"Mr. MacPhee," the psychiatrist said, "what brings you to me?"
Graham swallowed. "I need you to determine if Jamie knew the nature and the quality of the act he committed. Basically, if he understood the consequences of smothering his wife, if he knew it was wrong, that sort of thing."
"I don't know if I can fit my evaluation into your legal standards."
Graham felt his face burning a dull red. He had no doubt that if he'd breezed in here and said he was changing the plea, Harrison Harding would have done cartwheels to get his name connected with the case. "You thought I was coming to ask you advice about a euthanasia defense."
The doctor nodded, then sighed. "Let me tell you about myself," he said. "My wife and three-year-old daughter were shot by a sniper who went berserk at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Chicago. My daughter died immediately; my wife lasted on life support for over three years, fed through a nose tube and wearing a diaper, shrinking away until she was so unrecognizable I could not be entirely sure she was the same person. Out of this came my need to be able to control death."
Graham sat forward, transfixed. "You didn't kill her."
"That doesn't mean I didn't want to. Or that I don't think other people should have that right."
Graham picked a Rice Chex out of the mix on the table and ran his finger around its rough edges. "Then you should have quite a lot to discuss with Jamie."
For a long moment, neither man said anything. Finally the psychiatrist stood up and walked to the window. "I can't promise you anything, and I can't make judgments without having seen Mr. MacDonald," he said. "On the other hand, there are things you might consider. Impulsive behavior in Jamie's past, for instance. Is he the kind of man who packs up a suitcase and flies standby to Fiji for the hell of it? Or would he buy his tickets six months in advance for the price break? And there's also the psychiatric concept of regression, which suggests that under a period of extreme pressure the mind would revert to the state of a child."
Graham dug his notebook out of his jacket pocket and began to write down these terms. "There's a theory that suggests Jamie's personality may have been so fragile he would mentally bind himself to someone else," Harding said. "It's called a fusion fantasy. He was actually, in his mind, feeling the same pain that was affecting his wife. By killing her to end her suffering, he was ending his own suffering as well."
"That's probably right on the head," Graham said, "but I don't think it will hold up in court."
The doctor turned around, lost in thought. "In extreme cases, undue stress can lead to a psychotic episode. Think of the Vietnam vets who came back with PTSD--post-traumatic stress disorder. Some of them relive battles regularly. There have been a few instances of murder, when afflicted patients killed someone close by who, in their minds at the time, was VC."
Graham's eyebrows raised. "Will you see Jamie?"
Harding nodded. "I assumed you'd brought him for more than company on a long drive." He crossed to the door and opened it, gesturing to Jamie, who leaped to his feet like a puppy too long confined. "Mr. MacDonald," Harding said, shaking his hand. "I've been following your case."
Jamie glanced from Graham to Harding and back to Graham again. He sat down and belligerently crossed his arms over his chest. "I suppose you're going to want me to lie down and talk about my mother."
"No," Harding replied. He sat on the corner of his desk and reached for a small tape recorder, which he held out to Jamie for inspection. "You don't mind?" He pushed the record button, and let the dead air fill the room. Then he looked at Jamie. "I'm going to ask you some questions, yes," he said. "But first I'd like to tell you about my wife."
Cam was flipping through the past repair receipts of the Wheelock police cruisers when his mother walked into the station. He had not seen her since that unfortunate intrusion a week before, and he knew she had spoken to Allie since and had kept her silence. Allie had told him a few nights before that Ellen had called to say she wouldn't be able to make it to Christmas dinner; an old friend from a Vermont commune had invited her for a country celebration. "I can't say I'm not disappointed," Allie had said, "but how can we possibly compete with horse-drawn sleighs and a seance?"
Ellen stood in the doorway of his office, carrying two festively wrapped gifts. "Merry Christmas," she said, her mouth turned down at the corners.
"Merry Christmas," he murmured, keeping his eyes glued to his desk. He cleared his throat and stood up, jamming his hands into his pockets. "I heard you're going away for Christmas."
