Jamie MacDonald might not appear to be insane, might not even have been temporarily insane when he murdered his wife, but this was something Graham could work around. Euthanasia . . . well, euthanasia was not a sure thing. He sighed and stood up, glancing over the roofs of the many houses of Wheelock, lit at simple intervals by hissing streetlights. He wondered if Jamie was staring into the night too.
When Cam arrived at the station the next day, it was late in
the morning. He unlocked his office and set the stained-glass panel on the floor behind his desk Allie was due back that afternoon, and he'd brought it in case she came to the office before stopping off at home. Then he shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the hook on the back of the door.
Sitting at his desk, he leaned back in his chair and let his mind wander. When there was a knock on the door, he jumped. He hollered to come in, and the door swung open to reveal Hannah, leading Jamie MacDonald. "Chief," she said, "it's noon."
Cam looked at his watch. It was actually 11:59-Damn Jamie; he'd followed Martha Sully's strictures to a tee--he had yet to arrive later than noon to check in with Cam. And it was always the same--Hannah knocked at the door, pulling Jamie behind her like a recalcitrant schoolboy. Jamie would ask him how he was doing that day, and Cam would only grunt and nod his head in dismissal.
"Chief MacDonald," Jamie said pleasantly, filling the doorframe. He always called Cam that, and for some reason, it always rankled. "How are you this morning?"
Cam looked up from his desk, a frown on his face. "I wanted to thank you," Jamie said quietly. "For loaning me your wife."
At the words, Cam's blood stopped running. He stared at Jamie with a fury banked in his eyes, uncomfortable with the intimacy--however false--that the statement suggested. "Go away," he muttered, his voice as thin and sharp as the letter opener he had inadvertently picked up to brandish like a weapon in his left hand.
It took Cam most of the afternoon to calm himself down. He was still sitting in his darkened office, his head on his desk, taking deep, cleansing breaths, when Hannah walked in with the day's mail. "Good Lord," she said, stepping behind him to draw the curtains and crack open the window. "It's like a mausoleum." She tossed the packet of envelopes over Cam's bent head. "There's a phone bill in there," she added as she turned to leave. "One of the calls to Canada is a personal call I already docked from my pay."
Sighing, Cam began to sift through the mail. Junk mail, junk mail, a request from a lawyer, more junk mail, the phone bill. And a smaller envelope from the Wheelock Inn that had Cam's head throbbing before he even opened it.
Cameron, she said, please give these keys to Allie and make my apologies. The copper wire on the bonsais should be taken off completely sometime in February.
There isn't anything I can tell you, except that I cannot stay here. It's the coward's way out; I'm sorry about that.
The other thing I have to say is that I have cared about and slept with a number of men, but I've made love only with you.
By the time Cam came to the end of the letter, tracing the imprint the heavy pencil had made as if it might hold some further clue to where Mia had gone, he was shaking. He ran out of his office without his coat, without a word to Hannah. Dashing across the street to the Wheelock Inn, he stormed through the front doors and demanded the key to Mia's old room. "But, Chief--" the clerk began, before Cam cut him off with a raised hand.
The room was empty. It did not smell of her, but of white, fresh sheets and cleaning fluids. The King James Bible was in its customary place in the nightstand, the television remote was balanced on top of the console. With the bellboy gaping in the doorway, Cam sank to his knees.
He had forced her out of his mind, and this was the consequence.
He considered for one lovely, irrational moment running back to the station and smashing the stained-glass pane, as if Mia's disappearance was linked to its physical existence and shattering it would bring her back.
Cam sat down on the edge of the bed and curled his knees up to his side, the way Mia had slept in his arms on the couch for three nights. He closed his eyes and tried to feel the slightest ridges in the mattress, adjusting himself where there may or may not have been an imprint of her body. He pretended he was lying just where she had lain, and he whispered this to himself until he believed it was true.
He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He straightened his tie in the mirror and glanced toward the doorway, but the bellboy had gone. He left the Inn and walked across the street as if he were in complete control. Then he opened the door to the police station.
