The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  'I was in politics my whole life,' she said. 'Meaning never came into it. People who claimed to have a calling were usually people who couldn't justify their actions any other way.'

  He turned his chin minutely to the left, as if to look at her more closely. The light of the lantern hit his right eye and turned it a blinding white. 'I'm not in politics.'

  'No. You help others by murdering them.'

  'We pass into others' care,' he said. 'And they pass into ours.'

  'If that's what you want to call it.'

  'You were once mother to a helpless child, and now she houses you. Soon she'll feed and bathe you. You brought her into life, and she'll ...' He breathed in and out deeply. 'She'll play the role nature gave her.'

  'So you're an agent of nature.'

  'A different nature.'

  'And whose child are you, then?'

  'No one's,' he said, and his eyes moved off her.

  'You're someone's child.'

  'No,' he said. 'I am not child, parent or brother. I am not even I. Simon has survived himself. And he guides those who are willing to survive their deaths to another way of being.' He brought his gaze back and his eyes were dead now, flat like a dried stone. 'So much as a loyal child guides her mother to death.'

  She made eye contact with him. His hair lay down along his forehead and the sides of his skull. 'I don't need Hazel to die,' she said. 'All you need to do is keep me here another day or two without my medications, and I'll be quite capable of dying on my own.'

  'I'll minister to you.'

  'I'm sure you will,' she said. She'd placed the other scent now. It was the odour that came off a steak that had gone grey in the fridge. Fleshrot.

  'Your daughter and I will have much in common,' he said. 'I wonder if she will give of herself as I have.'

  'We'll see what she has to give when she finds you. I think you might be surprised.'

  'She won't find me,' said Simon. 'But yes, I'm sure it will be a surprise.' He scraped his chair closer over the grit until his knees were almost touching hers. The scent of decay washed over her. 'Have you accepted my apology?'

  'For what?'

  'For your friend. I don't want there to be bad feelings between us.'

  'What does it matter to you what I feel?'

  He wiped his hands over the tops of his legs, as if sweeping crumbs away. 'You're right. It doesn't matter. But there's no need for me to be rude.' He put one hand, his fingers splayed, against his chest and smiled with a mouth full of loose teeth. 'I'm your host,' he said. He stood again. 'Why don't we have some tea?'

  'No, thank you.'

  He got up and moved back to where she'd first seen him, where there was less light, and she heard metal scrape and sparks flew up from the inside of the stove. He put a kettle over the fire. She looked toward the door across from her again. He'd invited her to 'take the air', and she wondered what would happen if she did. She got up from her chair, being sure to make enough noise that he wouldn't think she was trying to be careful. Her legs had fallen asleep from sitting as long as she had and her knees buckled as she stood. The table was close enough to steady herself on. 'Don't get up too quickly,' he said from the stove.

  She turned around and looked at what was behind her. There was another window above a low, single bed. It glowed in the dimcast starlight like something seen at the bottom of a pond. She could also make out a line of small, shiny squares on the wall above the bed, but could not figure out what they were, beyond the fact that they were of identical shape and size. There were at least twenty of them. As she stared at them, trying to see clearly, they began to brighten as if imbued with their own light and the skin on the back of her neck prickled. Simon was coming up behind her with the lamp. 'Can you hear them?' he asked her.

  The objects were Polaroids and the light was beginning to pick up details. Faces. Mouths. The blood was roaring in her ears. 'My God,' she gasped. She heard the chair she'd been sitting in clatter to the side before she was even aware she'd burst for the door. She opened it and was through it and immediately she felt the sudden, too-bracing cold around her like a noose and the snow was beneath her feet and all around her the naked limbs of birch and alders stood against the predawn sky, vertical bars of treetrunks lining the world on all sides. She turned in a circle once, twice, the air piercing her, and she fell to the ground. He stood in the door to the cabin, the gauzy orange light bleeding out from behind him, the only sign of life anywhere and he called to her. 'Do you need some help?'

  'Go to hell,' she cried.

