The Killing Circle

32

Whitley, Ontario, is one of the stubborn towns along the two lanes that ride the hump of Lake Superior. Today it is known, to the extent it is known at all, as a stop to fill the tank or, perhaps, find a damp-smelling motel room to sit out a snowstorm. A half-day’s drive past the last cottages anyone is willing to drive to, this is the land most can locate only through the abstract—on maps or in the imagination. A door that opens on to one of the last Nothings on the planet.

It’s a drive that tortures the Toyota’s four cylinders. North of the Soo, the Trans-Canada loses its nerve, coiling into endless aversions to every swamp, hillock and inlet, so that the four hundred miles to Thunder Bay requires an athletic slapping of wheel and stomping of brake. But it’s not the wheezing ascents that are so troubling, it’s the freefalls that follow, sending the car shuddering helplessly cliffward every five minutes, and each time the turn is made—with a yank at the gearshift and a whispered Shit, oh shit—it’s a close call.

Not that the driver behind me has the same problems.

Over the afternoon’s last hours of light, on the rare straightaways, I glimpse a black sedan in the distance. It could be the Continental I spotted on the way to my visit to Sam in St Catharines. Every time I slow to get a better look, it must slow as well, or pull off to the side altogether—I never catch sight of it unless I’m moving. Later, when the dark forest leans over the road to block out any hint of a slivered moon, it’s still there. Winks of headlight.

It was on this road, coming into one of these curves, that Evelyn and Conrad White met their end. And it was probably a car following them like the one following me that forced them into the turn too fast. It may have been the very same Continental. The same driver.

Whoever is behind the wheel doesn’t seem to want me dead just yet, in any case. They want to see that I’m going in the right direction. Up here, there are only two choices: forward or back. One of which is no choice at all.

I roll into Whitley some time after midnight. The town itself sits behind a stand of trees, hidden from the highway as though ashamed of itself. A bowling alley. Two “Pre-Owned!” car lots. A tavern with squares of plywood where the windows used to be. Nothing appears to be open. Even the streetlights have been turned off for the night. Or were never turned on.

The TV in the Sportsman Motel’s office is working just fine, however. It’s how I decide on it over the competition: the sad glow that signals there may be someone else awake in Whitley aside from me. (When was the last time, I wonder, that the manager had to flick on the NO in front of VACANCY on the sign featuring a hunter with a rifle in one hand and a dead goose in the other?)

The guy behind the desk is watching Canadian MegaStar! Shaking his head at a girl from Saskatoon mangling a Barry Manilow tune.

“Can you believe these people?” he says, handing over the room keys without taking his eyes off the screen. “What are they thinking?”

“They want to be famous.”

“Oh, this one here’s going to be famous, alright. Famous for having a fat ass and a voice like a choked chicken.”

He shakes his head at the TV, snorts, folds his arms over his chest, makes his chair squeak. But he doesn’t turn the channel.

The room smells of rum and used rubbers. I pour the shampoo from one of the bathroom’s little bottles on to the carpet to freshen things up. I’m lathering the floor with my shoes when I think I spot the Continental slide past through the window.

It’s already reversing by the time I get the door open. Outside, the cold is a fist to the chest. It holds me there, my breath a grey halo over my head. Not that there would be any point in running after the car, now accelerating back toward the highway.

Whether it was him in the car or not, I know he’s here. There is a taste that comes with the Sandman’s presence that I’m spitting on to the Sportsman’s pavement. He’s here. Which means that Angela is too.

Aside from what remains of yesterday’s donut batch at the Hugga Mugga, the only breakfast in Whitley is to be found at the Lucky Seven Chinese BBQ. The eggs taste of egg rolls, the toast of won ton, but I’m hungry enough to get it down. And when I look up from my plate, Sam is sitting across from me. Looking worried. Not for himself, but for me.

You’re not a ghost. This is just me missing you. You’re alive.

“More coffee?”

