Mercy Read online

  She had taken a room at the Inn because she did not want to see Cameron MacDonald again. She knew this was unlikely in a town of less than two thousand people, especially since she was working with his wife, but that did not keep her from setting her distance.

  She stood in front of the dresser, peering into the antique mirror. Her face seemed bronzed and foggy; and her mouth was wide and straight, the way it always was. Her lips no longer looked swollen, as they had after Cam had dropped her off at the flower shop. When she discovered that Allie had gone out, Mia locked the front door and stood in front of the bathroom mirror in the back of the shop, holding her fingertips to her mouth as if she could keep the sensitivity at a peak.

  She began to rummage through the drawers of the nightstand and the dresser, not so much because she expected to find anything but simply because it was what one always did when settling into a stock hotel room. There was a votive candle in the bottom drawer of the dresser that smelled heavily of peaches, and a King James Bible--King James of Scotland, she now knew--in the nightstand to the left of the double bed.

  Under the Bible was a stack of paper imprinted with the town seal, and a small, chewed-off pencil. Mia lit the votive candle, then took the paper and pencil and sat down on the bed, using the Bible as a lap desk.

  Cameron, she wrote, because she liked the length of his name, I have been thinking of you. She thought of the fairness of his skin, and the way the sun brought to life the rich autumn colors in his hair. She remembered how, when he thought he had frightened her with the gun, he had gathered her close so that her head was pressed against his chest. She had listened to the rhythm of his heart, so remarkably strong that Mia believed her head was being pushed fractionally away with every beat.

  Mia picked up the pencil again and crossed out what she had written. Cameron, she began again, I have been thinking of nothing but you. Then she stood up and fed the paper to the flame of the votive candle, watching the traces of her folly fall to ash.

  Allie closed the flower shop early and drove to Angus's house, which stood beside a cornfield chat belonged to Darby Mac. He was the only farmer in Wheelock, nearly as old as Angus himself, and had been called Darby Mac all his adult life, in an effort to keep at bay the jokes about Old MacDonalds farm. In late September, the corn was quite high, almost hiding Angus's house from view. Allie glanced out the window at the field, and then slowed as she noticed the high color spotting the stalks. A bright red Mylar balloon emblazoned with Congratulations! bobbed in the light breeze. There were ordinary balloons too, pink and white and yellow, and a silver string of letters that spelled Happy Anniversary stretched the length of the front row of corn.

  Angus opened his front door before she knocked. "How festive," she said, still looking over her shoulder at the corn.

  "Aye, well, Darby Mac says it'll keep off the crows."

  Somehow, Allie felt disappointed. For maybe the slightest moment she had imagined there was a celebration under way, a party just inside Angus's door.

  "Lassie," Angus said, "are ye going to be stayin' out or in?"

  Allie turned and stepped inside. "Is Jamie ready?"

  Angus's house could politely be described as Spartan. With the exception of a hearth rug Allie herself had braided for him and a wing chair he'd had sent from the Great House at Carrymuir, there was little decorative furniture. He had a kitchen table, but no chairs, insisting he did not want to linger over dinner when the only person to hold a conversation with was himself. The mantel over the fireplace was empty, and the conspicuous absence of pictures on the walls only called more attention to the tiny brass frame on the side table that held a postcard of the mountains and rolling glen he'd always called home.

  "Jamie's as ready as he'll ever be," Angus said. He picked up an umbrella from a stand by the door and rapped it against the ceiling. "Jamie, lad," he yelled. "It's Allie come to see ye."

  Jamie came down the narrow stairs quietly, twisting a coat that must have been Angus's in his hands. "Are you sure you want to do this?" he said brusquely.

  Allie smiled at him. "You're going to have to get out sooner or later," she reminded him. "Where's that MacDonald pride I've heard about all these years?"

  Jamie shrugged himself into the coat, a shapeless tweedy brown jacket that was inches too short at the sleeves. Allie turned to Angus. "You're sure you don't want to come?"

  Angus snorted. "To a lecture about hell?" He shook his head. "I'm old enough. Why tempt fate?"

