In his black-and-white, Cam turned the volume down on the radio so that he could hear the pebbles catching in the tires as he patrolled his town. He didn't have to worry about missing a call; his code leaped out at him no matter how low the dispatcher's voice was. He drove by his house for the third time that night, seeing the lights on in the dining room and the glow of the television through a picture window.
Thanksgiving wasn't a bad one. Christmas got depressing; all those old folks setting fires in their kitchens or locking themselves out of their houses so they'd have someone to talk to, even if it was only a police officer. That was what he hated most about his job: he could not pretend, like the other citizens of Wheelock, that it was a quiet little New England town. He knew who abused his children, who beat his wife, who pushed drugs in front of the middle school, and who was most likely to be drunk at ten a.m. on a Wednesday. He knew his town like a mother knows her child.
When he got tired of prowling Main Street, Cam pulled into the lot of the Wheelock Inn and turned on his radar. He thought of Mia and wondered if she was upstairs, if she was with Kafka, if she was doing anything special for the holiday.
If she was thinking of him.
When the radio crackled, he automatically set the car into drive. The sound of static translated into a coded language he understood effortlessly. A robbery, in progress, at the minimart.
It didn't become any easier with time. Cam floored the gas pedal and went speeding down Main to the gas station on the edge of town, wondering if he'd catch the bastards before they lit out. The problem was, these were always the assholes who shot first and thought about it later.
He'd responded silently for obvious reasons, and shut off his reds as he came within a mile of the minimart. Through the plate glass Cam could see Gordo Stuckey, the teenager who worked there most afternoons, prone on the floor, his hands jerking spasmodically with his sobs.
Where the hell was his backup? C.J. was on, somewhere, and Wheelock wasn't that big a town.
Pulling his Smith and Wesson from its leather casing, he held it arm's length in front of him and slunk along the front of the building. There were two men inside, one overweight and eating a Twinkie while he pinned Gordo to the floor with his gun, the other shoveling money out of the cash register into a Friends of the Wheelock Library tote bag.
Pointing his gun at the guy standing over Gordo, Cam eased his way in through the door. There are two of them, some voice in his head said. There are two of them, but you don't know if the second one has a gun, and C.J. is coming.
"Put down your weapon," Cam said.
The man laughed. "I don't fucking think so."
As Cam took a step forward, the man who had been emptying the register raised another pistol and leveled it at Cam's head. "Maybe you should listen to him, no?"
Cam raised his hands as the one at the register came forward to relieve him of his own weapon. Fuck fuck fuck, he thought. And then a non sequitur: But it's Thanksgiving.
The man walked around the counter, past the coffee machine with the Styrofoam cups and lids and the milk decanter that always leaked onto Cam's regulation black boots. He slipped and landed on his back, and the gun went sailing under the metal shelving that held the rolls and bread.
"Drop it," Cam yelled, pointing his gun at the second man. On the floor, Gordo was whimpering.
He felt, rather than saw, the moment when the man went to pull the trigger. There was a displacement of the air around him, then an alteration of pressure that compressed his chest and burst upon his eardrums.
His own shot landed in the man's shoulder and sent the robber's bullet wild, shattering the tempered glass window of the minimart into a conflagration of spiderwebs. "Don't move," Cam shouted, as the accomplice inched toward the rolls.
By the time CJ. arrived, Cam had them sitting back to back, cuffed to the newspaper rack. "Shit," C.J. said. He looked Cam up and down. "Shit," he said again.
"There's a gun under the bread aisle." Cam wearily rubbed the back of his neck. "Ambulance is on its way." He nodded to the back storeroom. "I'll impound the car. Gordo Stuckey'll come down to the station to give a report after he changes."
"Pissed himself?"
Cam nodded. C.J. walked toward the two prisoners. "I'll take them to the lockup." He knelt in front of the wounded man, who spat. Then he looked up at Cam. "Were you aiming for the shoulder, or did you miss?"
Cam snorted and walked out to the black-and-white. It had been all of seven minutes.
