The Calling (20 page)

'Jim is short for James,' said Rose.

'You can call me Jim if you want.' Wingate opened
his notebook to the sketch Wineva Atlookan had
made of her father's visitor. 'Take your time.'

'That's a terrible drawing,' the child said. 'You
people sit tight.' She bounded off the couch and
ran upstairs. Hazel put her mug down.

'She hasn't had a seizure since ... since that man
was here,' said Terry Batten, opening her hands in
wonder. 'She'd have ten or twelve a day, but since
last Sunday morning ...'

'That's remarkable,' said Hazel.

'It is.'

'Do either of you know what this man did with
Rose when he was here that morning?'

'He wouldn't let us into the room with her. He
asked for hot water—'

'Hot but not scalding, please,' said Grace, as if
she were having a simultaneous conversation with
someone none of them could see.

'And he closed the door. We heard them talking.
Rose was talking about elves at one point, but I
have no idea what went on in there. He came out
after about forty minutes, and she was asleep in her
bed. He shook our hands. She didn't wake up for
about nine hours, and when she did, she was as sick
as a dog.'

'She threw up for thirty hours!' said Grace,
coming back to them, and Hazel could see this
woman was on the verge of cracking up.

'It's okay,' she said.

'No, it isn't!' shouted Grace MacDonald. 'We
thought she was going to die! She had a fever of a
hundred and seven. No one lives through that! I
brought him here,' she said, looking wildly at her
sister. 'He tried to kill her.'

'Grace—'

'He could have killed us all.' She put her face in
her hands, and Wingate got up from the couch to
guide her into a chair. 'I invited a murderer into
this house.'

'You people are hysterical,' said Rose Batten
from the stairs. She held a hardbound scrapbook in
her hands. 'Honestly. He was a nice man, he just
dressed funny.' She went to her aunt and pulled her
hands from her face, then folded herself into
Grace's lap. 'You stop that,' the girl said to her
quietly. She passed Wingate the book. 'Jim, you
can look at these if you want.' He sat down again,
opening Rose's scrapbook between himself and
Hazel.

'She was always an artistic child,' said her
mother.

They flipped the pages. The girl had rendered
her visitor in a number of poses. The drawings were
stellar: she'd made images of the man in black ink
and then coloured them. 'Is it him?' asked Grace.

'Absolutely,' said Wingate. 'It's him.' He held
Atlookan's drawing of a long, thin man in dark
clothing up against Rose's scrapbook. What had
been a ghostly remembrance of a visitor seen from
afar in the Pikangikum drawing was here a series of
living portraits. Rose had drawn the Belladonna
standing in her doorway, a phantom in a dark coat,
his hands leaking from his sleeves. In another
image, he was crouched down holding a weed in
his hand. 'That's mistletoe,' said Rose.

Hazel touched her finger to that drawing. 'Did
he kiss you?'

'Uck, no,' said the child. 'Anyway, that's a silly
application of a very important herb. The droods
worshipped it.'

'Who?'

'I think she means Druids,' said Wingate.

'Droods,' said Rose.

'He told you all this?'

'He made me tea out of it. It made me barf.' The
girl leaned forward and flipped the page. It was a
closeup of the Belladonna's face. His eyes were set
back in his skull, like little black beads. There were
lines all over his face, in all directions.

'Did he really look like this?'

She waved her hands side-to-side over the drawing.
'These are wrinkles,' she said. She waved her
hands up and down. 'This is steam. He's holding tea.'

'Can we take this, Rose? Just for a while?'

'
No
...'

'Honey, these people are trying to solve a very
serious crime.'

'They're not taking my precious significant
drawing journal, Terry.'

'I understand,' said Hazel. 'Maybe you could
make one just for us, then. A drawing of the man
who helped you get better. So we can see his face.
Could you do that?' She saw the girl staring at the
tray of sandwiches, and Hazel picked it up and
passed it to her. Rose took two sandwich quarters.

'It'll take me at least fourteen minutes,' she said.
'Do you have that kind of time?'

Hazel could not help it: she laughed. 'Honey, I
have all day for you.'

'Then I'd better get started,' she said.

'What a fantastic creature you are.'

