The Killing Circle

14

A plain envelope bearing a Toronto postmark. Inside, a newspaper clipping. No note attached. A piece from the Whitley Register, the local weekly of a northern Ontario town. A pin prick along the rugged, unpeopled spine of Lake Superior.

The story dated Friday, August 24, 2003.

CRASH KILLS TWO ON TRANS-CANADA

Author and Companion in ’Puzzling’ Auto Accident

By Carl Luben, Staff Reporter

Whitley, Ont.—An automobile’s crash into a stone cliffside on the Trans-Canada twenty minutes outside Whitley has resulted in the death of both its passengers early Tuesday morning.

Conrad White, 69, and Angela Whitmore (age unknown) are believed to have died on impact between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. when their car left the highway.At press time, Ms Whitmore’s place of residence has yet to be determined, but it is believed that Mr White’s current address was in Toronto. It is unknown what purpose had brought them to the Whitley area.

Mr White is the author of the novel Jarvis and Wellesley, a controversial work at the time of its publication in 1972. He had been living overseas for the last few decades, and only recently returned to reside in Canada.

So far, the police have yet to contact Angela Whitmore’s immediate family, as available identification did not contain next-of-kin information. Readers who are able to provide more information on Ms Whitmore’s relations are asked to contact the Ontario Provincial Police, Whitley Detachment.

Police are still at work determining the precise cause of the accident. “It’s a little puzzling,” commented Constable Dennis Peet at the scene. “There were no other cars involved, and no skid marks, so the chances they went off the road to avoid colliding with an oncoming vehicle or animal crossing seems unlikely.”

Investigators have estimated the car’s speed on impact in excess of 140 km/hr. This velocity, taken together with the accident occurring along a relatively straight stretch of highway, reduces the possibility of the driver, Ms Whitmore, falling asleep at the wheel.

“Sometimes, with incidents like these, all you know is that you’ll never know,” Constable Peet concluded.

My first thoughts after learning of the accident weren’t for the loss of the two lives involved, but who might have sent me the clipping. I was pretty sure it had to be someone in the circle, as my connection to Angela and Conrad White would have been known to few outside of its members. But, if one of them, why the anonymity? Perhaps whoever sent the envelope wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings and nothing more. Petra, maybe, who would feel obliged to share what she had learned, but didn’t want visitors showing up at her door. Or Evelyn, who would be too cool to write a dorky note. And then there was the odds-on favourite: Len. He’d have the time to scour whatever obscure database allowed him to learn of such things, and would appreciate how leaving his name off the envelope would lend the message a mysterious edginess.

Yet these practical explanations inevitably gave way—as all speculations about the circle eventually did—to more fanciful theories. Namely, to William. Once he entered my mind, the secondary questions posed by the article came rushing to the forefront. What were Conrad White and Angela doing travelling together through the bush outside Whitley in the first place? And why did Angela drive off the highway sixty kilometres over the speed limit? By factoring William into these queries, the notion that he was not only the sender of the clipping, but somehow the author of the crash itself, became a leading, if unlikely, hypothesis.

It was only sometime later, sitting on my own in the Crypt, that the fact Conrad and Angela were dead struck me with unexpected force. I lowered the three-month-old Time I’d been pretending to read to find my heart drumrolling against my ribs, an instant sweat collaring the back of my neck. Panic. Out-of-nowhere, suffocating. The sort of attack I’d succumbed to on more than a few occasions since Tamara died. But this time it was different. This time, my shock was at the loss of two people I hardly knew.

Hold on. That last bit’s not quite true.

It was the thought of Angela alone that stole all the air from the room. The girl with a story I would now never get to the end of.

After the night at Grossman’s Tavern, the murderer I’d come to think of as the Sandman stopped killing. The police never arrested anyone for the deaths of Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and the Vancouver woman eventually identified as Jane Whirter. Though a $50,000 reward was offered for information leading to a conviction and occasional police press releases were issued insisting they were working on the case with unprecedented diligence, the authorities were forced to admit they had no real leads, never mind suspects. It was proposed that the killer had moved on. A drifter with no links to family or friends who would probably continue his work somewhere else down the line.

For a time, though, I couldn’t stop feeling that the Pevencey, Ulrich and Whirter deaths were somehow connected to the circle. This is only a side effect of coincidence, of course. It’s the egocentric seduction of coincidence that personalizes larger tragedies, so that we feel what we were doing when the twin towers came down or when JFK was shot or when a serial killer butchered someone in the playground around the corner is, ultimately, our story.

I know all this, and yet even after the Sandman was declared to be retired I never believed he was finished. The dark shape I would sometimes catch in my peripheral vision could never simply be nothing, but was always the something of coincidence. The lingering trace of fate.

I spotted Ivan on Yonge Street once. Standing on the sidewalk and looking northward, then southward, as though uncertain which way to go. I crossed the street to say hello, and he had turned to look at me, blank-faced. Behind him, the lurid marquee of the Zanzibar strip club blinked and strobed.

“Ivan,” I said, touching my hand to his elbow. He looked at me like I was an undercover cop. One he’d been expecting to take him down for some time. “It’s Patrick.”

“Patrick.”

“From the circle. The writing circle?”

Ivan glanced over my shoulder. At the doors to the Zanzibar.

“Up for a drink?” he said.