He was still dazed as he pulled into the station. He had to file a report, he had to account for the discharge of his gun, he had a million and one things to do now that these two lowlifes had decided to infiltrate his town on Thanksgiving. But instead, he called into the dispatcher and announced that he was going home, that C.J. would be back with the prisoners shortly. He suggested calling one of the part-time cops in for the rest of the night, just in case these guys had friends.
Then Cam walked out to his car, which was parked behind the station. He sat down and gripped his hands to the wheel as his entire body started to shake. His vision bobbed and his shoulders grew rigid. He briefly thought of his house, overrun with people he had no desire to see, bright and holiday-happy. With great care, he drove less than fifteen miles an hour down the road to the Wheelock Inn.
Mia opened the door and the cat slipped from her arms. As she reached across the threshold to grab Kafka back, she noticed that Cam was trembling, a violent, frantic shaking that she had never seen before on a grown man.
She dropped the cat, who ran down the hall toward the ice machine. "What happened?" she asked, drawing Cam into the room. She was expecting the worst: My mother died. I have cancer. Allie knows.
Cam sank down on the bed and Mia crawled behind him, cradling him as best she could in spite of his size. He told her about the dispatcher's call, about how he'd been sitting in the parking lot just below her window, about the robber with the braided tail of hair and the way Gordo had shivered on the floor and the spill of milk which had ruined his shoes and now had saved his life.
When there were no more words, Cam opened his eyes. Mia was lying on the bed facing him, curled into a fetal position just as he was. Her arms were tangled with his, her feet were caught behind his ankles. He was reminded of those Chinese ring puzzles that you would work on for hours to pull free. Just try, he thought. You just try.
With the fear gone, his body seemed too big for his skin. He was bursting. He rolled Mia onto her back and kissed her, crushing himself against her and driving his tongue into her mouth. It was not the gentle lovemaking he was used to with her; it was the quickness and fury he'd always had with Allie, and somewhere in the back of his mind he noticed how easily, in certain dangers, the lines could be crossed.
He never took off his shirt. Mia tightened herself around him, stroking his hair and squirreling closer until the rhythm became a slow rock. At the last moment, he pulled out of her, spilling across the neat white sheets of the bed.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Mia smiled at him. "Imagine. A cop who's just no good at protection."
He brushed her curls off her face. "I missed you." He leaned down to kiss her neck, and shifted slightly away from her. His finger reached down to trace an angry mark over her breast, a welt left by the badge that had been on his shirt, digging into her skin.
Mia curled her way off the bed and walked into the bathroom. She stared at the welt. "It doesn't hurt," she assured him. "It'll go away." But it remained livid and red for the three hours Cam stayed in her room, through the second time they made love and a long, hot soak in the tub. In the end, before he left, she pulled on her thick, gray sweatshirt again; as if that might hide it, as if either of them might forget that she had been branded his.
THIRTEEN
It had taken Graham MacPhee over ten minutes to get up the nerve to call the Chief of Police. Ten minutes of rubbing his palms against his expensive trousers and getting Hannah's voice on
the phone and then hanging up. He now had less than two months left before trial, during which he'd be interviewing witnesses. Cam would be called by the prosecution--there was no doubt about that--but Graham wasn't leaving anything to chance. If he could just get a foot in the door, he could feel Cam out about his cousin. Every good defense attorney knew that even when you cross-examined, you never asked a question you didn't already know the answer to.
"MacDonald." Cam's voice was as blunt and abrupt as the rest of him.
"Chief, this is Graham MacPhee." He took a deep breath. "I was wondering if you'd have the time to meet me for a few minutes."
Cam was silent for a second. "Is this about what I think it is?"
Graham nodded before he remembered that Cam wasn't able to see him do it, "Jamie's case."
"Not in this lifetime," Cam said, and he hung up the phone.
Well, that was no surprise. Graham sighed and tipped his chair back, propping his feet on his desk. The police and the DA were always in each other's pockets in situations like this.
