Mercy (22 page)

But before she could let herself question any further, the room fell away around her and she found herself staring at three hovering holograms: a sk yscraper, a hotel, and a flagpole. A disembodied TV-announcer voice began to speak. "Please indicate which project you'd like to tour by pointing wi th your gloved hand," he said. As Allie reached out, he enunciated each ch oice. "Rystrom Towers," he boomed. "The Four Seasons, Toronto . . . Carter S. Wilder Elementary School."

Allie curled her fingers around the flagpole. "You have chosen Carter S. Wi lder Elementary School," the voice said. "If you would like to proceed with your tour, please say so now."

Allie cleared her throat, feeling a little foolish. "I'd like to proceed with my tour."

All of a sudden she was standing on a grassy slope, staring down at the new brick building with its shiny bike racks and wooden jungle gyms. She could feel the wind stirring her hair; she could hear the cries of children play ing. Astounded, Allie squatted down and rubbed her hand over the grass. Ins ide the glove, she could swear she'd felt the crisp spikes and stubby needl es of a just-mowed lawn. "Jamie," she whispered, "you are a genius." She stood up, walking and wondering why she wasn't bumping into the compute r unit that she knew was right in front of her--there must have been a movi ng platform she'd missed seeing. At the front door of the school, she reach ed out and pulled at the heavy aluminum door. It swung open at her touch, b ut not before Allie noticed that her hand, which was surely wrapped around ordinary air, had felt a handle, and resistance.

There was a trophy case in the main hall, and bright children's paintings o n paper that curled at the edges like eyelashes. Allie examined the stick f igures of one artist, and was brought whirling around by the sound of the d isembodied voice again. "Please choose the image you'd like to assume for y our walk-through." Again, hovering before her eyes, were several forms: a w oman, a child, a man, a wheelchair-bound boy. Unsure of why she was being a sked

her sexual orientation and physical capabilities, Allie pointed to the figure closest to her. "Female," the voice boomed. "Adult." The tiny image grew and grew until Allie realized she was standing face-to

-face with someone. Narrowing her eyes, she took in the thick hair, the gu ileless smile, the unmistakable image of Maggie MacDonald.

"Step forward," Maggie invited, and Allie wondered if it was her real voice

. She took one step and then, as Maggie urged her, another, until she reali zed that the Maggie-image wanted Allie to literally walk right into her. Of course, Allie realized. This was the way Jamie had chosen for the computer user to "see" him or herself in the school. Allie remembered the quick fla sh when she'd sat down at the computer--it must have been an internal camer a, capturing her own features to map onto this programmed female form. That way, during the walk-through she would be able to reach for things and see a female hand; she would be able to look in a bathroom mirror and see her own face.

With her eyes wide open Allie walked into Maggie's body, shuddering at the feel of being under someone else's skin and staring out at the world throug h borrowed eyes. And she wondered whether the sorrow she felt was something Jamie had intended, something Allie herself had imagined, or such an intri nsic part of Maggie that it floated through the halls of this untried schoo l like a sunken, dissatisfied ghost.

Cam sat at the work station in the flower shop, watching Mia rewrap the wire around the eight bonsai trees. "Looks like it hurts," he said. Mia smiled. "When was the last time you were wrapped with copper wire?" Cam laughed. "Now, there's an idea."

It was his third night with Mia. With the exception of his mother, who had arrived the day before at an unfortunate time, no one would have suspected him of unlikely behavior. And even she had no proof. Cam had been acting th e way he always did during the day, going into the station and checking the schedules and the court book and doing whatever needed to be done. But at six o'clock, he'd lock his office and tell Hannah that he was going to Jodi Picoult

take Mia Townsend to dinner. That Allie had asked him to keep an eye on he r.

He thought that telling half the truth might be better, in the long run, than ly ing.

Then he'd walk to the flower shop, stopping to chat with the old-timers in f ront of the coffee shop and on the steps of the post office, and he'd knock on the locked door. When Mia opened it, his senses would be assaulted by the fresh, sweet scent of the flowers she'd been working with that afternoon. S

he always looked as if she was surprised to see him, but she'd draw him into the shop and lock the door again and kiss him, her fingers kneading the sho rt muscles of his lower back.

