She couldn't breathe, at first. But she forced herself to relax. She closed her eyes so that the strobe lights were only pricks against her lids, and she made herself lean into the long, easy body before her. It was hard to be this close to another man, but she reminded herself that getting over the strangeness would be half the battle.
The music caught them like a whirlwind and drew them tighter, so that O'Malley's cheek was pressed against her own. Allie heard him murmuring the words of a song she did not know, and she sang her own lyrics to the same rhythm: Cam did it; Cam did it; so can you.
The only items left were the things Cam assumed no one had wanted, and that included himself. On the overturned cartons on the driveway were a few spare pairs of socks and boxer shorts, a sweatshirt he had splattered bleach on several years before, a drill that did not work.
He left them sitting where they were and went into the house again. It was strange to see the empty spots on the wall where Carrymuir paraphernalia had been, cleared rings on dusty shelves that had once been home to mugs he'd brought back from Munich and Stuttgart. He wondered what Allie had said to the people who asked questions. He wondered if she'd lied to them, or if she'd told them the truth. He wasn't certain which one he preferred.
The house still looked furnished, but it was a woman's house. Allies quilts were draped over the chair and the couch. Allies curtains were pulled back to let in the dying sun. Allies cookbooks stood in height order on the bookshelf.
He sank down on the couch--his favorite chair was God only knew where--and let it come. The frustration, the fury, the embarrassment. "Damn you," he yelled, and it felt so good that he did it again. "How could you do this to me?"
His voice was pitched so loud he could hear the echo of his outrage settling in the braided rug, the upholstered furniture. "Why did you leave me?" he said more softly, and that was when he knew that he hadn't been angry at Allie at all.
He wondered if Mia was thinking about him.
With a deep sigh, Cam stood up and dug his hands into his pockets. He moved through the house to get the full effect of his infidelity: the half-empty bathroom vanity, which housed no razors but a festival of lotions and bath gels and rose-colored soaps; the basement workshop, as bare as it had been on the day they'd moved in; the ridiculously tiny bedroom closet, now cavernous and spacious, littered with dust balls on the floor.
She'd even sold his fucking pillows.
He went into the bathroom again to take a leak, and noticed something wrapped in newspaper hidden in the dank area behind the toilet. Bending down, he drew it out. It was last Thursday's newspaper, and although he didn't think it had been intended, there was a big article about Jamie MacDonalds upcoming trial splashed across the page.
He knew what it was before he unwrapped it. Lying on the bathroom floor, with no incoming light, the stained-glass panel had no life or color. Cam sat down and stared at it. He did not know why it had not been placed in a carton with the other gifts he had given Allie; he would never know.
Cam could remember giving it to Allie. He'd told her to be careful with it. He'd given it to her and the whole time he'd still been thinking of Mia.
But he supposed it was going to be that way for a while. Regardless of what had happened to Allie and when she would resurface, another part of Cam had died. It was only reasonable to expect that he would need time to properly mourn.
Only he wouldn't let it show. He owed his wife that much.
Wife. The word congealed on his tongue. With great care he took a swath of toilet paper and cleaned the stained-glass panel. He wiped down the bright glass shards and dusted the lead panes. Then he walked with it into the bedroom and hung it again on its cast-iron hook, back where it belonged.
Cam stood before the stained-glass image until the moon rose behind it, and resigned himself to this day, the next one, and the next.
hen you are married to a person for a long time and you make love, you know how long and when your husband will kiss you. You know that he'll start at your right breast, and then concentrate on your left. You know that he will move his mouth down your belly and bring you to the edge, then slide up to your mouth again and let you taste your own excitement. With somebody new, you lose this rhythm. Allie lay naked on her back in a room at the Green Gate Motel, O'Malley heavy on top of her. They had bumped noses when they kissed and scraped the enamel off their teeth and being drunk was not the only excuse for such mismatch. Allie felt nervous, but not about the act itself. She didn't know what he was going to do next, and the very newness of it, the difference, made it seem wrong.
