The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  At the table, he put his medicines down in a row and explained in what order he would apply them; what effect she would feel, and how long it would take for these compounds to go to work. When she'd thrown his bag, she'd smashed the bottles of slippery elm and henbane, the latter of which he used quite a bit, and he told her he was improvising now. She handled the individual jars with care, turning them in her hands. 'Do you find people are ready when you come to them?'

  'Most are,' he said.

  'Are they frightened?'

  'They have different reactions. Some are scared, but most of them are resigned. Or even relieved.'

  'I'm not relieved.' She set the vials back down on the table in the order of their use and regarded them. 'I liked being alive. I was good at it. I loved well and I worked well. I was good at my job.'

  'You helped a lot of people.'

  'An oncologist with cancer,' she said. 'That's not ironic. Good thing I didn't choose a career in explosives.' She laughed and drew the first vial back toward herself. 'So, this one for tea, then?'

  'Yes,' he said.

  She brought it into the kitchen with her and he told her how much of it to put into a cup and how much water. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen with the cup cradled in her hand.

  'I'd like to die in bed. Is that okay?'

  He followed her down the hall to her room. She put the tea down and undressed with her back to him. He had intended to release her from this obligation, in return for allowing him to continue. However, here she was, standing beside the bed, her body giving off a greyish glow, like a stone lit from within. She turned to face him, and he took in the bones pushing out from under her flesh. There were patches of liverish marks pocked over the surface of her belly and chest. She sipped her tea.

  'I can't tell if you're examining a patient now or actually looking at a woman.'

  'When I ask people to undress, I look for scars.'

  'You didn't ask me. But I did it anyway.'

  'I had thought twice of it,' he said. His palms were buzzing. 'But here you are.'

  'I want to be seen. I want to be lit up in my last seconds on this planet.'

  She had answered her own question – he was looking at a woman – and in doing so, he was reminded of all the things he had once been, when he'd been merely a man. He'd had no mission at all then, and life had been a series of tasks that he fulfilled with passion or without. Now it felt as if he were bodiless; he had lost his corporeality when his brother had fallen ill. He was a memory of his brother's body that had been projected into the world.

  But this woman reminded him that he had once wanted to express himself differently.

  'I'm guessing you're not the kind of guy who'd go to bed at a time like this,' she said.

  'I'm sorry.'

  'You'll hold me at least. Right?'

  He said he would. He collected the two remaining vials off the dining-room table and returned to her with them. 'This is just pulverized ginger,' he said, holding up his right hand. 'It's a natural antiemetic.'

  'I guess the other one is pretty nasty, then?'

  'This is ground amanita. It's a fungus.'

  'My ex was an avid mushroomer. I know it.'

  'Destroying Angel, some people call it.'

  'Another exciting Sunday night in Pictou,' she said, and she sat down on the edge of the mattress, naked and shrunken, and looked up at him with her ruined face. He felt suddenly uneasy, but he was too focused to understand what it was that had distressed him. It was a cloud passing over the sun. 'Let's get going,' she said.

  He sat with her and administered the belladonna. She grimaced at the taste of it. He started to mix the amanita into what remained of her tea, but she grabbed his wrist to stop him and began to weep. He held her against him, anxious now to be done, to be separated from her love of life and her agony at leaving. 'I never prayed,' she said. 'I don't believe in any of that. What's that going to mean when you try me out on your God, Simon? He's not going to be happy.'

  'You can come home whenever you're ready, Tamara, even now.'

  She released her grip on his wrist. The belladonna was already flowing through her – in a dose that high, it was almost enough to put her under. She took the amanita from his hand and walked back into her kitchen, where she poured a dram of the remaining hot water out of the kettle and into a glass. 'How much?' she asked him.

  'The equivalent of one grain is enough.' He watched her take twice that and mix it into the water. She took his hand and drew him down the hallway. In the bathroom, she cracked a syringe and filled it.

  'Let's not fool around now,' she said back in the bedroom. He tied her off and she expertly found the vein in the crook of her elbow and put the needle in. They both watched the milk-coloured liquid vanish into her arm. 'You said you'd hold me. I want you to get out of your clothes.'

