by Jodi Picoult
Mia could hear Allies footsteps coming down the stairs, and the healthy mew of Kafka in her arms. She turned away from Cam, stayed silent. Yes, she said to herself, I think maybe you do.
FOUR
When Cam walked into the police station later that morning, his uncle Angus was sitting with Jamie MacDonald in the lockup, dressed in his bathrobe and playing a game of chess.
"For God's sake," he muttered, unlocking the cell. "Angus, what are you doing in there?" He looked around for Casey MacRae, the patrolman he'd left guarding the prisoner.
"I told Casey I'd spell him," Angus said. "I havena seen wee Jamie since he was seven."
Cam threw his cap onto the booking counter. He glanced at Jamie MacDonald. "Sleep well?"
"No," Jamie admitted. "Did you?"
Cam turned his back and began to leaf through the court book, praying he'd get Jamie MacDonald in front of a magistrate before lunchtime.
"What are you doing here, Angus?" Cam sighed. "And get out of the damn lockup. I can't let you in with a prisoner."
Angus tightened the sash of his bathrobe, grumbling, but stood from the cement slab that doubled as a bed in the cell. "Young Cam, I dinna think that's any way to be speaking to your elders."
Cam hated it when his uncle called him that, as if he were still six years old, as if the old Cameron MacDonald hadn't been dead
for two hundred years. He gestured at Angus's wet bedroom slippers. "You come here in your pajamas and get yourself locked up with a murderer, and you can't understand why I want to hire someone to take care of you during Che day?"
Angus stepped out of the lockup. "I dinna want some wee lassie telling me how to eat my parritch in the morning and washing my privates for me in the bath." He tapped Cam on the shoulder. "I didna come to speak about that, anyway."
Cam sighed and began to swing the heavy cell door closed again. "We're going to court within the hour," he said to Jamie, matter-of-fact, and then he slammed it shut.
He turned around to find his uncle in his office, sitting behind the desk with his feet propped up. Cam shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on a hook on the back of the door. "Sometimes I think I should have left you at Carrymuir," he said.
"Sometimes I wish that ye had."
Cam sat down in the chair opposite his uncle and rested his elbows on the desk. "Angus, I know what you're about to say to me, and don't think I haven't thought of it myself. But the fact is I've got a body lying across the street, and a signed confession that the man in that lockup killed her."
"Aye, well," Angus said, as if he hadn't heard a word Cam had said, "I was on Culloden Field last night."
Perhaps because they were the very last words Cam had anticipated as a response, he sat forward, speechless. Recovering, he shook his head. "You were where?"
"Culloden. Ye canna tell me that in spite of everything else ye've forgotten, ye dinna remember that."
For a long time Cam had resisted sending Angus to a retirement home because the closest one was over the mountains, a good forty-five minutes away. Moreover, someone who had grown up fenced in by nature would not take well to antiseptic-washed floors and Bingo in Che cafeteria. Bur he was beginning to see that he had little choice. "Angus," Cam said gently, "this is 1995."
"It may be at that, but all the same, I fought the English last night with Prince Charlie." He settled forward, as if he could nor believe that Cam was not quick enough to pick up what he had been trying to say. "Your great-grear-great-great-great-grandfarher isna happy. That's why Cameron's come to haunt me."
Cam laid his head down on his desk. He'd humor the old man; he'd talk for five more minutes; then he'd usher him onto Main Street and drive his prisoner to the district courthouse on the other side of town. "Cameron MacDonald has come to haunt you," he repeated.
"In a matter of words," Angus said. "It's a bit like I've crawled right into his wee brain." He paused, remembering. "He didna want to be on Culloden Moor at all."
Cam did not lift his head, so his words were muffled by his sleeve. "He was an incredible soldier. He supported the Stuarts. Where else would he have been?"
"He would have rather been home with his kinsmen, I imagine."
Cam's patience was wearing thin. "Angus, we all grew up with the story. The damn public school probably uses it as a primer instead of Dick and Jane." He snapped his head up, reciting in a singsong, "Cameron MacDonald offered his own life so everyone else could go back to Carrymuir."