O'Malley had spent an inordinate amount of time licking around and inside her ear, which she did not find erotic at all. He had a tendency to whisper things that made her want to clamp her legs shut: Want to ride a cowboy, honey? I can stay in the saddle a long, long time.
But to her surprise, she could feel her nipples tightening and her lower body going soft. She realized with a shock that this man she did not know and did not like was going to make her come.
It's just sex, she told herself as he slipped on a condom and drove into her. It was that way for Cam; it's that way for me. It's not the same as a marriage.
She started to cry, all the tears that hadn't fallen that morning or that afternoon on the way to Shelburne. She cried quietly at first, then loud sobs that made O'Malley pull himself from her with a bewildered look. She didn't explain to him. She didn't want to, didn't have to. She rolled to her side and curled into a ball, trying to remember the quickest way home.
Angus and Ellen left a spot between them for Allie when they entered the courtroom in Pittsfield, but ten minutes before the jury was set to convene, she still had not appeared. "I don't know what's keeping her," Ellen said, looking at her watch.
Graham, bouncing with nervous energy on the balls of his feet, shook his head. "She wouldn't miss opening arguments."
"A flat tire," Angus pronounced. "I canna imagine anything else."
Graham nodded, staring at the door Jamie would enter in a few minutes' time. "I hope she shows," he murmured. "It's going to kill him if she doesn't."
Graham leaned against the defense table, inadvertently scattering his notes. He wondered what Jamie was thinking, ensconced for a minute of quiet in a bathroom stall. He wondered how he'd be holding up by the end of the day, the first of many.
The defendant was the least important person in the courtroom. He wasn't involved in the case. He wouldn't be arguing his innocence. The only purpose he served was as a visual aid for the jurors while they heard testimony from others.
Graham also knew that this case was not going to be like the civil suits he had tired. The prosecutors had their evidence. The defense wasn't going to refute it or offer any other vindicating evidence. In fact, most of Graham's own witnesses were going to say things that corroborated the State's case. But he'd try to shape the facts with their attitudes and impressions of Jamie too. In essence, Graham's role was to tell the jury. Yes, here's a body. But you've got to look at it in a different context.
Not that Graham believed you could ever tell what the hell was going on in a juror's mind.
Jamie came back into the courtroom looking pale and tight, and slipped into a seat beside Graham almost at exactly the same time the jury filed in and the bailiff requested that everyone rise for the Honorable Judge Juno Roarke.
Audra Campbell was on her feet for an opening statement on the heels of Roarke's pronouncement that court was now in session. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she said, "on September 19, 1995, Margaret MacDonald was murdered by her own husband. He drove her to a nearby town, checked into an inn, held a pillow to her face, and cut off her supply of oxygen so that she died of asphyxiation. The State will show that the defendant turned himself in to the local police and voluntarily confessed to these actions."
The prosecutor was wearing a black wool suit that stood out from her shoulders like a linebacker's gear. She stepped around the table and crossed to st
and in front of the jury, smiling benignly. "I remind you all of the oath you've taken to uphold the law, and to bring the victim's murderer to justice." Then her eyebrows furrowed together to meet in the middle of her high forehead. "No one, myself included, will dispute that the circumstances surrounding this case are heartrending and pathetic. That it could not have been an easy time for anyone involved. However," she said, her voice strengthening, "the fact remains that the defendant committed a deliberate, willful, premeditated murder--and admitted so himself. As you, the jury, listen to the facts, remember that this is a case about breaking the law. Not about compassion, not about sympathy. It is the law you have been called here to consider, and it is the law which dictates conviction."
She sat down.
Jamie leaned close to Graham, who was halfway out of his chair. "Where's Allie?" he whispered.