Normally, that wouldn't have bothered him. The truth was he had a copy of Cam's arrest report and the notes the chief had made on Jamie's arrival in town. He had all the statements of the evidence taken at the crime scene. Hell, he'd been given a duplicate of the Wheelock police file, courtesy of Audra Campbell.
He remembered being in high school, when Cam had busted him for partying at the construction site. "Fuck you," he had said over and over as Cam cuffed him, pushed him into the station, and opened the door to the lockup. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." Cam had only laughed at Graham. "Believe me, you can find someone you'd consider a lot more pleasurable."
Cam had known that Graham fully understood he'd done something wrong. He didn't feel that Graham had to be punished, really; he just had to be reminded of it, scared by it.
Graham thought of this as a strange kind of justice, but an honest one. And now, years later, Cam had come into Graham's office to hire him for his cousin, a man he'd booked for murder hours before. Yet Cam had asked for anonymity. Maybe because he truly thought a public defender wouldn't do a polished job; maybe because he was rooting for the underdog in spite of his support for the DA's office. Either way, it meant that no matter how stiff-necked and uppity Cam got when it came to this case, he had to have some sympathy for Jamie; he had to care how this all turned out in the end.
That's what Graham had to do: show the jury that Cam was just as worried about Jamie as they ought to be.
Graham stared at the black modular phone on his desk. He glanced out the window toward the police station. If he kept careful watch, he could arrange to accidentally bump into Cam when he went to the coffee shop for a late lunch; he could happen to be on the street when Cam arrived at the station in the morning.
Or he could simply use the best weapon in his arsenal. With a triumphant smile, Graham picked up the phone and dialed the number of Glory in the Flower.
Allie unwound a long length of copper wire from her bonsai tree, letting it straggle from the branches in an uneven kink. "Look at that," she cried, tugging at Cam's shirt. "It's taking hold!"
Cam glanced at the little tree. "That's something," he said noncommittally, "if you like that kind of stuff."
Allie carefully began to rewrap the wire over parts of the trunk and branches that hadn't rubbed raw from the last placement. "Well, as a matter of fact, I do. Mia's going to be very proud of me."
"Mia's going to be very proud of you for what?" The voice came through the back door of the flower shop, and then Mia herself came around the corner, carrying an armful of holly and ivy and pine boughs. She let her eyes dart to Cam and slide back to the worktable. Then she dropped her bushel onto the floor, brushing the needles off her jacket. "I hate Christmas," she said. "I hate all the sap."
Allie nodded. "You can't get if off your hands, and you have to work with it all the time." She put her hand on Cam's shoulder and with her other hand executed a flourish. "Check out my maple."
Mia ran her fingers over the line of the branch. "Very nice." Out of the corner of her eye she saw Allies palm brush the back of Cam's neck, and she forced herself to walk away.
Cam took Allies hand away under the pretense of holding it, and then stood up and stepped back. He did not understand how he had come to this--being parceled up between the two women, so that Allie had a hold on certain things--like his name and his house--and Mia had a hold on others--his mood, the memories of this shop, the spot on the back of his neck that Allie had been rubbing a moment before.
He did not like coming to the flower shop, but he did it at least once a day so that he could see Mia. He had started telling Allie that he was doubling up on shifts, working eight hours Wednesday and then midnight-to-eight the next morning as well because one of the part-timers had moved and he was forced to fill in; but he spent that time instead with Mia, making love in her hotel bed with Kafka watching them from a perch on the television console, his eyes wide and yellow with knowledge.
Often he went to bed after an early dinner on Wednesday, waking up at eleven to find Allie pressed closed to him and those stained-glass daffodils dull and flat in the window before him. He'd dress quietly and drive to the Wheelock Inn, but he'd park on the side and take an employees' staircase up to the second floor, where Mia's room was. He did this so seamlessly that after several weeks, his duplicity was second nature, and it did not seem possible that his life had ever been any other way.
Allie began to sort through the holly that Mia had dumped onto the floor. She made two piles, one for greens and one for greens with berries. "Wreaths," she sighed. "I'm going to be doing wreaths all day."
