American Express had a credit card receipt with Jamie's signature at The Rooster's Comb, the swanky restaurant where they'd had dinner Saturday night. The manager of the Red Lion Inn di-recred Graham to the newlywed couple whose wedding Maggie and Jamie had crashed, who of course remembered them, and were surprised to hear that the couple who could jitterbug like professionals were not friends of either of the families.
Graham had had a difficult time finding eyewitnesses for Sunday, the day Jamie had taken his wife out to memorize the world. A hot dog vendor who had a spot at the park near the mountains where Jamie said they had been might have seen them, but he couldn't truly remember. Bud Spitlick had been mowing his lawn when the MacDonalds returned to their house at about five o'clock that night.
On Monday, a gas station attendant in Cummington had filled up the tank with unleaded and had chatted with Jamie as he wiped the windshield. He remembered Mr. MacDonald saying they were taking an impromptu vacation--remembered, in particular, the word "impromptu" because he hadn't known what it meant. The Wheelock Inn register had Maggie's signature, on behalf of Mr. And Mrs., entered at 11:15 a.m. The bartender in the lounge broke down when Graham asked if he remembered selling Jamie the champagne, saying he couldn't help but wonder if he'd sort of aided things along in the murder by getting Jamie drunk.
The owner of the pizzeria did not remember seeing Jamie MacDonald that Monday night, but then again he did not speak much English, so he might not have understood Graham's question.
On Tuesday afternoon Jamie had driven to the police station, as the police chief and Allie and any number of town eyewitnesses could verify.
But from Monday night to Tuesday afternoon, Graham's board was a blank.
He stuffed the remainder of the doughnut into his mouth and traced his finger over those gaping white holes on the dry-erase board. There was no telling what exactly had gone on in the room at the Wheelock Inn between eight-thirty Monday night and one p.m. Tuesday afternoon. Jamie and Maggie could have had a vicious, sniping fight. Jamie's mind could have snapped. Or Jamie might have simply been saying goodbye.
Graham hung his head and rubbed his hand over his hair, making it stand up in unruly tufts. He knew that, like his own, the jury's collective eye would be drawn not to the tangle of proof scribbled all over the board, but to those glaring white spaces. More than any tale he could weave as a defense, those blank spots invited interpretation. Everyone loved a mystery; everyone loved to be involved in the process of writing the story.
He pictured the unknown faces of the jurors, inventing their own versions of the last night of Maggie's life, and he wondered if even one of them would approximate the truth.
Cam had had every intention of taking his time at the card store to find something just right for Allie, but the DUI Zandy brought in for booking started throwing things off the counters and shoving Zandy and the other officer on duty, until it took all three men to physically restrain the asshole and get him into a lockup.
"I can't fucking believe this," Cam said to Zandy. "How come the crazy ones get arrested on the weekends when we can't ship them out for a bail hearing?"
The other officer, Maclver, was a middle-aged, part-time cop who'd worked for years with Cam's father. "Same reason your kids get sick when the doctor's office is closed," he said. "Just to piss you off."
The prisoner began to hurl his body hard against the door of the cell. "Hey!" Cam yelled. "You want to take it easy?" He glanced at the custody report and turned to Zandy and Maclver. "You two okay here, or do you want me to call in a backup?"
"The National Guard would be nice," Zandy muttered as a gob of spit hit the inside surface of the Flexon. "Or a few sacrificial natives to feed him for dinner."
The prisoner was as tall as Cam himself and twice as meaty. Cam wasn't worried about the man getting out of the cell, but he'd certainly be a pain in the ass. "I can call the courthouse," he suggested. "Maybe we can get someone out here to set bail and ask the sheriff to ship him to the county lockup."
Zandy shot Cam an appreciative look. "Whatever. Just make sure you leave in time to get down to New Braintree."
Cam had told Hannah and the other officers that he was attending a training seminar. He knew no one would doubt his word if he said there was a special weekend meeting for police chiefs on gun safety. With a nod, he went to his office and sat down.