"Aye," Angus said, pointing with one finger. "But do ye ken why he did it? Why he was willing to die?"
In a flash of insight, Cam suddenly realized where this was heading. "Because he was their chief?" he said smugly, ready to launch into an explanation as to why Jamie MacDonald would still have to be arraigned.
"No," Angus said, "because he couldna stand to see the people he loved hurting." He stood up and came around the desk, laying his thin, white hand on Cam's back. "Dinna fash yourself, lad. You'll come up with something." And with a goodbye knock on the Flexon-covered bars of the lockup, he walked out of the police station.
The art of bonsai, Mia told Allie, had to be fashioned in harmony with nature, in a desire to dominate it and to re-create it, although on a different scale. She told her its history in China, then Japan; how the French were fascinated by the power the bonsai artists had--being able to make such a towering, magnificent tree grow in such a tiny space. Allie watched carefully as Mia sketched for her the different forms of the trees, single trunks curved to the left, cascading trees, upright ones, knotted ones, trees that rooted to rocks. She repeated their Japanese names like mantras: Chokkan, Moyogi, Sabamiki.
They had bought some small Japanese maples at a nursery a half hour away, and Allie was going to turn them into bonsai trees, like the one Mia had shown her yesterday. Mia had a complete set of tools for pruning trees: saws, scissors, clippers, branch cutters. "I'm a surgeon," she had said, and Allie had laughed until she realized that Mia was serious.
There weren't many rules. Mia cut back one of two opposite branches on the first trunk with a saw, which would produce alternate branches. She told Allie to make the cuts clean, so the tree would heal quickly. She had her pluck off the leaves.
"It looks bald," Allie said.
Mia stood back, assessing her work. "It'll grow. You don't want it to be bushy."
Wiring was the most difficult part. It was to spiral at an angle of 45 degrees, wound around the branches of the tree to train it in the direction you wanted it to grow. The wire would remain on for several months, but was unwound daily and repositioned to keep it from cutting into the tree.
For a few minutes, Mia watched Allie work. It was easy to talk to her, to teach her, and to learn from her. She did not know if she really liked Allie---really, truly liked her--or if Allie had become a fast friend simply because she was the first person Mia had met in Wheelock. Mia could remember making friends in sixth grade when she'd had to change schools and did not know anyone--after a moment of solitary panic, she had laughed with the two girls whose seats had flanked hers in homeroom. By the time they left ten minutes later, Mia had traded her small secrets, receiving in return the information that Jenna was in love with Billy Geffawney and that Phyllis could swallow a hard-boiled egg whole. It was months later, with a knot of her real friends woven tight around her like a winter cloak, that Mia realized how little she had in common with these first girls she'd latched onto, how shallow and strange they seemed, how foolish she had been to doubt her future. For years she avoided them, thinking how much they knew about her, afraid that a single desperate act of friendship might one day be used against her.
While Allie worked on her new bonsai, Mia unloaded her works-in-progress from the back of the rental car she'd driven to Wheelock. It had been parked overnight in front of the library. After several trips, Mia returned, breathless, holding a pile of terracotta plates and an army-green duffel bag. "Well," she said, glancing at the floor, which was littered now with gnarled t
rees and hunched trunks in a smattering of containers and pots. "I feel like we're in Kyoto."
"You've traveled a lot, haven't you?" Allie asked, twisting a length of copper wire. "You're nor from around here?"
Mia shook her head and began to carry the pots into the back room. "I'm from everywhere. I haven't stayed long enough in one place to really say I'm from 'around there.' "
"Were you an army brat?"
Mia stopped at the threshold of the door. "No. My parents still live in the house where I grew up." She set two of the containers down on Allies desk and then dragged the chair into the workspace of the flower shop. Absently she took the wire from Allie and corrected a loop around a branch. "Did you grow up in Wheelock?"
Allie nodded. "So did Cam." She smiled. "I think I've know him my entire life."
Mia did nor find this unlikely; for a moment she could picture a toddling Allie grasping at Cam's shirt to hold herself upright. "You were high school sweethearts?"
