Mercy Read online

  Graham grinned. It took all his self-control not to jump off the corner of the desk. "That is why we're going to win this case."

  Jamie shook his head slowly. "They have a body, a signed confession, fingerprints, scratches."

  "Maybe so," said Graham MacPhee, "but we have you."

  Martha Sully, one of the magistrates at the Wheelock District Court, was a sassenach, but she usually agreed with Cam when it came to setting amounts for bail. She sat behind her podium desk reading Cam's arrest and custody report, noted that the complaint was based on "information or belief." She had already asked Jamie to enter his plea.

  "So," she said, glancing up at Cam. "Been busy out on your end of town?"

  Cam grinned. "You could say that."

  He liked Martha Sully; he liked her clipped English voice, with its trilling dips and draws. She sounded remarkably upper-class, like she was hiding cakes and crumpets just behind her gavel stand. Cam knew her to be a fair magistrate. He had only been the subject of her wrath once, when Angus, in a fit, had started screaming at her in the town coffee shop about the need to get those goddamned Windsors off a Stuart throne.

  Martha ran her courtroom very casually, at least at the beginning stages. She lifted her eyes, signaling to Cam that she was ready to begin. "Your Honor," he said, having done this a thousand times, "in light of the evidence uncovered by the voluntary statement given by James MacDonald and taken from the scene of the crime, we've booked him on charges of Murder One. Because he was the perpetrator of such a violent crime, we recommend that bail be set at fifty thousand dollars."

  When he said the sum, Jamie's eyes sought his out. Cam was not certain if he read disillusionment there, or respect.

  "Your Honor," Graham began, clearing his throat, "my client is an upstanding citizen of his community. He's never received a traffic ticket, he's a member of the Small Business Association, he's served on the Cummington selectmen's board for three consecutive terms. Since he does not in any way pose a threat to the Wheelock community, we feel that he should be released without bail, provided he stays in the area pending trial."

  Martha rubbed her temples and scanned the papers before her once more. She had, of course, heard of this case yesterday when it happened; had in fact been waiting for it to appear in her courtroom today. She knew what Cam was up to; she also knew what he was up against. She doubted he really wanted James MacDonald locked away at the county jail, in spite of his outrageous request.

  "Conditions for bail are as follows: Mr. MacDonald will remain within Wheelock proper pending trial; and he is obligated to check in with Chief MacDonald at the police station every day, excluding Sundays, before noon." She peered over her half-glasses at the small group in front of her. "Bail," she said, "is set at five dollars."

  Cam stayed in the courtroom after Jamie and his lawyer had left. He sat down at the prosecutor's table and stretched his legs in front of him, peering at the seal of an eagle over the judge's podium and squinting to read its motto.

  The last thing he wanted was to be Jamie MacDonald's keeper.

  Damn Martha Sully.

  With a sigh, Cam got to his feet and headed out of the court. He had a hundred things to do at the station, administrative duties that hadn't been finished in the bustle of the past two days. He had to talk to Allie too. He hadn't seen her yet this afternoon. He had driven Mia to the flower shop, but Allie had only left a note saying she'd be back soon.

  At the foot of the stairs he saw Jamie, standing before the bail bondsman's office, talking to someone. He considered just walking out the door, but realized it went against his better judgment. Taking a deep breath, he walked forward.

  "Fifty thousand dollars?" Jamie said.

  Cam opened his mouth, ready to reply, when he realized who Jamie had been speaking to. Allie was just shoving her wallet back into her purse, having obviously sprung Jamie free on his ridiculously low bail. "Really, Cam," she admonished, smiling up at him.

  Her heart-shaped face was pink from the cold and her tongue came out to wet her lips. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, catching here and there in the collar of her coat.

  Within an hour, everyone in Wheelock would know chat Cam had asked for fifty thousand dollars bail, that it had been set at five dollars, and that Allie had been the one to pay it. He found himself wondering how high she would have gone. A hundred? Five hundred? Five thousand?

  She slipped her hand through the crook of his arm, and at her touch, he felt his fury begin to recede. "Jamie's going to stay with Angus," she said, as if she were announcing Che seating at a dinner party. She smiled a goodbye and steered Cam out the door.