We put the daylight behind us and took a table in the corner. The afternoon girls rehearsing their pole work on the stage. Adjusting their implants in the smoked mirrors. Smearing on the baby oil.

I did the talking. Asked after his writing (he’d been “sitting on” some ideas) and work (“Same tracks, same tunnels”). There was a long silence after that, during which I was waiting for Ivan to ask similar questions of me. But he didn’t. At first I assumed this was a symptom of strip-bar shyness. Yet now, looking back on it, I was wrong to think that. It was only the same awkwardness I’d felt the first time I spoke with Ivan, when he’d confessed to having been accused of hurting someone. His loneliness was stealing his voice from him. Driving the underground trains, staring at the walls in his basement flat, paying for a table dance. None of it required speech.

I excused myself to the men’s room, and to my discomfort, Ivan followed me. It was only standing side by side at the urinals that he spoke.

Usually, exchanges that take place with another fellow in such a context, dicks in hand, requires strict limits of the subject matter. The barmaid’s assets or the game on the big screen are safe bets. But not Ivan’s admission that he’s been afraid to get close to anyone since he was accused of killing his niece fourteen years ago.

“Her name was Pam. My sister’s first born,” he started. “Five years old. The father’d left the year before. Scumbag. So my sister, Julie, she’s working days, and because I’m driving trains at night, she asks me to stay at her place sometimes to look after Pam. Happy to do it. The kind of kid I’d like to have if I ever had kids. Which I won’t. Anyways, I was over at Julie’s this one time and Pam asks if she can go down to the basement to get some toy of hers. I watched her run off down the hall and start down the stairs and I thought That’s the last time you’re ever going to see her alive. I mean, when you look after kids, you have these thoughts all the time. Yet this time I think Well, that’s it, little Pam is gone, and it stuck with me a couple seconds longer than usual. Long enough to hear her miss a step. I go to the top of the stairs and turn on the light. And there she is on the floor. Blood. Because she came down on something. A rake somebody’d left on the floor. One of the old kind, y’know? Like a comb except with metal teeth. Pointing up. But that’s not where it ends. Because Julie thinks I did it. The only family I got. So the police look into it, can’t make any conclusions, they’re suspicious but they’ve got to let it slide. But Julie hasn’t spoken to me since. I don’t even know where she lives any more. That’s how a life ends. Two lives. It just happens. Except I’m still here.”

He shakes. Zips. Leaves without washing his hands.

By the time I made it back to our table, Ivan is ordering another round. I told the waitress one was enough for me.

“I’ll see you around then,” I said to him. But Ivan’s eyes remained fixed on the slippery doings onstage.

A few strides on I turned to wave (a gesture I hoped would communicate my need to rush on to some other appointment) but he was still sitting there, looking not, I noticed, at the dancer, but at the ceiling, at nothing at all. His hands hanging cold and white at his sides.

Len, the only one I’d given my home number to, called once. Asked if I wanted to get together to “talk shop”, and for some reason I accepted. Perhaps I was lonelier than I thought.

I arranged to meet him at the Starbucks around the corner. As soon as the lumbering kid pushed his way through the doors I knew it was a mistake. Not that things went badly. We spoke of his efforts to give up on horror and “go legit” with his writing. He’d been sending his stories to university journals and magazines, and was heartened by “some pretty good rejection letters”.

It was over the same coffee that Len shared the gossip about Petra. Her ex-husband, Leonard Dunn, had been arrested for a whack of fraud schemes, blackmail, and extortion. More than this, reports had suggested that Mr Dunn had close connections to organized crime. Len and I joked about Petra’s Rosedale mansion standing on the foundations of laundered money, but I kept to myself my last glimpse of Petra outside Grossman’s, stepping into a black Lincoln she seemed reluctant to enter.

That was about it. Neither of us mentioned William or Angela or any of the others (I had not yet learned of the car accident outside Whitley). Even the apparent end to the Sandman’s career was mentioned only in passing. It struck me that Len was as unsure of the police’s presumption that we would never hear of him again as I was.

Afterwards, standing outside, Len and I agreed to get together again sometime soon. I think both of us recognized this as a promise best unkept. And as it turned out, it was only some years later, and under circumstances that had nothing to do with fostering a tentative friendship, that we saw each other again.

In interviews, I have repeatedly stated that I only started writing The Sandman after my severance pay from the National Star had run out, but this is not exactly true. If writing is at least partly a task undertaken in the mind alone, well away from pens or keyboards, then I had started filling in the spaces in Angela’s story from the last night I saw her.

Even after the circle and the long, worried days that followed, even as the bank started sending its notices of arrears followed by their lawyers’ announcements of foreclosure, some part of my mind was occupied in teasing out possible pasts and futures for the orphan girl, Jacob, Edra, and the terrible man who does terrible things.

It wasn’t that these considerations were a comfort. It would be more accurate to say that I returned to Angela’s story because I needed it to survive. To be present for my son, I required a fictional tale of horror to visit as an alternative to the real horrors that kept coming at us. I had Sam—but I was alone. We’d already lost Tamara. Now here goes the house. Here go Daddy’s marbles. And I couldn’t tell Sam about any of it.

This is how I thought The Sandman could save me. It gave me somewhere to go, something that was mine.

But I was wrong. It was never mine. And it could never save me.

The Sandman had plans of its own. All it needed me for was to set it free.