  Allie kissed him on the cheek and walked out the door. She was settled in the car, adjusting her seat belt, when she realized that Jamie was still standing outside, his fingers clutching the handle of the passenger-side door. She unrolled the window. "You don't want to be late," she said, and then she saw the direction he was gazing.

  She watched a breath of wind stir the rainbow of balloons. "I've never seen anything like this," Jamie said.

  Allie turned the ignition. "Darby Mac says it works."

  Jamie sat down and pulled the door shut. He stared straight out the window. "You know, when I got to Angus's house yesterday, the farmer only had that one balloon. The Congratulations! ." He smirked. "I thought it was for me."

  Allie pressed her foot on the brake to slow the car, and turned to stare at Jamie. "Well," she said, "you never know."

  The arraignment of James MacDonald had created such a stir in the sleepy little town that anyone who might have attended Verona MacBean's reading from her book on the nature of hell completely forgot it had been scheduled. Consequently, the Friends of the Library had judiciously postponed the reading until today, asking Allie to keep the three centerpieces in her cooler overnight. And because she'd agreed to do so without any additional charge, Verona herself had given Allie two tickets to the event.

  They were small black rectangles, printed with gold lettering. "Wheelock's Daughter, Verona MacBean," they said. "Reading from her critically acclaimed book, Damnation in the '90s: To Hell and Back." had, of course, offered Cam a ticket, but he had politely declined. Even if he had the time to go, he wouldn't need more than a smile to gain admission; it was one of the perks of being Chief of Police. "Maybe I'll meet you there," he had said, pulling on his socks that morning. "I wouldn't mind seeing how Verona turned out."

  "Then I'll just find another date. There are plenty of men in this town who'd like to escort me to a lecture on hell." Cam laughed. "You've already asked Angus?"

  Allie tossed her head. "Who says it has to be Angus? Maybe I'll take Jamie."

  At her words, Cam had gone still. He'd glanced up at her, his eyes dark. She thought he would become angry, or flat out forbid her to go, but instead he simply nodded. "Maybe you should," he'd agreed.

  Allie pulled up to the library and parked in a spot at the curb. She walked in and handed her ticket to the lady at the front of the conference room, turning to ask Jamie where he wanted to sit. He was standing awkwardly in front of the woman, who had started to walk away.

  "Excuse me," Allie said, grabbing the ticket from Jamie and ripping it in half and then dragging him into the room. She tapped the woman's back. "Is there a problem?"

  The woman glanced at Jamie and then looked away. "I don't think it's entirely proper for him to be here," she said, loud enough to make others turn their heads.

  "My cousin has not been convicted by a court of law. He's a guest of this town."

  "That doesn't mean we have to like it." Allie whirled around to find Jock Farquhason, a thin, reedy bank teller, staring her down.

  "Let's go." Jamie started to tug at the sleeve of Allies sweater.

  "Absolutely not," she hissed. She led Jamie to a table at the front of the room. It became crowded in a matter of minutes, and although some people nodded to Jamie as they passed, no one else came to sit beside them--those unwilling to cast the first stones didn't want their lot thrown in with a mercy killer, either.

  Allie did not realize that Cam had seen the whole thing. He was standing in the back of the room,
more comfortable with his shoulders against the cement-block wall than he would be sitting beside Jamie MacDonald with all of Wheelock watching. He could have said something to that asshole Farquhason, but he didn't have the heart or the inclination. If Jamie MacDonald was planning to win, he'd have to play by the same rules as anyone else.

  When the lights dimmed and Verona MacBean stepped onto the stage in all her glory, Cam could not suppress a smile. The woman in the severe black suit with her hair braided tight against her head was a far cry from Che hot little number who used to go down on him after-hours in the boys' locker room. He tried to undress her with his eyes, picturing Che creamy skin and swelling curves that had kept him in a permanent state of semierection in high school, but Verona's face and form kept giving way to the image of Mia's frightened eyes, the fragile bones of her spine.

  He turned and left before Verona even started speaking.