  They had taken separate cars, so they stopped at the center of the parking lot, hands bunched into their pockets against the unseasonable cold, like two fighters squaring off. "Allie," he said, "I have to know what you were doing here today."

  Allie stared at him as if he could create a whole different world for her, as if he already had. He thought of Mia, and suddenly he could not breathe. "Why, Cam," Allie answered, her voice clear and true and comfortable, "I came because of you."

  FIVE

  When Mia was in seventh-grade Latin class, she learned that her name derived from the classical word for "mine." The teacher made a joke about it, saying it was surely the most selfish name in the class. But Mia had only smiled weakly, wondering what her parents had had in mind. Whose was she, exactly? Her father's? Her mother's? In spite of their devotion to each other, they hadn't named their daughter "Ours," leaving her to believe she had to choose a side.

  She had played hooky for the rest of the day, coming home to sit in the rose garden her mother had abandoned several years earlier when she found that pruning took her away from Ed Townsend too many hours of the weekend. Mia had remade it into her own image, twisting the thorny bushes around wire frames and clipping them so that they resembled dragons and centaurs and big-bellied ships, trained to stay exactly as they'd been told. Her parents thought she was very clever, quite a little horticulturist. They had set a hammock in the garden, big enough for two, so that they could watch her work.

  But they weren't in the garden when Mia arrived, and she didn't go to her gardening shed immediately. Instead she sat on the cool, damp grass, picking apart a leaf with her nails. She thought about her name. She reached the conclusion that even at birth, her

  parents had wanted her to be separate and apart from the magical unit they fashioned when they were together. Self-sufficient, she was. Independent.

  Mia. Mine. And she knew then, perhaps had always known, that she could only belong to herself.

  Cam sat in the middle of a dark pew, staring at the body of Christ. It was a waxy sculpture that hung over the altar at the town's church. When Cam was a young boy at Sunday mass, he'd held himself awake by keeping his eyes wide and unblinking until the sheen of tears made the painted blood at Jesus' hands and feet look real.

  MacDonalds had always been Catholics. It was why some of the clan chiefs had decided to support the restoration of Prince Charles--and the Stuarts--to the British throne. By now, most of Scotland was Presbyterian, but the MacDonalds of Carrymuir, when they came to Massachusetts in the late 1740s, had brought with them their original religion.

  Cam was not a terribly religious man, but he knew that when he was overwhelmed, he had somewhere to turn. He had several reasons to be in church at this time: He wanted to light a candle for Maggie MacDonald; he had to pray for Jamie MacDonalds soul. He wanted to talk to someone about his own indiscretion, too-- and although the confessor he had in mind was Mia Townsend herself, he knew this was not possible.

  Unfortunately, as he sat there waiting for Father Gillivray to begin hearing confessions, he could only picture his wedding day five years before.

  Allie had been a beautiful bride, small and elegant in white satin that curved at her breasts and her hips. Cam had watched her walking down the aisle, and all he had been able to think was, She's so light. It seemed that with ever
y step she hovered inches above the ground, and when her father placed her hand on top of Cam's, he had clutched at it with his fingers, determined to keep her from floating away.

  Allie had been beautiful, but Cam had stolen the show. After all, it was not every day that a clan chief took a wife. He had worn his father's full-dress regalia: the black velvet coat with silver buttons, the heavy kilt in the strong MacDonald tartan, the white linen shirt with a festival of lace at the throat and the wrists.

  When they went back to their honeymoon suite at the Wheelock Inn, Allie had laughed, saying he had more clasps and buttons to undo than she did. . . .

  Cam sank to his knees, as if in prayer, hoping the hard bench below him would center his thoughts.

  Even in this church, where he could feel God sitting next to him, Cam could not get the image of Mia Townsend out of his mind; the slight tilt of her eyes, the spiral of her ear. She had been rooting for Jamie MacDonald, just like Allie, but somehow he did not hold it against her.

  Cam bent his neck so that his forehead touched the pew in front of him. He did not even know what exactly he was going to confess to. Was it adultery if you kissed a woman who was not your wife? Was it adultery if you thought about her so often you could hear her voice when you closed your eyes?

