Read Mercy Page 15


  Cam slipped back under the covers, smelling of mouthwash. He gathered her against his chest. "That was nice," he murmured into her hair.

  Tomorrow she would sleep in Jamie and Maggie MacDonald's bed. Allie wondered how firm it would be, what secrets would seep into her dreams. "Goodbye," she said.

  Just so you know," Maggie MacDonald had said, "I'm against this

  on principle.

  Jamie laughed and pushed her down into the chair that had been set up in the deserted lab. "You won't feel a thing."

  "It's not that. It's the very idea of it. I feel like a Barbie doll, and everyone knows that no living woman has her measurements."

  Jamie walked over to the device that could produce a design of a female body with lasers that would map a three-dimensional scan of Maggie's form. "You're not a Barbie doll," he said.

  Maggie lifted her eyebrows. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

  He walked to the chair and crouched in front of her, grasping her hands. "To me, you're the perfect image of a woman. So what's the matter with cloning you?"

  It was 1993, and Jamie was doing a body scan of his wife to use as the model for an architectural firm's VR program. Their contract to build an elementary school in a rich New York suburb led them to ask for this particular application: a walk-through in which a user could be made child-size, and thus see if there were sharp edges at eye level, or cubbies too high to reach. But they'd also asked for a grown-up prototype, so that teachers might be able to assess the best spots for storage and educational aids, as well as the potential for hazards. Since they hadn't specified the sex of the prototype, Jamie was giving them a male and a female model. The user would be able to texture-map his or her own face over the model's digitized one.

  "Who'd you use as the perfect man?" Maggie asked.

  "Rod."

  She laughed. "Rod? How come you didn't scan yourself?"

  Jamie grinned. "Flattering as that might seem, I'm too tall. Rod's just under six feet, which fits in more as average."

  "Ah," Maggie said. "So I'm not the perfect woman. I'm just average."

  "Your words. Not mine." He pushed several buttons on a keyboard, and the pale green lasers that would translate the physical points of Maggie's body to the computer shimmered and waved into a direct, striking line that ran down the center of her face. "Sit still," he said. "Here we go."

  He watched the beam of light pass over his wife's body, sliding over the curve of her breast and the valley of her stomach to her arm and the angle of her elbow. The laser rotated on its axis, glowing between her shoulder blades.

  Jamie turned his attention to the computer screen. As if it were a Polaroid, an image of Maggie was coming into focus by bits and pieces. Her eyes blinked blindly out from the inside of the screen, her hands materialized to rest at her sides. Her legs, eerily foreshortened at the knees for a few moments, sprang into view in a dotting of color. "Okay," he said, "now stand up."

  He wanted to make sure that the coordinates matched, while the lasers were still working. "Raise your right arm," Jamie ordered, and when Maggie did so, her computer image repeated the motion. "Touch your waist. Turn around." Every move she made, her prototype did as well. There was nothing missing.

  He watched on the screen as Maggie lifted her hands to her hair and skimmed them down her body. Jamie cupped his hand against the computer screen; she was small enough to stand in his palm, to carry around in his pocket, to set on a shelf like an object of rare and priceless beauty. "How is it?" she asked, her mute lips on the screen puckering with silent words, looking for all the world like a kiss.

  Jamie stared at Maggie's body on the screen, young and firm and healthy no matter how many times the program was switched on, no matter how old they all got in real life. "Perfect," he said.

  Glory in the Flower had been decorated to look like someone's living room on a rainy autumn afternoon. Instead of having tables spread with dried flower arrangements and herbal wreaths, Allie had set two enormous overstuffed sofas in the center of the shop. There was a coffee table sporting a fresh arrangement every day, as well as magazines and a small tea service. The only indication that one was in a flower shop came from the unexpected details: the ivy trailing over the fat arm and leg of the couch, the bowl of rose petals that stood beside the cream and sugar, the lampshade overhead, which was fashioned entirely out of dried primroses and statice in luxuriant jewel tones.

