The Calling (27 page)

'You want to make up your mind what you're so
upset about, Ray? One second there's too much
competition for your coffee cup, the next you're
accusing me of not reaching out. I asked for
support, Raymond; I didn't get it. What would you
have done?'

'Shouted,' he said. 'I would have gone down to
Barrie and hammered on Mason's door until he did
what I wanted him to.'

'You've got that power, do you?'

Greene swept an invisible crumb off the table in
front of him. 'I don't know what it's like to be a
female CO, Hazel. Or a female mayor, for that
matter. Maybe experience teaches you you're not
going to be taken seriously, that you're going to get
screwed. I'm sorry if it does. But you know, in all
the years I've worked with you, you've never acted
like that was true. Not until now. I don't like
Mason's ways any more than you do, but that
wouldn't make me careless. It might make me
angry, but I'd still be using the same playbook.' She
started to speak, but he went on. 'I don't like
having my name on this investigation, Hazel. I
don't like being a part of these methods.'

'These methods are getting results, Raymond!
Fuck! On Friday, you're telling me to have more
faith in myself, and today my methods aren't good
enough for you!'

'I didn't realize on Friday what was going on
here. I thought you were flailing. I thought you
were lost. But I see it more clearly now. Mason gave
you licence. He set you free to really do it your
way.'

She lowered her head. He was out of line, by a
country mile. She was going to have to discipline
him after this, but first, she realized, she had to
listen. 'I've made mistakes—'

'I'm resigning,' he said.

She set her jaw. 'You don't have to do that.'

'I'm resigning so you don't have to fire me.'

'I wasn't going to fire you.'

'Yes, you were,' he said, and he stood up. 'I'm
Sunderland's source. I went to him because I
thought it was wrong of you to shut him out. He
talks to our constituency. At first, I really just
wanted to tell him he should write about the way
Mason's left us out to dry up here, but the more I
talked to him, the more I thought it wasn't about
Mason. He's a certain kind of animal, Mason is.
You're a different one. But you changed. So I ended
up talking to Sunderland about that.'

'A week ago.'

He said nothing.

'I don't know what to think now.'

'I wanted to wait to tell you until after I thought
the case was hopeless. Thinking maybe there was
something I could do. Now that there isn't, I
wanted you to know.'

'You could have talked to me,' she said quietly.

'No,' he said. 'No, I couldn't have. There were
times when I could work with you, Hazel, but I
could never talk to you.'

'What were we doing in here Friday night? What
was that?'

'We were trying to save a marriage. I think we
both know what that's like. It's hard.' He watched
her absorbing that, watched her expression soften
to disbelief. He waited for her to decide what she
needed to say, but after a moment, he sensed there
was nothing to come. 'I'm gonna go,' he said.

'I accept your resignation.'

He nodded once and turned to leave. He
expected something at the door as he opened it,
but, again, there was nothing.

She'd told everyone in the station house that she
needed time to think, and she'd locked her door.
She opened the file cabinet so quickly that the bottle
fell over and clinked and rattled against the
bottom of the drawer, loud enough that she was
certain it could be heard in the pen. But no figure
appeared shadowed against the frosted window in
her door, and she returned to her desk with the
half-empty bottle in her hand. She expected no
further twists in the day and told herself she might
as well dip into oblivion if she felt like it.

She'd avoided Greene as he cleared out his stuff
and said nothing to anyone about what was going
on, but she'd made eye contact with Wingate on
her way into her office and she knew he was aware
of what was happening. For the first time in two
weeks, she could not focus on the case. Instead, she
saw what lay beyond it: there was going to be an
inquiry, and she was not going to come out of it
looking at all good. In a way, this comforted her:
she couldn't bear the thought of Greene's accusations
standing as a private matter. They would
have to come out. And then, afterward, as a matter
of public record, she would have to accept that
she'd been found wanting, or that she'd merely lost
a friend. She couldn't think which she preferred
right now.

She poured herself a second drink, one eye
trained on the door. She wanted to sleep. If
possible, she wanted to sleep with someone, and
not because she desired to be touched in any way,
but because she was tired of being alone. During
the day, her staff swarmed close with their
questions, with their need to be set on the right
path. But this was not human contact, and in the
mornings, waking alone, she felt keenly the lack of
another body. Even someone who came into her
bed in the middle of the night and left before she
woke would be enough, she believed. Anything to
maintain a connection of some kind. She despaired
she'd ever know it again.

