Mercy (9 page)

. "I met him in a hardware store," she said,

Jodi Picoult

clipping a maple branch that grew too close to the roots. "I knocked him un conscious."

She had been buying lumber for this very store. With careful instructions, Allie was going to fashion her own workbench out of several two-by-sixes. Cam, once again new to town, had been behind her in line. While Allie was rummaging in her purse for the correct change, the wood balanced precario usly at her shoulder, she heard Cam's voice behind her. "I have some chang e," he offered. She had turned around to take it from him, inadvertently s winging the two-by-sixes, and clubbed him on the back of the skull. He had awakened with his head in her lap and a vicious pounding behind his eyes, but other than a mild concussion, he was fine. When Cam told the stor y, he liked to say that from the first, Allie had made him see stars. Allie shrugged when she finished, a little self-conscious talking about her self at length. Mia was sitting at the workbench, her chin propped on her h ands. Beneath her elbows was a puddle of Japanese maple leaves, some as big as a fist. "You remind me of my mother," Mia said. Allie laughed. "Because I made you breakfast?"

"No, I always did that myself. Because of the way you look when you talk abo ut your husband." She thought of her parents, and the way they would tell a story: they'd sit close, continuously interrupting each other, and their han ds would flutter together and apart, like mating butterflies, coming to rest on each other's knees.

"And does Cam remind you of your father?"

Mia envisioned Cam's large hand pressed to the checkered kitchen tablecloth, and the shining line of auburn hair that brushed his collar. She tried to pic ture Allie in his arms, Allie under his solid body, but she could not. "No," Mia said, "he doesn't."

y^^raham MacPhee never got to do the divorces. He'd joined his vJT father's law practice four years earlier when he passed the Massachusetts bar, earnin g the dubious distinction of being the second lawyer in a town that barely n eeded one. His father, who had been Wheelock's attorney for forty years, did a smattering of everything: wills, real estate, contracts, bankruptcy, neig hbor disputes, personal injury.

Although Graham had plea-bargained and had done some civil 59

suits, his father always saved the messy marital disputes and shady cases f or himself. Said it was a question of experience, to which Graham had answe red that if he was never given a chance, he'd never get the damn experience

. He wanted to go to court.

He was reviewing a torts case when the bell over the door tinkled. Cleo, the p aralegal/secretary, wasn't at her desk, so Graham went to the front of the off ice himself. In the process of standing he knocked the torts file off his desk

, scattering papers at his feet.

"Shit," he muttered, kicking them into further disarray. He walked down the h all of the office and came face-to-face with the chief of police.

"Where's your father?" Cam said abruptly, glancing out the window. "I need to speak with him."

Graham watched the man turn his regulation hat around and around in his han ds, as if he were feeding a seam. "He's in court." Graham drew himself up t o his full height. "What can I do for you?"

Cam stared at Graham, who he knew was scared shitless at having to be with him in the same small room. When Graham was eighteen, Cam had caught him wi th a group of friends at the construction site of a house, drinking Coors a nd pissing on the newly erected staircase. He'd fingerprinted him, read him his rights, and detained him to put some sense in his head, but he'd never filed the arrest report.

Graham cleared his throat. "Was there something you needed, Chief?" Cam nodded shortly and then tilted his head, as if he were assessing Graham's physical strength. "Let's go to your office," he said, striding down the hal l to a place that would afford privacy.

Graham thought of the papers all over the floor, of the fishing magazine a nd the Walkman right smack on the desk. "The conference room," he suggeste d, steering Cam to his left.

Cam didn't even bother to sit down. "You know about the MacDonald murder," he said, gesturing for Graham to take a chair. Graham watched him pace in front of the oak table, listened to the way his voice crowded the corners of the room, and realized that Cameron MacDonald would be quite a presenc e in a court of law.

"I've heard some things," Graham hedged.

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Cam slapped his hat against the smooth surface of the table. "I want a defens e lawyer for this guy."

Graham frowned. "He's hiring this firm?"

