The Calling (19 page)

There was silence from the room.

'If they are sounds, Inspector,' said the dispatcher,
PC Peter MacTier, 'then how do we find
out what they are?'

She looked out onto a small sea of faces unconsciously
making the puckers and dead grins on
the wall behind her, and a thought came to her.

Friday 19 November, 10 a.m.

Her name was Marlene Turnbull and Howard
Spere had driven her from Upper Watertown. He
brought her into the conference room against her
will, it seemed, and she hung back, looking behind
herself, an ankle-length green parka swirling
around her boots. She'd done nothing wrong, but
some people act guilty in the presence of the law,
and Hazel marked it. Howard pulled a chair out for
the girl, and she sat at a table with the pictures
of the Belladonna's victims splayed over the tabletop.
Her black hair covered her face so they
couldn't see what she was thinking, but she had
one hand over her mouth and the other wrapped
around the Styrofoam cup of coffee she'd been
given when she came in.

'These are thirteen pictures we've been able to
track down over the last couple of days,' said Hazel.
'These people were all killed in the last six weeks
or so all over the country.'

'My God,' said the girl behind her hand. With
the other, she was gingerly pushing the pile of
pictures apart with a single fingertip, trying not to
touch them. She was no older than twenty-five,
her round, open face pinched at the temples where
her tiny glassframes fit too tightly. 'Who did this?'

'We don't know. But I think you may be able to
help us,' Spere said. Turnbull looked up, her face
white. Whatever she was feeling culpable for, Hazel
thought, this was the moment she thought it was
going to be named. She hated Howard for pausing.
'You work with the deaf,' he said at last. 'We think
these people are making sounds with their mouths.'
The young woman nodded absently at the pictures.
'Can you figure out what they are?'

She looked bewildered to be told that her
expertise and these pictures might have anything
in common. 'No.'

'Shit,' said Spere.

'I mean, I could give you some possibilities, but
you can't get a positive phoneme out of a picture.
I'm not the person you want for this.'

Hazel came forward. 'Marlene? Do you deal
drugs?'

'What?'

'Maybe you have unpaid parking tickets? Or you
drive a stolen car.'

'God no!'

'We didn't bring you in to accuse you of anything.
I don't care if you smoke pot at an expired
parking meter, not right now. We looked you up
because you lipread. That's all. Whatever else
you've done, it doesn't exist in this room, not right
now.' Marlene considered her for a moment, blinking.
Her eyes seemed huge behind the tiny lenses.
'We good?'

Marlene jutted her chin forward minutely. Hazel
took it for a nod that didn't want to look like
assent. The girl turned back to the pictures. 'We
call ourselves "speechreaders" now,' she said. 'Not
lipreaders. There's more to talking than lips, that's
why.' She turned one of the pictures to herself. It
was the morgue photo taken of a woman named
Elizabeth Reightmeyer. The Belladonna had driven
a twelve-inch spike through her ears. The bulge in
her facial structures made it look as if a train were
travelling through her head, just beneath her
cheekbones. Reightmeyer's lips were rounded into
a loose pucker. 'Like I was saying, it's hard to make
a phoneme positively from just a picture. Take this
lady, okay? She could be making a plosive here—'

'A what?'

'A hard sound. A
puh
sound or a
buh
. Or she
could be going
mmm
. It's impossible to be sure.
And these ones, with their mouths closed ...' She
stopped for a second and looked away. 'Sorry. It's
hard just to look at their faces.'

'Take your time,' said Hazel.

'If you can't see the oral cavity, it's more difficult.
People use all the parts of their mouths to make
sounds. There are eighteen distinct parts.' She
looked to Spere to see if this was useless information
to him, but he was expressionless. 'Um,
there's the tongue and the teeth and different parts
of the palate and the throat – it's a lot more complicated
than you'd think.' She studied some of the
images more closely, her face a mask of horror.
'Okay, like this lady. See her tongue?' She was
pointing at Delia Chandler's chalk-white face. 'Her
jaw is slightly open, the back of her tongue is pressing
against her upper teeth and the tip of her
tongue is against the roof of her mouth. So she's
probably making a
luh
sound.'

Spere looked closely at the picture. 'Could it be
a word, though?'

