The Killing Circle

28

I suppose it’s the guilt over what I did out back in the shed, the ratcheting worry of it being discovered—whatever the reason, I end up staying in all the next day punishing myself. A steady infliction of the most hideous domestic torture: I watch TV.

Not that I don’t try reading first. Sniffing at the opening of the latest Philip Roth (too sharp), sampling a random page of Borges (too fanciful), then a re-taste of Patricia Highsmith (too much like real life, or at least my real life). It seems likely I will never read again. I feel like the Burgess Meredith bookworm character in that Twilight Zone episode who, finding himself the last man alive on earth and prepared to finally savour all the works of literature he’d yet to get around to, sits down on the library steps only to have his specs fall off and shatter into a thousand pieces. That’s one nerd’s version of hell for you. And here is mine.

Not since I was paid to do so have I settled in for a full day with the early-morning Born Agains, followed by the afternoon Chatty Cathys, the primetime autopsies, all capped off with the soulless hours of miracle diet pills, phone sex lines, get-rich-quick infomercials. This, I realize now, was likely my true vocation all along. Not the life of one who writes or even writes about books, but a malingering lowbrow who wrongly thinks he deserves better. No wonder, when his life decides to assume the shape of literature, it isn’t a novel of ideas, but a chronicle of murder and suspicion. The kind of thing I always felt I was too good to actually read, but am now being forced to live. A bloody page-turner.

On the positive side, it appears I’ve gotten away with it. No phone calls from the city’s sanitation department inquiring about blue limbs punched out the side of compost bags, no neighbours coming by to complain about my screeching away with a rotary saw in the middle of the night. Petra will turn up some day, she’ll have to. But it wasn’t yesterday, and it wasn’t today. And even when she does show herself, a week, a year, half a lifetime from now, there’s no evidence to connect her to me. I likely won’t be around for it anyway. If the Sandman’s goal is to kill off everyone in the Kensington Circle one by one, he’s almost finished. I’d put my money on me being the only one left alive. And he’s already made it clear he knows where I live.

So now I wait for him down here in the Crypt, glancing up at any movement outside the basement windows, thinking every skulking cat or fast-food wrapper blown down the walkway are his boots passing by. He is waiting for me to come outside, and if I refuse, he will come for me here. I won’t hear him enter. He’ll find me in this very chair, the remote clutched in my hand. And he’ll do what he’ll do.

I wonder if he’ll let me see who he is before he does.

All at once there’s a collision of noise: the ringing of the doorbell, the sock-hop opening theme of Happy Days, the journal I’d been scratching in leaping to the floor. It’s morning. A sandy light spills into the basement through the storm-drain windows.

I must be awake. Can you smell how bad you smell in your sleep?

The doorbell rings again. I’m tucking in my shirt as I climb the stairs, all the while wondering why I’m bothering to make myself presentable to the Sandman. For this is how he’s decided to make his entrance. Not at night, but on a listless July morning with the clouds holding the heat over the city like a vast canopy of wool.

There’s the shape of a man, tall and long-armed, standing on the other side of the front door’s side windows. And I’m going to the door with no further prompting than another musical push of the bell—Shave and a haircut, five cents!—clicking the bolt lock open and turning the handle.

Ramsay offers one of his vaguely cruel, ironic smiles. He’s in a good mood.

“You want some coffee?”

“I’m trying to cut down,” he says. “But you know, I think I will.”

I give him his coffee and warn him it’s hot. But he wraps his hand around the sides of the mug and takes a thirsty gulp.

“Can’t get hot enough for me,” he says.

By now Ramsay has walked over to the sliding doors and is looking out at the day. Then, so deliberately I can only assume he wants me to notice, he lowers his eyes from the sky to the shed in the back yard.

“So are you going to put the cuffs on, or do we just walk out of here?” I say, slapping both hands on the counter.

“You think I’m here to arrest you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought we were friends.”

“What are you doing here? Because I’ve got some important Beverly Hillbillies re-runs to get back to.”

When he puts his mug down on the counter I see that it’s empty, while mine, still steaming, sits next to his.