  It didn't seem right that he'd only sinned in a matter of the flesh. For some reason, kissing Mia seemed less of a betrayal to Allie than having Mia running through his thoughts like stunning mountain scenery seen from a train: you did not keep looking after a while, yet you couldn't help but notice it was there just outside the window.

  The whole time Cam had been holding Mia on a bed he shared with Allie, on a quilt Allie had sewn one summer in a craft class, in a room that Allie had wall-papered and furnished, he had not had a single thought of his wife.

  He saw Father Gillivray's round, black-clad body shuffle from the vestibule to the small confessionals at the back of the church. Giving him a minute to settle in, Cam stood and drew open the curtain of the little booth, then sat down on the folding chair. "Bless me, Father," he began, "for I have sinned. It has been four months since my last confession."

  He could see Father Gillivray's profile through the latticed opening of the confessional. Impulsively, Cam pressed his big hand up to the partition, as if by blocking it off he would guarantee a greater anonymity. "I've been thinking a lot about this one woman," he said. "I can't get her out of my head. I see myself. . .

  well, with her. She's not my wife. And I kissed her. I kissed a woman who wasn't my wife."

  And I'd do it all over again, he thought.

  "Think about what you're doing," Father Gillivray said. "Think long and hard."

  He was given his penance and knelt in a different pew to say the round of the rosary. It was not the first time he'd been a hypocrite to the teachings of the Catholic church. He and Allie had been using birth control, after all, and he didn't make it to Mass every week.

  He looked up at the plaster face of the Holy Mother and pictured Mia, and knew that he was damned.

  When he broke from the heavy double doors into the fading daylight, he was sweating. He hadn't finished his rosary. He certainly hadn't been capable of thinking of his actions. Cam walked down the street toward the station to pick up his car, feeling the wind wrap about his neck. He did not realize until he was on his way home that he had never lit a candle for Maggie MacDonald, never prayed for Jamie at all.

  The ten men who had worked for Jamie at Techcellence were part computer geeks, part philosophers, and part geniuses. Two--Flanders and Rod--had been with Jamie from the company's conception over a decade earlier. Like Jamie, they were obsessed with pushing the envelope in their virtual designs. And like Jamie, they spent a good deal of their free time in the lab, shooting the breeze with each other and brainstorming tomorrow's toys.

  It was the fall of 1992, and they had just won their first big Sega contract. While Jamie tinkered with one of the huge graphics machines, Rod had run out to get a case of Rolling Rock. The three of them were halfway through the package, toasting their own success and their unquestionable brilliance. "Hey," Rod said, his eyes lighting up. "Give me an HMD." He reached for the high-tech helmet, switched on a couple of computers, and downloaded a program they'd recently finished for an architectural firm in Nova Scotia--a virtual walk-through of a hospital that had not yet been built. "You ever get into VR when you're shit-faced?"

  Jamie looked up over his shoulder. "You fuck with that program, and I'll kill you. That took me months to get right."

  Flanders had picked up the program at a different monitor, sliding his hand into the glove and fitting the HMD over his skull. On the two-dimensional screen, Jamie watched images of the men appear as they stepped into the glass-domed hospital foyer.

  Rod whistled, staring up at the impressive ceiling. "Nice," he said. "But how are they going to scrub the bird shit off the cupola?"

  "It's virtual bird shit," Flanders said. "Jamie thinks of everything."

  "You ready?" Rod asked, turning to the right so that the tracking device in his HMD picked up Flanders. Flanders nodded. "Let's rock," Rod said, and he took off down the main hospital hall at a breakneck run.

  Flanders was close at his heels, his feet flying on the motion-platform treadmill that was attached to the computer system. Jamie took a sip of his beer, smiling at the antics of his colleagues in someone else's virtual world as they sent wheelchairs careening and leaped up to touch the fluorescent ceiling lights. Flanders crouched down on the platform, pushing against something invisible that let him vault over a nurse's desk in the simulated hospital. "Hey," he said, "let's be derelicts."

  He tossed a virtual felt-tipped marker at Rod, who stretched out his gloved hand to catch it. "Too heavy," Rod commented. "Jamie, you're going to have to finesse the tactile feedback."

