Mercy Read online

  Success can be measured directly from how hard you work at it.

  God created man; science had little to do with it.

  If a person is pronounced brain-dead, he or his family should be able to ask a doctor to turn off the life-support machines.

  "Well," she said, taking a deep breath. "This ought to be fun."

  She pulled out of her pocketbook the Berkshire County voter registry, marked off with a red dot at every ninety-seventh name. "How long do we have to finish this?"

  Graham rubbed his hand over his face. "A week," he said. "You can call from my office; the kids will take the last half of the registry pages and call from the sociology department phones."

  He smiled at Adams, thanked him for his cooperation, and gently turned Allie away by the elbow. "Who the hell am I kidding?"

  Allie smiled up at him. "You get a gold star for effort."

  Graham smirked. "In this case, I need to have the highest grades in the whole goddamned class."

  They drove in near silence back to the law offices of MacPhee and MacPhee, where Allie spent the remainder of the afternoon with a tub of chicken salad from the coffee shop and a headset she'd taken from Graham's secretary which allowed her to talk on the phone without holding a receiver. She had just made her fortieth call when Graham walked into the room.

  "Any luck?" he asked, flipping through the pile of completed surveys.

  Allie shrugged. "Incredibly inflexible people. I think everyone I've called moonlights for the KKK," she said. "Except for those few who told me they didn't have time to talk to a telemarketer, and how would I like it if they called me at home?"

  Graham laughed. "I hope you gave out your number." He stuck a spoon into the chicken salad and took a bite. "I'm going out. I have my own hunches about jury surveys."

  Allie glanced up at him. "Bring me coffee. It's going to be a rough night."

  When he reached his car, Graham opened his briefcase and pulled out his copy of the voter registration list. The first name on it was Arlene Abbot, 59 Cheshire Road, Wheelock.

  He drove down Main Street, making only one wrong turn on his way to find a vaguely familiar street. The Abbot house was a tiny ranch, with a huge American flag hanging from a pole in the front yard. He noted this next to her name.

  Two more Wheelock residents had what Graham considered symbols of inflexibility: chain-link fences, German shepherds, manicured hedges. With a sinking feeling in his gut, he wrote down these details.

  The next name he picked was Lawrence Alban, 7572 Groundhog Path, Hancock. It was a bit of a drive to the bordering town, but he found the house with the help of a local map. Hubcaps in the yard, house painted shocking green, homemade bird feeders. He smiled, and scrawled a big star next to this first glimmer of nonconformity.

  For Christmas, Mia had given him the world. Cam turned the tiny globe around in his hands, letting the tissue paper from the box fall to the floor. There was no axis; it was speared in place by a strange magnetic attraction, or maybe by magic.

  "Brush up on your geography," she said, spinning the globe and offering one of those lies that always seem just within reach when it is Christmas. "We're going to go, someday."

  "This is great," he said, delighted. He kissed her. "This is perfect." He thought of Allie, who had bought him a guitar that he didn't know how to play. Mia hadn't purchased something she wanted him to have; she had read his mind and given him what he wanted. "Where did you get it?"

  Mia couldn't stop smiling. He liked it; he really liked it. "A catalog. One of those stores that have presents for the man who already has everything."

  "I don't have everything," Cam said. I don't have you.

  "Oh, I don't know." Mia slid an arm around his waist. "You've got a toehold on the American dream."

  Cam thought about that. The house, the cars, the backyard. The wife and the shadows of kids who would someday arrive. It made a pretty, colorful painting, but it was frightening to think of Mia standing somewhere outside the frame.

  "I thought you should have something you could keep at the office," Mia said quietly. "Small enough to stuff in a bottom drawer."

  Cam brushed her hair away from her face. "I'm not hiding this. I'd just spend the whole day taking it out and playing with it, anyway."

  They lay on their bellies on the bed at the Inn, the globe at arm's length. Like blind men, they shirred their fingers over the relief map that covered the ball, trailing up the Himalayas and into the Sahara and through the Mediterranean Sea.

  "Well," Cam said finally, pulling an envelope out of his breast pocket. "It's not nearly as exotic. But Merry Christmas."

  Mia tore the envelope open. Inside was a brochure, carefully hand-lettered, announcing the presence of Braebury House, a bed-and-breakfasr in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Her hair spilled over her face as she sat up, glancing at the photographs of a wing chair before a glowing fire, a four-poster bed, a comfortable clutter of antiques.

  "Two weekends from now," Cam said, his eyes pleading. "I'm going to say there's a training session in New Braintree. Your aunt could get sick again."

  Mia considered having Cam for a weekend, a whole weekend, in a place where nobody would judge her as the other woman and no one would know his name. She tried to imagine being part of a twosome like her parents, so close they would be able to think for each other. She considered what it might feel like not to be the odd one out.

  He pressed a kiss against the side of her neck, as if he thought she was hesitating; as if he thought she could truly tell him no. "Please," Cam whispered. "Let me try again."

  Christmas was not nearly so much of a celebration in Wheelock as Hogmanay, which was known to the rest of Massachusetts as New Year's Eve. As in Scotland, most of the town got roaring drunk. After midnight, neighbors went first-footing, going from house to house to wish each other a good new year, bearing shortbread or bottles of wine or fine whiskey.

  Since Cam was always working New Year's Eve, it was much the same as any other night for Allie, except for all the noise outside--it was difficult to ignore the drunken, off-key renditions of "Auld Lang Syne" and the spit and pop of firecrackers the teenagers set off in the wet, cold streets. She had tried to convince Angus and Jamie to spend the night at her house watching the Times Square ball drop, but Angus had simply grunted and said if he'd lived another year, he was damn well going to celebrate it by sleeping in.

  Jamie--well, Jamie just hadn't felt like celebrating. "Come by then, after twelve," she had said. "They say the perfect first-footer is a tall, dark-haired man who brings lots of food."

  Jamie had laughed at that. "Cam's just as tall. And I can't imagine he'll be happy to shoot the breeze with me after a night of locking up drunks."

  So Allie had found herself celebrating alone. At eleven o'clock she took out a bottle of Glenfiddich, which she never drank, and tossed back a shot. She did two more before eleven-thirty. By the time it was midnight, she was feeling charged and festive, her stomach burning pleasantly, her power enough to conquer the world.

  She watched Dick Clark for a little while and then went upstairs. On Hogmanay, Cam usually made it home around two in the morning. She could shower, change the sheets, and hope he wasn't exhausted when he got in.

  It was just after one when she finished. The bedroom was lovely; lit with candles she'd kept out from Christmas and smelling of the rose infusion she added to her detergent when she washed the sheets. She was still wearing plaid pajamas and oversized slippers in the shape of elephants, but she had plenty of time to change. Sighing, she glanced around, looking for something to do.

  She didn't want to straighten Cam's drawers, but she was feeling generous. It had always amazed her how someone who looked so starched and perfectly pressed during the day in a police officer's uniform could unwittingly wrinkle everything else he owned. Allie had once teased him, saying that he'd joined the force because he couldn't keep any other work clothes in decent shape. And Cam had said that when he was a