Graham shook his head and glanced at Angus and Ellen and the space between them. Then he turned toward the jury. He didn't say anything for a moment. He walked back and forth in front of the jury box, as if he was embittered about something and still trying to come up with the words to voice his protest.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'll tell you the same thing that the prosecution just did. Yes, Maggie MacDonald was killed on September 19, 1995. Yes, Jamie MacDonald, her devoted husband, admitted to this. However, unlike the prosecution, I'm going to put these facts into the proper emotional setting. On the day that Maggie died, Jamie was suffering from an exorbitant amount of stress and grief brought about by months of dealing with his wife's terminal illness. The latest news of her condition and her prognosis had reached a new low." Graham paused and looked directly at the juror with the badly dyed orange hair. "You'll hear testimony about how this prolonged grief and depression was affecting Jamie, to the point where his capacity to tell right from wrong was diminished. On the morning of his wife's death, he was not in control of himself."
The orange-haired woman looked into her lap. She didn't buy it.
Graham took a step back and hammered home his points. "One day, Jamie was deliberately making appointments with Maggie's physician to discuss a new form of treatment he'd heard about that might help the cancer. The next day, he'd be overwhelmed by the futility of putting his wife through more pain without guaranteed results."
The orange-haired juror looked up.
"This is not your average murder trial," Graham said. "Most criminals are driven by greed. Jamie was motivated by grief. Most criminals commit an act out of hate. Jamie committed an act out of love." He moved closer to the defense table, so that the jury would see Jamie out of the corners of their eyes. "You can't judge the deed unless you consider the context in which it was acted out. You can't consider reason and consequence unless you also figure in emotions and morality. Nobody lives, or acts, in a vacuum."
He glanced at Audra. "The prosecution would have you believe that this case is open-and-shut, a question of black or white. Well, look around you, ladies and gentlemen. In the real world, there's color. Lots of different kinds. Maggie MacDonalds death did not occur in a textbook, but in the real world. And Jamie's trial will take place there." He paused. "The evidence will show that in the real world, not everything is black and white. At the very least, there are infinite shades of gray."
Cam took a personal day off from work. He spent the morning going around to the houses of people he barely knew, asking them what it would cost to buy back a uniform, a fishing rod, a needlepoint MacDonald crest. He endured subtle ribbing from men in his father's generation about being in the doghouse, and outright smirks from his own contemporaries. It seemed that Allie had only let slip that they'd had an argument--she hadn't given the particulars. For that, he supposed, he was thankful. But it was still enraging to think that people saw his situation as same kind of childish prank on the part of his wife.
He drove to Glory in the Flower, thinking Allie had spent the night at her shop, but there was a sign that said the store would be closed for the duration of the MacDonald trial. For a moment he panicked, thinking of a greedy divorce lawyer bleeding him for his house, his possessions, his money. Then he realized she must have been talking about Jamie's court appearance.
The ADA said Cam would probably go on the stand tomorrow, which of course would be an impossibility if he didn't find a goddamn uniform before the day was out. Part of the deal in being the expert witness for the prosecution was coming in with all the trappings.
He wondered if Allie was watching the trial, or if, in the light of the past day, she'd forgotten too.
He managed to buy back some of his power tools and fishing equipment and he physically tore a uniform from a four-year-old who was playing dress-up in the nursery school make-believe corner. He ate lunch in his car and went into his office to find several more of his personal effects strewn across his desk: his sports jacket, a dress uniform, a pair of Sorrel boots, skis. Hannah came to stand in the doorway. "I did a little calling around, and I got some people to feel bad," she said quietly. "I'm not going to ask what happened."
He thanked her and locked the door when she left. He put his head down on the desk.
Seven times that day he turned to look out the window at the Wheelock Inn. But he did not go over there to check again, and because of this simple thing he went home with his hands curled around a glowing, growing grain of pride.
The first witness for the prosecution was Hugo Huntley. Audra smiled at him as he settled himself on the hard chair inside the witness box. She patiently waited for him to wipe his glasses on the spare material of his shirt. "Can you state your name and address for the record?" she asked.
"Hugo Huntley." His voice screeched into the microphone, so he leaned back a bit. "Fourteen-fifty Braemer Way, Wheelock, Massachusetts."
"And Mr. Huntley, what do you do for a living?"