  Flanders began to scribble on the pristine white walls. "God, I was always too good. I should have been doing destructive things all along."

  "Graffiti?" Rod said. "Graffiti's for kids." He walked into an adjoining surgery suite and dumped a tray of instruments all over the floor.

  "For Christ's sake," Jamie said. "Get out of there. Now."

  Reluctantly, Rod and Flanders tugged off their HMDs and gloves. "What's the big deal?" Rod sulked. "You can boot up the system again and it'll look just as sterile as it was before we went in."

  Flanders pushed away from the terminal. "Who's to say it will?" he asked. "I mean, if VR is so realistic that you feel, see, and sense an experience, who's to say it didn't happen?"

  "Oh, Jesus," Rod said under his breath. "Three beers and he's Aristotle."

  "No, I'm serious. If I think I walked through that hospital and left a graffiti mural, who can prove I didn't?"

  "When they build the hospital," Rod yawned, "your artwork won't be there."

  "That's the ticket," Jamie said. "For something to be real, it has to have an impact on the outside world. If you create a program that lets you think you've robbed a bank, it won't matter what you remember about it, because you didn't come away with hard cash, and you didn't hurt anyone else in the process."

  Rod leaned back in his chair. "All right. But what if you commit a virtual act that--even in the real world--wouldn't leave a visible mark? All you've got to go on is the memory of carrying it out." He grinned. "And what if someone's hooked up with you to a system? Then you both have the same experience of participation. Proof positive."

  Jamie arched a brow. "What act wouldn't leave any kind of mark?"

  Rod smirked. "Adultery. Good old computer sex. You're at one terminal, she's at another. You'd swear on your grandmother's grave that you can feel her skin and smell her. Shit, with a good bodysuit you could even come. And she feels it all on her end, too. Can you prove that it didn't really happen?"

  "No exchange of bodily fluids," Flanders said primly.

  "Yeah, but in this case, there wouldn't be a perceptible impact in the external world, so all the evidence would lie i
n the memory of the two people--whether they had sex in a real bed, or at a terminal." Rod hooted with pleasure. "Go ahead, Jamie. Shoot holes in that one."

  Jamie shook his head and started picking up the empties. "If a tree falls in the woods and no one's around ..." he said, letting his words trail off.

  "C'mon. You're telling me that even in a highly sensitive system, you'd be able to tell real sex from virtual sex?"

  "You boys wouldn't understand," Jamie said, grinning.

  "Oh, the old married man," Rod sang.

  "That's right. There's nothing that could fool me into believing virtual time spent with Maggie would be anything like the real thing."

  "Tell us, Confucius," Flanders said.

  But Jamie went around slowly and deliberately switching off the hardware and then the lights. You could not explain to someone who had not been there that to join with a woman in cyberspace, all you needed was a savvy program and a certain degree of skill--no roll of your soul, no heart. You could not explain to someone who had not loved as well and as strongly as he had that being with Maggie let him walk in a world he could never create on his own.

  Mia checked into the Wheelock Inn at a reduced long-term room rate. It was the tiniest room in the little two-story hotel, tucked next to a broom closet in the west corner. It had its own bathroom, and a claw-footed tub with a curtain drawn round for a shower. There was a tiny kitchenette. The bed was covered with a tartan blanket just like the one she'd used at Cam's house, and a small dresser was topped with a chipped blue ewer and washstand.

  She tossed her duffel bag on the bed and carefully set her knapsack down on a tipsy table. When she unzipped it, Kafka bounded free, happy to be unconfined. If she was careful about a litter box, the pinched clerk downstairs would never know she had a cat.

  She took the bonsai tree she'd been carrying in her other hand and began to unwrap it from its protective gauze layers. It was the one she'd shown Allie yesterday in order to get a job; a fig tree with exposed roots, twenty-eight years old, just like Mia. Of course she'd started to work with it some time ago, but it was still quite an achievement. Twenty-eight years, and thriving in this tiny terracotta plate. Mia ran her finger over its twisted, exposed roots, its whispering dime-size leaves. "Hello," she said softly, setting it in a place where it could begin to turn an unfamiliar room into a home.