Mercy Read online

  Ellen smiled at her son over her shoulder. "He just ain't like he used to be."

  Cam rolled his eyes and walked casually across the lawn to watch his mother in action. She held the copper rods at waist level, like a pair of six-shooters, closing her eyes periodically when one of them twitched toward the other. As Cam got closer, the rods began to shake and cross. "Cam," Ellen chided, "you're ruining this for me."

  "Because I think it's a crock?"

  Ellen sighed and transferred the rods so that they were both in one hand. "Because you've got too much energy around you. It's all I can tap into when you're so close."

  He crossed his arms over his chest, and not for the first time Ellen MacDonald looked up at her son and remembered the day she had gone to spank him and realized he stood a foot taller than she. "What's the matter with you?" she asked.

  "You tell me. You're the one with the sixth sense."

  Ellen smirked at him. "That's no challenge. Any halfwit can tell when you're angry, Cam. There's a big black cloud that follows you around."

  In spite of himself, Cam glanced over his shoulder. He turned back to the sweet rhythm of his mother's laughter. Why had she run

  away?

  "I got some interesting news today. I met with a man named Balmoral Beene."

  "Oh really?" Ellen said, starting back up to the house. "Do you want lunch or something?"

  Cam followed her in. "Mom, you know who he is?"

  "Of course, Cam." Ellen swiftly pulled a can of tuna from the shelf and opened it for Pepper, who liked Starkist more than any tabby cat Cam had ever seen. "He's a PI your father used from time to time. Is there something going on at the station?"

  Cam froze, realizing too late that bringing up Bally's name would of course make his mother ask what he needed a PI for in the first place. "Some case," he said noncommittally. "Bally told me Dad used him to check up on me when I was traveling."

  "Well, yes. I told him to."

  Cam leaned forward. "You told him to?"

  "Of course," she said easily. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."

  "I was twenty. I wasn't a kid."

  Ellen shrugged. "You'll always be my kid." She opened the refrigerator and picked out a Tupperware container full of something thick and brown. Dumping it onto a plate, she moved toward the microwave. "You sure you don't want some? Stroganoff. Made with tofu."

  "How come you ran away?" Cam blurted out.

  Ellen dropped the plate so it rang against the Formica. Little splats of gravy landed on her shirt. "Who told you that?"

  "Bally," Cam pressed. "He said it was the first case Dad ever asked him to take."

  Ellen stuffed the plate into the microwave and began to set the table. With slow, graceful movements she pulled two place mats from a rack on the counter and centered them in front of the kitchen chairs. She added napkins, forks, and knives. She had just picked two goblets off a shelf when she turned around to face Cam. "Well," she said, "for starters, I'm really fifty-two, not fifty-three."

  Cam's jaw dropped. "Do you think I give a damn if you lie about your age? I find out this morning that my parents didn't trust me, and if that isn't enough, I've got all kinds of assumptions running through my head about you being forced to marry Dad--"

  "Cam," Ellen said quietly, "think back. Do you really believe I didn't want to marry your father?"

  Cam tried to remember his parents interacting in any way whatsoever, and the first image that came to mind was once when, as a five-year-old, he had wakened from a nightmare and wandered into their bedroom in the middle of the night. Even in the dark, he could see the lump in the bed writhing and moaning. Frozen, he'd thought he heard his mother's cry, and that was when he realized the horrible thing was eating his parents alive.

  He'd crept to the side of the bed, ready to scream down the house, and saw his father under the covers. It was some kind of game. He watched for a minute, then tapped the nearest limb beneath the sheet. "Can I play?" he asked, wondering why, as his parents began to laugh, he hadn't been invited to participate.

  "Listen to me," Ellen said. "Why in the name of God would I go around telling people I was a year older than I really am?" She sat down in the chair that had been hers as long as Cam could remember. "And if you'd ever consider giving me a grandchild, you'd figure out that a baby born two months early is never, ever ten pounds."

  Cam's hands fell to his sides. "You ran away because you got

  pregnant?"

  "I ran away because I got pregnant and because your father thought I was eighteen. He was eleven years older; I didn't think he'd appreciate being shackled to someone like me, however entertaining I had been at the time. And we're talking about 1959, where men who weren't as honorable as Ian still did the honorable thing. So I figured I'd save him the trouble. Except he found me-- thanks to Bally Beene. I turned seventeen on the day we got married. In Maryland, where we could fudge my age and didn't need my parents' consent."

  Cam stared at his mother in a whole different light. "Dad didn't care?"

  "Oh, he cared a great deal. He cared about me and he cared about the fact that, as tiny as you were at the time, you existed. He didn't speak to me for a week after the wedding because I'd been stupid enough not to confide in him."

  The microwave beeped. Cam crossed toward it, removed the steaming plate, and set it down in front of his mother. "You hot little number," he said, grinning.

  Ellen speared a piece of tofu and blew on it to cool it down.

  "You going to tell me what you've got Bally working on?" she asked.

  Cam shook his head, still smiling. "You'll have to hightail it down to the station and dowse the files to see if you can figure it out. Confidential police business."

  "I married one chief and gave birth to another," Ellen said. "Don't give me this garbage."

  "It's just some stuff," Cam hedged.

  "As long as it has nothing to do with Jamie. He's got trouble enough."

  "Digging up dirt on a murderer isn't my job. I'll leave that to the DA."

  "Mercy killer," Ellen said, "not a murderer."

  "Seventeen, eighteen," Cam murmured, "a matter of semantics."

  Ellen glared at him.

  "Sorry," Cam said.

  She stood and began to bustle around the kitchen, rinsing her plate and her silverware and settling it into the dishwasher. Even the soft tap of her sneakers on the white floor was familiar, and Cam began to remember this room as a place of light and music, waffles burning black at the edges on a rainy Saturday morning while he clapped his hands to his parents' impromptu dance around the kitchen table. Even when the radio was turned off, he used to walk into the kitchen in his parents' house and hear its presence, its energy. Cam realized that he did not think of the kitchen of his own house this way, like it was a heart that pumped life out to the other rooms. When he and Allie were together in their kitchen-- chopping vegetables, or making coffee, or even eating--he was mostly aware of the quiet.

  "Allie back yet?"

  Cam nodded.

  His mother did not turn around, but that had never stopped her from being able to see him. "That must be nice for you."

  "It was," Cam said. "It is." He started back to the table to pick up the untouched setting that his mother must have laid out for him.

  "Oh," Ellen said over the stream of water in the sink. "You can just leave that."

  "I told you I didn't want any. You didn't have to set a place."

  Ellen shut off the water and wiped her hands on the dish towel. "It isn't for you," she said, a blush stealing over the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, taking away the lines and the history until Cam could clearly see what she had looked like as a girl of seventeen. "It's for your father."

  Cam started. "Dad?" He glanced at his mother's copper dowsing rods, carefully packed back in their padded wooden carrying case. An interest in New Age phenomena was one thing; channeling was quite another. He opened his mouth to tell her not to get her hopes up too