The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  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.'

  'Their deaths have changed them.'

  He heard her crying softly. 'Would you do for me what you did for them? If I asked you?'

  'Are you asking me?'

  She was silent a long time. He listened to her breathe. 'You never told me your name.'

  'You can call me Simon.'

  21

  Friday 26 November, 10 p.m.

  They stood on the street watching the preparations.

  A handful of local officers had arrived the day before, and their unmarked cars had been parked on the side streets near the Batten house since Thursday morning where Hazel had ordered them to go. Everything would be on foot now. She had seven men, five from Renfrew, and three of her own officers. Two of the local men – Constables Fairview and Glencoe – had once trained as sharp-shooters, but they were so rusty (the lack of demand for sharpshooters in eastern Ontario being such that not one of them had ever been called on to use their training) that Hazel ordered them onto a firing range in Hawley Bridge to practise shooting tin cans from three hundred feet.

  Once Canadian Crime Stoppers had agreed to Wingate's request for assistance, things had begun to happen quickly. The segment played three times a day on each of Tuesday and Wednesday and they were prepared to let it go in heavy rotation until something happened. They expected that someone would recognize him somewhere east of Ontario and they'd simply close in on him. He needed gas, he needed food. But they also held out the faint hope that he'd see the segment himself and react. They'd been lucky.

  During the week, information about the Mallicks had finally begun to filter in. The two men had lived in Port Hardy for almost twenty years. Neither had a criminal record, nor did they turn up in any of the credit bureau, social service or medical records they could get access to. Although many people they spoke to had heard of the Western Church of the Messiah, it was not registered as a charity in the province of British Columbia, and there was no information on the sect. A web search brought up nothing.

  The remote shack was in both their names; they'd bought it outright for $9,800 in cash in 1996. Before then, they'd lived in Victoria, in a house on Asquith Street. In 1977, their first year at the address, provincial records showed both men had changed their names to 'Mallick'. Before then, Peter had been 'Welland', and Simon 'Kressman'. Why had they done this, and were the two men, in fact, related? Wingate's digging found that the Welland and Kressman names were both adoptive ones: their father had died when Peter was five and Simon eleven and the brothers had been separated, Simon going to a family named Kressman in the Interior of B.C., Peter to the Welland family of Milk River, Alberta. His adoptive parents had been murdered in 1976, when Peter was sixteen. And then his brother had legally adopted him. Their father's name had been Gordon Mallick. There was no trace of the mother.

  So the elder had taken in the younger, had brought him home as it were, after the death of his adoptive parents. Peter's vocational trail was almost impossible to follow: it appeared that he'd worked for the post office briefly in the eighties, but apart from that, his worklife must have been peripatetic, a hand-to-mouth cash-in-an-envelope existence. Simon was in no records they could find at all. The silence of his history seemed to be in keeping with the establishment of a church they also could find no record of. If Peter Mallick had lived a crazy-quilt life, the fabric of Simon Mallick's life was gossamer.

  That morning, they'd found out what was in the packages that Jane Buck had been dropping off at the Mallick shed. Sevigny had packed them into his rental car in Port Hardy and itemized the contents before returning to Sudbury. Hazel couldn't think of the kind of trouble they'd all be in if it were ever discovered that one of her officers had removed evidence from a crime scene. But in her heart, she was glad for what he'd done. 'Slippers, books, Delia's duvet cover, a Bible, muffin tins—'

  'Muffin tins,' said Hazel.

  'I can't explain it.'

  'The kinds of things you might want to have around while you're getting over your death?'

  'Some of them ca
me with cards,' said Wingate. 'The cards are creepy.' He passed Hazel some scans.

  'Please accept this small token of gratitude from me. I look forward to meeting you.' Hazel squinted to read the signature. 'Elizabeth Reightmeyer. She was going to need a lot of makeup for that meeting.'

  'I beg your pardon?' said Wingate.

  Hazel leaned back and pulled a red folder from the middle of a mesh basket and passed it over the table. 'She's the one with the railroad spike through her brain,' said Hazel. Wingate declined to open the woman's file.

  Hazel flipped through the scans. One showed a sympathy card with the lines, Sincerest regrets for your loss. 'Christ,' she said, 'you're right about creepy.'

  'Detective Spere says he thinks these were payments of a sort. Shows of goodwill.'

  'We just call him Howard,' said Hazel.

  'He asked me to call him detective.'

  She passed the sheaf of paper back to him. 'Well, all of this is informative, but it's sort of moot now, isn't it?'

  'It's good to know more about him.'

  'Once the dreams start, you'll regret what you already knew about him.' She'd looked at her watch then. It was coming up on five o'clock. There was a skeleton crew in the station house. It was time to get ready. 'Have you eaten?'

  'I was just going to go home and make something. Clean the place up a bit.'

  'Good idea,' she said. 'I'm going to try to get some rest. It could be a long night in Humber Cottage.'

  'They've all been long nights. I'll see you back here in an hour?'

  She'd driven home on the cell the whole time, checking in with Renfrew, with Terry Batten. For the last two days, she'd spoken to Rose's mother six or seven times, calling her to reassure her with details of how their plans were coming, or taking calls in which Terry's first words would often be tearfully unintelligible. 'This time tomorrow,' Hazel had told her after lunch that afternoon, 'there'll be nothing in the world left to threaten you except the tantrums of an eight-year-old.' A couple of times, she'd even taken Rose's calls. 'Terry is absolutely hysterical,' she said in one of them. 'I don't know what I'm going to do with her.' As she pulled onto her street, Hazel was saying to the girl's mother, 'Six more hours, Terry. You've been braver than any of us.'