The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  'No,' she said. 'I won't be going home until this is ... settled.' She drew the palm of her hand down over her face, as if to scour herself awake. 'Whatever you might think of this man's state of mind, Howard, it's at least as sharp as ours, and we've only been up one night. This guy's been living rough for two months, and from the sound of him, he's firing on all cylinders with no fuel at all. So we're not going to use the word crazy about him to anyone.'

  'Okay,' he said, looking down.

  'Why did you ask me in here, Howard?'

  'Oh. Well, I thought you'd want to know that Margaret Entwhistle has died.'

  'Give me something, people! Who has news? Who knows anything?' She was standing, hands on her hips, and she'd startled them by flying into the pen already shouting. Some of them put down their phone receivers or pens and turned to her, flicking glances at one another. They were already doing everything they could. 'Come on!' Hazel shouted. 'We don't have a week to put a goddamned case together!'

  Sergeant Renald took a chance and stood to read something from his daybook. 'Report of a break-in at a pharmacy at Seymour Lake.'

  'Okay!' she said, stepping forward. Seymour Lake was ninety minutes southwest of Port Dundas. 'Any surveillance tape?'

  'Chief, this is a town of fourteen hundred people. There's probably a single camcorder there, you know?'

  'Fine,' she said. She was faintly aware of Wingate's presence beside her. 'What was taken?'

  Renald consulted his notes again. 'Uh, a shelf of adult diapers and also some chewable vitamins.'

  She was nodding. 'Great. That's our lead? He's incontinent and fighting fucking scurvy!?'

  'Hazel,' said Wingate quietly.

  'This is the ex-mayor of our town. This is my mother. Can you people get your heads on straight and figure out where this guy is? Who haven't you called? Where does he think we won't be looking? Look there! Have you thought of that?'

  'Skip,' said Wingate.

  'What?' He walked back into the hallway and her guts flipped. 'What is it!'

  'It's nothing,' he said, 'nothing about anything.'

  'Then what?'

  'Don't you think you should go home? Rest up a bit? This could go on for a while.'

  'Did Spere send you over to tell me that?'

  'No,' he said. 'I don't need Detective Spere to tell me you need a break.'

  'What am I going to do at home, James?'

  'These people need to focus.'

  She pushed past him, a caged animal. 'Would you go home, James?'

  He had to admit he wouldn't. But he wanted to give her a chance to decide for herself to leave. An officer driving Ian Mason up from Barrie had radioed from the road: they'd be there in half an hour.

  By mid-morning Terry Batten had filed suit against the OPS for reckless endangerment. She and Rose were in Mayfair, having insisted that Central put them up somewhere safe while she thought about their options. She had already decided that the house in Humber Cottage would have to be sold: they would not live in that town, she'd told Mason, not in a house marked by a killer. She'd filed a second suit for mental anguish naming just Hazel. She and her lawyer were working on other charges.

  Mason parked in the rear and sent in one of his men to ask Hazel to come talk to him outside. He told her he was sorry about her mother and that all the resources of OPS Central Division were being brought to bear on finding her. He reassured her that the abduction of her mother was not being treated as any other missing persons case: all available personnel as far south as Barrie were on it. Mason spoke to her with more respect and warmth than she'd ever seen coming from him, so she knew it was going to be bad. He asked for her badge. 'I can't do that,' she said.

  He turned his gaze to the two large police constables standing beside the car they'd driven him up in. 'You can have a radio,' he said. 'You'll hear what we hear in real time. But you can't be at the station house now, Hazel.'

  'You're going to need a judge.'

  He produced an envelope and held it up. 'I thought you might say something like that. I don't actually need anyone to take you off the job. But I've got a warrant for your arrest if I need it. You want to open it?'

  'Arrest for what? I'm being sued. It's not illegal to be sued.'

  'Trespass is illegal, Hazel. You're relieved of duty, and so as of this moment, you're trespassing.'