I raise my eyes to the waitress. When I look again, Sam’s chair is empty.

On the sidewalk, I peer down Whitley’s main street and imagine Angela’s father walking its length, searching for her. Just as I am. Raymond Mull is my sole connection to whatever traces she left behind here. What I need is to find the farm where he came to visit her, and to do that, I’ll have to find Edra, Angela’s foster mother. And if her surname was Stark in her journal, chances are she went by something else in the real world.

I decide to start at the offices of the Whitley Register. Although the sign on the door says they open at nine, the place remains locked at a quarter to ten, which forces me to sit on the front steps wishing I’d bought cigarettes at the Lucky Seven. Faces in passing pick-ups openly stare as they pass. I pretend not to notice. Pull the collar up on my overcoat against the stiffening breeze.

Autumn is a month further along up here, so that the trees have already surrendered their colours. A back-to-school litter clogs the storm drains: orange leaves and Red Bull cans. Garbage soon to be buried by snow only to emerge, fermented and soft, in the spring. Just as Jacob Stark’s body had shown itself after he’d taken his bootless run into the woods.

When a woman in a plaid hunting jacket pulls up I wonder if she’s going to ask me to leave. There is a downturn to her mouth and thickness in her shoulders that suggests expertise at this sort of thing. But when she stands with her hands on her hips and inquires as to what she can do for me, I end up coming right out with it.

“I’m doing some research. Hoping you could help.”

“Research? Into what? The history of the Whitley Whippers?”

“Sorry?”

“You’re speaking to the Register’s sports editor, not the archivist. If we had an archivist.”

“Maybe there’s someone in news I could speak to?”

“I’m news too. And entertainment, business, gardening tips. Some ad sales thrown in when I have the time.”

She extends a gloved hand, and I at first shake it, then use it to help pull me to my feet.

“Patrick Rush,” I say.

“Jane Tanner. Acting Editor-in-Chief. The real editor having passed on.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. It was three years ago. And he was a foul son of a bitch.”

Jane Tanner opens the door and lets me in. Offers me coffee from a pot that’s been left to stew on its hotplate overnight.

“So what would you be researching in Whitley? I’m thinking mines or crime.”

“Why would you say that?”

“That’s all we’ve got up here. A few bad people and some holes in the ground.”

“Well you’re right, as a matter of fact. I’m looking into the Raymond Mull killings of a few years ago.”

Jane Tanner lowers her mug. “Eighteen years.”

“I was wondering if I could go through the papers from that time. Your back issues aren’t available on-line yet.”

“Yet. I like that. Yet.”

I’m expecting questions—a stranger shows up asking about the worst thing to ever happen in a neither-here-nor-there town—but Jane Tanner just shows me down into the earth-walled basement where mouldering stacks of Registers threaten to bury anyone who gets too close.

“Have fun,” she says, and starts back up the stairs.

Eighteen years. I start sorting through the papers at the garden tools and work back toward the broken typewriters. The issues from autumn 1989 are to be found next to the furnace, so that I have to dig out copies while being careful not to burn myself. When I’ve collected an armload, I clear the rat droppings from an empty milk crate, sit down and start reading.

He was here alright. Over Raymond Mull’s childstealing spree the Whitley Register was a weekly memorial issue, with grieving family members and news of the unsuccessful police investigation, along with outraged editorials calling for the return of the death penalty. But it’s the smiling school photos of the victims that make what he did unthinkable. Laney Pelle first. Then Tess Warner. And finally Ursula Lyle, the one they never found because, if Angela’s journal is to be believed, she did such a good job burying her in the Stark farm’s woods.

After they caught him at a roadside motel twenty miles north and discovered—as they’d discovered at William’s—the pickaxes and hacksaws and gloves, Raymond Mull had nothing to say. The one picture of him in the Register shows a man in the grey work pants and matching zip-up jacket of a mechanic, eyes lifeless but with an uncertain grin on his face, as though surprised to find he was the only one to see the dry humour in all this.