Before long, the bottle was empty. She put
the last dram away into its hiding place, feeling the
welcome but artificial warmth in her limbs. As she
closed the drawer, there was a knock, and she went
to open the door. It was James Wingate. He
wouldn't meet her eye. 'I thought you'd want to see
these,' he said. He passed a small sheaf of paper to
her. 'Sevigny emailed his pictures of the crime
scene. They're pretty disgusting.' He seemed to
notice she was uncertain on her feet. 'Maybe you
should sit down,' he said. She retreated to the
safety of her desk.

She sat and shuffled through the images, her
stomach tightening. The man in the pictures was
as thick as a felled redwood. He lay on a small dais-like
bed and she thought she could smell his
half-rotted form right off the digital image. She
couldn't imagine the kind of strength it would have
taken to lift the stone pillar that lay on his chest. 'I
don't suppose you've heard any RCMP theories on
the body? Cause of death?'

'I thought it would be wise to keep low.'

'Probably. You think Simon killed his own
brother?'

'It's impossible to say.'

'And what about Peter Mallick? Did Sevigny
find out anything about him?'

'Not yet. He just sent the pictures. We can't find
anything on the church from this end. We did find
something, though, at the Pictou scene: there were
two distinct trails of blood in Laurence's house.'

'What?'

'Two blood trails, in addition to the cocktail of
blood they found on Laurence's face. As if she'd
been anointed with it, said the forensics guy there.
The two clear trails, though, one of them is hers,
but the other doesn't check out with anything we
have a record of. So I'm thinking she might have
tried to hurt him.'

'She changed her mind?'

'Maybe,' he said. 'But then again, she had no
defensive marks on her.'

'It hardly matters now. We're never going to see
him again. We had him for a second there. But he's
gone.' She watched him fail to think of something
that would give her a little hope.

'Inspector,' he said, 'he's still out there, and what
he wants hasn't changed. The way I see it—'

'How do you see it, James?'

'The way I see it, until he feels he's done, we still
have a chance to catch him.'

'Do you like our chances?'

'No,' he said flatly. 'But I haven't given up.'

She gestured to the chair and he sat. 'Ray
Greene isn't crazy about the way I ran this
investigation.'

'I gathered as much.'

'What do you think about it, James?'

His face darkened a little. 'Your methods are a
little different than I suppose I'm used to.'

'Different good, different bad?'

'Both. To be honest.'

'Shit is going to rain down on this place. You
know that, right?'

'Maybe it won't.'

'Until it does, are you still willing to work for
me?'

'Yes, Ma'am. I am.'

'You can call me Hazel now, James. It's just us.'

'Okay,' he said, nodding nervously.

'So if you're still with me, then you'll take a
direct order? Even if it seems a little ill-advised?'

'There's no reason to stop now,' he said.

She laughed. 'Good. I have a job for you.'

It was well past dinnertime, but she had no
appetite. She was hungry only for air. She put on
her runners and headed toward the lake.

It was almost the end of November now, and the
trees were utterly bare. Something about this
month had always seemed contingent to her, as if it
were a temporary bridge between places. They'd
put November up with planks and pennynails at
some distant point in the past to link autumn with
Christmas, but then they'd forgotten it was supposed
to be replaced with something sturdier,
something more lasting.

What had she wanted out of this life, back when
she was thinking about such things? Had Greene
been right when he accused her of wanting an
excuse to go it alone? She'd never detected the will
in herself to be a hero, but that didn't mean it
wasn't true. She cast her mind back to her time in
the academy. She'd once been excited by the idea
of playing a role in keeping
order,
but perhaps that
meant she'd once believed in such a thing. Order.
Now, after more than thirty years on the force, she
knew it wasn't something worth waiting for. Order
was not possible, but the dream of balance wasn't
entirely vain. A balance between what you could
control and the chaos that surrounded it. A
balance between good and evil. A balance between
what was difficult to do, and what, through
repetition, you could do in your sleep. Trying to
strike a balance kept things interesting. Hadn't
things, at least, always been interesting?

The truth was, though, that the police prayed for
boredom. Not for order, not for balance, even, just
regularity. Nothing out of the ordinary. And this
year
had
started out looking like any other, she
thought. Break-ins, car crashes, bar fights. If anyone
had told her back in May when she was slapping cuffs
on Mattie Barnstow for driving his VW Rabbit
through his ex-wife's living-room window that it
wasn't
going to be the height of excitement for the
year, she would never have believed them.

