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  Mia could hear Allies footsteps coming down the stairs, and the healthy mew of Kafka in her arms. She turned away from Cam, stayed silent. Yes, she said to herself, I think maybe you do.

  FOUR

  When Cam walked into the police station later that morning, his uncle Angus was sitting with Jamie MacDonald in the lockup, dressed in his bathrobe and playing a game of chess.

  "For God's sake," he muttered, unlocking the cell. "Angus, what are you doing in there?" He looked around for Casey MacRae, the patrolman he'd left guarding the prisoner.

  "I told Casey I'd spell him," Angus said. "I havena seen wee Jamie since he was seven."

  Cam threw his cap onto the booking counter. He glanced at Jamie MacDonald. "Sleep well?"

  "No," Jamie admitted. "Did you?"

  Cam turned his back and began to leaf through the court book, praying he'd get Jamie MacDonald in front of a magistrate before lunchtime.

  "What are you doing here, Angus?" Cam sighed. "And get out of the damn lockup. I can't let you in with a prisoner."

  Angus tightened the sash of his bathrobe, grumbling, but stood from the cement slab that doubled as a bed in the cell. "Young Cam, I dinna think that's any way to be speaking to your elders."

  Cam hated it when his uncle called him that, as if he were still six years old, as if the old Cameron MacDonald hadn't been dead

  for two hundred years. He gestured at Angus's wet bedroom slippers. "You come here in your pajamas and get yourself locked up with a murderer, and you can't understand why I want to hire someone to take care of you during Che day?"

  Angus stepped out of the lockup. "I dinna want some wee lassie telling me how to eat my parritch in the morning and washing my privates for me in the bath." He tapped Cam on the shoulder. "I didna come to speak about that, anyway."

  Cam sighed and began to swing the heavy cell door closed again. "We're going to court within the hour," he said to Jamie, matter-of-fact, and then he slammed it shut.

  He turned around to find his uncle in his office, sitting behind the desk with his feet propped up. Cam shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on a hook on the back of the door. "Sometimes I think I should have left you at Carrymuir," he said.

  "Sometimes I wish that ye had."

  Cam sat down in the chair opposite his uncle and rested his elbows on the desk. "Angus, I know what you're about to say to me, and don't think I haven't thought of it myself. But the fact is I've got a body lying across the street, and a signed confession that the man in that lockup killed her."

  "Aye, well," Angus said, as if he hadn't heard a word Cam had said, "I was on Culloden Field last night."

  Perhaps because they were the very last words Cam had anticipated as a response, he sat forward, speechless. Recovering, he shook his head. "You were where?"

  "Culloden. Ye canna tell me that in spite of everything else ye've forgotten, ye dinna remember that."

  For a long time Cam had resisted sending Angus to a retirement home because the closest one was over the mountains, a good forty-five minutes away. Moreover, someone who had grown up fenced in by nature would not take well to antiseptic-washed floors and Bingo in Che cafeteria. Bur he was beginning to see that he had little choice. "Angus," Cam said gently, "this is 1995."

  "It may be at that, but all the same, I fought the English last night with Prince Charlie." He settled forward, as if he could nor believe that Cam was not quick enough to pick up what he had been trying to say. "Your great-grear-great-great-great-grandfarher isna happy. That's why Cameron's come to haunt me."

  Cam laid his head down on his desk. He'd humor the old man; he'd talk for five more minutes; then he'd usher him onto Main Street and drive his prisoner to the district courthouse on the other side of town. "Cameron MacDonald has come to haunt you," he repeated.

  "In a matter of words," Angus said. "It's a bit like I've crawled right into his wee brain." He paused, remembering. "He didna want to be on Culloden Moor at all."

  Cam did not lift his head, so his words were muffled by his sleeve. "He was an incredible soldier. He supported the Stuarts. Where else would he have been?"

  "He would have rather been home with his kinsmen, I imagine."

  Cam's patience was wearing thin. "Angus, we all grew up with the story. The damn public school probably uses it as a primer instead of Dick and Jane." He snapped his head up, reciting in a singsong, "Cameron MacDonald offered his own life so everyone else could go back to Carrymuir."

  "Aye," Angus said, pointing with one finger. "But do ye ken why he did it? Why he was willing to die?"

  In a flash of insight, Cam suddenly realized where this was heading. "Because he was their chief?" he said smugly, ready to launch into an explanation as to why Jamie MacDonald would still have to be arraigned.

  "No," Angus said, "because he couldna stand to see the people he loved hurting." He stood up and came around the desk, laying his thin, white hand on Cam's back. "Dinna fash yourself, lad. You'll come up with something." And with a goodbye knock on the Flexon-covered bars of the lockup, he walked out of the police station.

  The art of bonsai, Mia told Allie, had to be fashioned in harmony with nature, in a desire to dominate it and to re-create it, although on a different scale. She told her its history in China, then Japan; how the French were fascinated by the power the bonsai artists had--being able to make such a towering, magnificent tree grow in such a tiny space. Allie watched carefully as Mia sketched for her the different forms of the trees, single trunks curved to the left, cascading trees, upright ones, knotted ones, trees that rooted to rocks. She repeated their Japanese names like mantras: Chokkan, Moyogi, Sabamiki.

  They had bought some small Japanese maples at a nursery a half hour away, and Allie was going to turn them into bonsai trees, like the one Mia had shown her yesterday. Mia had a complete set of tools for pruning trees: saws, scissors, clippers, branch cutters. "I'm a surgeon," she had said, and Allie had laughed until she realized that Mia was serious.

  There weren't many rules. Mia cut back one of two opposite branches on the first trunk with a saw, which would produce alternate branches. She told Allie to make the cuts clean, so the tree would heal quickly. She had her pluck off the leaves.

  "It looks bald," Allie said.

  Mia stood back, assessing her work. "It'll grow. You don't want it to be bushy."

  Wiring was the most difficult part. It was to spiral at an angle of 45 degrees, wound around the branches of the tree to train it in the direction you wanted it to grow. The wire would remain on for several months, but was unwound daily and repositioned to keep it from cutting into the tree.

  For a few minutes, Mia watched Allie work. It was easy to talk to her, to teach her, and to learn from her. She did not know if she really liked Allie---really, truly liked her--or if Allie had become a fast friend simply because she was the first person Mia had met in Wheelock. Mia could remember making friends in sixth grade when she'd had to change schools and did not know anyone--after a moment of solitary panic, she had laughed with the two girls whose seats had flanked hers in homeroom. By the time they left ten minutes later, Mia had traded her small secrets, receiving in return the information that Jenna was in love with Billy Geffawney and that Phyllis could swallow a hard-boiled egg whole. It was months later, with a knot of her real friends woven tight around her like a winter cloak, that Mia realized how little she had in common with these first girls she'd latched onto, how shallow and strange they seemed, how foolish she had been to doubt her future. For years she avoided them, thinking how much they knew about her, afraid that a single desperate act of friendship might one day be used against her.

  While Allie worked on her new bonsai, Mia unloaded her works-in-progress from the back of the rental car she'd driven to Wheelock. It had been parked overnight in front of the library. After several trips, Mia returned, breathless, holding a pile of terracotta plates and an army-green duffel bag. "Well," she said, glancing at the floor, which was littered now with gnarled t