She nodded. "To the Peace of Living Community. A woman I met in a Shiatsu class a year ago set it up on her eighty-acre farm when her husband passed away." She dumped the gifts onto the desk unceremoniously. "I invited myself. I couldn't possibly look Allie in the eye," she said. "God only knows how you do it day after day."
Cam forced himself to look directly at her. "I'm going to tell her. I am. But I'm not giving Mia up, either."
"And has anyone told Mia how foolish it is to run away with a man who's run away from somebody else?" She shook her head. "History repeats."
Ellen straightened her spine and touched the two gifts sitting on Cam's desk. "The skinny one is yours," she said. "I think you should open it while I'm here."
Cam slowly ripped the jolly green paper and the circus of ribbons that garnished its top. Inside was a handmade broom with a woven thatch of straw on one end and a carved face at the top of its sassafras wood handle. "A broom?" he said.
Ellen touched the leather thong that had been punched through its neck as a loop. "You're supposed to give a broom to a new couple for luck," she said. "Well, that's fitting, because even if I wish it wasn't happening quite this way, I still want you to be happy, Cam." She pointed to the face, the tiny image of a wizened, grizzled old man. "That's a tree spirit. It guides your spiritual cleansing."
She laid a hand on her son's arm. "If God had wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason." She drew him down and took him into an embrace, so that Cam could smell the familiar curl of peppermint drops and Fantastik and Chanel No. 5 that had laced through his childhood. He gave in to the urge to sink against his mother. "Promise me," Ellen said, "that this time you'll think twice."
Mia opened the gift box to find a wool scarf bright with the Carrymuir MacDonald tartan. "Thanks," she said, looping it around her wrist. She glanced at Allie and smiled, thinking, What is this supposed to mean? Does she know?
"I didn't get you anything," Mia said. "I'm sorry." Allie grinned. "I certainly wasn't expecting anything. If it makes you feel better, consider this a Christmas bonus for taking over while I was helping out with Jamie's defense. I would have had to close the shop, otherwise."
Mia laughed nervously. It was the day after Christmas, a slow day they would use to reorganize the stock and tidy up the shop, which had been strewn with velvet ribbon and overturned boxes of votives in the mad rush to do over sixty holiday arrangements.
She had not seen Cam on Christmas Day. Only briefly, on Christmas Eve, when he'd come to pick up Allie. They were supposed to be celebrating tonight. She did not know what excuse he was planning to use. Allie began to move around the shop, picking up spools of
French-wired ribbon and a few floating disks of Oasis that had managed to get overlooked by a broom. She was wearing an obviously new Christmas outfit--pale pink pants and an oversized sweater in shades of gray and white and pink. Her hands kept coming up to her ears, fiddling with a pair of twinkling sapphires. She glanced up at Mia. "Aren't they beautiful?" she said, clearly not expecting an answer. "Cam got them for me."
"Very pretty." Mia tried to keep her voice steady. "What did you get him?"
"Oh, things." Allie reached for a broom and leaned her elbow on the handle. "Some casual shirts, a portable CD player, a guitar."
Mia glanced up. "A guitar? Does he play?"
Allie smiled. "Not yet. I got him lessons, too. I always wanted a guy who would sing love songs to me."
Mia walked
to the low table that held the bonsai trees they had started together several months before. She ran her fingers over the lines of the trees, bending sideways and down in all sorts of carefully wired, unnatural positions. "You have to trim these buds," she told Allie absently. Then she walked to the cooler and took out her yogurt. She thought of herself in the shower of Allies master bathroom, pressed against Cam and loudly laughing through rondos of "Row Row Row Your Boat." "I didn't know Cam could sing," she said.
"He can't," Allie admitted. "But I couldn't change that on my Christmas budget."
Mia had had a difficult time finding a Christmas present for Cam. She would have loved to buy him a sweater or a faded old chambray shirt, so that when she undressed him she would finally be removing something chosen for him by her own hand, but she'd realized this was impossible. How could he explain to his wife a new item in his wardrobe that Allie knew nothing about? Cam wasn't the type to do casual shopping in a mall; he would tell Allie he needed a pair of jeans and scribble down his waist size and inseam.