Murder, she thought. And not just murder, a
lunatic murder. And God invoked. And the rest of
the country tied to them in it, even if they didn't
know it. This was the stuff of movies, of third-hand
tales. Even as an end to it all (an unhappy end, it
would appear) came closer, it seemed less and less
real to her. A symptom, perhaps, of her experience
with ordinary disasters. Divorce, pain, parenting an
unhappy daughter. Nothing, not even a life in law
enforcement, could prepare you for the wild
imaginings some people, in their passionate madness,
could unleash.

It was too cold to be outside with the sun going
down. She returned to the house. Her mother had
eaten and was reading in her room. It was fine with
Hazel that there was no one to tell her day to. It
was too awful a day to speak of. She sat in front of
the television numbly watching bits and pieces of a
bunch of different programs. The picture and
sounds seemed to reach her from far across the
room.

Sunderland's editorial the previous Thursday
had called her a 'little general', and she'd realized
that this was one of Greene's phrases. How could
she have worked so closely with this man and
never have sensed his exasperation? He'd always
been capable of a sharp word here or there, but
she'd always seen it as a form of camaraderie. What
if she'd misread more of the people in her life as
egregiously as she'd misread Ray Greene? In the
last two weeks, she'd sensed the wheels coming off,
but now she thought perhaps there'd never been
any wheels at all. What if, for much longer than
everyone but she had realized, sparks had been
flying off the chassis?

She went to bed at nine, too exhausted to wait
for Wingate's call any longer. The phone would
wake her. When it rang at eleven, she shot up in
bed and picked up the extension on the bedside
table. 'Wingate?'

'Yeah.'

'Well?'

'The word "unprofessional" was used,' he said.

'I should have it put on my letterhead. Were you
able to get past that?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'It's done.'

Wednesday 24 November, 8 a.m.

He pushed on, through a second sleepless morning.
He'd watched the sun come up over Mount
Carleton, turning the hills a deep red. The road
unfurled through the provincial park as he tacked
north and then west, toward Saint Quentin. He
turned on the radio to keep himself awake and
heard music from his childhood, music his father
had put on the turntable for him and Peter when
they were children. The Benny Carter Orchestra.
Jack Millman's All-Stars playing 'A Stranger
Called the Blues'. This was music their father had
loved. Simon could not remember his father's face.
For a moment, he closed his eyes tight and tried to
bring that beloved face back, but he could not.
Their father had given Peter his frail heart, the
heart that broke on him when he was thirty-nine.
He listened to his father's music drifting up in this
unspoiled place.

He drove aimlessly, waiting for the way to
become clear. He told himself he was only being
tested. Something would come to him. This far
north in the province, there was almost nothing
but the bad roads and forest. It occurred to him
that he might run out of fuel up here and have
nowhere to turn. His body, devoured to bone by
animals, would be discovered by hunters in the
spring. He checked the tank. From where he was,
he thought he could make it back to Kedgwick to
gas up, and then he could do another circle of the
interior and think.

Ten kilometres outside of the town, as he drove
on fumes, the radio sputtered back to life. He
listened to the news. There was nothing about him.
It occurred to him that he wasn't doing anything to
protect himself except to run. He drove down the
main street of Kedgwick and refuelled. Inside, he
bought one of the national newspapers. The smell
of candy in the kiosk made his stomach twist. He
was so hungry now he thought he might pass out.
The town had a café, and he went into it with the
paper and ordered hot water with lemon. The waitress
hovered over his table, looking down at him. 'I
can pay for it,' he said.

'I'm not worried about you running out on me
for a slice of lemon. I just think you should eat
something.'

'Just the water and lemon, please.' He kept his
face averted.

When she came back with the teapot, she
brought him a plate of toast as well. 'It's on the
house,' she said. 'I have a thing about customers
dying at my tables.' He thanked her and poured the
hot water.