Allie was standing in his office, holding in her hands the white-tissue-wrapped pane of glass. Her face was bright with a kind of joy that Cam associated with small children, who could find wonder in things they did not understand. "Cam!" she said, her eyes shining, "is this for me?"
She hung the stained-glass panel in the bedroom from a cast-iron hook that had been the former home of a lush, green wandering Jew. "I love it." Allie was sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him, holding her glass of Coke and balancing her dinner plate on her lap. She'd insisted on waiting for him for a late supper and serving it in the bedroom, so that she could look at her new gift as the sun set through it. "I'm going to go away more often," she said.
Cam smiled at his food. The stained-glass reflected itself in a puddle on the comforter that ran just over the edge of his foot. He scooted back a bit, but the color reached toward him again.
When she'd opened the pane in the police station, she had held it to the bright afternoon light, turning it this way and that. She'd gone on and on, trying to describe the color of blue in the panel-- how the lighter parts were something beyond robin's-egg, like the color you imagined when you pictured summer; how the darker slices reminded her of a moonless sky. In the end she gave up trying to put the colors into words. They were blues that you had to see for yourself, she decided, and that was the very beauty.
But Cam knew she was wrong. The lighter shade of blue was the color of Mia's eyes the moment before he kissed her; the darker shade was the color of her eyes the moment he drew away.
The last minutes of sunlight burned through the stained-glass, and then left it curiously dull and flat. "I'm never going to get tired of looking at it," Allie announced. "Maybe I'll have it set right into a window."
"There's an idea." Cam shoveled a forkful of potatoes into his mouth and tried to swallow. He knew he was not being fair to Allie--since she'd been gone for the better part of a week, he should have been animated and interested and plying her with questions about her trip--but he could not put Mia from his mind. He was afraid to, thinking it would drive her even farther away than she was right now.
He was going to find her before that happened.
"I think I'm going to take up investigative work," Allie said lightly, and Cam blinked at her, wondering if she had been reading his mind. "I liked scouting around for Jamie." She set down her plate and stretched. "I'd tell you all about it, but"--she lowered her voice here--"it's classified." Then she laughed. "I always wanted to say that. You know, like you're on a jury for a huge murder trial and you can't tell anyone what you know because you've been sworn to secrecy. This is almost as good."
"So you think you'll be able to help the defense?"
"Oh, I think Jamie's going to walk," she said, with unshakable conviction. "I can't tell you who I met with, but it's clear that the people of Cummington think his arrest is a mistake."
"That's not enough to sway a jury," Cam pointed out.
"No," Allie agreed, "but we've got proof that'll make them think twice about Jamie's motive."
"His objective was to kill Maggie. He told me so."
Allie snorted. "Sure, if you want to see it literally. But what if he wasn't himself?" Her eyes brightened, and in their reflection Cam could see the daffodils of the stained-glass pane. "Can you imagine loving someone so much that you completely lose the voice of reason?" Her mouth quirked up a
t the corners. "It's very romantic, I think."
No, Cam thought, it's a living hell. "I love you," he said thickly, "but I wouldn't murder you."
Allie stared at him. "I don't suppose you would." She was quiet, and when she spoke again, Cam had to strain forward to hear her. "But then, you and I aren't at all like Maggie and Jamie."
Cam had nothing to say to that. He set his plate down on the floor and stretched his hands behind his head, reclining on his pillow. "Nothing like a little light dinner conversation," he mused.
Allie grinned. "What do you want to talk about, then?"
Mia. Cam thought of the note in his back pocket, the keys he had yet to give to Allie. Maybe he would not tell her tonight. He'd let her get a good night's sleep and then break the news to her that her latest assistant had left town without a backward glance. But he found himself pulling the keys out of his pocket and rolling to face Allie. "Mia asked me to give you these," he said. "She had to leave town."
Allie frowned. "Is everything all right?"
No. "I guess so. Family emergency."
"Did she say when she was coming back? Did she leave a number?"