“I’m here to tell you we found him,” he says.

“Found him?”

“Arrested him this morning.”

“I’m not following you.”

“The Sandman,” Ramsay says. “The fellow who killed your writing circle friends. He’s ours.”

By now I’m leaning against the fridge door to remain standing.

“Who is it?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve thought it was everyone. Even you.”

“In my experience, the first choice is usually the right one.”

“William.”

“Congratulations.”

“And now you have him?”

“He’ll be arraigned later this morning. It’s why I have to run in a minute. Always like to be there for the reading of the charges.”

I suppose I must ask Ramsay other questions after this, because he’s telling me things. About the evidence they have on William. His background, criminal record, his aliases. The blood-spotted tools in his rented room. His membership not only in the Kensington Circle, but the ones before, the ones that Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey and Jane Whirter had been a part of. How the police will keep searching for Angela and Petra and Len, and they’ll find them too, their remains anyway, because Ramsay hates nothing more than an incomplete file.

“I never really thought it was you,” Ramsay is saying now. “But you were in that circle. And you were the one with the novel with the same title as the killer’s handle. It was odd. But the evidence speaks for itself. And besides, you were just using him for material, weren’t you? A parasite—if you’ll excuse the term. But that’s you. That’s the kind of fellow you are.”

Ramsay checks his watch. He’s still early for court—the kitchen clock has just gone a quarter to nine—but he pretends he’s running late. The fun’s over at the Rush household.

He strides to the door and I follow him. And though he moves with the self-assurance of a man who has once again been proved right, I realize, with an itchy thrill, that the triumph is actually mine. Nobody’s found Petra. Even if they do, they’ll attribute my handiwork to William. And Ramsay has done me the favour of catching the Sandman before he had the chance to visit me.

He’s halfway down the front walk before he turns.

“You better hope we get a conviction,” he says.

I knew it was William. That is, it could only have been him. And yet, almost from the very beginning, I had believed that the Sandman wasn’t just a killer’s pseudonym but an actual being for whom no real name exists. Separate from humanity not just in deed but composition. A monster.

Such was the charm of Angela’s story.

As a psychological profile, William’s a classic. A kid who lost his parents in swift succession when he was only six—the mother to MS, the father to a stroke—and spent the rest of his youth being traded around from one aunt or uncle to another, from prairie town to prairie town. “Nobody looking out for him,” as Ramsay put it. “That, or they were trying to look the other way.”

The fact is, little Will was a friendless bully as early as school counsellors started files on him. A teacher beater, window smasher, playground torturer. Followed by the emergence of more explicitly criminal talents. The dismemberment of neighbourhood pets. Thefts, break-and-enters, assaults. A graduation of offences from the petty to the brutal.

Then, a couple years out of high school, William went off the grid. No new charges, no known address. As far as the police could tell, he spent the better part of his twenties rolling between the rougher parts of towns out west, renting rooms in the most forgotten quarters of Winnipeg, Portland, Lethbridge, Spokane. Odd-jobbing for money. Spending his free time on far darker pursuits.

Where William went, missing people followed. A seemingly arbitrary string of men and women with no shared characteristics or backgrounds, all cold cases with little in common other than a tall, bearded man who kept to himself, had spent some time in their towns around the time they disappeared. “Only circumstantial,” Ramsay conceded. “But I don’t believe it for a second. Not after what we found.”

And what had the police found at William’s apartment over a bankrupted butcher’s shop in the east end? The tools of the trade for a new butcher’s shop. Cleavers, saws, meat-cutting wires. Most of it encrusted with human blood. All of it off to the lab for DNA testing. But given some of the other personal items found in William’s bathtub, kitchen cabinets, even lying at the end of his bed—Carol Ulrich’s purse, Ronald Pevencey’s diary—it’s certain that the results will prove that his tools were what he used to dispose of them all.

There were also the storybooks. Do-it-yourself editions with cardboard covers. Inside, pages relating the disconnected tales of a shadow that drifted through the night, periodically stopping to carve up complete strangers who caught his eye. Written in William’s hand. And the protagonist’s name?