  In the back of the store, behind the sofas, was the cooler and the workbench where Allie did most of her arrangements, set under the spill of sun from a skylight. Behind a Chinese screen was the storeroom, as well as shelves stuffed with metallic foil and fabric, a palette of ribbons, birdcages, baskets, and brocade hatboxes that were all used as containers.

  Mia walked to the cooler first and placed her lunch--yogurt-- next to a large black bucket of persimmon roses. Then she shrugged out of her coat and set it on the desk chair in the storeroom. Absently, her eyes scanned the tools of the trade: rubber bands, green wire, scissors, Pokon leafshine, Floratape, and huge boxes of Spanish moss and Oasis.

  It had taken her until yesterday to figure out Allies system of organizing flowers. The cooler was not arranged by availability or popularity of flowers, or even by color, but by what the flowers were supposed to represent. She knew that once, bouquets had been sent as a message, not just as ornaments of beauty. When Mia had first become interested in floral arrangement, she'd been fascinated by this philosophy. Evidently, Allie was fascinated as well. She'd bunched the flowers with positive qualities on the left side of the cooler, those with negative connotations on the right. So jasmine and lilac and camellias and passionflowers--representing grace, first love, perfection, and faith--were gathered together in serviceable black florist's buckets. Acanthus, crocuses, thorn apples, and peonies were bunched in dishonor on the other side, signifying artifice, abuse, deceit, and shame.

  It almost made Mia afraid to open the right door of the cooler, for fear that all the evil would seep into the world, like it had from Pandora's box.

  She jumped as the phone rang. "Hi," she said, "Glory in the Flower." She expected it to be Allie, checking up to make sure that Mia had arrived on time and had opened the store without any catastrophes, but even as she thought this she realized it was not Allies way. Allie would give her the benefit of the doubt, whether Mia deserved it or not.

  "Oh, Antonio," she said, relaxing at the voice of one of her distributors. She scanned the nails stuck into the shelf above her eyes at even intervals, each marked with a day of the week and spearing various orders to be filled. "I need jacarandas and some tree fern." Allie had told her to order whatever she could from Antonio instead of from the other wholesalers; his prices were a little higher but his flowers were always fresh.

  She haggled with him over the price of alstroemeria, finally agreeing on $4.75 a bunch, and said that she would indeed like to see the Washington State purple tulips. Then she got off the phone and closed her eyes and listened.

  The quiet had a noise; it pulsed through the air vents in the flower shop. And if she cracked the cooler a little, she knew she would be able to hear the whistling silk of the roses as their pursed heads began to open.

  Mia turned toward the storefront. Allie had set her bonsai tree on a low table across the room, along with the seven other trees they had wired together in hopes of future sales. With a smile, she crossed the room and unwrapped the wire from Allies tree, keeping it from cutting too deeply into the bark and listening to the sigh of the roots and the cambium at this freedom. "Sorry," she said, carefully rewrapping the bronze wire. "I can't let you go just yet." She did the same to several other trees, snipping leaves and branches where she thought Allie might have underestimated the future tree. Then she sat down on the couch that faced the front of the shop.

  There were a hundred things to do; Allie had left her that god-awful list, after all, but Mia only wanted to close her eyes and think about Cam. She knew she had to send him word o
f where she was going to meet him for this drink, but she did not think it would be prudent to waltz into the police station with the whole town watching. Not that what they were doing was at all out of sorts. A drink was just a drink. And Allie had asked Mia to watch over Cam.

  She walked to the cooler and gathered in her hands a bunch of sad-eyed pansies and delicate apple blossoms. She braided the stems around the branch and tied them with a French-wired ribbon. Then, after hanging the Closed sign, she ran down the street to the police station and tucked the tiny bouquet under the driver's-side windshield wiper of the unmarked cruiser she recognized as Cam's.

  Mia was out of breath by the time she arrived back at the flower shop, her pulse racing from more than the exertion. She sat back down on the couch, staring at the mess of petals that she'd made when she wrapped and wired the bouquet.

  Somehow, she knew that Cam would figure it out.

  Pansies meant, I'm thinking of you. And apples, since the days of Eve, had always meant temptation.