The first night had been something he would never be able to put into words

. Making love with Mia was a bit like waking up one morning to discover the color green. You saw it in the grass and the trees and the road signs and you could not imagine that you had spent so many years of your life in the absence of this hue, which seemed to make the rest of the world fall into p lace.

Tonight he had been watching her work, knowing how swiftly and gently her hands could move and shape and heal. She began to dig around the roots of a Chinese juniper. "Tell me what you were like as a kid," she said. "I wan t to know what I've missed.'

Cam grinned. "When I was six I plugged up the drain in my mother's bedroom shower. It was one of those glass stalls, you know, and I figured I could make my own swimming pool for the winter. It leaked through the floor and ruined the dining room table downstairs."

"Ah," Mia said, walking behind him and trailing her hand across the back of h is neck. "That tells me quite a lot."

"I used to stick dimes between the black and white keys of the piano," Cam added.

"No doubt." She wrapped her arms around him.

"My mother used to tell me," he murmured, feeling Mia's lips run down his ne ck, "I had one foot on the road to hell."

She crossed in front of him and straddled him as he sat on the stool. Cam fe lt the heat from her skin through all the layers of clothing between them. " And," Mia said, kissing him, "now here you are." He stood up and carried her with him to the couch. As he bent his head towar d her, she touched her hand to his lips. "Tell me your darkest secret." Cam laughed. "I wanted to be a travel writer," he admitted, his breath warm against her throat. "I wanted to go to the Yucatan, and Singapore, and Cul ebra, and Prague and tell the world what they'd been missing." His voice dr opped to a whisper. "I would have been good at it. I know I would." Mia pictured Cam on the steps of the white temple in Sagaing, walking alon g the gray ribbon of Burma's Irrawaddy River. She saw a pencil tucked behi nd his ear and a notepad in his back pocket. "Why didn't you do it?"

"I had to come back here. When my father died, I was supposed to be the cla n chief. I couldn't do that without a permanent address."

"You could do it now," she said.

Cam closed his eyes and thought of Mia in white linen, barefoot and sunb urnt beside him on a catamaran that wove its way through Sail Rock and M

ustique and the other Windward Islands. He shrugged, pushing away what h ad not been meant to be, and touched Mia's cheek.

"What's your deep dark secret?" he asked.

Mia blinked at him. "I love you."

The words stunned him. They were simple ones, ones he knew had been coming

, ones he had heard a million times before from his wife. It made no sense to him, but just as Cam knew that his soul belonged to Mia, this ordinary phrase belonged to Allie. He did not want to hear it from Mia, could not bear to hear it, because it reminded him of the colossal price he had to p ay and the pain he would have to cause to take what should have always bee n his.

Cam rolled away from Mia and sat down on the floor. He rested his head on the heels of his hands and took a deep breath.

Mia scuttled to the corner of the couch, and when he turned she was huddled into a knot, as if she were trying to make herself smaller than was physical ly possible. "I shouldn't have said that," she murmured, picking at her cuti cles. "I'm sorry."

Cam reached up behind him and squeezed her hand. "Don't be sorry." He hes itated, weighing the fences that his mind was already

Jodi Picoult

building against the fire that had crawled from his belly to his throat. "I love you too."

Mia became still. "You do?"

Cam nodded. He was feeling faint, and he did not know if this was because o f the lilacs and the marigolds that seemed to fill every corner of the shop

, or because--in the blink of an eye--he had turned into someone he no long er knew. "God help me," he said, "but I do." Mia placed her hand, light and cool, on the back of his neck. "God has nothin g to do with this."

li /Tornings at Sunny Side Up, the local coffee shop, were JL fA. crowded, full of colorful locals who had implicit reservations and tacitly assigned seats and could order the usual just by nodding at the short-order cook. Ev ery now and then Cam stopped in too. He was rarely hungry enough to take mo re than the coffee pushed at him, since Allie unfailingly made him a health y breakfast; but it was a good place to sit if you wanted to know which tee nager was most likely to set the bleachers on fire after graduation, or who se wife had been wearing sunglasses to hide a bruise on her face. With Allie gone, though, there was nothing for breakfast but cold cereal. So Cam had driven into town, come into the restaurant, and ordered scrambl ed eggs with bacon. It was placed in front of him within two minutes, runn y and malodorous.