What had exercised his exhausted mind over the
preceding forty-eight hours was the question of
where had he slipped up. He realized his faith had
kept his attention on the horizon, and he'd never
really entertained the idea that anything he'd had
control over could go awry. But now he considered
it. Someone had gained access to his list, which
meant one of two things: Carl Smotes had contacted
the police or Jane Buck had been found out.
But Smotes, even if he'd had a change of heart,
could not have known where Simon was the night
before he was to be in Trinity Bay. So that meant
someone had gotten to Buck, and despite her
commitment to them, she had broken. Buck was
fervent, but she was fearful. Perhaps someone else's
authority had elided his own. And this meant they
had his laptop, and, worse, had desecrated the
shrine. He pushed back the sudden anger that was
blooming in him with this thought and forced himself
to think rationally. If this was true, then it
meant that they had an idea of who he was as well.
They were wrong, but it wouldn't matter. How had
they got to Buck? He wondered if he should call
her, but if he was right, and they had any respect at
all for his intelligence, then they'd be expecting
that. He wondered if it was the Micallef woman
who'd tracked Buck down. He'd spent part of
Tuesday in a library in Edmundston collecting
information on Micallef, and judging from the size
of her detachment, he couldn't imagine she had
the resources to mount an investigation of any
magnitude, never mind one that might have
turned up one of their most trusted congregants.
But he could not discount Micallef: maybe he had
made the mistake in Delia Chandler of killing
someone too well-loved. He knew how motivating
a deep love could be. And it had somehow been
Hazel Micallef's voice on the other end of that call
Sunday night.

In the one photograph he'd been able to find of
DI Micallef online, he saw that she was an older
woman with short grey hair tucked up under her
police cap. Broadchested, like the matron of an
orphanage, but her eyes were not cruel. They were
bright and lively: clever eyes. He did not like the
thought of those eyes trained on him. So somehow,
she'd gotten into step with him, but he'd veered off
and now he was just a figure in the trees. He had to
assume those eyes were sweeping the forest for him.
He would have to emerge at some point, but in
what shape and with what purpose?

He tried to distract himself with the newspaper.
Reports on federal politics and problems in the
Middle East and the cost of oil. Someone had
written a column advising the reader to eat less
salmon and more mackerel. He had to laugh. No
one knew anything. The ecology of the body did
not matter at all: it was a machine that could be
transformed if you knew what to do to it. The body
was a barrier to its own becoming.

'You're allergic to toast,' said the waitress,
appearing beside him.

'I'm not hungry,' said Simon.

'Suit yourself, honey.'

He paid at the front and left a generous tip. He
went over his options: drive or sit still. But stillness
was torment, and he could think behind the wheel.

At four in the afternoon, he reached the Quebec
border. He'd changed cars twice while crossing the
country, so he was not afraid that his licence plate
would mean anything to the authorities. He'd
traded down each time through used-car dealers;
this third vehicle he'd picked up in Manitoba.
Probably he'd been driving it too long, but as the
urgency of his travels intensified, he'd run out of
time to stay on top of all the smaller details. He
drove with his brother's glistening eyes on him: he
saw them hovering over the road, in the trees, in
his mirrors. Especially in his mirrors.

He crossed into Quebec and drove down to one
of the smaller highways where he might find somewhere
to stop for the night. Outside of La
Pocatière, he at last saw the dreaded evidence that
his actions in the world were being noticed. The
New Brunswick papers had not paid any heed, but
here, on the cover of
Le Journal de Québec
, he saw
a picture of the cruiser he'd found in Tamara
Laurence's driveway, now with yellow tape around
it, and the simple headline:
Une Attaque Sauvage
.
And now, finally, he heard a clock ticking.

He pulled into the first motel along the highway
outside of the town and bought a room. Once
inside it, he turned on the television and flipped
channels trying to learn how limited his time
would be. There was nothing about him on the
evening news in French or in English. A woman
dead and a cop mutilated and it wasn't enough for
the six o'clock news in eastern Canada.

He continued to surf. After the news, it was time
for sports, edutainment and current affairs. On one
channel, a white lynx prowled for rabbit, springing
at one sitting almost invisible against the snow.
Another channel fuzzily showed a crime-stoppers
program. There was also hockey and curling. He
watched the curling for a couple of minutes, the
slow, inexorable progress of the heavy rock down
the white sheet of ice, curving gradually off its line.
It was a sleepy sport. He tracked back down the
channels. The lynx was nursing a blind, naked
kitten. Did they procreate in the fall? He went up
and down the short dial, the images blurring
together but united by the image of cold and ice,
and he began to feel hypnotized by it all, to the
point that, beneath the snow of static on one of
the channels, he even thought he saw himself. And
then the mask of his consciousness snapped back
down into place: it was him. He shot up straight in
the bed. It was the crime-stoppers program. He
leaped from the bed and adjusted the crooked
aerial until he could see himself better. It was a
drawing. A perfect rendition of himself in a dark
coat. He'd gone from moving in utter silence
through the houses of the dying and the dead to
being an open secret in a childish drawing beamed
to every television set in the country. He was
undone. He turned up the volume. They'd cut away
from the drawing and now they were showing the
exterior of a house he knew. He'd been in this house.