  'You're a piece of work, Ian.' He noticed the men and women standing in the hallway behind the glass door that led to the parking lot. She turned and looked. 'Do you really think they're going to let your two drug-squad bruisers jam me into the back of a car and drive me home?'

  Mason gestured to the small mob to come join them, and they pushed through the door into the cold sunshine of midmorning. He pushed up on his toes to see to the back of the crowd. 'Which one of you is Jim Windgate?'

  He stepped forward under Hazel's steady gaze. 'Et tu, Wingate?'

  He offered her a miserable look. 'He's going to move the investigation to Mayfair and put Spere in charge of it if you don't go.' Mason offered the young detective his hand. Wingate looked at it as if he were being asked to sign on the dotted line.

  'Take it,' said Mason, and Wingate did. 'Congrats, you're the new interim CO.'

  'Um,' said Wingate.

  'Look everyone,' Mason said to the officers, 'Detective Inspector Micallef has to take a break from active duty, but I know you'll all be reassuring her that you're going to carry on in her temporary absence under the capable direction of Sergeant Windgate—'

  'Detective Constable Wingate,' said Wingate.

  'Yes,' said Mason, 'and that everything here will proceed as per the instructions you've been given.'

  An unhappy murmur from the gathered officers. Wingate turned to them. 'I'm sorry, everyone, I don't like it any more than you do. Anyone who can't work under this arrangement should say so now, no prejudice. Otherwise, everyone back to their desks. There's a woman's life at stake.'

  'There you go,' said Mason, and he was grinning at her. 'It's like you were never here.'

  'I'll take my own car, you son of a bitch.'

  Her people were filing inside with backward glances. 'It's not your car, Hazel. It's the detachment's.' One of his men opened the back door of Mason's cruiser. 'Constables Erwitt and Atget will be more than happy to get you home.'

  She began to move to the car. Mason made a sound behind her, and she turned to him.

  'Your badge,' he said.

  'You want my gun too?'

  'Wingate will hold on to it for now.'

  'Why can't Wingate hold on to my badge.'

  'He can reassign the gun.'

  'That's not what I asked you.'

  'Just give me the goddamned ID, Hazel, and get into the car.'

  She tried to stare him down, but the man was an obelisk. He just stared back at her as if thinking of something else entirely. She'd never settled for herself whether Mason's sangfroid was a result of not caring or having seen it all. 'There's nothing you can do to me, Ian, that's any worse than what I've done to myself.'

  He shook his head slowly, and she realized to her regret that he was pitying her. 'After all this time, you still don't know me at all, do you, Hazel?'

  It was a long, silent drive back to Pember Lake.

  She cleaned the house for the rest of the day, furiously mopping, spraying the windows and washing them with newspaper in wide, wild circles, swabbing out various basins and tubs with mad application, and called in to the station every half hour for updates. She spoke only to Cartwright, standing in front of one of the clean windows with sweat pouring down her. There was no progress at all. She went back to cleaning, but in the middle of the afternoon when there wasn't a single unscoured surface, she broke down and threw a scrub brush into the hall mirror. It exploded like a window shattered by a rock, but revealed, instead of the unmediated background, a dark, featureless wall.

  She recalled a theory from one of Martha's high-school science classes. She couldn't bring to mind all of th
e details, but the basic idea was that if you put a cat in a windowless box and subjected it to a random process that could cause the cat's death at any given moment, then you had to say that the cat was both dead and alive until you were able to observe what was actually happening. This was how she felt about her mother. Her mother was equally dead and alive at this moment in time, and their investigation was the box. Simon Mallick was the random element, the radioactive isotope (as she now recalled) that might, at any moment, break down and cause her mother's death. The feeling of helplessness that suffused her now combined with the urgency in her muscles and she felt a kind of sick thrill in her veins, as if she were dying and being born all at once.

  Night fell. She lay on the bed with the phone on her chest. She dialled Melanie every half hour until her shift ended at eight o'clock. Then she dialled Staff Sergeant Wilton. He said, There's nothing in her ear all night long. He stopped saying I'm sorry, Hazel, at three in the morning. She could hear the voices of her people in the background. Somewhere, in the deeper background, was her mother, and Hazel didn't know if there was still a voice to be heard.

