Ellen smiled at her son over her shoulder. "He just ain't like he used to be."
Cam rolled his eyes and walked casually across the lawn to watch his mother in action. She held the copper rods at waist level, like a pair of six-shooters, closing her eyes periodically when one of them twitched toward the other. As Cam got closer, the rods began to shake and cross. "Cam," Ellen chided, "you're ruining this for me."
"Because I think it's a crock?"
Ellen sighed and transferred the rods so that they were both in one hand. "Because you've got too much energy around you. It's all I can tap into when you're so close."
He crossed his arms over his chest, and not for the first time Ellen MacDonald looked up at her son and remembered the day she had gone to spank him and realized he stood a foot taller than she. "What's the matter with you?" she asked.
"You tell me. You're the one with the sixth sense."
Ellen smirked at him. "That's no challenge. Any halfwit can tell when you're angry, Cam. There's a big black cloud that follows you around."
In spite of himself, Cam glanced over his shoulder. He turned back to the sweet rhythm of his mother's laughter. Why had she run
away?
"I got some interesting news today. I met with a man named Balmoral Beene."
"Oh really?" Ellen said, starting back up to the house. "Do you want lunch or something?"
Cam followed her in. "Mom, you know who he is?"
"Of course, Cam." Ellen swiftly pulled a can of tuna from the shelf and opened it for Pepper, who liked Starkist more than any tabby cat Cam had ever seen. "He's a PI your father used from time to time. Is there something going on at the station?"
Cam froze, realizing too late that bringing up Bally's name would of course make his mother ask what he needed a PI for in the first place. "Some case," he said noncommittally. "Bally told me Dad used him to check up on me when I was traveling."
"Well, yes. I told him to."
Cam leaned forward. "You told him to?"
"Of course," she said easily. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."
"I was twenty. I wasn't a kid."
Ellen shrugged. "You'll always be my kid." She opened the refrigerator and picked out a Tupperware container full of something thick and brown. Dumping it onto a plate, she moved toward the microwave. "You sure you don't want some? Stroganoff. Made with tofu."
"How come you ran away?" Cam blurted out.
Ellen dropped the plate so it rang against the Formica. Little splats of gravy landed on her shirt. "Who told you that?"
"Bally," Cam pressed. "He said it was the first case Dad ever asked him to take."
Ellen stuffed the plate into the microwave and began to set the table. With slow, graceful movements she pulled two place mats from a rack on the counter and centered them in front of the kitchen chairs. She added napkins, forks, and knives. She had just picked two goblets off a shelf when she turned around to face Cam. "Well," she said, "for starters, I'm really fifty-two, not fifty-three."
Cam's jaw dropped. "Do you think I give a damn if you lie about your age? I find out this morning that my parents didn't trust me, and if that isn't enough, I've got all kinds of assumptions running through my head about you being forced to marry Dad--"
"Cam," Ellen said quietly, "think back. Do you really believe I didn't want to marry your father?"
Cam tried to remember his parents interacting in any way whatsoever, and the first image that came to mind was once when, as a five-year-old, he had wakened from a nightmare and wandered into their bedroom in the middle of the night. Even in the dark, he could see the lump in the bed writhing and moaning. Frozen, he'd thought he heard his mother's cry, and that was when he realized the horrible thing was eating his parents alive.
He'd crept to the side of the bed, ready to scream down the house, and saw his father under the covers. It was some kind of game. He watched for a minute, then tapped the nearest limb beneath the sheet. "Can I play?" he asked, wondering why, as his parents began to laugh, he hadn't been invited to participate.
"Listen to me," Ellen said. "Why in the name of God would I go around telling people I was a year older than I really am?" She sat down in the chair that had been hers as long as Cam could remember. "And if you'd ever consider giving me a grandchild, you'd figure out that a baby born two months early is never, ever ten pounds."
Cam's hands fell to his sides. "You ran away because you got
pregnant?"