“Let me guess,” I’d interrupted Ramsay. “The Sandman?”

“Isn’t that copyright infringement?”

“Titles can’t be owned. Only the contents.”

“That’s too bad. I thought I might have another charge to lay against our friend.”

The police have their man. And their man is a man. Nothing supernatural about him, aside from the black magic that enables one to kill for no reason other than pleasure in the doing of it. The Sandman is a creation of fantasy. But the fantastical is not required here, it never is. All that’s needed is your off-the-rack dismemberment artist: the unloved child, the world hater, the remorseless sociopath. Check the back pages of any newspaper. There’s plenty of them.

I should be relieved. And I am. Sam can come home again. We can start on the business of making new lives.

But there is still the lone survivor’s question: Why me? Someone has to tell the story, I suppose.

And this time, it isn’t Angela’s, it’s not stolen. It’s mine.

The next day is William’s bail hearing, and though I want to go straight down to St Catharines and pick Sam up, I prevent myself with a sobering dose of fear. If the lawyer for the one they call the Sandman somehow manages to loose him on the streets this afternoon, I know where he’s most likely to visit first. Sam is safe now. One more day apart is the price for keeping him that way.

Still, the moment seems to call for some kind of celebration.

What I need to do is get out of the house.

A drive in the country.

The sign for Hilly Haven sprouts up from the horizon as a lone interruption of the flat fields. I turn in at the gate and wonder how I’m going to tell Angela’s mother that her daughter is likely dead. I suppose I don’t have to worry too much about the precise wording. Michelle Carruthers is used to receiving bad news. She’ll know before I’m halfway to telling her.

I park on the gravel lane outside her trailer, thankful for the cloud cover that veils some of Hilly Haven’s more dispiriting details. Its unwheeled tricycles, scalped dolls. The stained underwear swinging on the clotheslines.

“Nobody home.”

I turn before knocking on the trailer’s door to find a woman too old for the pig-tails that reach down to the two chocolate-smeared children at the ends of her hands. None wearing T-shirts of sufficient size to cover the bellies that peek out from over the waists of their sweatpants.

“Will Michelle be back soon?”

“Not soon.”

“Is she well?”

“You a friend of hers?”

A cop. That’s what I’d look like to her. Hilly Haven must get its share of plainclothes banging on its tin doors.

“My name is Patrick Rush. I was a friend of her daughter’s. She’s come into some trouble, I’m afraid.”

“Trouble?” the woman says, releasing the hands of the chocolatey kids.

“It’s a private matter.”

“You mean she’s dead too?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Michelle. She passed on last week.”

“Oh. I see.”

“The doctors didn’t know exactly what got her. But with her, it could have been anything.”

There is nothing more to say than this. Yet simply walking past the three of them to the car and driving off without another word doesn’t seem possible either. If it weren’t for the blackened tongue that the smaller of the two kids sticks out at me, I might not have come up with a question.

“Has there been a funeral already?”

“Two days after she died. A few round here were the only ones who showed up. As well as the son.”

“The son?”

“It’s who we all figured it was anyway.”

“What was his name?”

“Never asked.”

“What did he look like?”

“A big guy, I guess. Wasn’t the kind who seemed to like you looking at him all that much. Like he wanted to be there, but not have anybody else know it.”

I step down off the cement steps at the trailer’s door. The midday sun unveils itself from behind a bank of clouds.

“When was the funeral?”

“Last week. I told you.”

“Which day?”

“Thursday, I think.”

Thursday. Two days before William’s arrest. A big guy.

“I better be getting back,” I say. But as I try to pass the woman, she stops me with a hand on my arm.

“I suppose someone should look that son of hers up if his sister’s passed on.”

“I’ll let him know.”

“So you know him? We was right? He was Michelle’s boy?”

“You know families,” I say vaguely, but the woman seems to understand. She gives me a nod that takes in her own children, Angela’s mother’s trailer, the blazing sun, all of Hilly Haven.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “Full of surprises.”