"I run the only funeral parlor in Wheelock. I also serve as the medical examiner for the local police."
Audra asked him to recite his credentials: college, medical school, certification by a board of medical examiners.
"What do your duties as the medical examiner of Wheelock entail?"
Hugo puffed out his chest. "I investigate deaths where the cause is unknown, or needs to be verified. I perform autopsies when it's necessary."
"About how many autopsies have you performed?"
Hugo smiled. "I've done a lot of autopsies, I guess. A few hundred. Sometimes the families just want to know what gave out at the end."
"Did you perform an autopsy on the deceased last September?"
Hugo nodded. "Yes, ma'am," he said.
"And what did you determine as the cause of death?"
"Asphyxiation." He leaned forward and took a deep breath. "In layman's terms, a lack of oxygen to the brain, which eventually caused a massive cardiac arrest."
"I see. Were you able to determine the time at which the victim died?"
"Roughly," Hugo admitted. "In my opinion, it was between seven and ten in the morning."
Audra prowled in front of the witness box. "Did you do an external examination as well, Mr. Huntley?"
The little man nodded. "Of course. It's part of any autopsy," he
said.
"And what were your findings?"
Hugo glanced down at his lap, as if he had a script there. "Other than a scar from a recent radical mastectomy, there were no visible contusions or lacerations, no burn marks, nothing out of the ordinary."
Audra sucked in her breath. You couldn't lead a witness on direct questioning, and Huntley was forgetting the most important piece of physical evidence. "Did you examine her hands?"
Hugo's eyes shot up and caught the prosecutor's. "Oh, yes," he said. "Yes, I did. There was skin underneath her fingernails that matched up with samples taken from Jamie MacDonald."
"Did you also have a chance to see the defendant shortly after he confessed to the police?"
Hugo swallowed. "I did."
"Was there anything extraordinary about his face?"
/> "There were scratches on his cheek. His right cheek."
"And what did you conclude in your report?"
Hugo glanced at Jamie and then let his gaze slide away. "That this was a possible sign of a struggle."
Audra tossed her French braid back. "Your witness," she said, and she tapped her fingers on the defense table on the way back to her seat.
Graham remained sitting, like he had all the time in the world and he was just shooting the shit with Hugo on the back porch. "Mr. Huntley," he said, his legs crossed, his arm thrown over the back of the empty chair to his right, "have you ever testified at other trials?"
"One. It turned out to be a suicide."
Graham stood up gracefully. "So you aren't often called as a witness to murder trials?"
"No, oh, absolutely not. Things like that don't happen all the time in Wheelock."
"For which I'm sure we're all grateful," Graham said, and in the background he heard a stifled titter from the jury box. "How many funerals do you see a year?"
Hugo raised his eyebrows. "Oh, a good number. We have a decent reputation, so people from other towns come to us too. Fifty, I suppose. Maybe more."
"And how many years have you run the funeral parlor?"
"Fifteen."
Graham nodded slowly. "So that's seven hundred and fifty funerals you've seen." He whistled. "Would you consider yourself an expert on grief?"
"Objection!" Audra Campbell stood up. "Maybe defense could tell us what the criteria are for a grief expert?" "I'll allow it," Roarke said.
"Let me rephrase." Graham leaned on the railing beside Hugo, like he was a buddy, a pal. "Do you think you have a familiarity with grief?"
Hugo nodded. "I see a lot of it, sure. There are certain things you notice over and over--the same things you'd expect--you know, crying, and shock, and that sort of thing."
"Mr. Huntley, did you attend Maggie's funeral?"
Hugo brightened visibly. "Yes, and it was lovely. I arranged it, you know. There were flowers and the priest gave a very moving service, and a good number of people turned out considering she had been an outsider from another town."
"Did you observe Jamie at his wife's funeral?"
Hugo cleared his throat. "I did. He was crying so much I don't think he even knew he was doing it, and he physically could not stand up. He actually didn't make it through the whole service. To tell you the truth, I've never seen the like."