I track back over the weeks prior to Mull’s arrest, searching for stories of Jacob Stark’s mysterious death and his traumatized adopted daughter found nearly frozen to death in the barn, but when I do find mention of the incident, there are notable distinctions from the account in Angela’s journal. The name, for one thing. Jacob Stark was actually David Percy. And while his body was found under the unusual circumstances Angela described—buried in the first blizzard of the season, the flesh slashed and torn by a frenzied run into the trees—there is no Angela, no daughter, no girl who refused to share her secret. Along with something else. David Percy was legally blind.

Among the other missing pieces in the Register is the specific location of the Percy farm. In fact, it isn’t described as a farm at all, only the “Percy residence outside Whitley”. No good checking the phone book now, either. Marion (not Edra) Percy would almost certainly be dead now too. There’s no way of knowing who currently lives on that property, if anyone.

I drop the last Register on to the pile and think Maybe this is it. Maybe this is where it ends, in a cobwebbed basement with a man wiping his eyes at his flawed instincts and stupid mistakes.

Sam isn’t here. He never was. And in the time I’ve wasted, she could be anywhere. With him.

This very moment may have been Angela’s punchline all along: to make me think that all would be answered in Whitley, only to find that she had never lived here, never buried another girl her age, never been beckoned by the Sandman from her window. It was a story, nothing more.

“Sorry to say so,” Jane Tanner says, appearing at the bottom of the stairs, “but seems to me you found what you were looking for.”

“As a matter of fact I didn’t.”

“I can say with some regret that I’ve lived here all my life. Maybe I can help you.”

“David Percy.”

“Thought it was Mull you were researching.”

“I had an idea they might be connected.”

“You wouldn’t have been alone in that. At the time, every missing cat and lost car key was being blamed on Raymond Mull.”

“Did he have a child? Percy, I mean.”

“There was a girl.”

“The Percys’?”

“Adopted. Nobody knew her much because she lived outside town and wasn’t here long.”

“Why didn’t you mention her in the paper?”

“To protect her.”

“From what?”

“Whatever had come looking for her.”

“So they thought it was Mull who’d driven the old man into the woods.”

“Who else? Everyone figured it had to be him.”

“And that he wanted Percy’s daughter.”

“She was the right age. And she’d obviously been through something traumatic.”

“Hiding from him. In the barn.”

Jane Tanner comes to stand directly under one of the basement’s hanging bulbs.

“How do you know that?”

“It was just a story I heard.”

“You mean just a story you wrote.”

“You read my book?”

“Of course. Journalist turns successful novelist. Lucky bastard. You were one of us.”

She goes on to ask if I’m here to uncover the truth behind the bits and pieces of the Percy case I’d used for The Sandman, and I encourage her misunderstanding as best I can. Tell her I’m working on a magazine article. A behind-the-scenes exploration of where fiction comes from.

“Anything else I can help you with?” she offers, though unconvincingly, her body gesturing for me to lead the way up the stairs.

“Probably not. It looks like I can’t go much further than this.”

“That’s the thing about the past. Most of the time, it doesn’t want to be known.”

I’m about to step around her when Jane Tanner surprises me by putting a hand on my arm.

“Sorry about your boy,” she says.

“Thank you.”

“He’s not why you came to Whitley, is he?”

“I told you why I’m here.”

“Yes, you did.”

She remains standing in the basement even when I make it to the top of the stairs.

“Guess you’ve already spoken to her?” she calls up at me.

I turn. This woman knows Angela?

“She’s here?”

“Still alive, as far as I know. Up the road a bit. A nursing home called Spruce Lodge.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Marion Percy. She might be able to tell you how wrong or right the story you heard is.”

As is often the case with nursing homes, there is little nursing in evidence among the residents of Spruce Lodge. No one checks me in at the front door, and the halls appear empty of all but a couple wheelchairs and their head-slumped passengers, as though paused midway toward a destination they could no longer put a name to.