  'Hell?' he said, stepping down from the doorway. 'Do you mean where there's fire and it's warm?' He laughed softly and returned to the cabin, closing the door behind him. Emily pushed herself up to sitting and stared at it. He would not let her die. He needed her. Even though Hazel would come anyway. She would come for her whether she was alive or dead. But Emily wanted to live.

  She could barely get herself to standing; it felt as if she weighed a thousand pounds, dragging herself back to the promise of the cabin's meagre warmth. The door was locked. He would humiliate her now, make her beg for his murderous succour. 'Let me in!' she shouted, and banged on the door. After a moment, he did, and he stepped aside as she entered. Steam rose from the mouth of the kettle. 'Take the blanket from the bed,' he instructed her, and, quaking, she did, pulling it around herself and sitting on the edge of the mattress. She felt powerless now, and for the first time, her fear gave way to grief and she felt her eyes fill. 'Now for something to warm you up,' he said.

  'Just kill me,' she pleaded. 'I want it over with.'

  He was removing objects from a kitbag she hadn't seen before now and placing them on the stovetop. Glass vials. 'Are you offering your life?'

  'Will you leave my daughter alone?'

  'Do you offer it freely?'

  The tears were coursing down her face now. 'Yes,' she said. 'I do.'

  He put the vial he was holding back down on the stove and came toward her. 'Shake my hand,' he said. She looked at him bewildered. Her life would end on a deal sealed with a handshake, like a business transaction or a bet. He held his hand out, palm up. After a moment, her heart breaking, she laid her hand in his. But he didn't close his fingers over the back of her hand as she expected, only moved his forearm up and down minutely in the space between them. 'Just as I thought,' he said, moving back toward the stove.

  'Just as you thought?'

  'One hundred and fifteen pounds,' he said, reaching for one of the vials. 'Now, let's see what you'll take in your tea.'

  24

  Monday 29 November, 5 p.m.

  One of the sinister benefits of a life in policework was the context it gave one's own troubles. Many times, Hazel had reflected on a lost child, a life being ruined by drugs, those who died by their own hands. The suicides both haunted and reassured her: they were object lessons in how bad it hadn't been in her own life, even when she and Andrew were splitting up, even when one of Marty's depressions felt like thunder in the distance of her own life. In the midst of the joy-occluding pain she sometimes felt in her body, she could still take inventory in comparison and know how good her life was. So it was a revelation of the darkest kind when she realized there was nothing that could contrast with this moment in her life now. That there wasn't someone else's shoes she could be grateful for not being in.

  There had been no news for the rest of Sunday. She felt as if she were standing over a huge body of water into which someone had vanished and she was telling herself not to give up hope. Maybe a person can hold their breath for this long. Maybe they can tread water for this long.

  Monday morning, nothing. They'd expanded the road-to-road sweep into the smaller towns lining the 121 to the west, and all of the towns and villages within fifty kilometres of Highway 41 all the way to Fort Leonard. No one who listened to the radio, watched the television or read the Westmuir Record could not be aware that the largest manhunt in the county's history was unfolding over every inch of it. Sunderland ha
d, for the second time in as many weeks, spent the entire weekend resetting his front section. It was now dedicated to Emily Micallef's abduction and Clara Lyon's murder. His introduction to Adjutor Sevigny had inspired in the editor a certain new caution: the paper reported the latest tragedies to hit Port Dundas with something approaching sobriety. The bodily insult done, in various forms, to another five of the town's elderly population did not result in any woolly speculation on how safe it may or may not be to enjoy one's retirement in Port Dundas. However, sitting with nothing in front of her at the kitchen table but the paper, Hazel could not bring herself to feel grateful for the Record's newfound discipline. She was looking at a picture of her mother standing in front of Micallef's in 1952, her chin high, eyes bright, with that self-possessed smile of hers. Most children think of themselves as immortal, but as a child, Hazel had always looked into this confident face and believed that her mother was the immortal one. She lowered her head into her hands and wept.