When I get home there’s a message from Tim Earheart. He wants to get together, see how I am. But I know even as I return his call and arrange to meet at a bar near his new house in Cabbagetown that he’s heard about William’s arrest and wants to find out what I know about it. This has been Tim’s assignment from the start. And now that the final act is beginning—the public cleansing ritual that is every high-profile criminal proceeding—he wants to milk every advantage he has over the competition.

Tim thinks I know something. And unless something juicier presents itself, he’ll keep asking what it is. And yet I still cling to the possibility that I can escape disclosure. It’s true that if William does end up going to a full trial, I’ll be called as a witness. But if the prosecution ends up not having to probe that far, or, better yet, if William pleads guilty, no one need ever know that the author of The Sandman was once in a writing class with the Sandman. I still have a chance. So long as Tim can be discouraged from digging further into the Patrick Rush angle.

“How’re you liking the new place?” I ask him as the first round arrives.

“It’s an investment. Besides, I’m thinking of settling down pretty soon.”

“Stop it. You’re killing me.”

“I just need to meet someone.”

“Haven’t you met enough someones?”

“She’s out there. Just like your Angela person.”

I nod, trying to read Tim to see if he knows something about Angela’s disappearance that I don’t.

“Must be strange,” Tim muses. “Being so close to this William Feld business.”

“I wasn’t so close to it.”

“Your book could have been the guy’s biography.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“The whole title thing. It’s kind of hard to accept as coincidence.”

“The police didn’t think it was so hard.”

“They’ve talked to you?”

“A detective came round to ask some questions.”

“Ramsay.”

“I think that’s the guy.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“What I’m telling you. It’s a novel. It’s all made up. I’m just glad it’s over.”

Tim chokes on the sip he’s taking from his bottle. “Over? Not for me. This is my story. I’m going to be filing on Mr Feld’s trial for the next several months. Which could turn out to be a real bitch if I can’t come at it through a side door.”

He looks at me straight now, hands flat on the bar.

“I wish I could help you,” I say, blowing him back an inch with an exhaled belch. “But there’s not a goddamn thing I know about William Feld that anybody who read your story in today’s paper doesn’t know.”

I’ll never know if Tim believes me or not. But whether out of a sense that what I’ve said is true, or some last tug of friendship, he lets me go.

“Working on anything new?”

“I was thinking of returning to newspapering. I’d be prepared to try something new. The horoscopes, classifieds, crossword puzzles,” I say. “You think the Editor-in-Chief would have me back?” Oh yes. We both have a good laugh over that one.

In the morning I drive down to St Catharines. I’ve brought all sorts of presents with me (a plasma screen TV for Stacey and her husband, iPods and a Tolkien collector’s set for their kids) but nothing, intentionally, for Sam. Our gift to each other is the reunion itself. It will be up to Sam how he wants to spend the rest of the summer. We will work our way back to what we used to be at our own pace, and with only ourselves to tell us how it is to be done.

On the drive home I make a point of not overdoing how difficult the last weeks have been without him. And for the first hour or so, he offers anecdotes involving his numbskulled cousins, how good a swimmer he’s become. He’s going easy on me, too.

Then, somewhere around Oakville, flying past the low-rise head offices and steakhouse franchises, Sam decides I’m able to take his coming to the point.

“You have to tell me, Dad.”

“I know.”

“It doesn’t have to be now.”

“Okay.”

“But sometime.”

“I owe you that much.”

“It’s not about owing.”

Sam turns in his seat. And there’s not an eightyearold looking back at me but a young man who is surprised at how his father can’t appreciate what should be obvious.

“If you don’t tell me, you’ll be the only one who knows,” he says.

August decides to behave, with afternoon breezes off the lake nudging the smog northward to reveal the city it had shrouded in orange for the month before. To honour this change, Sam and I go for long walks. Lunching out in T-shirts and flip-flops, biking along the trails in the Don Valley, sliding our hands over the Henry Moore sculptures at the gallery when the security guards aren’t looking. We’ve even started reading again. Bookish picnics in Trinity-Bellwoods swallowing Robinson Crusoe (Sam) and Atonement (me) in the shade.

But even these happy days are not free of ghosts.

