The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  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.

  'Inspe
ctor, 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 psychopath,' 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.'

  '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 curt
sy. '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.