  'Tamara—'

  'You'll never have to do anything I ask ever again.'

  She reached for the button at the top of his shirt and he pulled away from her. 'Get in,' he told her, and she drew back the covers and lay down. He undressed. In the bed, she folded herself around him.

  'Tell me how long.'

  'Minutes.'

  They lay there in silence. 'Turn off the lamp.' In the dark, he listened to her breathe.

  He remembered what had disturbed him ten minutes ago. 'It's not Sunday night,' he whispered to her.

  'You got here yesterday, Simon. You were out for more than a day. You almost died.'

  He tried to sit up, but she held him there against the bed. She said, 'I'm still here.' And then, 'Still here,' and ten seconds later, she was dead in his arms and it was Sunday night and his plans were destroyed.

  He was furious with himself. He carried her form down the hall, cooling against his nakedness, and to the stairs and brought her into the room where he'd lain insensate for twenty-four hours, hours during which he was supposed to have been making the final leg of his journey. He was meant to be in Trinity Bay tomorrow afternoon, celebrating completion, but now he was nowhere.

  He'd followed his own rules, but instead of consecrating himself, he'd woken up to find himself fallen. He had not been right about his own strength.

  He laid her on the bed in the basement, her body as light as air, this very body that had pressed itself to him, held him back, spoken to him, begged him. He dressed and went to the car and got his flensing knife out from under the back seat and dragged the tin cup through the stinking fluid he'd driven across the country. In the house, he tilted her head back and poured his brother's blood into her, the blood of Victor Wente out of Oyen, Alberta, the blood of Elizabeth Reightmeyer from Norway House in Manitoba. Robert Fortnum, dead in Hinton, spread in her. Delia Chandler, Port Dundas, graced her. Father Price blessed her. He filled her with the congregation.

  He could not cut her, though. She'd transited through human in his presence. She'd been too much with him. His weakness had brought him here and he could not bear it. He knelt by the edge of the bed she lay on and brought up the curving blade of the flensing knife, seeing the little light that was there in that now-silent place glint in the steel. He gave a cry of anger and brought the blade down hard against the bottom knuckle of his right thumb. With two levered sawing motions he had the thumb off and the digit, as if possessed of its own life, sprang free from him and bounced across the floor. He cried out in agony and doubled over onto Tamara Laurence's cold belly, cradling the ruined hand between them.

  14

  Thursday 18 November, 6 a.m.

  ADDICT RAMPAGES THROUGH WESTMUIR COUNTY screamed the headline of the Westmuir Record Thursday morning. Ray Greene was on Hazel's doorstep first thing, the proof that all hell had broken loose drooping in his hand. 'I thought I'd better be the one to show you this,' he said. Hazel held the door open for him as she stared at the newspaper. She couldn't move.

  'What the good Christ do they think they're doing?' she said.

  Her mother was descending the stairs behind them. '
What who is doing?'

  'Your Honour,' said Greene, not joking, and bowing ever so slightly. 'The Record has decided to try out investigative journalism.'

  'I can't believe this,' Hazel said. 'There's going to be a fucking riot at the station.'

  'I'm Mrs Micallef to you, Ray,' said Emily, heading into the kitchen. 'Or Emily, if you must. Let's put on some coffee.'

  Hazel didn't look up once as she walked down the hall behind Ray Greene. 'I guess I really pissed off Sunderland,' she murmured. Greene said nothing. The entire paper was devoted to the murders of Delia Chandler and Michael Ulmer. All their sources were 'unnamed', but the facts, such as they were, were correct. It was their conclusions that were going to cause all the trouble. 'Ray, they think the Belladonna is killing for drugs.'

  'Yeah, I know. Because who has better drugs than the dying? Painkillers, sedatives, hallucinogens, you name it.'

  She fell into a kitchen chair, her forehead in her hand. There were pictures of both houses. Someone had even got a photo of Ulmer being loaded into the morgue van. 'I thought we took Ulmer out a back door.'