  A 1994 Gallup poll, Verona began, found that sixty percent of Americans believe in hell. That was up from fifty-four percent in 1965. Hell, she said, had developed in religion our of the sense that some people were getting away with sin in this life, and deserved punishment in the next one.

  She stood in front of a small podium someone had transported from the elementary school auditorium. "Jews had Gehenna," she said, "named for a dump near Jerusalem where animal carcasses were thrown into bonfires. The New Testament mentioned a lake of fire, an outer darkness." She paused and smiled at the crowd. "And in 1990, a tabloid ran a story about a Soviet drilling fleet who found hell when looking for oil. They had it closed off after smelling the ashes and smoke, hearing the shrieks of the inhabitants."

  Any schoolchild could describe a laughing, teeth-gnashing Devil, a pit of fire and brimstone. But, Verona said, the latest theology on the matter postulates that although hell exists, it isn't in a literal space.

  "We now believe that people don't get sent to hell," she said, stopping to take a sip of water from a tumbler. "That would make God into a horrible sort of magistrate. Instead, we see hell as a choice people make for the afterlife. People who decide during the time they're alive that they don't need God will have to spend eternity without Him too."

  Jamie, who hadn't wanted to hear Verona MacBean, hadn't even wanted to leave the safe haven of Angus MacDonald's home, found himself wholly entranced with her words. And as she began to speak of the popular image of hell, with its rings of Dantesque fire and burning walls, he had a sudden image of Maggie. She was getting into bed in the middle of the night, like she always did. She awakened at least once or twice to pee; she used to say she had a bladder like a thimble. By the time she came back to the bedroom, she'd be freezing. She'd slide under the covers and put her icy feet on Jamie's calves, and he'd pull her close, her back to his front. "You're burning," she would whisper. "You're on fire." He'd concentrate on the soft curve of her bottom, pressed to his groin, and he'd selflessly give her all his heat until he fell asleep, now clutching at Maggie for warmth.

  He did not necessarily agree with Verona MacBean's vision of hell. It could be much simpler than the theologians seemed to believe. You knew you were damned when you woke up in the morning and realized, with a jolt, that you were still alive. You knew you were damned when you went to sleep at night, and you kept seeing the love of your life just at the reach of an arm's length, but every time you went to touch her face she vanished like a reflection in a pond.

  He turned to watch Allie, still and intent on the lecture. She had come to the courthouse yesterday for his moral support; he knew this just as surely as he knew that she had not told Cam that was her reason for going. Jamie would have bet her husband didn't know he was with her now. Not that Jamie blamed her--he understood that sort of relationship, perhaps better than anyone. A lie of omission was much simpler than admitting to yourself you were going against the wishes of the person you idolized.

  And suddenly, in the middle of the Wheelock Public Library, the pieces fell into place. Jamie understood why he had been able to kill Maggie. He had been telling himself over and over during sleepless nights that he would have done anything Maggie had asked of him; that was the nature of love. But he was starting to see that he had wanted to do it, and for a purely selfish reason: he did not wish to see her sick and pained and beaten, because that wasn't the way he wanted to remember her. He had held her head when she vomited after chemotherapy; he'd kissed the scar where her breast had been; he'd been a paragon instead of a husband. But when he first woke up in the morning and turned to see her sleeping--bones taut under stretched skin, hollow asymmetry of her chest rising and falling with battered breaths--he had always shuddered. Slight, small tremors; they were easy enough to suppress before he put his arms around Maggie and woke her up with a genuine smile.

  He had wanted back the old Maggie. The woman he had fallen in love with.

  He hated himself for this.

  But it had been a strong current in him, strong enough to make him take her life when she asked, although he had to have known she was not--could not have been--thinking clearly.

  It disgusted Jamie that the last six months he spent with Maggie had been a well-constructed lie. It infuriated him that he had not been brave enough to see past what the cancer had taken away and to find instead the wonderful, indefatigable qualities that remained.

  And it was agonizing to know that in spite of what he had done, it had all been for nothing. Killing Maggie had not brought her back whole and shining as she used to be. Jamie looked at Verona MacBean, black-clad and confident and artsy, and knew that she didn't really understand hell at all.