Cam fell onto his pillow. "She didn't say a hell of a lot of anything."
Allie lay down beside him, fitting her head into the crook of his arm. "I hope we didn't scare her away," she murmured.
Cam closed his eyes. He pictured Mia's curls, which stood out in a wild tumble after he'd buried his hands in them, proof of his passion.
Allies fingers slipped between the buttons of his shirt and began to stroke his stomach.
He imagined the weight of Mia, damp and open on top of him as she cried out in the night.
Allie kissed his shoulder, her breath making a hot circle through the fabric.
He altered his breathing so that it was even and deep. He managed to produce a short snore.
Allie brushed her hand over his brow. "Tough week?" she whispered. She kissed the corner of his mouth and gently pulled away from him to lie on her side of the bed. Cam kept his eyes closed, but he could feel the moment when Allies hand moved down between her own legs. The silverware on the empty dinner plates trembled. Cam clenched his jaw, thinking that this hurt more than sleeping with Allie would have, and he forced himself to endure the quiet rock of the mattress as she gave herself what he could not.
TEN
Balmoral Beene had been named after the English royal family's castle in Aberdeenshire; not because his parents were Scots or English or had ever even traveled across the Atlantic, but simply because his mother had seen a picture on a postcard and liked the way the word filled up her mouth, like a cheekful of rich sponge cake. It was almost poetic justice that he should wind up on the Rolodex of the Wheelock Police Department, quite possibly the only town in America where every resident was practically born knowing the name Balmoral. For that reason, or maybe in spite of it, he had taken to calling himself Bally several years before he became a private investigator-for-hire.
As far as Cam knew, the department--meaning himself, his father, or his grandfather--had never commissioned the help of Bally Beene. Sure, they got shorthanded, but whenever a case that big happened involving Wheelock, there was always a battalion of state troopers the DA would loan to help with an investigation. Nevertheless, Bally's number remained in the Rolodex.
Bally Beene had answered the phone himself, and had stalled over setting a time for an appointment, as if he was incredibly busy. But when Cam arrived at his Great Barrington office at the decided hour, Bally was sitting back in his chair, his feet on his desk, filing his nails. "Hey," he said when Cam walked through the door, as if he'd known him his entire life. "You ever get a manicure?"
Cam stopped, the door open behind him. "No," he said slowly. "Damn me if it isn't the most relaxing thing in the world." He grinned at Cam. "So how's your father?" "Dead."
"I'd heard that," Bally admitted.
Then why did you ask? Cam thought. He looked around the tiny room, which was located above a bakery and as a consequence was laced with the most remarkable scents of cinnamon and fleshy dinner rolls and chocolate babka.
"The answer is no," Bally said. "You can't put on weight just breathing the stuff in." He tossed his emery board into a trash can that had a picture of Larry Bird's smiling face and the exuberant green number 33 on its side. "Come in, close the door." He gestured to a chair in front of the desk. "Stay awhile."
Cam tried to collect his thoughts enough to sound dispassionate while he commissioned this man to find a woman he hardly knew yet could not function without. He was startled by Bally's laugh. "Look at what you've turned into. Your dad would have bust a gut with pride."
"Have we met?"
"Not really," Bally said. "Not quite."
Cam shifted in his chair. "Maybe this is a good point for you to tell me why you're in the files at the Wheelock station. What did you do for us in the past?"
"I'm an investigator. I investigated."
"What case?"
Bally narrowed his eyes, and then sighed. "I don't give out information like that, but seeing as how the guy who hired me-- your dad--is dead, I expect it don't much matter." He smiled beautifully, revealing even, white teeth that looked odd and out of place among the crags and pits of his thin face. "I investigated you."
Cam blinked. "You investigated me?" "That's what I said." "For my father?" He nodded.
Cam shook his head, trying to sort the information. "Why?"
Bally sighed. "Investigate probably ain't the best word. I sort of kept an eye on you. When you were jet-setting all over the world." He grinned. "Never got myself over to Paris, not to mention Nepal. Shit, I ain't even been to California."