She glanced up at Cam. Graham had called her a few days ago and asked for her help again, but this wasn't nearly as simple as rounding up the details of Jamie's life in Cummington. He had explained to her how he was questioning prospective witnesses, and how she couldn't really be one since she didn't have firsthand knowledge of the incident or of Jamie's character before the incident. But, he had said, she knew Cam better than anyone else. And if she could get a bead on how, exactly, Cam was feeling about Jamie in the days leading up to the trial, it would make the defense a lot smoother.
"You're asking me to spy," she had said, laughing.
Graham cleared his throat. "No, I'm asking you to infiltrate."
He did not tell her why it was important that she barrage Cam with reminders about Jamie, only that it was necessary to Graham's line of questioning at the trial. Still, Allie wasn't stupid; she assumed it had something to do with guilt. And it wouldn't be difficult to work Jamie into their dinner conversations.
She took a sprig of holly, complete with three berries, and tucked it into the buttonhole of Cam's breast pocket. "There. Very dapper."
Cam looked down at it. "I've got to go now."
"Oh," she said, tapping her finger to her lips. "I remember what I was supposed to ask you. Jamie wanted to know if you have one of those adjustable ratchet sets."
"Jamie wanted to know that?" He frowned. "Is something broken at Angus's, then?"
Allie shook her head. "Not that I know of. He's just trying to come up with Christmas gifts, I think." She set herself to the task of pulling the lower leaves from several bunches of holly. "He was really set on getting you something you need."
"I don't need anything from him. I don't want anything from him." Cam pulled the holly out from his buttonhole and rolled the stem between his fingers.
"Scrooge," Allie chided. "He's your cousin."
He set his cap on his head and pulled the brim down to his eyebrows. "I don't know if I'll see you later," he said, deliberately changing the subject. From the corner of his eye, he noticed Mia outside on the front porch of the shop, battling with several long whips of curly willow as she twisted them into a tidy circle. "It's Thursday."
Allie nodded and turned to the ivy, spread at her feet. She began to gather it up. "I'll probably be here until four in the morning myself," she sai
d. "You don't know how many orders I already have for next week."
Cam knew next week was Christmas, which wouldn't have ordinarily been a problem, but Allie would be going off with Graham for several day trips to Cummington, to meet with the witnesses she'd dug up on Jamie's behalf. Which meant Mia would be left here all alone to make up over fifty different wreaths and centerpieces and holiday baskets. Which meant that Mia would be left here all alone.
Feeling much better, Cam put his hand on the doorknob. Mia was still outside; he could see her breath steaming on the cold air. He turned his attention to his wife. "You'd better get something for Jamie. I mean, I don't want to be caught empty-handed."
He had already turned his back, so he did not see Allie's bright, wide smile. "I'll take care of it," she said. "Don't you worry."
Hugo Huntley led Graham into a chamber filled with caskets.
X X "I'm sorry," he said for the fifth time, "but we have very little room when there's a wake going on."
Graham would have gladly postponed his interview with the funeral director/medical examiner if he'd known there was going to be a wake in progress. However, overwhelmed by details, Hugo hadn't called to cancel the meeting, and so Graham had found himself offering his condolences to a tiny weeping woman. Now he was in the selection room. At twenty-six, Graham hadn't given much thought to dying, not even considering Jamie MacDonalds case. It was something that happened to you when you were much older and much more finished with living. He had never contemplated securing a family plot in the cemetery; he had never even realized that coffins came in different shapes and sizes and colors, as individually suited to the deceased as the clothes in which they were buried.
"Mr. Huntley," Graham began, "I'm trying to get a bigger picture of the events leading up to Maggie MacDonalds death. And I understand that you provided the autopsy report for the DA's office."
"Oh." Hugo leaned against one of the coffins. "I'd be happy to tell you anything I can."
Graham breathed a sigh of relief: a witness for the prosecution who was going to be cooperative under cross-examination. "What can you tell me about the cause of Maggie MacDonalds death?"