SIXTEEN
At 8:05 on Monday morning, Mia Townsend took the clothes she'd neatly arranged in the dresser of the Wheelock Inn and rolled them into sausages, which she'd always found to be the best method for traveling. She stuffed her belongings into her knapsack and scooped up her cat with her free hand.
Setting Kafka on her stomach, she lay down on a bed that still smelled of her and Cam from the afternoon before. She had arrived in Wheelock before him, and he'd come to the Inn instead of going home. Cam had undressed her so tenderly she thought he must have guessed her decision. But then she realized that it was simply his way of marking something that, in his mind, was not an end but a beginning.
Her body could not let go quite so easily, and had sung to him a lullaby orchestrated by her skin moving against his, until he fell into a deep sleep at her side. Then Mia had closed her eyes and concentrated on the sounds that pushed through the walls and the windows, family sounds and leisure sounds, the hum of a weekend as it shuddered to a close.
She turned her face into the pillow that had been Cam's. She didn't think she'd ever quite forget the scent of him, but when he'd gone to the bathroom she had stolen one of the sweatshirts he'd brought to New Hampshire, just in case. That was what she was taking this time, her keepsake of Wheelock.
Kafka mewed and scratched at her ribs. She absently stroked his neck, and she tried to imagine every line of Cameron MacDonald's face.
Mia took a last look through the drawers and the bathroom to check that she was not leaving a piece of herself behind. With a gentle hand, she ran her fingers down the twisted trunk of her ancient bonsai, the one that had accompanied her everywhere. This she placed on the middle of the bed, where Cam would be certain to find it.
She locked the door to the room that had been hers for a little while. She walked downstairs and settled her bill and returned her key. Then she stepped outside.
It was unseasonably warm for January. Fifty degrees, at least, and it was early in the morning. The snow had melted down to the bare ground in some spots, leaving the grass weak and yellow, looking violated.
Mia took a deep breath and kept her chin held high on the way to her car, carefully avoiding a glimpse into puddles that would only show her herself.
At 8:05 on Monday morning, Allie was rounding up the dirty laundry for dry cleaning. She took it in to Mr. Soong's place every other week, or else Cam would run out of uniforms. He had left early this morning--another meeting out of town, this one for some kind of task force. And since he'd returned after ten the previous night, he hadn't had a chance to unpack.
Allie could remember him saying that the gun safety seminar in New Braintree had been casual, but she wasn't sure if he'd packed anything other than a uniform which might merit dry cleaning. He had several cotton sweaters that couldn't be laundered in any other way.
She bent down to rummage through the duffel bag that was lying on its side, pulling out a pair of jeans and a wet musty set of polypropylene long underwear. She was absently thinking that the yellow sweatshirt he'd left town in was missing, when the pictures tumbled into her lap.
They were very bad Polaroids, that was the first thing she noticed. The images were filmy and the colors a bit too awkward, so it was almost possible to believe that she was not seeing clearly as she recognized Cam and Mia standing together in front of a pond full of skaters.
They had red eyes, like people in Polaroids always do.
His arms were around her.
She, Allie, had been so stupid.
As if the images were whirling by in a carnival ride, she remembered Mia standing beside Cam in the kitchen, Mia's toothbrush in their bathroom, Mia and Cam making conversation in the flower shop with her in the back room.
Mia's underwear in Cam's dresser drawer.
Allie felt her spine give way. She lay on her side on the bedroom floor, holding on to those pictures, wondering why she wasn't starting to cry.
It was what she had thought she would do, if this situation ever came about. And she supposed she'd imagined it--didn't everyone who was married consider the worst that could happen? She read Glamour and Cosmo; she knew the stories. The magazines advocated strong, ballsy women, but Allie believed that when push came to shove, if her husband was cheating on her, she would shut down her systems and retreat into her shell.