'If the word is
luh
,' she said.

'What about
the
? Could she be saying
the
? Or
then
?'

Marlene put her fingertip against the image of
Delia's tongue. Her hand was shaking, as if she
were touching the dead woman's actual face. 'You
see how the tip of her tongue is behind her teeth?'
They looked. 'This is an alveolar lateral approximant.
I mean, that's what it's called. It's nothing
like the
thuh
sound.'

'English.'

'It just means that the
luh
is made with the air
flowing over the sides of the tongue with the
tongue touching a zone directly behind the teeth.
The
thuh
sound – it's completely different. The
tongue's lower against the back of the teeth. And
the air goes over the middle of the tongue.' She
touched another picture, this one of Robert
Fortnum, from Hinton, Alberta. 'You can see this
guy's tongue is curved a little at the edges, but
this lady's tongue is flat. You can try it.'

'I'll take your word for it,' said Howard
Spere, but Hazel was quietly making the two
sounds.

'I see your point,' she said. 'One makes a rumble,
the other a hiss.'

'Sort of,' said Marlene. 'The bottom line is you
can't see air in a picture.' She pushed her chair
back, relieved to have been no help at all. 'I'm
sorry I can't—'

'Well, hold on,' said Spere. 'So there's nothing
you can give us at all?'

'What these people are doing, if they're doing
anything
, could be any number of sounds, and
sounds are not what I'm trained in. I'm trained in
speech, and speech is made up of movement,
sounds running together. To me, these are just scary
faces. Can I go now?'

Hazel had been staring at the face of Morton
Halfe (sixty-six, Eston, Saskatchewan, Lou
Gehrig's disease, shot through the heart); she was
certain he was saying
wuh
. 'Hold on, hold on,' she
said. 'Speech.'

'Yeah. Like I said, what I do is called speech-reading.'

'Oh my God,' Hazel said. She grabbed Spere's
arm. 'Don't let her go anywhere.'

She burst out of the office and into the hallway.
The entire pen stood as one. 'Wingate. Greene.
The French guy—'

'He went to B.C.,' someone shouted.

'Fine, Wingate and Greene, where are they? Get
them for me. Now!' A flurry of motion, and within
ten seconds both men appeared.

'What is it?' said Greene.

'Come with me.'

Back in the conference room, Marlene Turnbull
already had her parka on. 'Tell them what you told
me.'

'About what?'

'About what speech is made of.' The young
woman looked around uncomfortably – she was
certainly not pleased to see the number of policemen
in the room double – but before she could
recall what she'd said, Hazel was rotating her hands
in front of her chest as if she was trying to catch her
breath. 'Speech,' she said, 'sounds. Two things. She
said that sounds, individual sounds, are made with
your tongue and your teeth and your lips and all
kinds of things, right?'

'Yeah ...'

'But speech, listen, speech is these sounds put
together.'

'Very good, Skip,' said Greene, 'you've invented
talking.'

'
No
... listen! These faces: they're not just making
sounds. They are, on their own, making a
sound, each of them. But that's not what the
Belladonna is doing. He's making them say something.
One thing. All together.'

They looked to her and then to the pictures, and
as if magnetized, they moved toward the table
where the images still lay.

'A word,' said Hazel, 'or a phrase. They're each
contributing a sound to it.'

Marlene reached down and straightened the
pictures into a line. She took her parka off and laid
it over the back of the chair and sat down again.

'Are they?' said Spere.

'Could be.'

'Can you see what it is?'

Wingate was leaning over Howard Spere's
shoulder. 'How would we even know what order to
put them in?'

Marlene Turnbull suddenly swept the pictures
back up into a pile. 'I need a phone,' she said.

Hazel pawed at the various piles of forms and
papers that had built up on her desk during the
week. The last thing she wanted to do was explore
the varied misdemeanours, complaints, regulatory
conflicts, licensing queries and job applications
that made up a normal week in Port Dundas. She
doubted her ability to make sense of any of it in
this state. It was as if the agglomeration of
meaningless things that comprised a life in policing
were merely the stuff of distraction while something
truly awful made its way toward you –
perhaps over the distance of many years. The one
case that made you, that destroyed you. This was it.
I'm retiring after this, she thought, and then
remembered that her mother had been mayor of
Port Dundas until she was seventy-nine, and would
have been mayor longer if not for the newspapers.
Sixty-one was going to look like early retirement.
But then she could blame her back for it if she had
to.