He called the courthouse and got a court clerk to round up a bail officer; then he set the phone back in its receiver. He had meant to call Mia to finalize plans, but time had gotten away from him this morning, and by now she'd be at the flower shop--or even on her way. With a sigh, he stood up and walked out of his office and locked the door behind him. "They say they'll send someone out by the end of the day," Cam said to Zandy. "You want me to call from the road?"
Zandy shook his head. "Contrary to what you believe, Chief, we can function without you here." He grinned and nodded toward the door. "Go on."
Cam almost drove to Allies shop, until he remembered her Valentine's Day gift. Making a U-turn in the middle of Main, he headed for the card store on the other side of town. He turned on the radio and sang along with Van Morrison. As he pulled into the parking lot, the midday news was coming on in the announcer's nasal drone.
Cam glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Noon. Shit.
He ran into the card store, grabbed a box of candy, pulled the first card with a heart off the shelf, and drove fifteen miles over the speed limit back to Glory in the Flower.
Allie was bent over her bonsai tree, carefully rewrapping the painstakingly twisted limbs. "Hi," she said, her eyes fixed right on the bag in his hands.
"Where's Mia?" he asked, the way he had practiced a hundred times that morning.
Allie shrugged, wiping her hands on her jeans and moving closer to Cam, her hands hovering about the paper bag like honeybees. "She asked for some time off. Her aunt's sick again."
Cam nodded in sympathy. "That means you'll be all alone this weekend. You gonna be okay?"
She smiled. "I can function quite well without you, thank you very much," she said, and she reached into the bag.
Cam sat down on one of the work stools. "That's the second time someone's said that to me today."
Allie ran her thumb beneath the sealed edge of the envelope. "And what does that tell you?" She pulled the card out of the envelope, red with a big pink heart on the front. HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, DAD, she read. She opened the card. I MAY BE DIFFICULT, BUT AT LEAST I'M CUTE.
He had signed it Love, Cam. Thinking she must have been mistaken, Allie closed the card again. HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, DAD. "Is this a joke?" she asked, smiling tentatively.
Cam stared at her. "What are you talking about?"
She waved the card beneath his nose. "Happy Valentine's Day, Dad?"
Cam snatched the card from her hand. He scowled at the front and passed a hand down his face, rubbing his eyes. "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."
Allie blinked at him. He wasn't thinking? He couldn't even read a stupid card to see what it said before he bought it for her?
She looked down at her hands, still stained with soil and scratched by sharp ends of copper wire. She didn't want him to leave in the middle of an argument. She bent over the bonsai tree so that Cam would not be able to see the thoughts skittering across her features. Maybe she was making too much of this. Maybe he had other things on his mind.
She just wished she were one of those things.
"Well." She set the card and candy on the worktable beside the bonsai tree. She picked up a pair of wire cutters. "You probably want to get going."
"Yeah," Cam agreed, coming to his feet. "You never know what kind of traffic you'll hit."
They both came toward each other, awkwardly hugging around Cam's gun belt and Allies wire cutters. Cam kissed the top of her head. "Happy Valentine's Day," she said brightly.
"Happy Valentine's Day," he murmured. His chin was tucked over Allies shoulder, and he could see out the b
ig picture window in front of the store. He knew it faced north. He wondered how many miles it was to New Hampshire.
Mia watched the smooth slide of snow run by, curved and white like the lines of a woman. She sat in the passenger seat, her legs tucked beneath her, her back turned to Cam. He was driving with one hand; the other was laced with her own fingers on the inches of seat between them.
They were in Braebury, New Hampshire, a town that ran over the Connecticut River and into Vermont when you least expected it. It was close enough to the ski areas to be renowned, but distant enough to keep the crowds at bay.
Cam pulled the dark blue Ford sedan into the driveway of a gingerbread Victorian, riddled with cornices and turrets and painted the slightest hue of pink, so that it stood against the snow as if it were ashamed. Stuck into the piles of snow in the front yard was a sign, BRAEBURY HOUSE B & B, and a carved wooden gull whose wings spun in the wind.
"Oh," Mia exclaimed, staring at the winding, circular porch. "It's terrific."
Cam laughed. "It could have been a cave, and it would have been terrific." He squeezed her hand. "Let's go in."