  Allie did not go directly to Jamie MacDonalds house. Instead, she drove to the office of Dr. Dascomb Wharton, the family practitioner who had taken care of Maggie after she fell sick in 1993.

  She found herself without an appointment, sitting on a cracked black Naugahyde chair and reading a magazine that dated back to the Gulf War. From time to time, when she knew that the receptionist was watching, she would glance at her watch.

  Two hours after she'd arrived at Dr. Wharton's, she was ushered through the winding corridors behind the reception desk and into his private office.

  The doctor was a tremendous, shaggy-haired man who seemed to have learned about the dangers of cholesterol too late. He was eating a calzone, dipping it at regular intervals into a small vat of spaghetti sauce, when Allie pushed open the door. "Sit down, sit down," he bellowed. "You don't mind me eating lunch while we chat?"

  Allie shook her head. She had never seen anyone quite so large, except of course for the terribly sad cases on the Oprah show, and she wondered why the spindly-legged chair beneath the man's bottom did not simply give way. The doctor wiped his mouth with a napkin and smiled at her.

  What big teeth you have, Allie thought. She smiled back. "What can I do for you, Mrs. MacDonald?" Allie pulled a Polaroid photo of Jamie from the front pocket of her purse. It was certainly not a good picture; in fact, Cam had loaned it to her from the police file that had the copy of the arrest report. "I'm here on behalf of this man," she said, offering the photograph to the doctor. "Do you know him?"

  Dr. Wharton pursed his lips. "Why, of course I know Jamie. But I know Maggie better, being her doctor."

  "Knew," Allie said, before she could think. The doctor stared at her. "She . . . died a few days ago."

  "Oh." Dr. Wharton looked nonplussed. "Oh, well, yes, that was to be expected."

  Allie stuffed the photograph back into her purse. "She was very ill, then?"

  Dr. Wharton leaned forward. "My dear, this is a matter of patient confidentiality."

  Allie nodded, having anticipated this. She withdrew a letter from Graham MacPhee, on a piece of paper emblazoned with the legal firm's letterhead, and handed it wordlessly to the doctor. "I see," he said, scanning the few lines. "So Jamie did it."

  "We've yet to go to court." She leaned forward. "That's why I'm in Cummington. I'm trying to find people who knew Maggie, who knew Jamie, who would think that this kind of charge is ridiculous."

  Dr. Wharton stuffed the last of his calzone in his mouth and held up a finger. When he swallowed, he rested back in his chair, tipping it precariously. "What I will tell you, and any court that subpoenas me, is this: Maggie MacDonald would not have lived out the year, in my opinion. Her breast cancer, diagnosed two years ago, had spread to her bones, and finally to her brain. It had not responded to chemotherapy or radiation, and the last time I treated her it was because the tumor had infiltrated the optic nerve." He paused, as if trying to see how sharp Allie was. "The eye."

  "What kind of tumor was it, originally?"

  "Ductal carcinoma," Wharton replied. He rapped his fingers against the smooth surface of his desk.

  Allie looked away before asking the next question. She pictured Maggie laid out on the embalming table of the funeral home, her knees grotesquely bent into the air. "Was she in a lot of pain?"

  The doctor made a strange sound through his nose. "Well, now, pain is a relative thing. Some women breeze through childbirth, for example, and others beg to be unconscious."

  "We aren't talking about having a baby."

  "No," Dr. Wharton agreed. "We are not." He steepled his fingers and rested his chin on top of them. "I think Maggie MacDonald was in physical pain, yes," he conceded.

  "But . . ." Allie prompted, hearing the qualification in his tone.

  "But I don't think it was what hurt the most." Allie raised her eyebrows, and Dr. Wharton smiled so gently all the pockets of his face dimpled and folded into each other until he looked like an entirely different man. "I think what was killing Maggie was knowing that she would be leaving Jamie behind."