  The house seemed like a museum where all the artifacts from her life had been carefully reproduced and placed in attitudes that recalled to her that she had once lived there and had, at times, been happy. She had led a married life here, as a wife and a mother, with no awareness of what her future held. She would leave everything behind now, she told herself, this house, this town, this body even, if her final thoughts could contain the knowledge that her pride and her stupidity had not cost her mother her life. But what was there to hope for now? Her mother had not had her calcium supplement in two days, nor her blood thinners, her painkillers for her arthritis, nor her manganese, her B vitamin, or her iron. The Fosamax she took for her osteoporosis lay powerless in its bottle. And it was so cold outside now, with the snow falling and falling, accumulating – where was she? She had been taken in indoor shoes and without her coat. Was she outside? Was she walking in this? Was she alive?

  The Toronto Sunday Star: 'Maverick Smalltown Police Chief Puts Eight-Year-Old in Line of Fire'.

  She took her pills early and kept to her bed and the living room. Her heart kept pounding. She took Ativan. Daytime television seemed especially sinister, like some kind of alternative reality in which lonely women were being trained for a violent takeover of the world's kitchens. She would watch the various shows with their strange codes and drowse off with the sound up. When the credits music woke her, she called the station house. Melanie was back on as of ten. There was still nothing to report. Hazel was dying. 'I never thought I'd be saying this,' said her mother standing in the big picture window, the light a corona around her head, 'but I think you should eat something.'

  'I'm not hungry.'

  Emily Micallef came and sat on the coffee table, pushed the jumble of the day's newspapers aside. 'Public life has its risks, Hazel. We think we'll be commended for serving, but really, the only thing that gets noticed is failure. You just had a longer run than most.'

  'You can shake off a political mess, Mother. But if you let a murderer go, it's something else.'

  'It's just a different level of public relations,' said Emily.

  What she wouldn't have done to be twelve again, in tears, her face against her mother's chest, willing, at last, to listen to the soothing platitudes mothers are so good with when their children's tempests threaten to overflow their teacups.

  Except this wasn't a tempest, it was an earthquake. She realized that she could see the television through her mother's chest and she sat up on the couch, fear rippling through her. 'Where are you?'

  Her mother was fading. 'Somewhere cold,' came the reply, and then Hazel was alone in the room.

  23

  Saturday 27 November, 4 a.m.

  She woke and lifted her head off her chest. Her eyes fell on an expanse of darkness broken only by a thin yellow flame clinging to the wick of an oil lamp on the other side of the room. It illuminated only the space of the lamp itself, four glass panes enclosing a square of dim light. She was in a hardbacked chair staring out onto nothing, but the staleness of the air suggested an enclosed space. A back room or a shack of some kind. She moved a foot over the floor and felt her shoe rumbling over grit. She swept to the right and then, with the other foot, to the left – semicircles to the sides of the chair. Nothing. She was not bound in any way. It meant she was free to move and it also meant that he was in complete control, that he did not fear she could somehow turn the situation to her advantage. It was risible, anyway, to think of herself sitting there, in the cold, looking for an angle. But what person who wanted to live would not?

  What must Hazel be going through, she wondered. She thinks I'm dead. And they must know about poor Clara by now. She clenched her eyes. We who survive our widowhoods, our cancers, the benighted mates our children choose, the many small insults of old age ... and then to die like that, in sudden pain and horror. She tried to push back the image of her dear friend's mild eyes, that unassuming smile. And the sudden savagery of it, those features she knew so well vanishing in a moment of unthinkable violence. Her friend's blood was still on her clothing. And then this man had stepped over Clara's body as if it were nothing more than a spot on the floor and herded them out of the back of the house, the remaining four of them steeped in a terrible silence full of knowledge. At the last moment, he'd held her back and put the others into the garden shed. The screech of the steel door closing on them. 'They'll die of cold,' she'd said to him, and she'd felt a sharp pain in her upper arm. She thought he'd cut her. But then a strange warmth filled her and she was falling through space and the next thing she knew, she was in a chair in the dark.

