The Calling Read Free Page B

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 color screens?” And here she was, six years on, driving the same car. Two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers 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 driveway 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 kilometers 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 Cafe; 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 kilometers 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 lifepartner 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 cafe, the counterman, Dale Varney, turned the moment