The same went for pieces of art, or things electronic. Mia couldn't buy him tickets to a Bruins game because she herself was a beggar for his time, and she couldn't presume to steal any more of it. She had worked herself into a fury over choosing a gift, to the point where one morning she had called in sick to the flower shop and spent the day sifting through catalogs that she'd spread over the bed at the Inn like a bright-colored quilt.
"So Jamie's trial is coming up," Mia said.
Allie stopped sweeping for a fraction of a second. "In less than a month. It's hard to believe." "That it came so soon?"
"No," Allie said. "That it's coming at all." She set the broom against the worktable and put her hands on her hips. "I'm probably going to be out most of the time between now and New Year's. Graham asked me to do some kind of telephone survey."
"A survey?" Mia spooned up the last of her yogurt and rested the cup on the large waxy leaf of a plantain. "For what?"
"For the jury. I think he's trying to outsmart the process. I'm supposed to meet with some university guy today who's going to explain it all to me."
And then I'll go home to Cam. The words were unspoken, because they were routine for Allie. Mia looked down at the table, following the whorls in the wood. She wanted what this woman had. She wanted to be able to take Cam's exits and entries so easily that her heart would not beat at the back of her throat and her palms would not itch with anticipation.
Six more hours, she told herself. Six more hours and he belongs to you again. She looked up to find Allie watching her, a strange expression written across her face. "You don't mind?" Allie asked, and for a moment Mia froze, wondering how important the question she had missed was.
"Mind?" she repeated.
"Running the shop alone." Allie smiled a little. "Being your own boss. Again."
Mia stood up and dumped her empty yogurt container down the hole in the worktable that was centered over a rhirty-two-gallon trash can. "Of course not," she said. "I'd be happy to take your place."
As a personal rule, Graham MacPhee did not believe in blind dates. He thought they revealed a flaw as deep as a mountain fissure, as if simply agreeing to one meant you were branding your forehead with the word DESPERATE. He went out when he felt like it, which was not often in this tiny town. In the back of his mind was the niggling suspicion that his mother believed he was gay.
His mother was a dental hygienist, and was always offering up the daughter or niece of one of her patients. "Lovely," she'd say over
Sunday dinner. "Magna cum laude from Skidmore." Graham had once picked up girls at a country-western bar two towns south of Wheelock, but it was a half-hour drive and one of his excursions had left him with a raging case of crabs, so he had been single and celibate for some time. For his last birthday, his mother had enrolled him in a video dating service. He had never been to their office; he threw out their newsletter.
Then his mother found Veronica Daws. She had come in with an emergency cavity. She taught third grade. She had curly blond hair and a figure, his mother said, to die for. She was willing to go out with Graham.
"That's fine," he had said, "but you don't have my consent."
So his mother had started making Veronica Daws her personal crusade. She somehow procured a picture of the girl, who was passably attractive, and mailed it to Graham return receipt requested. She brought up the girl's name during every phone conversation and meal until Graham realized it would be easier to simply go out on one blind date than have his mother on his back for the rest of his natural life.
"I heard about your trial," Veronica Daws said, playing with her Caesar salad. Through an entire appetizer and now the salad course, she had managed to shuffle her food into unlikely configurations, but Graham had yet to see her put a bite into her mouth. "It sounds pretty heavy."
Heavy? He scowled, then tried to cut the woman a little slack. How else would she be able to reduce the mass of roiling emotions that made up Jamie MacDonalds defense to a third-grader's level?
"Did he do it?" she asked.
She was looking up at him with these baby-blue eyes, raking her fork over her plate, flawlessly acting out the suggestions in whatever universal women's dating manual said that you were supposed to get the guy talking about himself. "Yes," Graham said.
Veronica shuddered. "Eww. How can you be in the same room as him?"