As if the idea spurred her to action, she tore at the duffel bag with such a vengeance she broke the zipper. She ripped the pictures as best she could given the resilient Polaroid film. She found condoms in Cam's shaving kit and woodenly moved herself to the toilet, where she opened each foil pack and flushed them, one by one.
She still wasn't crying.
She wasn't thinking, What did I do to deserve this? She was wondering instead, What did you do to deserve me?
She dressed quickly, because she had a great deal to do. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, hugging the information she'd unearthed to herself until it became a small, hot knot of pain as hard as unmined coal, and lodged just as soundly.
At 8:05 on Monday morning, Jamie MacDonald was running with the wolves. At least, that was what he was pretending.
He'd stepped barefoot into the melting snow and had walked through Darby Mac's cornfield slowly until the soles of his feet grew numb. In the winter, the field was nothing but a square of stubble sticking out above the snow. Jamie made his way between the rows, darting back and forth, stumbling to his hands and knees and going up to his elbows in snow. He hoped he'd get pneumonia.
He pushed himself on, back and forth across the acreage, until his breath was burning in his lungs and his eyes were tearing with effort. Then Jamie sat back on his heels and threw back his head and howled in the direction of the sun. He yelled until his voice gave out. He yelled until there was nothing left inside.
He stood up and walked back, like a man again, to the side of Angus's little house. In the dogcatcher's mesh cage were two mutts and a purebred spaniel. They jumped and yipped at him as he drew close. They pushed their hot, wet muzzles into the shell of his hand.
Without thinking twice, Jamie unlatched the cage. He watched the dogs take off down the road, their tails twitching, their feet picking up speed as they caught the faint scent of freedom.
At 8:05 on Monday morning, Graham MacPhee was asleep on top of a collection of dusty law books. The spine of one had carved a thick line down his cheek, and his eyes, when they started to open, were red and gritty. He had been up most of the night preparing his opening statement. Although it was Monday, it was Martin Luther King Day, and the courts weren't in session. It gave him, Jamie, everyone involved, a day of grace.
He sat up and took a swig of Coke from a two-liter bottle, hoping to wipe out the metallic taste in his mouth. No one who could see him this morning--shoeless, disheveled, sallow--would recognize him tomorrow at the defense table.
A woman was walking in front of his dry-erase board. "Hey," he said, wondering how the hell she'd gotten in when he hadn't yet unlocked his office door. "Mind telling me who you are?"
At his voice, she simply touched the board where the three days before Jamie's arrest were chronicled. Her hand went straight through it. More gently this time, she reached a fingertip to one of the empty white squares that marked the night Jamie and his wife had last been alone together.
With his heart pounding, Graham scrambled to his feet. He took a step closer to the woman as she turned to face him.
He had seen the Polaroids taken by the medical examiner. He had seen pictures Allie had stolen from Jamie's house in Cummington. He was staring at Maggie MacDonald.
When Graham tried to speak, nothing came out of his throat. He rubbed his eyes, but she didn't disappear. He thought of Dr. Harrison Harding, and wondered if this was a psychotic episode.
Maggie rubbed her hand against the gaping hole in Graham's defense theory, the only period of time he could not account for before the death. And as quickly as she had appeared, she was suddenly gone.
Gr
aham stepped up to the board. He stretched a hand out to touch the place Maggie had touched. Instead of a bare white box there was a spot, a fingerprint. It was an unmistakable mark pressed in dark red ink, or maybe blood.
Ellen MacDonald was out for her daily constitutional at 8:35, Monday morning. If she took off south from her house and looped around the park and the library, past the Wheelock Inn, she could get a good two-mile track. If she was feeling particularly lively, she could make it briskly in a half hour.
She had on her Walkman, playing an Enya tape. Her jogging suit was made of natural fibers. Her sneakers allowed her feet to breathe.
One of her shoelaces became untied at the Wheelock Inn. She crouched down to fix it, unintentionally hiding herself behind a melting drift of snow. It was from this vantage point that she saw the unmarked cruiser Cam usually drove pull into the Inn's parking lot.