  Graham MacPhee was sitting in his office with a bottle of Rolling Rock--it being far after hours--and scribbling down defense possibilities on the back of a take-out Chinese menu.

  Absence of Malice. Murder One was defined as having malice aforethought. This defense was the most likely possibility, and yet the one no one could really prove. Who knew what went on behind locked doors? Who said that an intentional killing motivated by grief or love even fit into the same category as an accidental killing? He considered Jamie's confession, which stated that Maggie had asked to be killed. If a victim consented to her own death, was the killing still a criminal action?

  He knocked his head against the edge of his desk. There were big enough holes in that argument to drive a herd of elephants through. The prosecution would laugh him out of the courtroom.

  Graham twirled his pencil around his fingers like a miniature baton. Suicide, he wrote, Accomplice to the Act. He was reaching a little, since Maggie MacDonald had certainly been capable of slitting her own wrists or swallowing a bucket of pills. What would she need Jamie for?

  In some states, a botched suicide attempt was considered a crime. This wasn't the case in Massachusetts, thanks to generations of Democrats. If committing suicide wasn't a criminal act, aiding a suicide should not be one either.

  "Sure," he said aloud. "Tell chat to Jack Kevorkian."

  Temporary Insanity. This was what Graham had suggested to Jamie at their first meeting; the catchall for defense strategies when there were extenuating circumstances. It meant that Jamie was not in control of his faculties at the moment he had killed his wife. He would not have been able to understand the nature and the quality of the act he was committing. Which basically said that when he picked up a pillow, Jamie didn't really know it could be used to smother; when he held it to his wife's face, he didn't know it could be fatal. Temporary insanity meant that Jamie did not know at the time that what he was doing was wrong.

  Graham snorted. Jamie had known damn well what he was doing; he simply thought it was right.

  In other cases, where killing had been a means of mercy and the defense had been psychiatric, the record of acquittals seemed to follow a pattern. The more violent the method of killing--bullets, knives--the more likely the defendant was to go to jail. The more incapacitated the victim had been at the time of the killing, the more likely the defendant was to go free. Jamie had used a pi
llow; you couldn't get gentler than that. But Maggie had been walking, talking, laughing, in the minutes before.

  Graham swallowed the last of his beer and set the bottle upside down on the polished surface of his desk. He was pussyfooting around the truth, which suddenly seemed to have a startling presence, as if it had taken the form of a carrion bird that was perched on the edge of his windowsill. The reason Jamie MacDonald had killed his wife was because she was going to die, she was in pain, and she simply didn't want to suffer anymore.

  Mercy killing was too gray an area to be a suitable defense. Jurors weren't reliable enough to guarantee acquittal. Prosecutors talked out of both sides of their mouths, saying euthanasia was merciful, of course, but that didn't justify breaking the law.

  Graham had known when he got into trial law that his business was not judging morality but securing acquittals. His father had defended clients who were as seedy as Che bottom of a sewer, and had won his cases anyway, because it was what he was paid to do. But to defend Jamie on the basis of the truth?--well, that meant challenging the way the laws had been written.

  Graham didn't know how he felt about euthanasia. He had never loved a woman enough to even contemplate what kind of thoughts had run through Jamie's mind leading up to the killing. He tried to see it from Maggie's point of view--if he was going to be sentenced to such a life, would he want someone to help him out of it? Was it the same as wanting someone to pull the plug if you ever became a vegetable?

  It was easy to mull over after three Rolling Rocks, when he was in full control of his faculties and every cell in his body was screaming with health. He was too young to make that kind of choice.

  Maggie hadn't been all that old either.

  Taking a deep breath, Graham began to draw circles around the words he'd already written on the menu. Were there certain variables, certain instances where the law should not have control over death? What kind of law could you possibly put on the books, when there were so many different issues to consider? To Graham, defining mercy killing would be like peeling an onion. Every case involved another layer, and another, and you'd keep stripping these and making exceptions and before you knew it there'd be nothing left at all.