  Anyone who wondered why the town's flower shop was open late at night would suspect that Allie was working on a wedding. Sometimes it took two or three days to wire all the flowers in a bridal bouquet, and Allie often stayed into the witching hours to get the painstaking work finished. So when Cam walked down the street from the station, passing several families en route to dinner at the coffee shop, he did not turn away or try to hide. He simply tucked the limp knot of flowers into his coat pocket and smiled at Geordie MacDonald and Sarah Murray and said yes, the weather was getting colder much quicker than usual.

  Mia had locked the door, so Cam had to knock. This took him by surprise; he was always yelling at Allie to lock the door, to which she simply replied she wasn't a target: if by any chance a thief ever did happen to set foot in Wheelock, he wouldn't pick a store that barely turned a profit. Cam had almost succeeded in pushing that last thought of Allie out of his mind when Mia's small face appeared in one glass pane of the door.

  She was wearing jeans that looked very soft, and a man's white shirt rolled up at the elbows. For one irrational moment Cam wanted to grab her shoulders and demand that she tell him whose shirt that was. But instead he smiled at her, and pulled the tiny bouquet out of his pocket. "I got your flowers."

  Her face was as pale as the collar of the shirt, but that only made her eyes stand out in relief. They were shining and sapphire; they reminded him of the trappings of royalty. He unbuckled his gun belt and laid it gently across the counter by the cash register When he turned, she was standing two feet in front of him. "What makes you think," she asked quietly, "that I'm safe?"

  He sat down on one of Allies couches, which he personally had lugged out of a cousin's pickup truck when Allie found them at a tag sale in a town over the mountains. Mia had set the fine bone china tea set on the low table, along with a bigger vase full of the same flowers she'd tacked to his windshield.

  "They're pretty," he said, brushing one pansy. "And they smell like spring."

  Mia sat down on the couch opposite Cam and plucked one branch from the arrangement. "Apple blossoms. They're very hard to get in October." She stared at the patterns of the flowers, dotting the bark in a neat spiral. "Do you know that, supposedly, if you cut an apple in half on Christmas Eve, and put the left half close to your heart and the right half by the front door, the person you want will be found near the right half at midnight?"

  Cam watched her hands absently strip the bark from the branch. "Is this something you've done?"

  "No," Mia said. "I've just heard of it."

  "How do you know which is which?"

  "What do you mean?"

  Cam touched the branch closest to him. "Which is the left half and which is the right half of the apple?"

  Mia raised her eyebrows. "I don't know. I suppose it all depends on your point of view:" She ran a finger over the rim of one of the two teacups, but did not make an effort to pour out, o
r even ask Cam if he wanted some tea. He saw her knees bounce as she tapped the floor with her feet, and realized she was even more nervous than he was.

  Suddenly she bolted up and walked past him to the flower cooler. From his seat, Cam could see the reflection of her face in the glass. Her features seemed so drawn that the slightest motion of her mouth might make her shatter. "When I was traveling," she said, "I learned everything I could about flowers. On Corfu, the natives wear sunflowers as hats. And in France, the country wives use clematis as a clothesline." She passed a hand down the chilled front of the glass case, grasping for the handle as if she were drowning. "Did you know Allie keeps fresh herbs, too? Here's basil. It's supposed to be a symbol of hatred." She turned quickly, and offered a fragrant sprig she'd broken off to Cam, who had come to stand behind her. He took it from her, set it on the edge of the couch, and then closed his fingers over hers.

  Mia tugged free and crossed her arms over her chest. "But in Romania," she said, her voice high and thin, "if a woman gets a man to take basil from her own hand, he'll be faithful for the rest of his life." Suddenly she sank against the cooler, as if her knees had simply given out. She buried her face in her hands. "Oh, God," she murmured. "Oh, my God."

  Cam drew her into his arms and held her until all the brittle-ness melted from her carriage and left her soft and sobbing against him. "Sssh," he whispered into her hair. His eyes fell on the basil, balanced on the edge of the couch. "Sssh."

  Jamie MacDonald lived in a modest Colonial on the north side of the Cummington duck pond. It had been painted white, and its black shutters were beginning to peel. When Allie pulled up in her car and parked in the driveway, a neighbor waved to her, as if she had been expected.