  'It's not that easy to disguise an icewagon driving down a side street, Hazel. Someone followed it. These guys did their homework.'

  She leaned in closer to an item on the second page. It had a picture of her cellphone box lying in a garbage can with the caption 'Second Murder Jolts Chief into Twenty-first Century', and below it: 'Questions? Call her on ...' and there was her cell number for every last reader in the county to see. She shoved the paper violently across the table. 'Great! Now they're infiltrating our bloody offices! They're supposed to be covering giant pumpkin contests for Christ's sake!'

  Emily put down two cups of instant. 'I don't understand how you can be surprised, Hazel.'

  'I suppose I'm not.'

  'After I left your father, they asked the good people of this town if I was the kind of role model they wanted in city hall. They asked that question all the way to the polls the following year. "Will she abandon you next?" they asked. And you're surprised they took a picture of your garbage can?'

  Hazel pulled one of the coffee cups toward herself, still holding the paper in the other hand. 'What is it about this place that inspires such vindictiveness? Everything about Westmuir County is a little pastoral dream except for the fucking newspaper.'

  'Don't forget the guy butchering the terminally ill,' said Greene. 'He's not so nice either.'

  Emily opened the fridge door. 'You hungry, Ray? I can make you a couple of fried eggs.'

  'Actually, I am kind of hungry. Thank you, Your Honour.'

  Emily shook her head, smiling, and turned to the stove. 'Can I make a suggestion, officers?' They waited. 'Hold a press conference. Now. This morning. Not a statement on the station-house steps, Hazel, a press conference. Eat and get into the station house and act like public officials who care. Grant an interview to Gordon Sunderland. Let him sit down with you.'

  'The son of a bitch.'

  She turned from the stove with an egg in the palm of her hand. 'Take control of the story. Don't make the mistake I made.' They heard the crack and sizzle in the pan. 'They'll ambush you if you don't invite them in first,' she said.

  'It's too late for that,' said Hazel.

  Her mother swirled the pan on the stove. 'It's almost too late,' she said.

  The station house was full when they got there, but it was ruled by a fearful silence. Hazel walked out into the pen and held the paper up. 'It's eight o'clock right now, people. At nine, we're having a press conference. Set this place up and get anyone in here who wants to hear what I have to say.' She checked to make sure her cellphone was still off and retired to her office, surrounded by the only people she was certain hadn't betrayed her.

  'I have to sit down,' she said when the door was closed. She couldn't make it behind the desk and sat down in the visitor's chair in front of it. Greene, Wingate and Sevigny tried to arrange themselves in front of her. 'We've lost complete control of this thing.'

  Greene reached toward her and gingerly slipped the paper from her grasp. He folded it and put it down on the side table. 'What are you planning to say at this press thing?'

  'I'm going to remind them what community service means.'

  'Should we maybe get Eileen in here? Go over some talking points?'

  'Eileen knows how to lead school trips, Ray. I know what needs to be said.'

  'She is the community liaison officer.'

  She squared to him from where she was sitting, her head tilted to one side to take the sting out of her middle back. 'I was using the term community euphemistically, you know? When the local paper decides to cash in by printing the results of their own investigation, the concept of neighbourliness is not one that interests me all that much. Just make sure Sunderland is here in one hour.'

  Greene went back into the hallway to organize the conference. Hazel hoped he wasn't going to warn Community Liaison Officer Eileen. She turned to the other two men in her office.

  'Do you need an aspirin, Skip?' said Wingate.

  'I need a bottle of Scotch and a long blade, Detective,' she said. 'But let's focus on what's possible. Catch me up on what's going on out there.'

  'Crime scene and morgue photos are coming in. We're getting a lot of digital images, and Detective Spere is calling in some favours out west anywhere we're getting resistance.'

  'We're getting resistance?'

  Sevigny spoke up. 'Little jugs,' he said. 'I spoke to some of your people and told them to keep the details of the investigation as vague as possible.' He made vague rhyme with bag. Hazel pushed herself up from her chair, ignoring the shooting pain that went down through the back of her thigh and into her foot. She felt she had better be behind her desk now.

