Authors: Inger Ash Wolfe
Simon pulled the valise toward himself and
placed it on his lap, opening it wide and turning its
mouth toward the light so he could see inside. He
took another vial out of his bag and with it, a long,
thin spoon with a narrow head. He dipped it into
the lunar white powder within the vial and drew
out enough to coat the face of a dime. He held
Delia's mouth open with the thumb of his other
hand and tipped the contents of the spoon into the
space beneath her tongue and stirred it into
the moisture there, making a thin, ivory-coloured
paste. He replaced the vial and the spoon and
pulled out a length of tubing and a sterile swab
along with his sharps, and put them down on the
table. There was a coil of wire around a dowel in
there that he rejected, along with vials of herbs and
dried mushrooms that had come loose of their
moorings on the side of the bag. He cleaned it all
up. There was a .22 in there somewhere, but it felt
wrong for tonight, as did the hammer he pushed
aside. Its metal head clinked against glass. Finally,
his eye fell on a leather knife-sheath, and he took
it out and held the weight of it in the palm of his
hand. He wrapped his fingers around the handle,
and the sound as he drew the blade from its hiding
place was like a voice, like a word whispered: an
utterance. It said
taketh
, and he did.
Saturday, 13 November, 7 a.m.
'Hazel! Hazel Pedersen, are you out of bed?'
Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef opened her
bedroom door. She could hear a low chuckle
emanating from the bottom of the stairs. 'Mother,
don't use my married name. Especially this early in
the bloody morning.'
'Sorry, Miss Micallef. Your breakfast is ready.'
'Keep it up, Mother.'
That low chuckle again.
Hazel closed the bedroom door and hobbled
back to stand in front of the mirror. She was still
hunched over, the pain in her lower back radiating
around to her hips. She watched herself in the
mirror lean forward to brace herself against
the dresser. It sometimes took up to ten minutes
before she could stand upright in the mornings. If
it still hurt after fifteen, she took a Percocet,
although she tried to save the painkillers until the
evening, when it wouldn't matter if she could think
straight or not. She tried to push her pelvis forward,
but a bolt of electricity rushed down through
her rear end and into the back of her leg. She
shook her head at herself, ruefully. 'You goddamned
old cow.' Her grey hair was standing out on the
sides of her head and she leaned across the dresser,
separated the comb and brush and pulled the brush
through her hair. Two bobby pins tucked in tight
behind her ears would keep it all in place. She ran
her hand over her forehead and her hair, and her
other hand followed with her cap. She tugged it
down. Every morning, this transformation: a sixty-one-year-old
divorcée under the covers, a detective
inspector with the Ontario Police Services Port
Dundas detachment in front of the mirror. She
straightened her name tag and pulled her jacket
tighter around her shoulders, trying to stand tall.
Then she took the cap off and shook her hair out.
'Christ,' she said. The Percocet was in the top
drawer, between the underwear and the bras. She
looked at it, respite tucked between underthings,
almost erotic, a promise of release. She closed the
drawer.
* * *
Downstairs, there was an egg-white omelette with
a single piece of sprouted wholegrain flax and
kamut toast sitting on a plate. The bread that made
this toast was so dangerously high in fibre it had to
be kept in the freezer lest it cause bowel movements
in passersby. There was a cup of steaming
black coffee beside it. 'You need a haircut,' her
mother said.
Hazel Micallef took her seat and put her cap
down beside the plate. 'No one sees my hair.'
'I see it.'
'Are you going to eat with me, or are you just
going to torment me?'
'I ate.' Her mother – either Mrs Micallef or Your
Honour to the entire town – was still dressed in her
quilted blue-and-pink housedress. She kept
her back to Hazel, moving something around in
the frying pan. Hazel smelled bacon. 'Eat,' said her
mother.
'I'll wait for the bacon.'
'No meat for you, my girl. This is for me.'
Hazel stared down at the anemic omelette on
the plate. 'This isn't food for a grown woman,
Mother,' she said.
'Protein. And fibre. That's your breakfast. Eat it.'
She stared at her daughter until she picked up a
fork. 'How's your back?'
'The usual.'
'Every morning your back tells you to start eating
right. You should listen.'
Her mother had been back in the house for
almost three years. After Hazel's divorce from
Andrew, she had taken her mother out of The
Poplars and brought her home. She'd never cared
for that place, and having her 'underfoot' (as Hazel
put it to her, to get the old goat's goat) provided
them both with company. Her mother was the sort
of elderly lady that younger people called 'spry', but
to Hazel, Emily Micallef was a force of nature, and
not to be trifled with. She had seen her mother, on
more than one occasion, react to an offer of help –
to carry a bag, to cross a street – with a tart 'piss off,
I'm not crippled,' followed by a semi-lunatic smile.