He carried her knapsack for her--complete with Kafka and tins of Fancy Feast dinners--and his own duffel bag. Mia walked in the path he cut through the snow, and thought that this, more than anything else, signified their relationship. Her bag and his bag, unmatched, clasped by the same unrelenting hand.
The innkeepers, Alice and Horvath Kingsley, were waiting at the front door. "Come in, come in," Horvath said, his voice heavily accented.
Alice fussed over the snow that had caught on the edges of Mia's big jacket. "You made good time getting up here?" Cam smiled. "Not a soul on the roads."
Mia stamped the slush from her boots. "I should take these off," she said, bending down to untie the laces. She tucked down her chin, oddly self-conscious around this old man and his wife, who did not know her or Cam, yet around whom she felt like a horrible imposter. She was wriggling her toes in their thick ragg socks when she felt Cam's hand on the back of her neck, heavy as a yoke.
"You've come to ski?" Horvath asked. His belly hung over the lip of his suspendered pants in odd juxtaposition to his wife--thin as a stick, all angles and elbows.
"Among other things," Cam said easily. "We're newlyweds."
Mia's mouth dropped open, and she forced herself to close it and smile as she turned to Cam.
Alice Kingsley beamed at her, looking rather like a hawk. "How wonderful!" she cried, and touched Mia's arm. "How long has it been?"
Mia's mouth felt full of stones. "Three--" she said, her voice cracking on the single word. "Three weeks," she repeated, at the same time Cam interrupted and said, "Three months."
Cam looked at Mia and laughed. "It feels like three months."
Over the icy white acres came the soft moan of a cello, joined by the dance of a piccolo and a lively violin. Mia turned her head to the breezeway door, thinking this was something she must have imagined. "Is that what I think it is?" she asked.
Alice nodded. "We're a mile away from a musician's colony," she explained. "Members of the BSO come for a couple of weeks at a time, and when the wind's blowing right, well, you can hear it all. Of course, it's much more pleasant when the strings come than, say, the percussion. But it's lovely in the summertime. They do little quartets sometimes, right on the front lawn."
She slipped an arm around Mia's shoulders and pulled her into the main room of the house, a den with a cavernous ceiling and a fireplace that could seat six. "Come, dear," she urged. "You'll have to sign our register." She glanced at Horvath, who was talking with Cam about the bird feeders dotting the snowy back lawn like tiny telephone booths. "Why don't you show Mr. MacDonald to his room?"
Mia picked up the pencil and looked at the neat loops and curves of the names of the people registered before her. Her hand started trembling. It wasn't right, she knew it wasn't right, but then again, Cam had said they were married.
Mr. and Mrs. Cameron MacDonald, she scrawled unsteadily. Wheelock, Mass.
She stared at it for a moment, feeling better and better as the sloppy, scratchy words came into focus. It was her weekend after all, her present, and didn't she have a right to pretend?
Cam came up behind Mia and pulled her against him, the pad of his thumb just brushing her breast. He looked at what she'd written in the register, his name in Mia's shaky handwriting.
Cam wound his fingers with hers. He understood for the first time how if you believed you belonged to someone, no piece of paper or priest's benediction could make it any more real. "Not bad for a beginner."
Mia turned in his arms to face him. "Well," she said, "practice makes perfect."
PSYCHIATRIC REPORT
SUBJECT: James MacDonald BY: Harrison Harding, M.D.
In my initial session with Jamie, he was reserved and guarded. He repeatedly told me that since he wasn't crazy, he didn't understand what a psychiatrist could do for him in court. I explained that, court procedure notwithstanding, it made sense for someone who had experienced the trauma he'd experienced to discuss his feelings with a trained professional. # To which he said that no one else, with the possible exception of his attorney, thought he'd been through a trauma.
I asked him to tell me about his background, his current living situation, and his relationship with his wife, all in an effort to understand what he was like when his wife died. I said that eventually we would discuss the days leading up to Maggie's death, but that did not necessarily have to be today.
He spent most of the time discussing his wife, Maggie. He said that he believed you fell in love once, and he was lucky enough to have experienced that for eleven years. If pressed, he could describe details of his wife, from the arch of an eyebrow to the length of her fingernails and the location of beauty marks. When speaking of Maggie, Jamie smiled quite often, and he would stand and walk to the window occasionally, as if he was expecting to see her.