Cam shook his head. "I'm hiring you on his behalf. I'll pay the bill. In ret urn, you don't breathe a word about who's funding your client--not to your f ather, not to a judge, not to my wife. Your job is to make him look like Mot her Teresa in front of a jury." He took a deep breath, and when he looked do wn at Graham again, Graham almost believed he could see fear in the police c hief's eyes. "Just get him off the hook," he said softly. Graham stared at Cam. "What are you going to do?" Cam picked up his hat. "I'm going to book him for murder, and fight you eve ry step of the way."

"IT/VTien Cam went home after meeting with Graham MacPhee, Vr he foun d the door unlocked.

He knew Allie was at work; he'd just talked to her. It was clearly a B & E. He pulled his gun out of its holster and swung himself into the doorway, c hecking right and left and right again as he'd been trained to do. Wild con nections began to take root in his mind: Jamie MacDonald was part of a drug ring; the murder had been a setup to cover a larger crime; someone was rig ht now in his bedroom stealing cufflinks and stray buttons and rug fibers, trying to implicate Cam himself.

A thorough search of the downstairs revealed nothing. He crept up the stair s and threw open his bedroom door, fully expecting to find some vermin goin g through his drawers, and pointed his gun at the moving figure on the bed.

"Police," he yelled, his throat dry and pounding.

"Oh," Mia Townsend said, her face blanched and drawn at the sight of the gu n. "Jesus."

Cam flicked the safety and jammed his gun into his holster. "Fuck." Trembli ng, he crossed the room in two steps. "I could have killed you. I could hav e killed yon." He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, speaking thro ugh a clenched jaw. "What the hell are you doing here?" Mia's teeth chattered. "I came for the cat," she said, and then she started to c ry.

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She had never been held at gunpoint; she hadn't expected Cam to come home in the middle of the day; she was in the bedroom snooping when she shouldn

't have been. The pressure of Cam's fingers tightened on her upper arms, a nd then she felt him pull her against him. He stroked her back, which felt fine-boned and light.

"I'm okay," she said, working her hands up between them. Cam stepped away, and Mia sat down on the edge of the bed. "Where's Alli e?"

"At the shop. Working on bonsai. I taught her." She listened to the patterns of her own voice, frail and stilted, and shook her head to clear it. She wo ndered why she could not think or manage to form a complex sentence.

"Bonsai? That's what you do? Force trees to grow the way you want them to

?"

Mia tried to smile. "I guess you could look at it like that." Cam sat down beside her. "You and I, we do not have a good track record." Mia shook her head. Cam watched her bend down to pick up a fallen spray of p hotos, resettle them in a heart-shaped striped box that Allie had found at a tag sale. "What's this?" he said.

She could feel the blush creeping from between her breasts, all the way to t he high points of her cheekbones. Stupid, stupid. She had never in her life done something like this--violated another person's privacy. In fact, she had learned how to fade into the woodwork at a very early age, since the best way to please her parents had been to simply stay out of th e way. She had made unobtrusiveness an art that, as she grew older, natural ly spilled into bonsai, where restraint and blending into the background we re the measures of success. She was not accustomed to being anything but an outsider; never had been, until yesterday's hectic events had dragged her from a vantage point on the outskirts of Wheelock smack into Allie MacDonal d's world.

And with the MacDonalds, her interest was fast becoming an obsession. She ha d parked her car at the curb so that she'd have more time to explore, figuri ng the neighbors wouldn't worry if they didn't see a strange vehicle in the driveway. Then she'd gone inside to piece together all the blank spaces in t he life that Allie

had spent the morning drawing. By ten o'clock Mia knew how Cam and Allie had met; the names of Cam's childhood pets; the tradition they had of cel ebrating Valentine's Day--a florist's nightmare--early, when Allie wasn't overwhelmed with work.