She'd got Ray to silence the ringer and the alarm
on her phone, but nothing could stop it from its
endless blinking. It lay at the corner of the desk
signalling her like a madman in a crowd –
Over
here! Over here!
– and she picked it up and flipped
it open. She had seventy-one messages now. She
somehow navigated her way to the voicemail
function and the voice said 'You have ... seventy
... one ... new messages. Press one to—'

She started listening.

'Officer Micallef,' said seventy-one.
Detective
Inspector
she said to herself, 'I was in Matthews
Funeral Home on Tuesday, and there was a guy
standing alone at the back, and I—' Erase.

'I'd like to know when we can expect to be able
to—' Erase.

'Inspector, it's Paul Varley from Kehoe. My
brother-in-law is a policeman in Owen Sound, and
if you guys need any—' Erase.

Sixty-four: a man wondering if the municipality
would reimburse him for extra locks he felt he had
to put on his door.

Fifty-five: A spiritualist.

Fifty-one: 'This would never happen in
Winnipeg.'
No, but Norway House and Gimli, sir,
try those places.

She'd erased down to twenty-two, writing down
three numbers she felt she had to call back, and
then she heard an anxious voice: 'Inspector, I'm
sorry to keep calling – I'm sure you've turned off
your phone by now, but please do call us.'

This same voice had left five messages. Hazel
skipped down to the first one. It was from a woman
named Terry Batten. She lived in Humber Cottage.
Hazel listened to the message and took notes.
Three minutes later, she was in her car with
Wingate in the passenger seat. 'When was this?' he
asked.

'This Batten woman says it was the fourteenth of
November. Early in the morning. Ulmer was killed
around noon that day. It's only twenty-five kilometres
to Chamberlain from Humber Cottage.'

She was driving a hundred and sixty with the lights
flashing. When they went through the small towns
that dotted the 121, she turned on the siren. The
towns went by like identical siblings lining a
parade route. They were there in just under two
hours.

Wingate knocked. 'You guys are allowed to
speed, I guess,' said Terry Batten.

'It's the only reason to become a policeman,'
Wingate said.

She opened the door wide and they entered.
There were sandwiches on a tray and coffee, for
which they were grateful. Terry's sister Grace was
there, but she wouldn't look them in the eye. Terry
called the child in from the yard.

'This is my daughter, Rose,' she said.

She shook hands with both of them. The girl's
cheeks were red from running around. 'How do you
feel, Rose?' said Hazel.

'I'm excellent.'

The two sisters traded a look.

'Should she not feel "excellent"?'

'She started having seizures back in February.
They didn't know what was causing them. By June,
she was having them almost every hour.'

'How old are you, Rose?'

'Eight.' The girl took one of the egg sandwiches.
'Those are for our guests, Rose.'

'But I'm hungry, Terry.'

'Let her eat,' said Hazel, casting a glance at the
girl's mother. 'Come sit with me, sweetie.' Rose
hopped up onto the couch beside her, her legs
almost reaching the floor. She ate through the
middle of her sandwich and put the crust down on
the sidetable. 'Your mother tells me you were a very
sick girl.'

'Terry worries a lot.'

Hazel looked up at the girl's mother. 'It's a
phase,' said Terry. 'I ask myself, would I rather have
a sick child, or a disrespectful one?'

'It's your name,' said Rose.

'I know.'

Hazel patted the girl on the knee. 'How did you
get better, Rose?'

'Auntie Grace brought me a witch doctor.'

'He told me he was an
herbalist
,' said Grace
MacDonald. 'Or a naturopath or something like
that.'

'Maybe he said
psycho
path,' said Terry.

'Anyway,' continued Grace, 'he came into the
diner at sunrise that morning and we got to talking.
I had no idea ...'

'We're not saying he's our guy, you understand,'
said Hazel. 'And even if it is, you've done nothing
wrong. Rose,' she said, turning back to the child,
'this is James Wingate. He works for me. He's going
to show you a drawing someone made, and I want
you to tell us if you think it's the same man.'