He indicated several times that the woman he fell in love with was not the same woman he had killed. I asked him to elaborate. He said, "Everyone says I killed Maggie, but they don't remember what she used to be like. There was very little of her left by the time we got to Wheelock." He told me graphic stories of the pain she experienced, from hallucinations during the night to violent vomiting after chemotherapy. He said the last of her ailments was the cancer spreading to the optic nerve, and he relayed how he had sat pressing the sides of her skull in his hands because she was convinced the bright flurry of colors would send it flying apart.
It seems that in spite of the reports from physicians, Jamie's awareness of the pain his wife was undergoing came from Maggie herself. Moreover, the nature and strength of their relationship indicates that Jamie may have indeed felt emotionally the same anguish his wife was physically suffering.
When I asked him if there was anything he hadn't had a chance to tell Maggie, he nodded. "That she was wrong," he said. "When we talked about it, she said it would be better to remember her as the woman she was than the woman she had become. But the truth is, now I have neither."
Jamie views his relationship with his late wife as something fine and sacred. His actions in the past seem to have
Democrats rated the highest. People under thirty scored five points, while senior citizens received only one point. Jews were worth six points; Protestants, three; Catholics, one. Graduate degrees were each worth an extra point.
According to Fyvel Adams, who'd run the computer analyses of the jury survey, sex made no difference in determining the ideal juror for Jamie's trial. Neither did nationality. The best juror for Jamie would receive, in total, twenty points. Anyone who rated less than fifteen points shouldn't be allowed to serve.
Graham and Audra Campbell had met with Judge Roarke an hour before, agreeing to select fourteen jurors, which included the two alternates. Roarke reminded Graham about the verbal-prohibition motion Audra had filed. "Oh," Graham said under his breath, sneering at the ADA, "you mean the 'M' word?" r />
When Roarke gave him a dirty look, Graham had realized something crucial to his client's case. Judge Roarke wanted a conviction. Which meant he would not make mistakes that could lead to an appeal.
On Friday afternoon, Graham, Allie, Jamie, and Fyvel Adams sat at the defense bench as the veniremen were called up individually. Jamie's left leg tapped nervously until Allie, cool and prepared in a smart plum wool dress, stilled it with a touch. Graham smiled at her. He saw her take Jamie's hand and clasp it on the defense table between her own.
The first prospective juror was Alexander Grant, a retired colonel, who'd made a career of the Army. Graham rolled his eyes. "Great way to start," he whispered, and he used one of his twenty peremptory challenges to excuse the juror.
been calculated to please Maggie, which led to his agreement and involvement in her death.
NOTE TO GRAHAM MACPHEE: I know what you're looking for from me, but the truth is Jamie was well-spoken and calm. He seems to feel remorse--not over the fact that he committed murder, but because at the very end, the woman he'd idolized betrayed him about the ramifications to his own life. It's not his mind that was broken. It was his heart.
Grant was replaced by Roberta Cavendish, forty-seven, Catholic, high school diploma, mother of five. "Seven points," Fyvel murmured, leaning toward Graham. "That won't do." Graham scanned his own list of yard checks, and saw that he had passed by the Cavendish home. Mangy dog, he had written. House only half painted. Christmas lights everywhere. "She stays," Graham murmured.
The next potential juror, a young woman who taught music at the elementary school in Wheelock, winked at Graham as she sat down to answer questions. Audra Campbell folded her arms across her chest and used one of her peremptory challenges.
Graham challenged a sixty-five-year-old farmer with a sixth-grade education. Audra challenged a twenty-five-year-old black social worker.
A woman with limpid eyes and badly dyed orange hair waddled her way up to the stand. Obese, tentative; she knotted and unknotted her fingers every time Audra or Graham fired a question at her. Beside him, Fyvel was furiously circling the number he'd totaled up on his scale for her: 8. He shook his head and mouthed the word "No." But Graham looked her in the eye, and thought he noticed the yellow spark that compassion sometimes leaves in its wake. He nodded to the judge.