Mercy Read online

  Jamie MacDonald might not appear to be insane, might not even have been temporarily insane when he murdered his wife, but this was something Graham could work around. Euthanasia . . . well, euthanasia was not a sure thing. He sighed and stood up, glancing over the roofs of the many houses of Wheelock, lit at simple intervals by hissing streetlights. He wondered if Jamie was staring into the night too.

  When Cam arrived at the station the next day, it was late in

  the morning. He unlocked his office and set the stained-glass panel on the floor behind his desk Allie was due back that afternoon, and he'd brought it in case she came to the office before stopping off at home. Then he shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the hook on the back of the door.

  Sitting at his desk, he leaned back in his chair and let his mind wander. When there was a knock on the door, he jumped. He hollered to come in, and the door swung open to reveal Hannah, leading Jamie MacDonald. "Chief," she said, "it's noon."

  Cam looked at his watch. It was actually 11:59-Damn Jamie; he'd followed Martha Sully's strictures to a tee--he had yet to arrive later than noon to check in with Cam. And it was always the same--Hannah knocked at the door, pulling Jamie behind her like a recalcitrant schoolboy. Jamie would ask him how he was doing that day, and Cam would only grunt and nod his head in dismissal.

  "Chief MacDonald," Jamie said pleasantly, filling the doorframe. He always called Cam that, and for some reason, it always rankled. "How are you this morning?"

  Cam looked up from his desk, a frown on his face. "I wanted to thank you," Jamie said quietly. "For loaning me your wife."

  At the words, Cam's blood stopped running. He stared at Jamie with a fury banked in his eyes, uncomfortable with the intimacy--however false--that the statement suggested. "Go away," he muttered, his voice as thin and sharp as the letter opener he had inadvertently picked up to brandish like a weapon in his left hand.

  It took Cam most of the afternoon to calm himself down. He was still sitting in his darkened office, his head on his desk, taking deep, cleansing breaths, when Hannah walked in with the day's mail. "Good Lord," she said, stepping behind him to draw the curtains and crack open the window. "It's like a mausoleum." She tossed the packet of envelopes over Cam's bent head. "There's a phone bill in there," she added as she turned to leave. "One of the calls to Canada is a personal call I already docked from my pay."

  Sighing, Cam began to sift through the mail. Junk mail, junk mail, a request from a lawyer, more junk mail, the phone bill. And a smaller envelope from the Wheelock Inn that had Cam's head throbbing before he even opened it.

  Cameron, she said, please give these keys to Allie and make my apologies. The copper wire on the bonsais should be taken off completely sometime in February.

  There isn't anything I can tell you, except that I cannot stay here. It's the coward's way out; I'm sorry about that.

  The other thing I have to say is that I have cared about and slept with a number of men, but I've made love only with you.

  By the time Cam came to the end of the letter, tracing the imprint the heavy pencil had made as if it might hold some further clue to where Mia had gone, he was shaking. He ran out of his office without his coat, without a word to Hannah. Dashing across the street to the Wheelock Inn, he stormed through the front doors and demanded the key to Mia's old room. "But, Chief--" the clerk began, before Cam cut him off with a raised hand.

  The room was empty. It did not smell of her, but of white, fresh sheets and cleaning fluids. The King James Bible was in its customary place in the nightstand, the television remote was balanced on top of the console. With the bellboy gaping in the doorway, Cam sank to his knees.

  He had forced her out of his mind, and this was the consequence.

  He considered for one lovely, irrational moment running back to the station and smashing the stained-glass pane, as if Mia's disappearance was linked to its physical existence and shattering it would bring her back.

  Cam sat down on the edge of the bed and curled his knees up to his side, the way Mia had slept in his arms on the couch for three nights. He closed his eyes and tried to feel the slightest ridges in the mattress, adjusting himself where there may or may not have been an imprint of her body. He pretended he was lying just where she had lain, and he whispered this to himself until he believed it was true.

  He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He straightened his tie in the mirror and glanced toward the doorway, but the bellboy had gone. He left the Inn and walked across the street as if he were in complete control. Then he opened the door to the police station.

  Allie was standing in his office, holding in her hands the white-tissue-wrapped pane of glass. Her face was bright with a kind of joy that Cam associated with small children, who could find wonder in things they did not understand. "Cam!" she said, her eyes shining, "is this for me?"

  She hung the stained-glass panel in the bedroom from a cast-iron hook that had been the former home of a lush, green wandering Jew. "I love it." Allie was sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him, holding her glass of Coke and balancing her dinner plate on her lap. She'd insisted on waiting for him for a late supper and serving it in the bedroom, so that she could look at her new gift as the sun set through it. "I'm going to go away more often," she said.

  Cam smiled at his food. The stained-glass reflected itself in a puddle on the comforter that ran just over the edge of his foot. He scooted back a bit, but the color reached toward him again.

  When she'd opened the pane in the police station, she had held it to the bright afternoon light, turning it this way and that. She'd gone on and on, trying to describe the color of blue in the panel-- how the lighter parts were something beyond robin's-egg, like the color you imagined when you pictured summer; how the darker slices reminded her of a moonless sky. In the end she gave up trying to put the colors into words. They were blues that you had to see for yourself, she decided, and that was the very beauty.

  But Cam knew she was wrong. The lighter shade of blue was the color of Mia's eyes the moment before he kissed her; the darker shade was the color of her eyes the moment he drew away.

  The last minutes of sunlight burned through the stained-glass, and then left it curiously dull and flat. "I'm never going to get tired of looking at it," Allie announced. "Maybe I'll have it set right into a window."

  "There's an idea." Cam shoveled a forkful of potatoes into his mouth and tried to swallow. He knew he was not being fair to Allie--since she'd been gone for the better part of a week, he should have been animated and interested and plying her with questions about her trip--but he could not put Mia from his mind. He was afraid to, thinking it would drive her even farther away than she was right now.

  He was going to find her before that happened.

  "I think I'm going to take up investigative work," Allie said lightly, and Cam blinked at her, wondering if she had been reading his mind. "I liked scouting around for Jamie." She set down her plate and stretched. "I'd tell you all about it, but"--she lowered her voice here--"it's classified." Then she laughed. "I always wanted to say that. You know, like you're on a jury for a huge murder trial and you can't tell anyone what you know because you've been sworn to secrecy. This is almost as good."

  "So you think you'll be able to help the defense?"

  "Oh, I think Jamie's going to walk," she said, with unshakable conviction. "I can't tell you who I met with, but it's clear that the people of Cummington think his arrest is a mistake."

  "That's not enough to sway a jury," Cam pointed out.

  "No," Allie agreed, "but we've got proof that'll make them think twice about Jamie's motive."

  "His objective was to kill Maggie. He told me so."

  Allie snorted. "Sure, if you want to see it literally. But what if he wasn't himself?" Her eyes brightened, and in their reflection Cam could see the daffodils of the stained-glass pane. "Can you imagine loving someone so much that you completely lose the voice of reason?" Her mouth quirked up a