She was the only woman Hazel had ever met who
loved being old. At sixty-one, Hazel herself was not
entirely enamoured of old age, but at eighty-seven,
her mother was in her element. Thin and rangy,
with skinny red-mottled arms, and long blueveined
fingers, her mother sometimes seemed a
clever old rat. Her eyes, still clear but rimmed with
faint pink lids, were vigilant: she missed nothing.
In her younger years, before she entered civic
politics, she and Hazel's father had owned Port
Dundas's largest clothing store, Micallef's. It was
legend in the town that no one ever stole anything
out from under Emily. She could smell unpaid-for
merchandise going out the door, and after catching
a dozen or so would-be thieves, it was widely
assumed that no one ever tried again. It was only
after Burt Levitt bought the store, in 1988, that
Micallef's even had a theft-detection system.
Her mother brought a plate of crispy bacon to the
table. Hazel had choked down half the flavourless
omelette (it had a sliver of waxy 'Swiss cheese' in it
that she suspected was made of soy protein) and
watched her mother snap off a piece of bacon
between her front teeth. She chewed it savouringly,
watching Hazel the entire time. 'I need the fat,' she
said.
'And the salt?'
'Salt preserves,' said her mother, and Hazel
laughed.
'Are you Lot's wife?'
'I'm nobody's wife,' she said. 'And neither are you.
Which is why I need to put on weight, and you need
to take it off. Or the only man who'll ever come into
this house again will be here to read the meter.'
'What would you do with a man, Mother? You'd
kill anyone your age.'
'But I'd have fun doing it,' said Emily Micallef
with a grin. She finished off a second slice of
bacon, then flicked a piece onto Hazel's plate. 'Eat
up and go. My shows are coming on.'
Hazel and Andrew had bought the house in
Pember Lake in 1971, when Emilia, their first
daughter, was eighteen months. It meant a ten-minute
drive back into Port Dundas to get to
Micallef's for Andrew (whose father-in-law had
hired him on), but both he and Hazel preferred
being at least a little outside of the town's grasp.
Later, when Hazel had been promoted back to the
town after paying her dues at a community policing
office in the valley, the house served double
sanctuary. Both born in places where dropping-in
was de rigueur, they'd opted for privacy in their
adulthoods, raising children in a town outside of
the 'big smoke' (as they called Port Dundas), in a
place with a population of less than two hundred.
People knew not to come knocking – with a job
that saw her knowing many hundreds of men,
women and children by their first names, Hazel
Micallef was a woman entitled to her time off. You
didn't come to the house in Pember Lake unless
you were invited, or it was an emergency.
Hazel got into the Crown Victoria she'd inherited
when Inspector Gord Drury, the
detachment's CO since 1975, had retired in 1999.
Central Division of the Ontario Police Services
had been promising a replacement for Drury ever
since, but it was an open secret that the
commander of Central OPS, Ian Mason, wanted to
roll the Port Dundas detachment, and five other
so-called rural stations, into Mayfair Township's
catchment. Mayfair was one hundred kilometres to
the south, in a different area code. It was a long-distance
call to Mayfair. Hazel, the only detective
inspector in the entire province acting as a detachment
commander, was holding her ground: she
reminded Mason on a regular basis that Central
owed her a CO, but she was despairing of ever
getting one.
She remembered the look on Commander
Mason's face at her swearing-in as interim when
Drury had dropped the Crown Victoria's keys into
her hand, like the passing of a torch. It had been
fairly close to a sneer. A female skip. A female skip
whose mother had once been mayor, and who herself
was a mere detective inspector. Drury had been
superintendent material, but he chose fishing over
it. Hazel knew what Mason thought of her: she'd
made DI by the skin of her teeth and now she was
in charge of a detachment that represented a
saving of over nine million dollars a year to the
OPS if they could get the clearance to merge
services with Mayfair. She'd been entitled to a new
car, one that didn't smell so much of Gord's
cigarettes, but she knew the car would air out
eventually, and it was still running. Plus, the
frugality would look good on her, she thought. Let
Mason deny her anything: she was driving someone
else's junker. But deny her he did. It was sport
to him. Extra men, travel allowances, computer
upgrades. He lived to say no, mumbling across the
line from the HQ in Barrie, 'Goodness, Hazel, what
need have you up there for colour screens?' And
here she was, six years on, driving the same car.
Two hundred and fifty thousand kilometres on it,
but it was her vehicle like it or no, and she was
going to drive it until the engine fell out. Then, she
suspected, Mason would give her a horse if she
begged enough for it. She backed out of the drive-way
and onto Highway 117.