  At his supper break, Wingate showed up at the house with food. He stood in her doorway, willing her to say or do anything to him she felt she had to, but after a moment of staring into her red-rimmed eyes, he simply put down his bags, stepped into the foyer and held her. She turned and led him down the hall and into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on for coffee. 'I know you haven't eaten,' he said.

  'Not hungry.'

  'You could need your strength at any moment,' he said.

  She leaned against the counter. 'You mean to help me bear up when the bad news comes?'

  'I mean to lead.'

  She laughed, a dry, clicking sound in her throat. 'Sure, James. From my empty living room in Pember Lake.'

  'You have no idea how many of us have personally made our opposition to Mason's decision known to both him as well as anyone they can get through to at the OPS head office in Toronto. You have everyone on your side.'

  'Have you spoken to Mason to oppose his decision?'

  He hefted his bags onto the kitchen table and without looking up, he said, 'I'm not Ray Greene.'

  'I know that,' she said. 'Ray would have brought me whiskey.' She watched as he expressionlessly removed a sixteen-ouncer from one of the bags and put it on the table. 'Ah,' she said.

  He sat down awkwardly at the small table and arranged the rest of his purchases. Cheese, deli meat, bread, a large bar of dark chocolate. She saw the chocolate and felt hungry for the first time in two days. She poured the hot water into a mug and put it and a jar of coffee grains in front of him, but didn't give him a spoon. He said nothing; it seemed a lot to ask for a spoon at this moment. At the station house, there had been a lot of whispering about Hazel having been under a doctor's supervision for some time. If she hadn't been, he hoped she was now, or would be soon. He knew what intractable grief could do to a person. He looked at her carefully as she reached into her cupboards for a couple of plates. He saw she was sockless in slacks and a freshly ironed blue dress shirt. It was as if she'd dressed the role to the 60 per cent mark and stopped. He half expected to see an empty holster on her hip.

  'You want me to make you a sandwich, or are you skipping right to the chocolate?' he asked.

  'I'm going to be positive and say that sometime soon there's going to be someone back in this house telling me what to eat. So yes, I'll have the chocolate now.'

  He passed it to her and she unwrapped it. The smell of the dark bar caused her mouth to fill with saliva. She imagined she might look like a starving dog. When she bit into the chocolate, the glands at the back of her jaw clenched with such force that she thought she was going to cry out in pain.

  'To answer your question, yes, I did tell Mason how I felt. He gave me a choice to wait and hear the outcome of the investigation in Barrie or to lead it here in Port Dundas.'

  'Did you call him "sir"?'

  'I didn't call him what I wanted to call him.' He tore a chunk from the baguette with his bare hands and then split it open. 'I did tell him that if Simon Mallick had shown up at Humber Cottage three days ago that Mason would be having his picture taken beside you right now.'

  'The thing you should be asking yourself right now, James, is whether or not a bottle of Scotch and a loaf of bread is enough to make you a codefendant in the eyes of the magistrates of Renfrew and Westmuir counties.'

  'I'd sit at that table with you, Hazel.'

  'Let's hope it doesn't come to that.'

  She put a full carton of milk and the sugar bowl on the table, and then finally noticed he didn't have a spoon, and she placed one in front of him wordlessly. 'Look,' he said, 'there's something I have to say.'

  'Go ahead.'

  'I get why Ray quit. I understand why he did what he did.'

  'I see.'

  'They told us when we were cadets that nothing was personal when it came to the world outside the station-house door. But that inside the doors, we're family.'

  'And I got that wrong?'

  'You saw a killing in your own town as a personal affront. You were willing to do anything to get this guy. You crossed all kinds of lines.'

  It hurt to hear him talk this way, more perhaps than the way Greene had spoken to her. Wingate bore her no ill-will. He was telling her the truth. 'Well, I've been punished then.'

  'I'm not saying I wouldn't have done the same thing, maybe. In your shoes. I know a little about what it feels like to want to avenge something.'

  'Tell me about that.'