Ellen turned around and headed home before she could bear witness to anything else.
At 8:45, Cam was informed that Mia Townsend was no longer a guest at the Wheelock Inn. Stifling an urge to grab the manager by the throat and shake an explanation out of him, he calmly asked the man to check his records a second time. "You must be mistaken," he said. "She must have said something else."
When Cam entered the lobby, the manager--who'd been bribed weeks ago to ensure discretion--had called out to him. Ms. Townsend had settled her bill and left early this morning, the manager said, pulling her checkout slip from a small pile. Cam recognized Mia's signature, the same spiky hand that days ago had registered them as husband and wife at a secluded bed-and-breakfast.
As Cam jogged up the stairs, he told himself he didn't have time for this crap today. He was going to a legitimate seminar, this one on breaking and entering, so he had to be in Pittsfield by ten o'clock. He had come to tell Mia that he hadn't told Allie anything because it had been too late. That he was going to see a lawyer when the seminar was over, and speak to Allie tonight. He had come to see her smile at him and to hold her close, so the attraction could come like a shock between them and he could carry the aftereffects with him all day.
He opened the door to the tiny room beside the closet with the key Mia had given him. The space was neat and markedly empty of personal effects. Except for the mussed bed, which still smelled of sex, and the bonsai tree in the middle of it.
It was propped between two pillows so that the soil would not spill out. The image hit him more strongly than any note could have, which must have been why she left it.
Left it.
As he watched, the tree began to twist. It was no longer wrapped in copper wire, but gnarled through time into its unnatural shape. Cam's mouth dropped open as the trunk split and expanded. The branch that dipped horizontally and then toward the ground flexed like a bicep and redirected itself toward the sun. The exposed roots burrowed deep into the soil and the snipped, pinched buds began to flower with waxy green leaves.
No longer a bonsai, the tree began to grow the way nature had intended.
Cam leaned against the wall of the room where he had fallen in love, and realized that this time, there would be no visit to Bally Beene, no tracking Mia across the country.
The tree festooned in a burst of pink blossoms. This time, there was no going back.
At 9:05, at Glory in the Flower, Allie stood in front of the parson's bench that held the bonsai trees and watched, transfixed, as they burst free of their copper wire. As if they were hatching, their branches tussled and stretched, breaking the coils that bound them, until they looked like they had months before when Mia and Allie brought them home from the nursery.
Allie had come to make sure that her assistant was not around; would never come around again. She had played the scenarios out in her mind driving to the center of town. She would storm in and scream at Mia and tell her to get the hell out of her life. She would be extra sweet and go about business as usual and then, when Mia least expected it, drop the bomb that she knew. She would offer her a week's extra salary and simply dismiss her.
Her rage had not lessened. In fact, Allie felt more in control of herself than she had in a long, long while.
But the bonsais beneath the window had distracted her. They had claimed her attention so completely that she'd missed seeing the geraniums which Mia had toppled from their pots to carpet the floor, the worktable, the counter.
The petals were blue and mauve and purple, pink and red and white. They caught on the bottom of Allies shoes and stuck to the ankles of her slacks. Geraniums meant: I shall never see him.
By the time she had hung the Closed sign on the door and visited the liquor store for spare boxes, the snow had nearly melted. The lawn was virtually clear; there were only a few white spots left to remind Allie it was winter. With great deliberation she spent the morning sifting through her husband's belongings, removing every trace of him from the house. She set his shoes and his books and his fishing poles and power tools out on overturned cartons that lined her driveway; she sat with a strongbox beneath a makeshift clothesline hung with his uniforms and casual wear and his one sports jacket.
Good weather drew people to garage sales. Allie bartered and bargained, her objective to clear the tables rather than to make any given amount of money. She told shoppers to send their friends along. She made deals: two-for-one on sports equipment. Buy a uniform, get a pair of shoes for free. She watched the evidence that her husband existed disappear in the arms of neighbors who had simply been passing by. She felt the winter sun, just as unexpected and hot as her anger. And she waited for Cam to come home.
