The Calling (11 page)

'Not yet,' said Greene. 'But there's nothing in
them, really. Unless they're all in code.'

'I think you can safely assume my mother wasn't
writing some strange woman in Florida in code. She
could barely remember a phone number.'

'I know, Bob. The emails were along the lines of
gardening tips. It's probably just like you say.'

'Was there anything else?' Chandler asked.

'I don't think so,' said Greene, and the two men
stood. Greene held out his hand and they shook. But
he didn't release Chandler's hand.

'What?'

'I was just thinking. Did your mum talk about
wanting new bedclothes or anything like that?'

'Bedclothes?'

'No, I'm just wondering. What did she sleep with?'

'About eight blankets,' Chandler said.

'She didn't have a duvet?' said Greene.

Chandler wore an expression of complete bafflement.
'I don't have a full list of all my mother's
linens, Ray, but as far as I know, she didn't own one.
Anyway, what does this have to do with anything?'

'It's nothing,' said Greene, and he patted
Chandler on the shoulder and started back to his
cruiser. Back in the car, he called Spere. 'You're
needed,' he said. 'Talk to your computer guys again.'
He told Spere what he wanted.

Back at the station, Hazel was waiting for him in
the parking lot.

'Well?'

'He has no idea,' said Greene. 'He told me she
didn't own a duvet.' He shook a cigarette out of a
brand new pack.

'Spere gives you one cigarette and suddenly you're
buying packs?'

'They help me think.'

'Give me one,' she said. He looked at her with his
eyebrows raised. 'Maybe I'll have a new thought
myself.'

He lit a second cigarette off the end of his
and passed it to her. They stood together in the
parking lot, smoking like two kids outside of
school.

'Don't inhale.'

She took a deep drag and inhaled the smoke. 'If
you want to admit you're scared shitless, Ray, I will
too.'

'I've never seen anything like it,' he said.

'We had two murders in the four years I was in
Kehoe Glen, and in all the time I've been back
in Port Dundas, I've had five more, and all seven of
them were open and shut. Christ, six of them were
domestics. Now two in one week, and we have no
idea where this guy is right now. He could be in
Texas for all we know.'

'He could be anywhere.'

'I get the feeling he's not thinking of getting
caught.'

He flicked the spent cigarette onto the asphalt.
'How far along is he? What's your guess?'

He'd put into words the thought she'd been
dreading: that Delia Chandler and Michael Ulmer
were not this person's first two victims. But which
ones were they? The fifth and sixth? The twentieth
and twenty-first? She ran her hand through her hair.
'Any number you say could be right. And he could
be beginning or ending or right in the middle, and
we're exactly nowhere. This woman in Florida is
probably some knitting champion Delia met online
somehow. But just the same, if Spere can figure out
where she lives, maybe we can get in touch with
her.'

She crushed the cigarette under her foot.

'I had a question for you.' She waited. 'Bob said
something about your mother not being heartbroken
about Delia's death. What did that mean?'

The last uninformed soul in town. 'My father and
Delia,' she said. 'It went on for about five years.'
Before Greene could reply, she walked straight into
the station.

Monday 15 November, 9 p.m.

The house was dark when Hazel got home. She
could hear her mother's music coming from upstairs
– she couldn't sleep without CBC Two playing, and
Hazel made out the sounds of a Bach sonata wafting
out from under the closed bedroom door. The
kitchen was spotless, and a plate of cold chicken
was wrapped in the fridge. She sat alone at the
small table and ate it with her fingers.

Her head was swimming with details. Everything
they knew now had a relationship with
everything they did not know. What they'd learned
stood like a range of trees on a lakeshore, reflected
in reverse on the water below. Hazel dreaded the
journey it would require to get to those dark shapes.
A dead woman, a dead man. A pact of some kind.
Was it being kept? Were these deaths, at least, part
of something longed for? As she got older and
acclimatized herself to her own failures, she had
begun to understand death's draw. At the worst of
times, even those who were not inclined to consider
death an escape could still look at it as a point
beyond which they could do no more wrong, would
suffer no more. Death brought with it more than
just the mere cessation of cellular life: it meant the
end of action, and on days like this, Hazel felt that
it would be a welcome change – sometime in the
future – to be permitted to stop thinking and
making choices and waiting for their outcomes.

