The Killing Circle

22

This may be hard to believe, to accept as something that a person in a real situation would do (as opposed to what I am unfortunately not: a character in a story), but the reason I don’t ask Angela, having seen her diminished foot, if she is, in fact, the grown-up version of the little girl in her journal of horrors, is that I don’t want her to think I am so unsophisticated a reader. To assume that missing toes prove that whatever happened to the Sandman’s girl was autobiography and not fiction—a fiction that, like all fiction, is necessarily made of stitched-together bits of lived as well as invented experience—would reveal me as that most lowly drooler of the true-crime racks, the literal-minded rube who demands the promise of Based on a True Story! from his paperbacks and popcorn flicks: the unimaginative.

And why do I care if she held this impression? Pride, for one thing. I may be a charlatan author, but I’m still a good reader. Still on the endangered species list of those who know it is only foolish gossip to connect the dots between a writer’s life and the lives she writes.

There is this, along with another reason I keep any questions of frostbitten piggies to myself as I step out of her bedroom to find Angela pouring me a cup of coffee: I’m lonely.

“Sleep all right?” she asks, sliding a World-Class Bitch mug over the counter toward me.

“Fine. Bad dreams, though.”

“How bad?”

“The usual bad.”

“Me too. It’s why I’m up. That, and I have to be at work in less than an hour.”

I’d forgotten she has a job. I’d forgotten anyone has a job. Another of the side effects of the writer’s life. You start to think everybody can professionally justify shuffling around the house all day, waiting for the postman, pretending that staring out the window and wondering what to toss in the microwave for lunch is a form of meditation.

“About last night,” I start. “I wanted to tell you how much—”

“I think you should talk to some of the others.”

“The others?”

“From the circle.”

Angela holds her coffee with both hands, warming them against the bracing chill of condo A/C.

“That’s funny. I was going to say something about us. Something nice.”

“I’m not too good at the morning-after thing, I guess.”

“So you’ve had others. Other mornings.”

“Yes, Patrick. I’ve had other mornings.”

I take a suave gulp of scalding coffee. Once the burning in my throat has dulled to an excruciating throb, I ask why she wants me to speak to the others.

“To find out what they know. If they’ve been…involved the same way we have.”

I nod at this, and keep nodding. It’s the word she’s just used. Involved. Said in the way Conrad White said it when I asked what he thought of Angela’s story. You want to know if someone else has been involved in the way you have been involved.

“How did you come to leave your purse in Conrad’s car?”

“I told you. We were seeing each other a little at the time.”

“Seeing each other? Or seeing each other?”

“He was interested in who I was.”

And who are you? I nearly ask, but stop it in time with another tonsil-scarring sip of coffee.

“Have you read his work?”

“Jarvis and Wellesley? Sure,” she says. “Why?”

“I think he saw in you what the character in his book was looking for.”

“His dead daughter.”

“The perfect girl.”

“He told you that?”

“So I’m right.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Angela tells me that Conrad would drive her home sometimes after their get-togethers. At first, their topics were the usual literary matters such as favourite books (The Trial for Conrad, The Magus for Angela), work habits, writer’s block and how it might be overcome. Soon, though, Conrad would focus their discussion on where Angela’s story came from. Her childhood, her friends growing up, where her parents were now. Something in the pointedness of his queries put Angela on the defensive, so that her replies became more intentionally vague the more he persevered. It made him angry.

“Like he wasn’t just curious, but desperate,” Angela says, slipping her cellphone and keys into her purse.

“Was he in love with you?”

“He might have been, in a way. More like a freaky fan than a lover, you know? But that wasn’t what made him ask all those questions.”

She stops. Not liking where this is taking her.

“I think he was scared,” she says.

“Scared of what?”

“The same thing we’re scared of.”

“And he—”

“He thought it had to do with my story.”

I’m following Angela to the door, slipping on watch and socks and shoes as I go.

“Did he have any contact with the Sandman—someone he thought was the Sandman? There were those killings back then. Maybe he was making connections in ways none of us had thought of.”

“Maybe,” Angela says. “Or maybe he was a messed-up shut-in who was driving himself crazy making something out of nothing.”

In the elevator down, I ask who from the circle she thinks we should try to look up first.

“We?”

“I thought you said it might be useful to know what the others know.”

“But I can’t do the asking.”

“Why not?”

“Who did he deliver the Yankees cap to?”

The elevator doors open. Outside, the heat bends the air into shimmering vapours.

“Can I call you?” I ask.

“Not for a while.”

“Why not?”

“You are mine. Remember?” she says, opening the doors to the burning world. “I don’t think he’d like it if he thought I was yours.”

You wouldn’t expect, being caught in a web of intrigue (who knew I would ever use this phrase so personally, irreplaceably?) that, in between the recorded scenes of revelation and confrontation, one could still have so much spare time. Unemployment can open yawning chasms in the middle of the most mentally preoccupied days, believe me. There are still the self-maintaining banalities to attend to: the belated meals, the bathroom dashes, the long showers. Still the mail, the erupting laundry hamper, the dental appointment. One can be a murder suspect, a serial killer’s prey, and still have time to waste on the last sobbing half-hour of Dr Phil.