"I ran away because I got pregnant and because your father thought I was eighteen. He was eleven years older; I didn't think he'd appreciate being shackled to someone like me, however entertaining I had been at the time. And we're talking about 1959, where men who weren't as honorable as Ian still did the honorable thing. So I figured I'd save him the trouble. Except he found me-- thanks to Bally Beene. I turned seventeen on the day we got married. In Maryland, where we could fudge my age and didn't need my parents' consent."
Cam stared at his mother in a whole different light. "Dad didn't care?"
"Oh, he cared a great deal. He cared about me and he cared about the fact that, as tiny as you were at the time, you existed. He didn't speak to me for a week after the wedding because I'd been stupid enough not to confide in him."
The microwave beeped. Cam crossed toward it, removed the steaming plate, and set it down in front of his mother. "You hot little number," he said, grinning.
Ellen speared a piece of tofu and blew on it to cool it down.
"You going to tell me what you've got Bally working on?" she asked.
Cam shook his head, still smiling. "You'll have to hightail it down to the station and dowse the files to see if you can figure it out. Confidential police business."
"I married one chief and gave birth to another," Ellen said. "Don't give me this garbage."
"It's just some stuff," Cam hedged.
"As long as it has nothing to do with Jamie. He's got trouble enough."
"Digging up dirt on a murderer isn't my job. I'll leave that to the DA."
"Mercy killer," Ellen said, "not a murderer."
"Seventeen, eighteen," Cam murmured, "a matter of semantics."
Ellen glared at him.
"Sorry," Cam said.
She stood and began to bustle around the kitchen, rinsing her plate and her silverware and settling it into the dishwasher. Even the soft tap of her sneakers on the white floor was familiar, and Cam began to remember this room as a place of light and music, waffles burning black at the edges on a rainy Saturday morning while he clapped his hands to his parents' impromptu dance around the kitchen table. Even when the radio was turned off, he used to walk into the kitchen in his parents' house and hear its presence, its energy. Cam realized that he did not think of the kitchen of his own house this way, like it was a heart that pumped life out to the other rooms. When he and Allie were together in their kitchen-- chopping vegetables, or making coffee, or even eating--he was mostly aware of the quiet.
"Allie back yet?"
Cam nodded.
His mother did not turn around, but that had never stopped her from being able to see him. "That must be nice for you."
"It was," Cam said. "It is." He started back to the table to pick up the untouched setting that his mother must have laid out for him.
"Oh," Ellen said over the stream of water in the sink. "You can just leave that."
"I told you I didn't want any. You didn't have to set a place."
Ellen shut off the water and wiped her hands on the dish towel. "It isn't for you," she said, a blush stealing over the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, taking away the lines and the history until Cam could clearly see what she had looked like as a girl of seventeen. "It's for your father."
Cam started. "Dad?" He glanced at his mother's copper dowsing rods, carefully packed back in their padded wooden carrying case. An interest in New Age phenomena was one thing; channeling was quite another. He opened his mouth to tell her not to get her hopes up too
high.
"It's not what you think," Ellen said. "I just thought that if he was planning on returning for any period of time, it would probably be to me, and it would probably be during a meal. My guess is Thursdays, when I make chicken pot pie."
Cam fingered the fringed edge of the place mat, picturing his father's strong body filling the space that surrounded his chair. He remembered how his father would salt everything without even tasting it, until one day his mother cooked a chicken with an entire box of Morton's to teach him a lesson. He remembered his mother serving vegetables onto his father's plate, a cloud of steam curling the edges of Ellen's hair while Ian held her close with a hand slipped around her thighs.
"Has he come yet?" Cam heard himself ask.
"Not that I've noticed," Ellen admitted. She moved beside Cam and placed her hand over his, on top of the place mat's fringe. In the reflection of the plate, Cam could see their faces, and the slight distortion made by hope. "But that doesn't mean he's not on his way."
Graham opened the package with Jamie in his office. It had arrived beaten and battered. Jamie fiddled nervously with the arms of the chair while Graham attacked the yellowed tape and brown paper wrapping of the box. "You don't think it's a bomb, do you?" Jamie asked.