Allie shook her head. "No, in fact, those awful baskets you made for the library luncheon are for a program being given in honor of Cam's old girlfriend."
"I can honestly say you have better taste."
"That," Allie replied, "isn't saying much." She began to pinch the leaves off one side of the tree, as Mia had shown her earlier. Thin light filtered through the high windows to skitter on the wood floor. "I knew Cam in high school, but he didn't really know me or pay any attention to me. I mean, everyone knew Cam. He went to college in Scotland, and then he traveled around a little, and he came back to Wheelock when his father died."
Allie had explained to Mia the night before the strange chain of command that stretched backward in Cam's family all the way to the Scottish Highlands. "I met him in a hardware store," she said, clipping a maple branch that grew too close to the roots. "I knocked him unconscious."
She had been buying lumber for this very store. With careful instructions, Allie was going to fashion her own workbench out of several two-by-sixes. Cam, once again new to town, had been behind her in line. While Allie was rummaging in her purse for the correct change, the wood balanced precariously at her shoulder, she heard Cam's voice behind her. "I have some change," he offered. She had turned around to take it from him, inadvertently swinging the two-by-sixes, and clubbed him on the back of the skull.
He had awakened with his head in her lap and a vicious pounding behind his eyes, but other than a mild concussion, he was fine. When Cam told the story, he liked to say that from the first, Allie had made him see stars.
Allie shrugged when she finished, a little self-conscious talking about herself at length. Mia was sitting at the workbench, her chin propped on her hands. Beneath her elbows was a puddle of Japanese maple leaves, some as big as a fist. "You remind me of my mother," Mia said.
Allie laughed. "Because I made you breakfast?"
"No, I always did that myself. Because of the way you look when you talk about your husband." She thought of her parents, and the way they would tell a story: they'd sit close, continuously interrupting each other, and their hands would flutter together and apart, like mating butterflies, coming to rest on each other's knees.
"And does Cam remind you of your father?"
Mia envisioned Cam's large hand pressed to the checkered kitchen tablecloth, and the shining line of auburn hair that brushed his collar. She tried to picture Allie in his arms, Allie under his solid body, but she could not. "No," Mia said, "he doesn't."
Graham MacPhee never got to do the divorces. He'd joined his father's law practice four years earlier when he passed the Massachusetts bar, earning the dubious distinction of being the second lawyer in a town that barely needed one. His father, who had been Wheelock's attorney for forty years, did a smattering of everything: wills, real estate, contracts, bankruptcy, neighbor disputes, personal injury.
Although Graham had plea-bargained and had done some civil
A9A
suits, his father always saved the messy marital disputes and shady cases for himself. Said it was a question of experience, to which Graham had answered that if he was never given a chance, he'd never get the damn experience. He wanted to go to court.
He was reviewing a torts case when the bell over the door tinkled. Cleo, the paralegal/secretary, wasn't at her desk, so Graham went to the front of the office himself. In the process of standing he knocked the torts file off his desk, scattering papers at his feet.
"Shit," he muttered, kicking them into further disarray. He walked down the hall of the office and came face-to-face with the chief of police.
"Where's your father?" Cam said abruptly, glancing out the window. "I need to speak with him."
Graham watched the man turn his regulation hat around and around in his hands, as if he were feeding a seam. "He's in court." Graham drew himself up to his full height. "What can I do for you?"
Cam stared at Graham, who he knew was scared shitless at having to be with him in the same small room. When Graham was eighteen, Cam had caught him with a group of friends at the construction site of a house, drinking Coors and pissing on the newly erected staircase. He'd fingerprinted him, read him his rights, and detained him to put some sense in his head, but he'd never filed the arrest report.
Graham cleared his throat. "Was there something you needed, Chief?"
Cam nodded shortly and then tilted his head, as if he were assessing Graham's physical strength. "Let's go to your office," he said, striding down the hall to a place that would afford privacy.
Graham thought of the papers all over the floor, of the fishing magazine and the Walkman right smack on the desk. "The conference room," he suggested, steering Cam to his left.