PART III
If you forgive people enough, you belong to them,
and they to you, whether either person
likes it or not--squatter's rights of the heart.
--James Hilton, Time and Time Again
SEVENTEEN
Allie remembered once hearing a song that said the first person you fell in love with stole your heart. The first person you made love with stole your soul. And if these were one and the same, you were damned.
She was huddled over her stool at the country-western bar in Shelburne Falls, watching people whose lives had not hit rock bottom line dancing to the lively strains of a fiddle. She had left Cam standing in front of the cartons from which she had sold his possessions, left him standing right in front of the house, and had walked into the center of town. From there, she'd hitched rides until she was far enough away from Wheelock to breathe again. The only reason she'd come to Rodeo Joe's was because it was the first place she'd found in Shelburne Falls with a liquor license, and she planned to get rip-roaring drunk.
She fingered the napkin beneath her glass--a straight shot of tequila, her sixth. Rodeo Joe's motto promised her, personally, a shit-kickin' good time. Allie wondered if she could get her money back. After all, you never could get drunk when you most needed to.
A man in a red western shirt hooked a leg over the stool beside hers like it was a horse. He nodded a greeting, then gestured to the bartender. "Rexie, the lady's next one's on me."
She stared at him. How long had it been since someone had bought her a drink? "That's very nice, but I'm not going to be good company."
"Draw a bad one today?" he asked. His voice had that wide western sound, and he was talking with rodeo lingo, as if he ranched in the middle of Massachusetts. Allie bent down over her drink, trying nor to smile. Country-western did that to people-- made them wear big hats and say things they wouldn't otherwise be caught dead saying. The man beside her was probably a tax accountant on State Street in Boston.
"Cowboy," she said, "I should never have climbed into the chute."
He was not as tall as Cam, and his body was not as muscular, but he was in good physical shape. Rangy--like he played racquet-ball instead of working out at Gold's. The features of his face were sharp, almost to the point of discord, but came together in a way that made him look honest and rough. His hair was darker than Cam's. And he didn't have a dimple in his chin.
Allie pushed her drink away, disgusted. When would she stop measuring everything by that benchmark?
"The name's O'Malley," he said.
Allie glanced up. "Just O'Malley?"
He nodded. "It's all I'll answer to, at any rate."
She laughed and traced the beads of condensation on her glass. "I'm Allie."
"Just Allie?" The man was grinning; it softened him.
Allie smiled back. "It's all I'll answer to," she repeated. "Do you live around here?"
O'Malley nodded. "A fair ways west. I'm the foreman on the Double K."
Allies eyes widened. "You mean there's actually a ranch around here?"
"Of sorts," he said. He leaned forward conspiratorial. "Bet you five bucks no one on that dance floor could tell the nose of a horse from its ass."
Allie laughed again. It felt good, lessening the tightness in her chest and shoulders. "So you really are a cowboy."
O'Malley shrugged. "For lack of a better word. We actually breed bison out at the Double K."
"Bison? You mean buffalo?" "None other."
Allie took a deep drink of tequila. "What for?"
"Mostly meat. You'd be surprised how many fancy restaurants in Boston place standing orders."
Allie raised her eyebrows. "I've never eaten buffalo."
O'Malley reached over and covered her hand with his. "You ain't missing a hell of a lot." Then he smiled, his teeth even and white, like a line of light. "Let's dance, Allie," he said, and before she could remember to resist, he'd taken her into the center of the crowd.
He held her left hand close between them, pressed against her breasts. From time to time he fiddled with her wedding ring, but he didn't say a thing about it. He didn't say much of anything, really. He hummed in time to the quiet ballad, moving his hips in a rhythm Allie suspected had been bred from a saddle, and he took her with him.