The Calling Read Free Page A

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 flavorless omelet (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 savoringly, 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 adult-hoods, 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 kilometers to the south, in a different area code. It was a longdistance 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 savings 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