Cam looked up at Vera, the morning waitress. "That's amazing," he said. "I

've never seen someone cook an egg so fast."

She shrugged. "He's looking to impress you. Don't be shocked if you find sh ells mixed in."

Cam spread the paper napkin in his lap and lifted the first forkful to his mouth. The eggs were greasy, almost unfinished, the sort of thing Allie wou ldn't have been caught dead serving. He lifted his coffee cup and scanned t he restaurant, trying to match the puzzle-piece edges of names and faces as he nodded and smiled. In the rear of the establishment was Elizabeth Frase r, children's librarian, and Wheelock's newest citizen--her three-week-old baby. In the front window was Joshua Douglas, a nine-year-old kid who as fa r as Cam knew was on the straight and narrow, but all the same, shouldn't b e sitting alone in a coffee shop having his breakfast. He made a mental note to check on the Douglas family as the man sitting to th e left of him said goodbye and vacated his stool at the counter, leaving C

am an unobstructed view of Jamie MacDonald lowering a newspaper from his f ace.

Jamie stared at him levelly. "Chief MacDonald." Cam snorted and turned back to his coffee.

"Enjoying your breakfast?" Jamie asked pleasantly. Cam swallowed. "I was," he said. He fixed his attention on his plate, won dering what it was about Jamie MacDonald that rubbed him the wrong way. H

e'd been around criminals before, some far more dangerous than Jamie was, but this one set him on edge. Even more so, now that things had started up with Mia. Cam could not look the man in the eye and know Jamie was bei ng tried for murdering his wife, without feeling, somehow, that he was th e one who should feel guilty.

If Jamie was telling the truth, he had done the one thing he least wanted t o do, just because it was what his wife had wanted. Jamie, the felon. Where as Cam, the upstanding police chief, could not get past what he most wanted to do: push thoughts of his wife aside and be with Mia Townsend. Disgusted with his own absence of honor and the line of reasoning that was t urning Jamie into a plaster saint, Cam clattered his fork against his plate. In his peripheral vision, he watched Jamie separate the folds of the newspa per and hold out a section to him. "Sports page?" Cam grunted and took it from him. He stared blindly at the statistics for the regional high school teams and finally shoved the paper beneath his plate. W

ithout looking at Jamie he rested his chin on his clenched fists. "Angus all right?" he asked.

He could sense Jamie's head swinging slowly toward him as he realized that Cam had taken the first stab at a civilized conversation. But before Jamie had a chance to answer, the door of the coffee shop flew open, crashing aga inst its frame and ringing the sleigh bells that hung from its handle. A ma n in a black raincoat with wild yellow eyes was waving a Beretta. He advanced on Jamie, who shrank back against his stool and paled. In the background, Elizabeth Fraser's baby had started to cry. "James MacDonald

," the man hissed, "no one but God

has the right to take a life." He released the safety on the gun. Cam stood up and pulled his own gun from his holster in a swift motion. "Po lice," he said, in case the nut couldn't see for himself the badge and unif orm that were as plain as day. "Drop your weapon." The man's eyes didn't waver from Jamie. "No. I've been called to do this." Cam glanced over his shoulder, motioning for the other patrons of the restau rant to file out slowly through the door. "Do what? Take Jamie's life? I tho ught that was only up to God."

"I'm an agent of God."

"Of course." Cam cleared his throat. "You can shoot him," he said, ignoring the shock on Jamie's face, "but then I'd have to shoot you." If the man weighed that as a consequence, he didn't show it. He started runn ing toward Jamie, screaming biblical proverbs and interjecting these with cr ies of "Murderer!" In the split second that lengthens with danger, Cam reali zed Jamie was doing nothing to defend himself. Jamie was looking at the man, waiting, really, for the lunatic to shoot at close range. Cam leaped on the man, grabbing his wrist and yanking it up so that the gun fired into the ceiling, raining plaster down on Jamie. He wrestled the man d own to the floor, pulling his wrists behind his back so that he could snap o n the handcuffs and spit Miranda into his ear.

The short-order cook came out of the kitchen, visibly shaken, and pointed t o his damaged ceiling. "What do I do about that?" he asked.