Mercy (44 page)

"The name's O'Malley," he said.

Allie glanced up. "Just O'Malley?"

He nodded. "It's all I'll answer to, at any rate." She laughed and traced the beads of condensation on her glass. "I'm Allie."

"Just Allie?" The man was grinning; it softened him. Allie smiled back. "It's all I'll answer to," she repeated. "Do you live around here?"

O'Malley nodded. "A fair ways west. I'm the foreman on the Double K." Allie's eyes widened. "You mean there's actually a ranch around here?"

"Of sorts," he said. He leaned forward conspiratorially. "Bet you five bucks no one on that dance floor could tell the nose of a horse from its ass." Allie laughed again. It felt good, lessening the tightness in her chest and sh oulders. "So you really are a cowboy."

O'Malley shrugged. "For lack of a better word. We actually breed bison out at the Double K."

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"Bison? You mean buffalo?"

"None other."

Allie took a deep drink of tequila. "What for?"

"Mostly meat. You'd be surprised how many fancy restaurants in Boston pla ce standing orders."

Allie raised her eyebrows. "I've never eaten buffalo." O'Malley reached over and covered her hand with his. "You ain't missing a hel l of a lot." Then he smiled, his teeth even and white, like a line of light.

"Let's dance, Allie," he said, and before she could remember to resist, he'd taken her into the center of the crowd.

He held her left hand close between them, pressed against her breasts. From time to time he fiddled with her wedding ring, but he didn't say a thing a bout it. He didn't say much of anything, really. He hummed in time to the q uiet ballad, moving his hips in a rhythm Allie suspected had been bred from a saddle, and he took her with him.

She couldn't breathe, at first. But she forced herself to relax. She closed he r eyes so that the strobe lights were only pricks against her lids, and she ma de herself lean into the long, easy body before her. It was hard to be this cl ose to another man, but she reminded herself that getting over the strangeness would be half the battle.

The music caught them like a whirlwind and drew them tighter, so that O'M

alley s cheek was pressed against her own. Allie heard him murmuring the words of a song she did not know, and she sang her own lyrics to the same rhythm: Cam did it; Cam did it; so can you.

The only items left were the things Cam assumed no one had wanted, and that included himself. On the overturned cartons on the driveway were a few spa re pairs of socks and boxer shorts, a sweatshirt he had splattered bleach o n several years before, a drill that did not work.

He left them sitting where they were and went into the house again. It was strange to see the empty spots on the wall where Carrymuir paraphernalia had been, cleared rings on dusty shelves that had once been home to mugs h e'd brought back from Munich and Stuttgart. He wondered what Allie had sai d to the

Jodi Picoult

people who asked questions. He wondered if she'd lied to them, or if she'd t old them the truth. He wasn't certain which one he preferred. The house still looked furnished, but it was a woman's house. Allie's quilts were draped over the chair and the couch. Allie's curtains were pulled back t o let in the dying sun. Allie's cookbooks stood in height order on the booksh elf.

He sank down on the couch--his favorite chair was God only knew where--and let it come. The frustration, the fury, the embarrassment. "Damn you," he y elled, and it felt so good that he did it again. "How could you do this to me?"

His voice was pitched so loud he could hear the echo of his outrage settling in the braided rug, the upholstered furniture. "Why did you leave me?" he s aid more softly, and that was when he knew that he hadn't been angry at Alli e at all.

He wondered if Mia was thinking about him.

With a deep sigh, Cam stood up and dug his hands into his pockets. He moved through the house to get the full effect of his infidelity: the half-empty b athroom vanity, which housed no razors but a festival of lotions and bath ge ls and rose-colored soaps; the basement workshop, as bare as it had been on the day they'd moved in; the ridiculously tiny bedroom closet, now cavernous and spacious, littered with dust balls on the floor.

She'd even sold his fucking pillows.

He went into the bathroom again to take a leak, and noticed something wrapp ed in newspaper hidden in the dank area behind the toilet. Bending down, he drew it out. It was last Thursday's newspaper, and although he didn't thin k it had been intended, there was a big article about Jamie MacDonald's upc oming trial splashed across the page.