"My father paid you to follow me?"
"I didn't really follow you. I just kept tabs from here. You can do anything with a computer and a telephone line. I tracked where you got your money, who gave it to you, whose apartments you spent the night in." Bally paused. "It wasn't that he didn't trust you," he said. "It was just that he wanted to make sure you were safe."
Cam stared down at his hands, fisted in his lap. He wondered if his mother knew about this. He wondered what, in his character, had seemed so lacking that his father would feel a need to check up on him.
He was not certain at all that Bally Beene was the right man to find Mia.
He was on the verge of standing up and leaving, when Bally's voice rang out again. "Before you think you made a mistake coming here," he said, "let me remind you how good I am at being confidential. After all, it's been fifteen years since I started tailing you, and you didn't find out."
Cam forced himself to relax. He took deep breaths of anisette, fresh yeast, and icing. "I need to find someone who has disappeared. This has nothing to do with police business."
"A personal matter," Bally said, flicking a pen out of his shirt pocket and beginning to scribble on the back of a Dunkin' Donuts napkin.
"Very personal."
"She steal something of yours?"
"No." Cam stopped. "How do you know it's a she?"
"Lucky guess," Bally said, not glancing up.
For the next hour, Cam answered so many questions about Mia that she began to take shape before his eyes, as if she were sitting perched on the desk before him. He stared at the pale V of skin that rose above her cotton sweater, the willowy bow of her neck.
"No picture?"
"Not one you can hold on to," Cam murmured, and at that, Bally looked at him curiously. "Never mind."
Bally would not promise him anything but said he'd try to find Mia. She'd leave a paper trail of some kind--charge receipts, work applications, a driver's license--and since she hadn't been running away per se, she probably would not bother to alter her name. He said he would call Cam, not at home, and refer to himself as Albert Prince.
"Prince Albert? Like Victoria's consort?" Cam said, laughing.
Bally had shrugged. "Hey," he said. "Whatever."
He walked Cam the three feet to the doo
r, urging him to try the napoleons the bakery made on his way out. "It's funny. What goes around comes around. The first case I did for your dad was to find some woman who ran away."
"Police?" Cam said, buttoning his coat.
"Personal. What did you call it? Oh, yeah--very personal."
Cam looked up. The image he had of his father was crumbling in bits and pieces. The man had had him tailed through Europe and Africa and Russia. The man had had some connection to a woman who had run away from him.
"Did you find her?"
Bally laughed. "If I didn't, you think your dad would have kept using me? Of course I found her."
Cam stared at Bally. He wouldn't know, of course, what Ian MacDonald had done after he'd handed him the address of this woman. Had he set her up in a house miles away from the one Cam had grown up in? Did he exist at home with Cam and his mother, but come to life with someone else?
"I wonder if he kept in touch with her," Cam said steadily.
Bally lifted his eyebrows. "I would think so. She's your mother."
The chimney of the house Cam had grown up in was covered from top to bottom with ivy, so recognizable from a distance that as a child Cam had believed it was a tall, furred, slumbering beast. He found Ellen in the backyard, poised at the base of the chimney, holding a pricey pair of L-shaped copper dowsing rods as she began to make her way slowly across the lawn. "Digging a new well?" Cam said, standing at the sliding door that led outside.
"Directing my inner vision," Ellen called out. Since Cam's father had died, she'd taken up the practice, joining the American Society of Dowsers and becoming so good at it that several years back, after locating accurately on a map the places where the Bosnian Serbs had been keeping their supply of missiles, she was named Dowser of the Year. She did it as a hobby now, finding water lines for the people who bought property in Wheelock, determining the sex of unborn children, hunting for lost pieces of antiquarian jewelry. "I think there's an electromagnetic field in the northwest corner here that's bothering Pepper."
Pepper was the fourteen-year-old cairn terrier, who was not bothered by doorbells or grease fires or anything else Cam could think of. "How do you know it's bugging him?"