The girl attempted a curtsy. 'Thank you!'

She ran up the stairs. The four adults watched
her in a bewildered silence. 'I'm not going to say I
preferred it when she was sick, because, Christ,
I really don't,' said Terry.

'I hear you,' said Hazel. 'Where's her father?'

'Long gone.'

'Dead?'

Terry Batten narrowed her eyes. 'I wish.'

They raced home, lights and sirens, a blue, red,
yellow and white streak. Wingate sat with the girl's
drawing in his lap, staring at it. She'd drawn him
face front, his legs planted slightly apart, his arms
slack at his sides. The coat was done up to his neck,
and above it, the killer's pale, creased face stared
out. His expression was one of calm expectation, as
if he were waiting to hear the answer to a question.
He did not look a danger to anyone. Wingate ran
his finger lightly over the coat. At one point, he
tapped a spot over the Belladonna's heart. 'Did you
notice this in her other drawings?'

Hazel tried to look at what he was pointing at.
'What is it?'

'Just a couple of white scratches against the
black of the fabric. I didn't really think anything of
it until now. Do you think it's a tear?'

'We have his face now, James. I don't think a
tear in a coat is going to be an identifying
characteristic, do you?'

'No ... but it's just odd she would notice it.'

'She noticed everything. She was completely
alive.
He
brought her back to life.' She tapped the
paper in Wingate's lap. 'What do you think of that?
He's on a murder rampage and he stops to save a
life.'

'Yeah, I know. But maybe ... maybe he
was
trying
to kill her, and he botched it.'

'James, do you really think this guy is capable of
botching anything? If he wanted this girl dead, she
would be dead, her mouth twisted into some alien
hoot, and her mother and aunt chopped into cat-food.
No: he stopped and saved this girl. He knows
how to do such a thing.' She looked out over the
road, shaking her head. 'My God, he's magnificent.'

'Magnificent?'

'I think you were right about him,' she said.
'That he "cares". He's motivated by love. He is. He
believes he's doing something good. This trail of
dead bodies is a monument to something. And
those mouths, those mouths, James, they're going
to tell us what they're a monument to.'

'I want to thank all of you for your hard work, and
especially for your discretion,' said Detective
Inspector Hazel Micallef. The entire force, local
and seconded, was standing in the pen. 'I know a
lot of you feel the way I do about this case: you've
never seen anything like it in your lives. We've
seen how something this disturbing can change a
place. People are frightened. People we've known
our whole lives seem different to us. Accept that,
but try not to change yourselves. You were here to
do a job, and you've done it brilliantly. Now I ask
you to do the hardest thing: go back to your regular
lives. All you men and women who came to us
from Mayfair, it's time to go home. Your aid was
indispensable. But I ask you not to speak. The time
to tell of what you saw will come. But you've seen
how irresponsible speculation can be a major setback
in an operation like this. Keep your own
counsel. And as for those of you who were taken off
your desks to assist this week: please go back
to your dockets. There's a week of catching up to
do.

'We now have fifteen pictures, including the
Atlookan images, which I understand came in this
afternoon, right, James?' Wingate nodded. 'Good,
now, judging from the blood samples we have,
we're short two victims. But we can work with
what we have, and what we have is all due to your
hard work. So again, I thank you. As you were.'

The Mayfair cops gathered their things and
began to file out. Many shook her hand as they
went and thanked her for letting them be a part of
the investigation.
Thank me
, she thought,
for
putting pictures in your heads that will give you
nightmares for years to come
.

When the place was cleared out, it looked
empty. The nighttime shift began to filter in. She
tried to dismiss Greene and Wingate, but they
weren't hearing any of it. Greene was eating an Oh
Henry! for supper. 'Where's Sevigny?' she asked
him.

He peeled the candy like a banana and spoke
without looking at her. 'He left on a four o'clock
flight out of Toronto. He had to take the dog down
to the airport.'

'You speak to him?'

'Yeah, we traded recipes.'

In her office, she took Rose's drawing out of a file
folder and put it down on her desk. 'A kid did this?'
said Greene. 'Maybe we should hire her.'

'What's your problem, Ray!'