'On the morning of November fourteenth,' a
voice was saying through the buzz of the bad reception,
'Grace MacDonald brought a visitor to
her sister's house.' They cut away to the inside of
the house. The mother of Rose Batten was sitting
at her kitchen table.

'I was scared of him,' she said. 'He came into the
house and he wanted to see my daughter.'

'Terry Batten's daughter, Rose,' said a woman
standing on the street now, talking into a microphone.
'An eight-year-old girl with brain cancer. In
her desperation, Terry agreed to let this stranger, a
man claiming to be a naturopath, examine her
child. To this day, neither sister knows exactly
what the man gave Rose Batten, but at first it
seemed to work.'

Back on Terry Batten. He watched with dumbstruck
horror. 'She was her old self for a few days.
Bright, energetic. Happy. We couldn't believe our
luck,' she said. 'I wanted to find this guy and thank
him. I would have given him everything I owned.'

'But Miss Batten's joy was to be short-lived. By
the middle of last week, her daughter began to
decline again, steeply.'

Now the girl was on camera, looking into the
lens. Her face was pallid, her skin almost see-through.
She seemed groggy, as if roused from sleep.
An off-camera voice spoke to her. 'What did he do
to you, Rose?'

'He didn't mean to hurt me,' the girl said. 'He
was a nice man.' She looked away from the camera,
then up again, away from it, her eyes distant.
'He wanted to help me. But nothing can help
me.'

Simon felt the heat returning to his limbs.

On the street again, the reporter said, 'An
innocent child and close call with a killer. Did he
come here to help? Or has he taken another victim,
here in the quiet hamlet of Humber Cottage?' They
showed the drawing again. 'If you see this man, do
not approach him. It's believed he is somewhere in
Nova Scotia or Newfoundland at this moment. If
you see him, or this car' – now a drawing of his
battered Chevy Cavalier: they had no licence
plate, but they had the make now; Grace
MacDonald had seen it of course – 'call the police.'

The reporter was staring beseechingly into the
camera. 'With your help, Crime Stoppers can catch
this man before he kills again. Damian?'

They switched to a man at a desk in a studio.
Simon had seen enough. He turned the television
off. There was only one thing to do now. He was
going to need his sleep.

He would have to eat to regain his strength. There
was a café across from the motel, but when he sat
down he became aware that others were looking at
him. If others had marked his wretchedness before
he'd turned up on television he hadn't noticed. He
ordered a large salad and an order of bacon to go
and waited with his back turned on the dining
room. He hadn't eaten pig in almost twenty years,
but he needed the fat. People came and went from
the front cash to pay for their meals, and he could
sense their curiosity. He should have shaved; he
should have bought some better clothes, but it had
never occurred to him until this moment that he
would ever walk among people again. He felt
dangerously exposed. His order came and he went
to the front to pay. He asked the woman for twenty
dollars in dollar coins.

An hour later, fed and feeling like his strength
was coming back, Simon stopped at a bar and used
the pay phone. His tongue felt slick with fat and
salt. An operator gave him the number he
requested, and Simon put two dollars into the
phone and dialled. Terry Batten answered, and he
hung up. Five towns and two hours later, he tried
again, got Terry again, and hung up. Finally, three
efforts later, in a gas station in the middle of the
province, he heard the voice he wanted to hear.

'It's you,' she said.

He cupped the mouthpiece in his hand and
spoke as quietly as he could. 'Why did you do that,
Rose? I never harmed you.'

She was silent, and he trained his ears on the
background noise. There was nothing. 'I'm sorry,'
she said.

'How sick are you?'

'I feel like there's a fire in my brain. And I throw
up when I eat. I'm scared.'

'I'm sorry I failed you,' he said. 'There's more art
involved in what I do than I like to admit. I truly
had faith that you'd be all right. Do you believe
me?'

'I do,' said the girl.

'I'm calling to apologize. It seems nothing I do
right now is turning out the way I'd hoped. You
must think some very bad things of me.'

She let out a long, terrible sigh. 'Can I ask you
something?'

'Yes.'

'Is it true? What they say you've done?'

He leaned against the wall looking out toward
the pumps. 'In a way it is.'

'Are they going to catch you?'

'Probably,' he said. 'But I've never taken anyone
who said they didn't want to go. I'm not a
murderer.'

'They say you are.'

'I hold the door open to another place. People
choose to step through.'

He heard the girl shifting around, like she was
taking the phone somewhere and hiding with it.
'So those people wanted to die?'

'Yes.'

'And you were helping them.'