It was fall in Westmuir County. A carpet of
leaves had accumulated at the edges of fields, on
lawns, in parks. Still red and yellow, but within a
couple of weeks, the trees would be entirely bare,
and the leaves on the ground brown and brittle.
The air was changing, the moisture leaving it, and
in its place was a wire-thin thread of cold that
would expand, leading deeper into November and
December, to become sheets of frigid wind. Hazel
could already hear the branches rattling with it.
She took the bridge over the Kilmartin River
and noted a torrent of leaves flowing down the
middle of it. In three of the last four years, the river
had spilled over its banks, eating away at the base
of the high shale walls and destabilizing the road
above. There had already been one tragedy, across
the way from where she now drove, when a car
carrying four teenagers back from a prom in
Hillschurch had driven off the blacktop by two or
three feet and hit a fissure. In a panic (so investigators
later said), the girl behind the wheel had hit
the accelerator rather than the brake, and the
crack in the earth had directed them right over
the edge, like a rail. All four were killed. There was
not a shop or service within forty kilometres open
for business on the day of the burials.
She rolled down the window, coming into town,
and the scent of the fall air swirled around her
head. She followed the road down to the right and
then up into Main Street rising in front of her, its
far end a full eight hundred feet higher above sea
level than its bottom. On either side of the street
were arrayed the buildings and names she had
known her whole life: Crispin's Barbershop; Port
Dundas Confectionery; The Ladyman Café; Carl
Pollack Shoes (Carl himself dead now almost twenty
years); The Matthews Funeral Home; Cadman's
Music Shop; The Freshwater Grille (the 'e' was new);
Micallef's, of course; the Opera House and the bowling
alley behind it; the Luxe Cinema; Roncelli's Pizza
and Canadian Food (which everyone called
'the Italians'), and the newer businesses, like the
computer shop owned by the guy from Toronto; a
bookstore that actually sold more than suspense and
horror paperbacks, called Riverrun Books; and a
mom-and-pop store beside the gas station, called
Stop 'N' Go. All of it serviced a population of 13,500
in the town; Hoxley, Hillschurch, and Pember Lake
made it 19,000.
It was strange to have spent all of one's life in or
close to a single place. But every time Detective
Inspector Micallef drove this strip, her heart sang.
This was where she belonged; there was no other
place for her. Mayfair was more than a one-hour
drive (forty-five minutes if it was an emergency),
and Mason, in Barrie, was a further thirty kilometres
to the south. She kept that world at a
mental arm's-length as much as she could.
This
was
her world. Every doorway framed a story for her –
some good, some not so good – and the faces that
peered out of those doors, or walked the sidewalks,
were her intimates. When she and Andrew split
up, she felt lonesome and bereft, but the feeling
only lasted a while. And then, as if the marriage
had been a caul in her eye, she saw her true life-partner
in front of her, and it was this place.
She pulled up to the curb beside Ladyman's and
put her cap back on. Inside the café, the counterman,
Dale Varney, turned the moment he saw her
and poured a cup of coffee. 'Your mother still
starving you?'
'To death,' she replied.
'Toasted western?'
'Please, Dale.'
She pulled a copy of the
Toronto Sun
toward her
along the countertop and took in the front page.
Some giant baseball player had admitted to using
steroids.
Really – you mean you don't look like a
firetruck from guzzling raw eggs, pal?
She sipped the
coffee and leafed through the paper. Nothing of
interest, and of course, nothing local. You needed a
gruesome murder in the middle of Main Street to
make it into the Toronto papers. In these parts, the
paper came out only twice a week, but everything
in it counted. Who was born, who had died, what
happened in the county courts, what shocking
speeds certain cars on certain country roads were
caught going. Her name and the names of her
officers were standard fare in the pages of the
Westmuir Record
; it came with the territory. Any
crime reported in the county had her imprimatur
on it (or her deputy Ray Greene's), and a quote
from the Port Dundas OPS meant that what you
were reading was true, was vetted. It was as much a
responsibility as policing was, but it had different
rules. Hazel had made it clear to her corps that any
media requests came through her, and once she
agreed to speak, or to let someone speak, to a
reporter, she got final cut on the quotes. It wasn't
exactly tampering, but her office was the only outlet
for the bona fides. So the
Record
played by the
rules. And when she asked the paper – as she did
from time to time – to hold back something of
what they'd learned about a certain situation, or to
delay publishing a detail or two, they complied.
Because they were neighbours and friends to everyone
who walked the streets of the various
townships their newspaper covered, they knew
everyone affected by a crime, or involved in one.
Their first vested interest was their own community,
the second was newspaper sales. Hazel
liked living in a place where certain priorities still
held.