  He was using her for bait.

  She tried to imagine all the mechanisms that were already in place to find her, and she dreaded what it meant for Hazel. Because if she was alive, it was Hazel he wanted. Although Emily could not imagine what difference her being alive or dead could make to this man. She hoped that they would never find her. It was the only hope she had now.

  Her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the poor light, and although she could not see her own body, ten feet away there were a few inches of lit wall behind the oil lamp. There might be a door in that wall, she thought. She decided to try standing, and she leaned forward to get up, but as she did, she heard a flutter of movement from the other side of the room and she slowly lowered herself back into the seat. A bandaged hand floated up in the space between lamp and wall, and the flame climbed the wick. Its light crept along an arm to a shoulder and stopped there, holding the disembodied limb in its glow, and then the man who had called himself Simon leaned into the light and it picked his eyes out of the darkness like two dying stars. She thought her heart would stop.

  'You're awake,' he said. 'How are you?'

  She wondered if he could see her, if she was yet safely enclosed in her own darkness, and she felt like shrinking into it, pushing away from the threat of that light on the other side of the room. But when he'd spoken, she knew from how the sound of his voice had travelled that there was not far to run.

  'You may feel a little weak. Be careful if you get up. I wanted to keep the light low in case you needed to rest longer. Are you rested? Do you feel all right?'

  'Do you care how I feel?'

  'I do.' He turned the lamp up higher and a yolky, pulsating light bloomed into the space. Now she saw what she had intuited: a small cabin with nothing in it but a table and two chairs, a wood-stove in the corner where he sat, and a window beside it looking out on a moonless night. He was dressed exactly as he had been (earlier in the night? How long had she been out?), his coat flowing over his legs. There was a single door to the shack, directly in front of her. He saw her looking at it. 'Do you want to go outside? Take the air?'

  'No,' she said quietly.

  'Ask yourself if you'd be alive right now if I did not will it.'

  'I would have come with you. You didn't have to do what you ... what
you did.'

  'Words would not have been enough to express the urgency of my situation.'

  'I would have come if you'd only asked.'

  'I apologize then. If I was too forceful.' He rose on forceful and her chairlegs squealed beneath her: she'd instinctively pushed herself away from him. He picked up both the lamp and the small table it had been sitting on and came toward her. The ball of light went with him as he moved through the room and she saw his body in full again: he was like a sliver of black soap, as if the very air had been wearing him away to nothing. When she'd first seen him, in the briefness of her fear he'd seemed immense. Now it was as if he were made up of incommensurate parts: the heavy, bony hands, one of them wound with a bloodied cloth wrap, at the end of the seemingly powerless arms; the starved skull over broad shoulders. She had a strange thought: he was not the man in charge. He was the forward scout, the messenger. She expected a man with more life in him to come through the door. Although she knew in her heart it was only this man, just this man, and whatever unnameable thing he carried with him she was never going to see nor understand. He put the table and the lamp down in front of her and then retrieved his seat and gingerly lowered his body into it. A sweetly sour odour emanated from him, like stale sweat, and something else, something she couldn't identify. He seemed exhausted with the effort of crossing the room three times and she could hear the air whistling thinly in his chest when he sat in front of her. She took him in: the sallow, parchment-coloured skin, the putty-pale eyes. She looked at his hand. 'What on earth happened to you?' she said.

  'I hurt myself.'

  He blinked as slow as a tortoise. 'Tell me ... did you choose your life, Emily Micallef?'

  'Yes, I did.'

  'Could you have said no to any of the things you were called upon to do? Any of the things you were meant to be?'

  'I could have.'

  'If you could have, you would have learned your calling was false,' he said. He laid his hands on his knees – long, thin hands her mother would have called piano-playing hands – and straightened his back. 'Else you did what you were meant to do.'