The first arrives in the form of a voice. A phone call near midnight that sounds like it’s coming from a bar.

“Patrick?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Len.”

“Where are you?”

“The Fukhouse.”

“Why?”

“I’m not too sure. I guess it’s got some sentimental value.”

“This is going to sound stupid, but I have to ask,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut against the bedside lamp I click on. “You’re not dead, are you?”

“No,” Len says after a moment’s thought. “I don’t think so.”

“Where have you been?”

“I just kind of left everything behind and rented places all over town. It was pretty screwed up for a while there.”

“It was.”

“They got him now though.”

“Yeah. They got him.”

He sighs into the receiver. A wet-lipped whistle that tells me that until I just confirmed it for him, Len wasn’t sure if it was over or not.

“You know what’s funny?” he goes on. “I was about to say that maybe I can go home now, but I don’t have a clue where that is. My old landlord threw all my books and comics out at my old place.”

“You can always start again.”

“Start what?”

“Collecting.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

In the background, someone smashes what sounds like a shot glass against the wall.

“Busy night down there?”

“It’s okay,” Len says nervously. “Hey, you doing anything right now?”

“I was getting ready for bed, actually.”

“Is it that late? I was going to ask if you wanted to come out and meet me. To celebrate.”

“Not tonight.”

“Another time.”

This seems to be it. But Len lingers, the loneliness travelling down the line like an invisible weight.

“I guess we’re the only ones left,” he says finally.

“What about Angela?”

“You think she could still be alive?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

“Well, here’s to us, Len. To the living.”

“To the living,” Len says, sounding less than certain about who that might be.

The other phantom of August isn’t dead either, but might as well be.

I see him walking back from the corner store one afternoon, Sam gripping my thumb with one hand, and screwing a popsicle into his mouth with the other. A father and son holding hands on a neighbourhood street in summertime. One version of freedom.

We’re passing by the punky hair salon on the corner—the place where Ronald Pevencey once cut and coloured—when a black panel van pulls over against the curb twenty feet ahead of us. Although this part of Queen Street has delivery trucks stopping and starting outside throughout the day, something about it draws my attention. Not any detail, but its utter lack of detail: no business name painted on the doors, no stickers, no rear licence plate. Even the black paint is of an age that has dulled its finish to an old chalkboard.

I slow our pace as the distance between us and the van shrinks to a couple of strides. Neither driver nor passenger doors have opened, and the angle of the side mirrors doesn’t let me see who sits up front. But it’s the back of the van that radiates trouble. The two rear windows webbed with dust, along with streaks of something else. Dried smears running from the top of the glass to the bottom. Rain. Or solvent rubbed off of work gloves. Or bare hands split open in an effort to scratch through the glass.

“Why are we stopping, Dad?”

I’m thinking of an answer—It’s such a nice day, I just want to turn around and go home the long way—when I see him. William’s face against the van’s back window.

I pull Sam against me. His popsicle drops to the sidewalk.

Nobody sees William but me.

And even I’m not seeing William. He’s in a solitary confinement cell somewhere, awaiting sentencing. Because there will be no trial. Not now. Not after he pleaded guilty and agreed to sign a written confession just days ago. All that’s left to be determined is how many consecutive life sentences he will serve.

So it’s not William whose lips are stretched into an oval, his tongue pressed white against the glass in a silent scream. But this doesn’t stop me from scuffling backwards to slam my shoulders against the hair salon windows.

This is what terrifies me about the van: not William, but what horrors have taken place within it. The sort of things that would frighten even William. And there’s his face to prove it. Never before showing anything but veiled threat—coal-eyed, beard-shrouded—yet now stretched with panic.

The van spews exhaust. When it clears, William isn’t there. But the wet circle his tongue cleared on the glass still is. Was there to begin with.

With a lurch, the van re-enters the lane of moving traffic. A half-block on, it makes a turn and is gone.

Sam kicks the melted pool of popsicle goo against the wall. Takes my hand to lead me home. He doesn’t ask what I think I saw. He doesn’t have to. As with the bad man who lives in the bedroom closet, if you can just hold on to what you know is real, he can’t hurt you.