"It's not making any noise," Graham said, although the very idea---a bomb, delivered to him on behalf of a client--was so incredibly dramatic he couldn't help but revel in the thought for a moment. He grunted and ripped away the last of it to reveal an ordinary Bible, the kind found in hotel rooms. He handed it to Jamie.
As they passed it over the desk, a note fell from the frontispiece. Jamie unfolded it and began to read it aloud.
Repent, it said. Our loving God will forgive you. Remember Isaiah, 1:18---"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." I know you will pray for forgiveness during your trial, may this Bible begin your salvation.
Jamie crumpled the note in his fist. "I haven't forgiven God for letting Maggie get sick," he said. "So why the hell should He bother to forgive me?"
During the interminable night after Maggie asked Jamie to kill her, he must have slept for at least five minutes. He did not remember falling asleep--he thought he watched every digital flip of the clock--but at one point Jamie opened his eyes and ran his hand over Maggie's side of the bed and came up with nothing.
He'd shot upright, thinking, She's already gone. Then, as his reason returned, he got to his feet and wandered out of the bedroom. He checked the bathroom first, but it was empty; then he went downstairs to the kitchen, where Maggie sometimes went to brew herself some tea when the pain was getting worse. It too was deserted. Jamie had stumbled through the dark house, hitting his shins and his elbows on unlikely pieces of furniture. He stuck his head outside and whispered her name. Then he started back to the bedroom.
Jamie was coming upstairs when he noticed the line of light ribboning from his study. He turned the knob and silently swung open the door to find Maggie standing in front of his home computer terminal, dressed in her bathrobe, wearing the HMD and the glove that were attached to the system.
He knew she would not be able to hear him with the HMD's audio feedback in her ears, so he did not bother to call her name. Instead he walked forward until he was standing just behind her, watching her interact with one of his old programs.
It made absolutely no sense, but then again, nothing had that night, starting with Maggie's request to be killed. She was not a computer jock like he was--she wasn't even an aficionado. She went so far as to refuse to dust in Jamie's office because she was afraid of crossing wires or upsetting the delicate technological balance. In the years they'd been married, Jamie could not ever remember seeing Maggie voluntarily enter his study, much less boot up one of his virtual reality programs.
He peered at the screen. What he was seeing was far different, of course, from what Maggie was seeing, since she had the HMD on. But even in two dimensions Jamie was able to tell that Maggie had found the disk for the program he'd written years ago, the architectural walk-through for which he'd digitized an image of her body. She was somewhere in the middle of an elementary school, determinedly stalking the halls. "Come on," she said softly, under her breath. "There has to be one around here somewhere."
Jamie frowned and watched her stretch out her gloved hand to open the door of a faculty bathroom. He had designed it with female professionals in mind, complete with a full-length mirror on the wall beside the paper towel dispenser. Maggie stepped in front of it, so that she had a clear picture of her own face and form. Except that her body was the one which had been digitized in 1993 before she'd gotten sick.
He heard her draw in her breath and, with her bare hand, untie the sash of her robe. Then, with her gloved hand, she began to stroke herself. Jamie knew what she was seeing, because the same mirror image he could make out on the small computer screen was what Maggie was visualizing through the HMD. But Maggie, who was also wearing all the trappings of a VR system, would not only look different to herself, but feel different as well.
Jamie stepped closer, until he was within arm's reach. Maggie's hand, in the specialized glove, hovered just centimeters from her own skin, yet he knew she was feeling the heat and resilience of a real body. Her hand skimmed over her ribs, toward her collarbone, cupping the air above her mastectomy scar. On the screen, in the mirror, she was holding her healthy breast.
Beneath the goggles of the HMD, Maggie was smiling.
Jamie felt the backs of his eyes burn. And he, who had dedicated a career to creating virtual environments that did not allow for intrusions, committed the cardinal sin of invading the periphery. He slid his arms around Maggie's waist and retied the sash of her robe. He reached for the glove and tugged it off her hand and laced his fingers with Maggie's; squeezing until there was pain, until she had no choice but to remember that out here, still waiting, was the real world.