He knew what it was before he unwrapped it. Lying on the bathroom floor, wi th no incoming light, the stained-glass panel had no life or color. Cam sat down and stared at it. He did not know why it had not been placed in a car ton with the other gifts he had given Allie; he would never know. Cam could remember giving it to Allie. He'd told her to be careful with it. H

e'd given it to her and the whole time he'd still been thinking of Mia. 313

But he supposed it was going to be that way for a while. Regardless of wha t had happened to Allie and when she would resurface, another part of Cam had died. It was only reasonable to expect that he would need time to prop erly mourn.

Only he wouldn't let it show. He owed his wife that much. Wife. The word congealed on his tongue. With great care he took a swath of toilet paper and cleaned the stained-glass panel. He wiped down the bright glass shards and dusted the lead panes. Then he walked with it into the bed room and hung it again on its cast-iron hook, back where it belonged. Cam stood before the stained-glass image until the moon rose behind it, and resigned himself to this day, the next one, and the next.

"IVV'hen you are married to a person for a long time and you Vr make love, you know how long and when your husband will kiss you. You know that he'l l start at your right breast, and then concentrate on your left. You know that he will move his mouth down your belly and bring you to the edge, the n slide up to your mouth again and let you taste your own excitement. With somebody new, you lose this rhythm.

Allie lay naked on her back in a room at the Green Gate Motel, O'Malley hea vy on top of her. They had bumped noses when they kissed and scraped the en amel off their teeth and being drunk was not the only excuse for such misma tch. Allie felt nervous, but not about the act itself. She didn't know what he was going to do next, and the very newness of it, the difference, made it seem wrong.

O'Malley had spent an inordinate amount of time licking around and inside he r ear, which she did not find erotic at all. He had a tendency to whisper th ings that made her want to clamp her legs shut: Want to ride a cowboy, honey

? I can stay in the saddle a long, long time.

But to her surprise, she could feel her nipples tightening and her lower bod y going soft. She realized with a shock that this man she did not know and d id not like was going to make her come.

It's just sex, she told herself as he slipped on a condom and drove into her. It was that way for Cam; it's that way for me. It's not the same as a marriage

.

She started to cry, all the tears that hadn't fallen that morning or that aft ernoon on the way to Shelburne. She cried quietly at first, then loud sobs th at made O'Malley pull himself from her with a bewildered look. She didn't exp lain to him. She didn't want to, didn't have to. She rolled to her side and c urled into a ball, trying to remember the quickest way home. Angus and Ellen left a spot between them for Allie when they entered the cou rtroom in Pittsfield, but ten minutes before the jury was set to convene, sh e still had not appeared. "I don't know what's keeping her," Ellen said, loo king at her watch.

Graham, bouncing with nervous energy on the balls of his feet, shook his h ead. "She wouldn't miss opening arguments."

"A flat tire," Angus pronounced. "I canna imagine anything else." Graham nodded, staring at the door Jamie would enter in a few minutes' time.

"I hope she shows," he murmured. "It's going to kill him if she doesn't." Graham leaned against the defense table, inadvertently scattering his notes

. He wondered what Jamie was thinking, ensconced for a minute of quiet in a bathroom stall. He wondered how he'd be holding up by the end of the day, the first of many.

The defendant was the least important person in the courtroom. He wasn't in volved in the case. He wouldn't be arguing his innocence. The only purpose he served was as a visual aid for the jurors while they heard testimony fro m others.

Graham also knew that this case was not going to be like the civil suits he h ad tired. The prosecutors had their evidence. The defense wasn't going to ref ute it or offer any other vindicating evidence. In fact, most of Graham's own witnesses were going to say things that corroborated the State's case. But h e'd try to shape the facts with their attitudes and impressions of Jamie too. In essence, Graham's role was to tell the jury. Yes, here's a body. But you'

ve got to look at it in a different context.

Not that Graham believed you could ever tell what the hell was going on in a juror's mind.

Jamie came back into the courtroom looking pale and tight, and slipped into a seat beside Graham almost at exactly the same

time the jury filed in and the bailiff requested that everyone rise for the H

onorable Judge Juno Roarke.