  'Who gave you permission to talk to "my" people, Detective?'

  'I offer my apologies. But I felt it was important.'

  'You're a guest here. You don't give orders.'

  'I apologize. However—'

  She waved her hand at him to stop him from speaking, and lowered her head. She hoped it appeared as if she was thinking, but sitting in the padded chair behind her desk had introduced a pain so exquisite that she was worried she would cry out. She raised herself minutely out of the chair and then slowly lowered herself back down. She breathed out slowly. 'The both of you know what Howard's people found on Delia Chandler's computer, yes?'

  They both nodded.

  'Then what do we do about it?'

  Sevigny came forward tentatively and pulled one of the file folders on Hazel's desk toward himself. He flipped it open and removed a sheet. 'The delivery address is a post-office box which is part of a rural array about five kilometres out of Port Hardy,' he said. 'It's registered to a "Jane Buck" .'

  'That's clever,' said Wingate.

  'I don't care who it's registered to,' said Hazel. 'What do we do about it? I'm presuming, Detective Sevigny, that you'd advise against deputizing someone in the Port Hardy PD to go and look into it for us.'

  'If you want to maintain control ...'

  'Someone has to look into it.' She turned her eyes on Wingate, who visibly shrank back.

  'Oh no,' he said. 'You can't ask me to do that.'

  'I would if we had the budget for it. But I doubt Ian Mason will spring for four flights in the same month.' She flipped her fingers out at the paper in Sevigny's hand. 'James, you take that and go lock yourself in an empty office – if you can find one – and track down this Buck woman.'

  'She doesn't exist,' said Wingate. 'This is the Belladonna's idea of a joke.'

  'He's not killing John and Jane Does, however, is he? So go find out. And if it's a dead end, I expect you to push through into the woods. Find out who's checking that mailbox.'

  Wingate left with the sheet in his hand. Sevigny watched him go and then turned back to the desk. Hazel's fist was balled up on the blotter. He stepped to the file cabinets on his left and opened the bottom drawer. 'That's a cliché, Detective,' said Hazel. Sevigny hesit
ated, then lifted his hand to the drawer above, opened it and took out a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He brought it over to the desk. 'Can you guess where I keep the knife now?'

  'When you talk to your newspaper men,' he said, 'remember that you are really talking to your staff. Tell them that nothing can get in their way now. They will find him. They will win.'

  She opened her hand to accept the bottle as he slid it to her. 'They make you guys pretty confident where you come from, huh?'

  'My mother had eleven children, Chef. I learn to make myself heard.' He looked at his watch. 'I'll be in the audience listening.'

  'I'll try to impress you, sir,' said Hazel with a crooked smile.

  She sat with the bottle in her hand. The palpable sensation that things were truly coming apart was upon her now. Perhaps at one time in her life, when she was just starting out, a case this big would have been a dream come true. Eager people all around her, the puzzle pieces dropping into place. But the most pressing thought she was having right now was that here a person she'd known her whole life was dead. Underneath the grandeur of the crimes they were now confronting, under the cipher of this man's intentions, was the simple thought that Delia Chandler had been murdered. Dead bodies were the coin of the realm for every entertainment she knew of: television mysteries, Hollywood bloodlettings, celebrity magazines, pocketbooks (what her father would have called 'dime-store' novels) – all of it was so general that it was as if everyone lived in the midst of a bloodbath. But here she was, so-called chief of police of a small-town police detachment, a woman who'd seen bodies, the profoundly unentertaining facts of death, and she still couldn't wrap her mind around the fact that someone had passed through her town and drained a woman she'd known her whole life of almost every drop of blood in her body.

  She twisted the cap off the bottle and poured a full inch into her coffee cup. She thought twice of making her desk drawer the new hiding place, but if Sevigny ever thought of bartending out of that drawer, it would look even worse than if the bottle had been in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. She got up and hobbled over to the file cabinet and put the bottle into the bottom drawer. He'd look there last. But, she felt quite certain, he'd look there eventually.