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  Jamie smiled ruefully. "Do you think it's as easy as that?"

  "Oh, yeah," Graham said, pushing away from the garage and walking toward Jamie with the best image of confidence he could present. "Piece of cake."

  Angus looked from Graham to Jamie and back again. "Clot-head," he muttered. He straightened, stared at the whooping dogs, and started back to the house. "Would ye care for a wee dram, Graham?" he called over his shoulder. "No?" he said, not giving Graham a chance to answer. "Well, you'll have to come again sometime when you're no' due back at the office." The screen door slammed behind him, leaving Jamie and Graham alone.

  "I'll let you know what I hear," Graham said, moving down the driveway.

  Jamie walked into Angus's house and sat on the bottom step of the staircase. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and sighed. "Blue-deviled, are ye?"

  Jamie looked up to see Angus holding a bottle of whiskey and a small tumbler. Angus poured some liquor into the glass and handed it to him. "It's barely eleven in the morning," Jamie said.

  Jamie took the bottle from Angus and poured him a drink in his own glass. He passed it wordlessly to his uncle and waited for him to drain it. "It all works out in the end, though, no?" Angus said, pulling himself up on the banister.

  "What do you mean?"

  Angus held the bottle of whiskey up to the light. Jamie watched his uncle through the amber liquid, which did not distort the old man's face, but made it take on darker and more somber shadows. "It willna matter, after a time, that Maggie and Fee have gone," Angus said softly. "What matters now and for always, Jamie, is that they went the way they wished."

  his case," said Audra, pinning all twenty-three jurors with her

  gaze, "is about murder. Murder One is legally defined as a murder with malice aforethought. If you find the defendant guilty, he has to be guilty of three separate processes: premeditation, deliberation, and willfulness. Premeditation means he formed a plan

  Dee.

  "That's as good a reason as any." Angus tipped the bottle up to his mouth and sank down beside Jamie. "Is she with ye much today?"

  "Who?" Jamie said warily.

  "Maggie." He patted Jamie's arm. "Some days are stronger than others. Fee used to tell me when I got to looking like you do now that I'd best snap out of it and stop digging my own grave, since she fully intended to go before me."

  "Fee?"

  "Fiona. My wife. Died--just like she said she would--in '75."

  Jamie's mouth dropped open. "I didn't know you were married."

  "Oh, aye, well." Angus smiled. "She was scared to death of being left behind. I'd wake up from a doze in a chair to find her poking my side, or holding a mirror up under my nose." He laughed. "It got where if she wasn't trying something or other when I woke up, I figured I must be well and truly dead." His eyes stared through the screen of the door, unfocused. "In the end, 'twas I who found Fee, asleep too late in the morning for all to be right." Angus closed his eyes, remembering how, in that moment of stillness, her face had blurred at its edges, until he was left looking at the smile of the girl he'd met barefoot beside the river

  to kill. Deliberation means he considered the pluses and minuses of his plan--even if this consideration lasted only a couple of seconds. And willfulness means that he intentionally carried out what he planned to do.

  "Now, as you know, Maggie MacDonald is, indeed, dead. We have a witness who heard the defendant confess to killing his wife. We have a statement signed by the defendant which indicates he actually drove all the way to a different town from the one in which he resided to commit the murder. You'll hear from the officer who investigated the crime scene, finding incontrovertible evidence that links the defendant to the scene of the crime. And you'll also hear from the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on the deceased." She stood up from her rigid plastic chair, her feet braced apart, her hands clasped behind her back. "I'll bring each witness in, and I'll question him. If there are any issues you need clarified, I'll turn to you afterward."

  Audra opened the door and gestured down the hall to Hugo Huntley, who folded his crossword into his pocket and moved toward her reluctantly, as if he were being pulled slowly and inexorably into her web.

  The foreman of the grand jury swore Hugo in. His hair was brushed asymmetrically back over his left ear, as if to conceal a bald spot. His hooked, bulbous nose reminded Audra of a pelican. "Would you please state your name and address for the record?"

  "Hugo Huntley," he said. "Fourteen-fifty Braemar Way, Wheelock, Massachusetts."

  "And Mr. Huntley, what is your profession?"

  Hugo licked his lips. "I'm the owner of Huntley's Funeral Parlor in Wheelock. I also serve as the medical examiner for the local police."

  Audra nodded. "Could you describe for these people what you saw on the afternoon of September nineteenth?"

  "I was working when Zandy Monroe--he's a sergeant with the police station--asked me to come over to retrieve a body. So he brought me across the street, and showed me this woman in the front seat of a pickup truck who had been dead, at first glance, for several hours. We took--" '

  "We?" Audra pressed.

  "We meaning me, and Zandy, and Allie MacDonald--she's the chiefs wife and she happened to be there at the time with Zandy. We took Maggie's body to the funeral parlor and I started to take care of her like I take care of all the funerals in Wheelock."

  "But this wasn't an ordinary funeral," Audra prompted.

  Hugo blinked at her. "It was very nice. Flowers and everything."

  Audra set her teeth. "I was speaking in terms of the deceased. Can you describe the cause of death?"

  "Asphyxiation," he said curtly. "Most likely by smothering, as there were no bruises on the neck that would indicate strangulation or any other kind of struggle." He stopped, removed his glasses, and wiped them on the lapel of his jacket.

  ''Was there anything else you found?"

  Hugo thought for a moment. "Various evidence of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and the radical mastectomy scar on her right breast."

  Audra froze in her tracks, scanning the faces of the jury to sense the slightest confusion or leanings toward sympathy. "I meant anything out of the ordinary."

  Hugo stared at her. "I don't know what you want me to say."

  "Did you find evidence of the defendant's skin beneath the victim's fingernails?"

  Hugo nodded.

  "You'll have to speak up," Audra prompted.

  "Yes," he said dutifully.

  "Which would indicate what, exactly?"

  He shrugged. "She scratched him. But that doesn't mean much. I mean, who's to say there was a fight? It could have been a back rub." He blushed. "Now, I certainly didn't know the two of them when the missus was alive, but I saw that man at her funeral. Believe me, I've seen plenty of mourners, but Jamie MacDonald is the only widower I've seen who couldn't stand because of the grief. He was . . . distraught. I guess that's the term."

  "Thank you, Mr. Huntley," Audra smoothly interrupted, before he could go any farther to undermine her case. "I have nothing further."

  Hugo left, closing the door behind him. Audra turned to the grand jury, smiling warmly. "Now," she said, "are there any questions?"

  Cam walked around the small studio apartment, which was overfurnished in a country-kitchen way complete with an oxen yoke over the doorway and braided rag rugs. There was a staggering amount of bovine paraphernalia: Holstein-patterned spoon rests and salt and pepper shakers, a milk pitcher in the shape of a heifer, a black-and-white-spotted armchair, cow quilts and posters framed and tacked on the wall. It was a frowsy, overblown room and he never would have believed it was Mia's if he hadn't seen her bonsai, centered by itself on the kitchen table, a palm tree on an island in a storm.

  Bally Beene had called him three weeks and one day after Mia left, to tell him she'd been under his nose the whole time. He had braced himself when he'd taken the call at the station, expecting to be given an address in t