ELEVEN
Audra Campbell, Assistant District Attorney, pretended to converse with one of the Pittsfield Superior Court clerks while instead focusing her concentration on the small but dedicated clot of media that was hovering outside the building. A grand jury hearing was not usually cause for much press--ninety-nine percent of the cases presented to an impaneled jury ended in indictment--but this one had attracted the papers and the local TV stations. A little ambition could go a long, long way, and Audra meant to ride Jamie MacDonalds filthy coattails all the way to a promotion.
"It's like this," she said, turning to the clerk whose name she had already filed away for a future favor. She balanced a pencil over the backs of her knuckles, hooking her middle finger over it. The clerk had been trying the stupid bar trick but could not seem to master it; Audra squeezed her fingers and the pencil snapped in two.
"Don't think about it as the power of your strength," Audra said. "It's all in the strength of your power." She smiled brilliantly at the young man and turned away, nodding at the grand jury she had helped select some weeks ago as they filed through the door of the small conference room.
There were twenty-three of them, all of whom had at least one distinguishing characteristic to fix them in Audra's mind: a handlebar mustache, a pregnant belly, shifty black badger eyes. The foreman sported a pug nose with uneven nostrils; she couldn't have forgotten that if she had tried. She grinned at him as he stepped through the doorway.
The witnesses she had subpoenaed were sitting in a row outside the conference room. Hugo Huntley, the mortician, sat alone doing a crossword puzzle. The police chief and the underling who had investigated MacDonalds room at the Inn were bent together, heads nearly touching and dressed alike, forming in tandem a mirror image.
The defendant, of course, and the defense attorney could be in Bermuda or orbirting the moon, for all she knew. In a strange and-- for her side--wonderful twist of justice, the defendant had absolutely nothing to do with a grand jury proceedi
ng. Even in a crime where someone was unjustly accused, at a grand jury hearing the defendant was not allowed to be present.
With the high surge of anticipation burning a patch down her spine, Audra Campbell stepped into the conference room and closed the door.
They're going to indict me," Jamie said glumly, sitting on a bag of Blue Seal dog food and watching Angus go about his morning chores. Graham MacPhee, who had come over to offer emotional support on a day that was bound to be difficult, was leaning against the garage, trying not to get dog shit on his expensive Bally loafers.
"A grand jury indicts everyone. If the prosecution said a ham sandwich had committed a murder, hell, they'd indict a ham sandwich," Graham said. "It isn't a personal thing, and it doesn't have any bearing on the trial." He watched Angus move out of the way of a mean black Rottweiler. "The best thing we can do is just take the information Allie gave us, and start preparing your defense."
Angus had been given the dubious honor of being Wheelock's dogcatcher. Cam had offered him the position to keep him busy when he'd first dragged him all the way over from Scotland, and Angus took to it eagerly, constructing a large wire kennel in his backyard and diligently roaming the back roads of Wheelock to find unlicensed, uncollared dogs.
Today, there were two mutts, the Rottweiler, a fluffy thing that looked to Jamie like a bichon frise, and a fat Dalmatian, all barking furiously to get Angus's attention as he calmly poured dog food into several large bowls. Angus locked up the gate of the kennel, pulled a small pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and lit his pipe, taking a deep draw before turning to Graham and Jamie. "Having a ceilidh, are ye?"
"No, not quite a party," Graham said. "Jamie's not in a festive mood."
"Aye, well, ye should have had your hearing at Carrymuir, laddie. Scots justice comes down to 'guilty,' 'not guilty'--but there's a third verdict, too--'not proven.' " He paused for a moment, then turned sharp eyes on Jamie. "Sort of means 'not guilty--but dinna do it again.' "
Jamie kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot. "Not much chance of that."
"Jamie," Graham said, "we're going to get you off." He grinned. "Scot-free, if you'll pardon the expression. You won't have this hanging over your head for the rest of your life."