  'Another time,' he said. He tore off a piece of bread and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment, looking down at the table. 'I just want to say that we should have all gone down together. You're the skip. You lead, we follow. But we shouldn't have been that far in back of you, Hazel. Ray Greene was better than that. I'm better than that.'

  She felt sodden, sinking into the floor. 'I wish I was going to have the chance to make it up to you, James, I really do.'

  'You might. When the dust settles they're going to take a long look at this place and try to decide how they want it to run.'

  'They're going to amalgamate us. Everything that just happened here is catnip to Ian Mason. Greene was right. God knows Mason'll probably tap him to take over.' She looked over at Wingate and the colour had drained out of his face. 'You're kidding me.'

  'I was going to circle around it a while longer. Get a sense of how hard you were willing to fight before I told you.'

  'God.'

  'They haven't asked him yet. They wanted to test it out on us.'

  'I don't think it's going to matter what you want, James. That's not how they work.'

  'I said I understood why Ray did what he did. But I never said I agreed with it. Nobody wants to work for Ray Greene. We want to work for you.'

  She reached for the instant and turned to stir a spoonful of it into her cup. 'You people shouldn't be wasting your energy trying to save my bacon.'

  She heard his chair slide back suddenly and she turned and he was leaning over his fists on the table. 'Do you see? Do you see what you said? We're not trying to save just your goddamned bacon, Hazel!' His arms were shaking.

  'I'm sorry, James.'

  'Family inside, the rest of the world outside. That's how I was trained to see it. If we fight for you, will you try to see it that way?'

  'Yes,' she said, thoroughly ashamed. 'I'll try.'

  He slowly sat back in his seat, his eyes sliding away from her. Who was this young man, she wondered? This ferocious young man? Would she survive all of this to be permitted to return to that world he lived in?

  'I heard from Sevigny this morning.'

  'You did, eh.'

  'He called from some back room in the courthouse in Sudbury.'

  'What's going to happen to him?'

  'Nothing good.' He made eye contact with her again. 'Hazel, he searched Jane Buck's house before he left Port Hardy.'

  'What?'

  'Told me she wanted to help our investigation. I think it might have been a euphemism.'

  'Christ, James! Why didn't you say that as s
oon as you walked in?'

  'I had more important things to say first.' She came to the table, drew a chair out and sat. He watched her process what he'd just said. He wondered if his treatment of her here today would come back to haunt him. 'He said he'd had an intuition about Buck when they were out at the cabin. She flinched when he took the Lord's name in vain. So he took her home and "motivated her" was how he put it.'

  'I don't want to know.'

  'He spared me the details. He had the right instinct about her though: turns out she was the church secretary. She'd been in it right from the beginning; she had all kinds of paraphernalia.' He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a couple of folded sheets. 'He talked some clerk at the Sudbury courthouse into faxing this for him. It's the back and front of a pamphlet advertising the church. It's from 1988.'

  She unfolded it and began to read. The pamphlet invited those who were dissatisfied with their own churches to consider one that understood the conditions under which the True Christ would return. 'Will the Christ,' she read aloud, 'who suffered in the wilderness, come to deliver those who wear furs and whose breath stinks of blood? In whose veins unnatural abominations run?' She looked up at Wingate.

  'Keep going,' he said.

  The pamphlet asked the reader to consider whether the Son of God would descend to deliver the venal from their false gods. The church proposed a return to severe purity. Its touchstones were extreme hygiene, a diet based in local and natural foods, and an obsessive belief that it was only to a wilderness imbued with this kind of propriety and integrity that Christ would return. Modern medicine of any description was forbidden. It was a short argument, intended to attract only those who were already halfway there. The leader of the group was Simon Mallick.

  'There's a picture of him at the bottom of the second page,' Wingate said, and he folded back the page she was reading. There was a picture of a man at the bottom of the last section. He sported a huge, black beard and was as stout as a Viking.

  'That's Simon Mallick?' said Hazel, looking at Wingate.