Audra Campbell was on her feet for an opening statement on the heels of Ro arke's pronouncement that court was now in session. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she said, "on September 19, 1995, Margaret MacDonald was mur dered by her own husband. He drove her to a nearby town, checked into an i nn, held a pillow to her face, and cut off her supply of oxygen so that sh e died of asphyxiation. The State will show that the defendant turned hims elf in to the local police and voluntarily confessed to these actions." The prosecutor was wearing a black wool suit that stood out from her shoulde rs like a linebacker's gear. She stepped around the table and crossed to sta nd in front of the jury, smiling benignly. "I remind you all of the oath you

've taken to uphold the law, and to bring the victim's murderer to justice." Then her eyebrows furrowed together to meet in the middle of her high foreh ead. "No one, myself included, will dispute that the circumstances surroundi ng this case are heartrending and pathetic. That it could not have been an e asy time for anyone involved. However," she said, her voice strengthening, " the fact remains that the defendant committed a deliberate, willful, premedi tated murder--and admitted so himself. As you, the jury, listen to the facts

, remember that this is a case about breaking the law. Not about compassion, not about sympathy. It is the law you have been called here to consider, an d it is the law which dictates conviction."

She sat down.

Jamie leaned close to Graham, who was halfway out of his chair. "Where's A llie?" he whispered.

Graham shook his head and glanced at Angus and Ellen and the space between them. Then he turned toward the jury. He didn't say anything for a moment

. He walked back and forth in front of the jury box, as if he was embitter ed about something and still trying to come up with the words to voice his protest.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'll tell you the same thing that the prosecution j ust did. Yes, Maggie MacDonald was killed on September 19, 1995. Yes, Jami e MacDonald, her devoted husband, admitted to this. However, unlike the pr osecution, I'm going to put these facts into the proper emotional setting. On the day that Mag-Jodi Picoult

gie died, Jamie was suffering from an exorbitant amount of stress and grief brought about by months of dealing with his wife's terminal illness. The l atest news of her condition and her prognosis had reached a new low." Graha m paused and looked directly at the juror with the badly dyed orange hair.

"You'll hear testimony about how this prolonged grief and depression was af fecting Jamie, to the point where his capacity to tell right from wrong was diminished. On the morning of his wife's death, he was not in control of h imself."

The orange-haired woman looked into her lap. She didn't buy it. Graham took a step back and hammered home his points. "One day, Jamie was deliberately making appointments with Maggie's physician to discuss a new form of treatment he'd heard about that might help the cancer. The next da y, he'd be overwhelmed by the futility of putting his wife through more pa in without guaranteed results."

The orange-haired juror looked up.

"This is not your average murder trial," Graham said. "Most criminals are d riven by greed. Jamie was motivated by grief. Most criminals commit an act out of hate. Jamie committed an act out of love." He moved closer to the de fense table, so that the jury would see Jamie out of the corners of their e yes. "You can't judge the deed unless you consider the context in which it was acted out. You can't consider reason and consequence unless you also fi gure in emotions and morality. Nobody lives, or acts, in a vacuum." He glanced at Audra. "The prosecution would have you believe that this case is open-and-shut, a question of black or white. Well, look around you, ladie s and gentlemen. In the real world, there's color. Lots of different kinds. Maggie MacDonald's death did not occur in a textbook, but in the real world. And Jamie's trial will take place there." He paused. "The evidence will sho w that in the real world, not everything is black and white. At the very lea st, there are infinite shades of gray."

Cam took a personal day off from work. He spent the morning going around to the houses of people he barely knew, asking them what it would cost to buy back a uniform, a fishing rod, a needlepoint MacDonald crest. He end ured subtle ribbing from

men in his father's generation about being in the doghouse, and outright smir ks from his own contemporaries. It seemed that Allie had only let slip that t hey'd had an argument--she hadn't given the particulars. For that, he suppose d, he was thankful. But it was still enraging to think that people saw his si tuation as same kind of childish prank on the part of his wife. He drove to Glory in the Flower, thinking Allie had spent the night at her shop, but there was a sign that said the store would be closed for the dura tion of the MacDonald trial. For a moment he panicked, thinking of a greedy divorce lawyer bleeding him for his house, his possessions, his money. The n he realized she must have been talking about Jamie's court appearance. The ADA said Cam would probably go on the stand tomorrow, which of course would be an impossibility if he didn't find a goddamn uniform before the d ay was out. Part of the deal in being the expert witness for the prosecuti on was coming in with all the trappings.