Her back was killing her. She pushed herself out
of the chair and went upstairs to get a Percocet.
She was almost out and she took the cap off to
leave on her bedside table as a reminder. The drugstore
could call in a renewal to Dr Pass in the
morning – it bothered her that she could only get
fourteen pills at a time; it meant nuisancing Pass
twice a month, but she understood that such a
dangerous substance as one that could rid you of
pain had to be carefully monitored. She went back
downstairs and took the pill with a glass of milk.
Go now, little pill
, she thought.
Go find those knives
and blunt them
.

Wingate had come back from Mayfair after
lunch with the bewildering news that
none
of the
blood on Delia's clothes had been hers. He'd
described Deacon's face as 'blanched' when he'd
emerged from the downstairs lab at Mayfair Grace.
The clothes had gone to Toronto to be tested
further, but Deacon had said that there was more
than one person's blood on the victim's dress.
Whoever had killed Delia Chandler had enacted
something so precise that he'd been capable of
painting a pattern on his victim's body, clothes and
furniture with another person's blood. This killer's
attentiveness and creativity were beginning to give
them all a sense that he could see them in his audience,
was aware of their growing amazement.
Greene had said that the killer was making it
impossible for them to categorize any of their
evidence as purposive behaviour on his part, or,
alternatively, accidental. Because everything that
looked like mayhem was turning out to have been
carefully planned.
Made
was the word Wingate
used. The killer was
making
the crime scenes. So
even if they lucked out now and found a hair or a
fingerprint, they wouldn't know if they had been
meant to find it, or if the killer had made a mistake.

They didn't even know if these bloody tableaux
they'd found in Port Dundas and Chamberlain
were even meant for them. The most terrifying
possibility was not that the killer was leaving
complicated clues behind to taunt the police, but
that he was not talking to them at all.

In the afternoon, Hazel had put the new kid on
a national canvass, asking him to look into killings
elsewhere in the country that had any of these hallmarks,
specifically terminally ill victims who had
been murdered in their own homes. Anything that
fit this description would be worth following up. By
five o'clock, Wingate had completed his calls to all
the major centres in the country, and none of them
were surprised to learn that nothing fitting the MO
of their guy had shown up. This confirmed one
supposition: that this killer was staying out of cities,
even the small ones. He was taking advantage of the
state of police affairs in smaller communities: a single
murder in a minor municipality – even if it were
referred to a larger jurisdiction – was unlikely to
appear as a pattern to anyone. If Delia Chandler had
lived in Toronto and Michael Ulmer in Ottawa, it
would not be long before the lines between the two
police services would light up. As it was, the Renfrew
County cops had called them not only to share information,
but because two cops accustomed to
fishing in the afternoon needed serious backup.

'We have to call him something,' Greene had
said. 'Make him more real so we can hold him in
some
way in our minds.'

'How's "Satan" hit you?' said Howard Spere.

'What about Destroying Angel?' said Wingate,
and Greene had almost sneered.

'Sure:
Look out! It's Destroying Angel!
'

'Fine,' said Wingate. 'It was only a suggestion.'

They'd finally settled on calling him the
Belladonna Killer, and before the end of the day,
they were calling him, simply, the Belladonna.

The Percocet was starting to work. Hazel poured
herself a shot of Bushmills and turned on the television
in the living room. There was a report on
the news out of Mayfair that a killer had 'struck' in
the 'small town' of Port Dundas. They had shots of
both Delia's house and Bob's. There was nothing
on the Chamberlain killing. At least that was still
under wraps. Hazel was pleased to have confirmation
that the information dykes were still holding
at the station house. They'd got the officers in
Chamberlain to agree on a story for the time being:
people stopping by on the sidewalk in front of
Ulmer's house had been told that there'd been a
break-in, and the canvass on Ulmer's street was
conducted with a burglary as a cover story. Again,
no one had seen a thing.