Presented with her first chance to get close to people in over ten years, M

ia wanted to become totally immersed. It was why she had become obsessed wi th Allie and Cam, or at least this was what she told herself. She did not n otice that she spent far more time looking at Cam's things than she did All ie's, that for a full five minutes she had traced his monogrammed initials on a pressed white dress shirt. She did not notice that as she moved from r oom to room, she tried to seek out certain places--the snug hollow of an ar mchair, the spot in front of a dresser--where she knew Cam must have been. Mia had come to the house to get Kafka, but she was far more interested in spying. She'd checked the books on the nightstand--Allie favored romance no vels, Cam--to her shock--poetry; she'd sat, like Goldilocks, on all six dif ferent cushions of the living room couches. She'd even sprayed a line of Ca m's shaving foam across her forearm and sniffed at it, trying to determine if that was the scent that had stayed with her all morning. And Mia, who wa s so sensitive to sounds that she could hear a fly brush a window screen an d the moon shifting in the middle of the night, had become so absorbed in t he contents of the bedroom that she had actually been discovered in the act. Cam took a few of the photographs from her and held them up to the light. Mia did not look at him. "You caught me," she said quietly. "I was snoopin g."

To her surprise, Cam laughed. "And?"

She raised her chin, figuring if she could not be brave about this she would never survive it at all. "You wear boxers, not briefs; you had more blond i n your hair than red when you were little; you get your uniforms dry-cleaned in Hancock."

"And Allie?"

Mia plucked at the quilt on the bed. "I haven't gotten around to her, yet." T

he corners of her mouth lifted. "I found your stash, too. The travel magazine s inside your tool chest."

Cam took a second group of photographs from Mia's hands. It 63

didn't bother him that she knew about the magazines, not nearly as much as it had bothered him yesterday to think of Allie knowing this. Maybe it wa s because he knew that Allie would not even begin to understand. You simpl y could not define freedom to someone who did not realize they were caged.

"I read the article on Tibet," Mia admitted.

Cam nodded. "Ever been there?"

She shook her head. Stooping low, she took the last collection of spilled ph otographs from the floor. She leafed through a few shots of Allie as a young girl; a wedding picture of Cam, breathtaking in full Highland dress regalia

. She seemed to be looking for something in particular, so Cam uselessly shu ffled through the pile of photographs he held, as well, as if he could divin e what she was missing.

"Here," she said, holding out a photo of a lush green valley ringed by mounta ins, with an imposing white stone keep to the left. "I've been here."

"You've got to be kidding," Cam said.

"It's in Scotland, isn't it? Near Glencoe?" She ran her hand over the folded ta rtan blanket at the foot of the bed. "Is this the place where you're all from?" He stared into Mia's dark eyes, thinking this all hit a little too close to home to ring true, and folded his arms over his chest. "Prove it." Later, Cam wondered whether things might have worked out differently if Mia had been able to tell him the number of cobblestones in the front walk of the Great House, which he'd counted as a child when he was bored by the adu lt conversation inside; or if she had remembered that under the rosebush to the left of the gate was a small gravestone for an old terrier who used to stand guard beneath it. As it was, Mia simply shook her head. "It was a lo ng time ago," she said, "and anything I would be able to remember is someth ing I could have seen on a postcard." She shrugged lightly and stared at th e skin at the base of his throat, which was so fine and white she could see the blue veins mapped beneath it. "I guess you'll have to trust me." That was the moment Cam thought it was possible he had seen someone wh o looked like Mia Townsend at Carrymuir, maybe the

Jodi Picoult

time he went when he was eight, maybe when he was eighteen. Perhaps she had walked with a lighter step; perhaps her hair was a little shorter, but surel y he remembered that delicate carriage, those spi-raling curls. And because he felt it was the only way to be perfectly sure, he leaned across the inche s between them and kissed her.

She fit. Through slitted lids he saw that her eyes were still open and this b ecame his goal: he wanted to see them drift shut. So he ran his tongue across the line of her mouth and kissed the edges. He was not thinking clearly. He told himself that if she tensed just the tiniest bit beneath his hands, he wo uld break away. He told himself he would count to ten and see if this happene d.

At about the same time his heart began to beat again, one curl of her hair wou nd its way around his finger, as if it could will him to stay. Mia's eyes began to close and she wondered what in the name of God she wa s doing. Her blood was running fast, not simply because of this man with his big hands framing her face, but because she had known this was coming and now it had finally happened.

Cam buried his face against her throat. For a man who longed to travel, wh o had known the comfort of a wife and a job and a mortgage, he had the str angest sense of coming home. He felt the vibrations of her voice against h is lips, motions that hummed through him for several seconds before he rea lized they were words.