There are a pair of activities over these melting July days, however, that are returned to with too great a frequency to note each time they occur. The first is my journal. I’ve graduated from stolen jottings at bedtime to carrying it around wherever I go, recollecting snatches of conversation, the wheres and whens of things. It is, in the rereading, an increasingly unstructured document. What begins as tidy pages of coherent points soon breaks down into messages to Sam, scribbled drawings of Petra, Detective Ramsay (though I don’t attempt Angela, can’t imagine where the first line would start), even a letter to the Sandman, asking that if he has to take me with him into the Kingdom of Not What It Seems that he leave my son behind. It occurs to me that later, when it’s all over, this journal of mine may be the sort of thing that supports the contention that poor old Patrick had lost his way well before the shadow got him. After all, what is sanity other than guarding the border between the fiction and non-fiction sections?

My other habit is to give Sam a ring and see how he’s doing. Most of the time he’s out in the yard playing with Stacey’s kids (they have a pool, an unthinkable suburban luxury for us city mice), or camping overnight (instead of the artsy-craftsy day school I’ve been sending him to), or one of any other number of healthy summer distractions I have long meant to get around to doing with him, but mostly never have, slipping him books or movie passes instead. In other words, even when I call I don’t get to talk to him. But it gives me a chance to thank Stacey yet again for what she’s doing, to assure her that I’ll collect Sam once I’ve “cleared the deck of a few things”, to ask her to tell him that I called.

There you have it: even a man caught in a web of intrigue still fights against the inevitable with whatever’s left to him. To hang on to the shape life used to take before he became trapped, and now can do little but wait for the spider to feel his struggle and decide enough, that’s enough for this fly. It’s time.

Since we parted in her condo’s lobby, and despite her asking me not to, I have put in a handful of calls to Angela, and received some cursory excuses in return (“Work is really crazy this week”, “I don’t know, I’m just so tired”). I tell her I need to see her. That I miss her.

“I’m not sure I can do that,” she says.

“We can just talk.”

“What would we talk about?”

“It wouldn’t have to be…bad things.”

“But that’s all there is.”

She goes on to tell me how she’s gotten a couple more signs from “him”. When I ask what these indications are, she goes silent. Her breath clicking in her throat.

“Maybe, if we stay together, we could protect each other,” I suggest.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I said maybe.”

“I think he wants us apart. For each of us to have our own course.”

“And if we don’t play along—”

“—he’ll separate us. Or worse. We’ve got to play this the way he wants.”

And look how well that’s turning out, I want to say. Along with another remark that comes to me too late: What do we think he wants anyway? If it is Patrick Rush feeling the profoundest regret for having used his name for the title of a ripped-off novel, then mission accomplished. Mea culpa. And if it’s just random lives he wants to get back to taking, then I’m certainly not the one standing in his way.

Random lives.

This is the puzzle that fills the next hour. Buried away down here in the Crypt, mapping out the few connections I can make in my journal.

Carol Ulrich.

Ronald Pevencey.

Jane Whirter.

And now Petra Dunn.

Not a thing common between them. But in his mind, there must have been. For the Sandman, there was nothing random about them at all. All that’s required is to think like a psychopath.

Well, I think. I’m a retired writer. How hard could it be?

Even in the four years since the Kensington Circle, the available venues for writers’ groups have multiplied. Libraries, bookshops, coffee houses—but also rehab clinics, synagogues, yoga ashrams, Alcoholics Anonymous. There is no limit to the Self-Writing Seminars, (Her)story Workshops, Focus Group Your Novel! round tables one might sign up for. And I sign up for them all. Or as many as I can. Not to learn, to exchange, to discover myself. But to retrace the steps that have delivered me here. The same journey all murderers of passion are obliged to make: a return to the scene of the crime.

With Sam safe at Stacey’s, I am free to skip from one circle to another over the sweltering remainder of the week. As I expresswayed and subwayed to the various gatherings uptown, crosstown, and out-of-town, I asked the same question. And a couple of times I got answers.

“Do these names mean anything to you?” I would inquire of my fellow circlers, and offer to them the first names (and surnames if I knew them) of each member of the Kensington Circle. By the end of the week I had confirmed what I’d suspected.

In a basement in Little Italy, I learned that William had been a participant for a time several years ago, and was going to be asked to leave (the boyhood tales of an animal-skinning sociopath too much to take) before he abruptly stopped showing up all on his own. I heard much the same thing in a Coffee Time in Scarborough, a public library in Lawrence Park, a gay bar on Jarvis Street: big scary man with too-real horror story joins writers’ club, then disappears.

And that’s not all.

There were other names I mentioned in the circles. Names of those I had never met, but were of increasing significance to my situation, nevertheless. Carol Ulrich. Ronald Pevencey. (I left out Jane Whirter, as she had lived in Vancouver for over twenty years prior to her death.) Names that some of the people I asked had heard of before. But not only because Ulrich and Pevencey were among the Sandman’s first round of victims. They were remembered because, at one time or another, both of them were participants in some of the city’s writing circles.

This is what I have, and what, if newspaper reports are to be believed, the police don’t: a connection between the Sandman’s “random” victims. They were writers. And somehow it got them killed.