There was nothing on the Toronto news except
some folderol about how much time a waterfront
revitalization program was going to take. Maybe it
would make more sense to build condos. The
phrase 'income-per-vertical-square-metre' was used
by an expert. She pictured people – maybe old
women like herself – piled up practically to the sky
on the edge of Lake Ontario, pacing the rest of
their lives to the rate of vertical acreage going up
on all sides. Penned in, hemmed in, like animals.
Maybe people like her mother were going to be the
very last generation in history to have any chance
of growing old with dignity. Most of her mother's
friends were either dead or living in retirement
homes in towns like Port Dundas and Kehoe Glen,
playing cards and making crafts in little gingerbread
houses quietly staffed by bored nurses.
Suddenly, she felt terribly lonely.

She dialled Andrew's number. Glynnis, his new
wife, answered. 'Hi, Hazel,' she said. 'He's just gone
to bed.'

'Is he asleep?'

'You want me to check?'

'Do you mind?'

She waited on the line for longer than a minute.
A call this time of night meant a drunken Hazel;
she knew this was the content of the conversation
Glynnis was having with Andrew. She hated
being seen as a kind of occupational hazard, the
occupation being married to Andrew. 'I'm not
drunk, for Chrissake,' she said when she heard
Andrew pick up the phone.

'Who said you were drunk?'

'You've been married three years and already you
go to bed before your bride?'

'At least she's home at bedtime.' Hazel
laughed into her glass. 'You said you weren't
drunk.'

'I'm having a nightcap, Andrew.'

'How's your back?'

She knew what that meant. The first warning on
the pharmacy fact sheet was not to mix alcohol
with oxycodone. 'It's much better now, actually,'
she said. 'Although I guess you're aware that I'm
spending a great deal of my time running pillar to
post to catch a murderer.'

She heard Glynnis's voice in the background,
and for a moment, the mouthpiece on the other
end was muffled. 'It's terrible about Delia,' Andrew
said. 'It's a real shock.'

'I think it was to everyone but her.'

'How do you mean?'

'We think she let the killer in. That she knew
what was going to happen.'

'Should you be telling me this?'

'I can trust you.'

There was silence on the other end for a
moment. 'It's late, Hazel.'

'I know it's late, Andrew. But I figure thirty-six
years of marriage entitles me to a late-night phone
call once in a while. On days like this.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Just a second.' He put the phone
down on a hard surface, and Hazel strained to hear
the brief conversation her ex-husband was having
with his second wife, a woman he'd met two years
before their marriage ended. At the time, and to
this day, she could not begrudge the fact that her
husband had cheated on her. It was so completely
out of his character that she had been forced to see
it as a necessity. By 2000, with Drury gone and all
the new responsibility fallen to her, her drinking
was out of hand. She'd had to shift her hours forward
to accommodate her difficult mornings, and
when he finally saw her in the evenings, she'd
already put away a couple at the Thirsty Goose and
had left him to eat dinner on his own. She'd
cleaned up by 2002, the year they divorced, but by
then it was too late; he'd fallen in love with a new
lawyer at his company. The firm was called
McMaster Pedersen Crombie – Glynnis, née
Crombie, had made partner the year after the
divorce – and now this Glynnis Pedersen sported
what used to be her last name. She hadn't felt an
ounce of anger. The sadness had never given way to
it. 'We can talk now,' he said, coming back to the
phone. She pictured him sitting on the bed, shirtless,
his fine head of curly grey hair framing his
face. She'd sometimes slept with her fingers in that
hair.

'You know, I don't think Glynnis likes me.'

'She doesn't know you, dear. To know you is to
love you.'