Cam didn't even bother to sit down. "You know about the MacDonald murder," he said, gesturing for Graham to take a chair. Graham watched him pace in front of the oak table, listened to the way his voice crowded the corners of the room, and realized chat Cameron MacDonald would be quire a presence in a court of law.
"I've heard some things," Graham hedged.
He knew Allie was at work; he'd just talked to her. It was clearly a B & E. He pulled his gun out of its holster and swung himself into the doorway, checking right and left and right again as he'd been trained to do. Wild connections began to take root in his mind: Jamie MacDonald was part of a drug ring; the murder had been a setup to cover a larger crime; someone was right now in his bedroom stealing cufflinks and stray buttons and rug fibers, trying to implicate Cam himself.
A thorough search of the downstairs revealed nothing. He crept up the stairs and threw open his bedroom door, fully expecting to find some vermin going through his drawers, and pointed his gun at the moving figure on the bed. "Police," he yelled, his throat dry and pounding.
"Oh," Mia Townsend said, her face blanched and drawn at the sight of the gun. "Jesus."
Cam flicked the safety and jammed his gun into his holster. "Fuck." Trembling, he crossed the room in two steps. "I could have killed you. I could have killed you." He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, speaking through a clenched jaw. "What the hell are you doing here?"
Mia's teeth chattered. "I came for the cat," she said, and then she started to cry.
Cam slapped his hat against the smooth surface of the table. "I want a defense lawyer for this guy."
Graham frowned. "He's hiring this firm?"
Cam shook his head. "I'm hiring you on his behalf. I'll pay the bill. In return, you don't breathe a word about who's funding your client--not to your father, not to a judge, not to my wife. Your job is to make him look like Mother Teresa in front of a jury." He took a deep breath, and when he looked down at Graham again, Graham almost believed he could see fear in the police chief's eyes. "Just get him off the hook," he said softly.
Graham stared at Cam. "What are you going to do?"
Cam picked up his hat. "I'm going to book him for murder, and fight you every step of the way."
When Cam went home after meeting with Graham MacPhee, he found the doo
r unlocked.
She had never been held at gunpoint; she hadn't expected Cam to come home in the middle of the day; she was in the bedroom snooping when she shouldn't have been. The pressure of Cam's fingers tightened on her upper arms, and then she felt him pull her against him. He stroked her back, which felt fine-boned and light.
"I'm okay," she said, working her hands up between them.
Cam stepped away, and Mia sat down on the edge of the bed. "Where's Allie?"
"At the shop. Working on bonsai. I taught her." She listened to the patterns of her own voice, frail and stilted, and shook her head to clear it. She wondered why she could not think or manage to form a complex sentence.
"Bonsai? That's what you do? Force trees to grow the way you want them to?"
Mia tried to smile. "I guess you could look at it like that."
Cam sat down beside her. "You and I, we do nor have a good track record."
Mia shook her head. Cam watched her bend down to pick up a fallen spray of photos, resettle them in a heart-shaped striped box chat Allie had found at a tag sale. "What's this?" he said.
She could feel the blush creeping from between her breasts, all the way to the high points of her cheekbones. Stupid, stupid. She had never in her life done something like this--violated another person's privacy.
In fact, she had learned how to fade into the woodwork at a very early age, since the best way to please her parents had been to simply stay out of the way. She had made unobtrusiveness an art that, as she grew older, naturally spilled into bonsai, where restraint and blending into the background were the measures of success. She was not accustomed to being anything but an outsider; never had been, until yesterday's hectic events had dragged her from a vantage point on the outskirts of Wheelock smack into Allie MacDonald's world.
And with the MacDonalds, her interest was fast becoming an obsession. She had parked her car at the curb so that she'd have more time to explore, figuring the neighbors wouldn't worry if they didn't see a strange vehicle in the driveway. Then she'd gone inside to piece together all the blank spaces in the life that Allie had spent the morning drawing. By ten o'clock Mia knew how Cam and Allie had met; the names of Cam's childhood pets; the tradition they had of celebrating Valentine's Day--a florist's night-mare--early, when Allie wasn't overwhelmed with work.