Graham glanced over her shoulder at the clock. "It's not like he's Charlie Manson," he said. "I don't exactly have to fear for my life."
"But still," Veronica pressed. "He killed her. I mean, I know she was dying and all, but that doesn't mean he has the right to play God."
Graham flashed her a smile. "Would you excuse me?" He walked to the rest room and stepped inside, mentally taking note of the fact that the only window was too high off the floor for him to reach and too narrow for him to ever escape through. Sighing, he sat down on a toilet seat in a stall, still wearing his trousers.
Sure, Jamie had been playing God. But then again, he'd assumed the position at Maggie's request. Graham could rationalize a hundred different ways--a life spent as a vegetable was not a life; a person in pain has the right to end that pain; an act of mercy precludes an act of murder. In the abstract, most people would agree to those statements. We were all programmed to think the best, weren't we? But that didn't cancel out the fact that Jamie MacDonald had held a pillow over his wife's face until she stopped breathing. Whatever he had believed he was doing, he had believed strongly, and these emotions were so real that he had killed another person.
In the long run, it didn't matter what label Graham pinned on these feelings. Call it love, call it fear, call it desperation, call it mercy. It could have been all or none of these. And still, Jamie MacDonald had felt it and had done the thing that the overwhelming majority of us wouldn't do.
Graham knew why Veronica Daws didn't buy it. Why the waiter had looked at him sideways when he'd first given his name at the reservations desk. It was difficult to see past the reality of a victim's body into the shady areas of motivation and controlling passions. It was tough to admit to yourself that someone else had more courage than you would in the same situation, or that it was possible to love someone in a way that you had not personally experienced.
And because it was so hard for outsiders to understand, Graham knew the only chance he had of getting Jamie off was to make him look like he'd gone crazy.
Graham flushed the toilet twice, as if this would help to clear his mind. He washed his hands and patted them dry against his thighs and decided he would use the rest of the dinner as a mock trial, trying to sway Veronica over to his side. She was young and impressionable; she could have been a member of a jury. You know, he would say when he sat down again, in law there's often a lot that does not meet the eye.
Graham mentally reviewed a hasty opening statement and walked out of the bathroom. Veronica Daws, fluffed and bubbly and waiting, immediately gave a tiny wave. Graham stra
ightened his tie and wondered if in matters of love, he'd ever be as lucky as Jamie.
Fyvel Adams, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, worked out of a closet. He said he didn't need a lot of light and space to collect and shape data.
Allie and Graham stood out in the hall. It was lit by fluorescent balls strategically hung every three feet, which gave Graham dark shadows beneath his eyes and a five o'clock beard. Allie wondered if it was just the dungeon offices, or if he'd been having trouble sleeping.
Graham had explained the principle of a jury survey on the long ride to Amherst. The final list of jurors for Jamie's case would come from a list of three hundred names, pulled from a random sampling of citizens in Berkshire County. The survey she'd be working on with Fyvel Adams would involve questioning their own sampling of citizens. Then, personality attributes of respondents who had been sympathetic would be computer-matched to demographics such as age, sex, occupation, political affiliation. Based on the results of the computer run, the characteristics of the perfect juror for Jamie's case could be outlined, and these would be used as a benchmark when it came time for Graham to select a jury.
Fyvel Adams was of a height such that his Adam's apple bobbed directly in front of Allies eyes. He seemed all throat--he was skinny and his head seemed to recede to a point at the top. He had two students working with him, thesis candidates who were happy to volunteer their services to Allie.
He spread out several papers on the floor so that Allie and Graham could read them. "We've got the basics," he said, running his fingertip down the first page. "Age, sex, religion, nationality, what have you." He flipped this over and began making a graph that neither Allie nor Graham could decipher. "Then you get the fuzzy gray statements."
Allie knelt down and read the poorly typed second page. The instructions asked respondents to rate their answers, 1 being strong agreement, 4 being strong disagreement. She glanced at the first statement: In certain circumstances, a person should be allowed to break the law. She glanced at Graham.