'Thank you for that.'

'So, how much have you had tonight?'

'I'm not drunk, Andrew. I'm Percocet.'

'Ah. So dangerously relaxed?'

She finished the finger of Bushmills and cast a
glance over at the bottle. She knew if she had one
more, she'd be stepping over an edge. She looked
away from it. 'Did Marty tell you she and Scott
broke up?'

'She did. I think it's a good thing. I wasn't crazy
about him.'

'I wasn't either. But she's heartbroken.'

'Martha's strong, Hazel. She's her mother's
daughter.'

'How old is Glynnis?'

'For God's sake.' He was laughing. 'Why don't
you date, Hazel? Just go out with someone nice and
have supper. Get back out there.'

'Where am I going to find someone to date me,
for the love of Pete? Should I just go out and cuff
someone? Toss them into a banquette at Silvio's
and hold a gun on them until they order a carafe of
the house red?'

'You can make it sound impossible, Hazel, and
then it will be. There are ways.'

'Single white divorcée, sixty-one, arresting,
seeking man with clean record.'
'It would be a start.'

'I'd like to see you sometime. For dinner.'

'I'd like that, too,' he said.

'I suppose Perky couldn't complain if you saw
your ex-wife behind her back.'

'I would tell her, Hazel. It wouldn't be behind
her back.'

'It was behind my back.'

He sighed. This was territory that was well worth
staying out of. But she knew that Andrew could
not suppress his penchant for truthfulness, and he
said, 'It could have been on the front lawn, dear.
You wouldn't have noticed. For the top cop of a
major township, you had your blind spots.'

'I guess I did.'

'I'm going to go,' he said. 'Call me during the day
at my office and we'll figure out a time to have a
nice lunch, okay?'

'You're talking to me the way I talk to my
mother.'

'How is Her Honour?'

'Trying to slim me down for some future altar.
Maybe a sacrificial one, I haven't figured that out
yet.'

'Call me, Hazel.'

'Fine.'

'And go to bed now.'

She hung up and stared at the phone, silenced in
its cradle. That old voice there, which used to ring
in this house. Her glass was empty. She got up from
the couch and picked up the bottle, pretended to
read the label – DISTILLED THREE TIMES
it read (imagine being capable of such purity) – and
then put the bottle back on top of the fridge.

She opened the door to her mother's room and
stepped in quietly to turn off the radio. In the fresh
silence, she listened to her mother's soft breathing.
She remembered the profound pleasure of sleeping
in her parents' bed as a child, escaping a nightmare
to the safety of their warmth. She'd once woken
between them in the middle of the night and
watched the curtains in their bedroom transform
into a carousel full of children. The sensation of
this sanctuary came back to her as if she had just
sat up in that bed of fifty-five years ago. She
smoothed the covers over her mother's back and
closed the door behind her. As she turned, she saw
a wave of light swim through the window of the
front door and move off down the street, the sound
of its source humming past. It was late to be out,
but she had the urge to go back down to the main
floor and look outside. The car had already
vanished down the street and turned another
corner. She looked across the street at the
Edwardhses house – all the lights were off,
although she sensed the thin glow from a light left
on in an upstairs bathroom.

She had her coat on now, although she could not
remember slipping it on, and the car keys were in
her hand. The night air was sweet and cool, like
riverwater. Hazel got into the Crown Victoria and
turned right out of her driveway. The 117 between
Pember Lake and Port Dundas was not lit, and she
snapped the brights up and drove the empty road.
The twin cones of light drenched the trees on
either side in a wash of brilliance and the leafless
birches glowed in her headlights like bones standing
in the earth. And then, as if her mind had
wandered, she was making the turn onto the main
street of Port Dundas, drifting down it under the
lonesome streetlamps. A few people were still out,
leaving bars or walking their dogs once more before
turning in. Although what time was it? The dashboard
clock said it was half past two in the morning;
no one should be out with their dog now, she thought.