're the Wizard of Oz," she would te ll him. "You make people's wishes come true."

He'd sort of liked that image. It was true--people tended to seek out Techc ellence to do things no other conceptual-design firm would do. Because Jami e wasn't afraid to take a challenge and shape it with his mind and his hand s until it fit on a seven-by-nine screen, his company often produced the sy stems and models for virtual worlds that became prototypes for other firms to copy.

Jamie had a high-end computer system at his house in Cum-mington, comple te with a bodysuit and glove and head-mounted device, but most of the de sign work was done in his lab. Located downtown, it had computers with m ore technological expertise, as

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well as the big equipment--the SGI Onyxs, graphics machines which could ge nerate the real time in the virtual world. There were about ten people who worked full-time for Jamie, and when Tech-cellence secured a contract wit h Nintendo or the Defense Department or a teaching hospital, there were tw o hundred more people he could hire on as subcontractors--digital sound mi xers, artists, story writers, texture mappers, producers, directors, progr ammers. In many ways, Jamie was like a chef--finding cooks who had already made dishes that he could combine into something even more flavorful, in spite of the fact that he'd grown none of the ingredients himself. He often came into work on weekends, when it was quietest; and he'd bring Maggie with him. One Saturday, a few years after they were married, Jamie had come in to fiddle with a program for a private client, a formerly seed ed millionaire tennis player who had become quadriplegic after a heli-skii ng accident. Maggie, who openly admitted to being terrified of so many com puters, sat curled with a book on a Salvation Army wing chair where some o f the best brainstorming was done.

Jamie was stuck. It wasn't creating the virtual world--any savvy hacker coul d jump on the Internet and download to do that. This client had a specific r equest: he wanted to play tennis again.

Had Jamie wanted to milk him for his money, he could have simply set the p rogram up like some of the other virtual reality systems developed for han dicapped people. A sweatband around a quadriplegic's head could measure th e magnetic field given off by the optic nerve, so that the guy would be ab le to move a cursor--or a virtual tennis racket--simply by shifting his ey es. But Jamie, who had always been something of a perfectionist, wanted to give his client more. It would not be enough to see a racket swing on a c omputer screen and know you had connected with a ball, like those archaic Pong games on the old Atari video game systems. He wanted his client to be lieve he was on his own feet again.

Ordinarily, this wasn't a problem when creating a virtual world. A good HM

D tracked your head movements and isolated your views to computer-generate d images, in a 190-degree field. With the addition of a glove, a bodysuit, and a motion platform, there were three kinds of feedback a designer coul d generate. Tactile

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feedback produced vibrations at specific parts of your body, which your brai n would interpret along with visual and auditory clues--if you see and hear oozing slime, you'll feel it. Auditory and visual feedback employed subtleti es, such as subfrequencies outside the hearing range, to give the sensation of motion, or flight, or vertigo. And force feedback--actual shoves applied to the body--could make you feel like you were in microgravity, or blasting off in a rocket.

The problem was, on someone who couldn't sense anything beneath his neck, these types of feedback would be lost.

Jamie pulled the HMD off his head and rubbed his hands over his face. He w asn't even aware he'd sighed in frustration until Maggie put down her book and came to stand beside him. "Tough day at the office?" she said, rubbin g his shoulders.

"Impossible," Jamie admitted. "How do I go about making someone feel some thing they're not physically capable of feeling?"

Maggie frowned. "I'm not following you."

"VR for the handicapped," Jamie explained, passing her the HMD. "Quadripl egic wants to play tennis."