He stared at her for almost five full seconds, his
eyes dead. 'Nothing.'

Wingate stepped between them. 'When are we
going to hear from Sevigny?'

Hazel looked at her watch. 'He won't be in Port
Hardy until late tonight at the earliest. He's got to
get a car and then he could be up north for days. By
now, the Belladonna's at his next stop, or even the
one after. Ray's chart shows at least two more
killings after Havre-Saint-Pierre. One somewhere
in Nova Scotia, and one in PEI, Newfoundland, or
both. We don't have time.'

'
Anyway
,' said Ray Greene. He sat in Hazel's
chair to find the garbage can under her desk. He
threw his candy wrapper at it. 'I don't think we can
tip our hand now.' He was looking at Rose's
drawing again. 'I don't think these eyes miss a lot,'
he said.

'When does Ms Turnbull's friend get here?'

'She's getting on a bus first thing tomorrow,'
Hazel said.

'Buffet-style policing,' said Greene, leaning back
in Hazel's chair. 'I like it. A little bit of this, a little
bit of that. All four policing food groups.'

'Get out of my chair, Ray.'

He took his time standing up. She felt like she
was going to grab him by the shirt and wrench him
out of it. 'This is what I'm saying: don't you think
it's time to stop accepting the kindness of strangers
and catch this guy?'

'You're the one who wanted me to be open to
"the new".'

'I meant cellphones,' he said.

'Well, you'll be thrilled with me then,' said
Hazel. 'Because our lipreader's friend is coming
here with some kind of supercomputer that makes
instant cartoons. Miss Turnbull even said it was
cool
. So show me some respect.'

'Cartoons,' said Ray Greene, his mouth pursed
into mock wonder. 'Well then, we must be close.'

'Sorry,' said Wingate. 'Cartoons?'

'What kind of state is your apartment in, James?'

'
My
apartment?' She waited him out. 'I'm still in
boxes.'

'Stash 'em,' she said. 'When our guest arrives,
we'll be working from your place.'

Wingate gave Ray Greene a look. 'Hey, I didn't
know anything about this,' Greene said. 'It's a
whole new world for me, too.'

'That's my home, Skip. I like to go there
after
work.'

'Look,' said Hazel, 'I don't want to be a bear
about this, but Sevigny is right. You weren't here
for my press conference, but you wouldn't have
liked it. Only God knows what kind of shit people
are going to think up. It's star-chamber time now. I
want privacy with this woman, and you live alone,
James, so it's got to be you. When her bus gets here,
I want you to pick her up at the station, call us, and
we'll all meet you at your apartment.'

'You do things differently here,' he said.

'I'm making it up as I go along, James.' Greene
made a huffing sound. Hazel held the door open for
Wingate, but stood in it when Greene started to
leave. 'What the hell is your problem, Ray?'

'I don't have a problem, Hazel. And if I did, I'm
sure it wouldn't be anything a few dozen extra
people couldn't solve.'

'You think this was a job for you and me and a
couple of duty officers?'

'No,' he said, 'it was a problem for the RCMP.
But since we took a pass on—'

'Don't start with that again, okay?' He shrugged,
like he couldn't be bothered to get into it with her,
but this gesture upset her even more. 'You let me
know when you want to sit behind this desk, with
no commanding to help keep you out of the soup,
and a whole county scared out of its wits, okay?'

He squared to her, the look of sarcastic defiance
gone from his eyes, replaced with a glint of real
anger. 'When did you lose faith in your own
abilities, Hazel? Huh? When did you lose faith in
mine? Because I don't recall a time when we
couldn't handle what happened in our own town.'

'This isn't just in our own town any more.'

He flung his hands into the air. 'Yeah, and now I
got fucking Howard Spere in my rearview mirror all
day long, a rookie with theories, appointments
with lipreaders and comp-sci grads, and about
twenty strangers in uniform stalking the halls of my
station house. I haven't had a drink out of my own
coffee mug in three days—'

'I'll get you a new mug, Ray—'

'But the thing is,' he said, running over her, 'is
that any of it would be bearable if not for that wild
goddamned look in your eyes. You look like someone
who heard her name called from a tree.'