Things are even more disheartening in the Recreation Lounge. Fluorescent tubes ablaze over a dozen or so jigsaw puzzlers and chin tremblers, nothing on the walls but a taped-up notice on how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. The only one who notices my entrance is a fellow standing by the water fountain with his arm down his pants. Spotting me, he releases his grip long enough to take his hand out and offer a welcoming wave.

“You belong to someone here?” a nurse asks after I’ve been standing in the doorway five minutes or more.

“Marion Percy.”

“Family?”

“No.”

“Then the church must have sent you.”

“Is Mrs Percy here?”

The nurse was just warming up—she looks about as lonely as any other Spruce Lodger—but she can tell I’m not in the mood. She points out a woman sitting on her own next to the room’s only window. “That’s Maid Marion, right over there.”

Who knows how old she is. Marion Percy has reached that post-octogenarian stage of life where any numerical expression of age doesn’t do justice to the amazing fact that she is still here, still a blinking, Kleenex-clutching being. A living denial of odds who is at the moment staring out at the tangled woods that surround the rear of Spruce Lodge’s lot.

“Mrs Percy?”

I’m not sure she’s heard me at first. It’s the turning of her head. A twitch that takes a while to become something more intentional.

“You’re new,” she says.

“I’m a visitor.”

“Not a doctor?”

“No.”

“Too bad. They could use a new doctor.”

She might be smiling. I can see her teeth, anyway.

“I know your daughter,” I say, watching for whatever effect this announcement has on her, but nothing changes in her face. A waxy stiffness that might be a reaction in itself.

“Oh?” she says finally.

“We were friends.”

“But not any more.”

“We haven’t seen each other in a while.”

“Well she isn’t here, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Was she here?”

The smile—if it was a smile—is gone.

“Are you a policeman?” she says.

“Just a friend.”

“So you said.”

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“You haven’t. But you’re about to, would be my guess.”

“I’m here to ask about what happened to your husband.”

She looks at me like she hasn’t heard what I just said. It forces me to speak again, louder this time.

“His accident.”

“Accident?” She reaches out to touch my hand. “Would you accidentally run four miles half-naked into a snowstorm?”

Her hand returns to her lap. I step between her and the window. She looks through me anyway. Studying the small square of world outside the window she’s come to memorize in such detail she needn’t look at it to see it.

“Do you believe he was driven into those woods? Mrs Percy? Please?”

“I’m old. Why are you asking me this?”

“I know your daughter, ma’am. I was just interested—”

“But this isn’t about her. Is it?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“My son.”

“Your son?”

“He’s missing.”

Maybe it’s the sound I make trying to sniff back my show of emotion—a reddening, moistening attack that strikes within seconds—but she sits up straight. Her knuckles white and hard as quartz.

“You’re looking for him.”

“Yes.”

She nods. Sucks her bottom lip into her mouth. “What were you asking me?”

“Your husband. Have you thought that perhaps he was pursued into the woods?”

“He wouldn’t have left her alone like that. Not unless he thought he was trying to save her.”

“Angela.”

“Your friend,” she says, her eyes clouding over. “Our daughter.”

Mrs Percy tells me how in the days before her husband died—and before she went into hospital to have her gallbladder removed—he confessed to hearing voices. David Percy believed someone was coming into the house and tormenting him, nicking him with knife cuts, moving the furniture so that he would trip over it. And a presence he felt, outside but looking in. Waiting. He wondered if he was losing his mind. By the time Marion made it home, her husband was gone. And Angela wasn’t talking.

“Do you think it could have been her?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Whatever drove your husband into the woods. Could it have been your daughter?”

The old woman wrinkles her nose. “She was only a child.”

“Still, who else could—”

“Our child.”

Marion Percy may be old, but she is clearly more than able to hold the line. In this case, it’s the question of her adopted daughter’s involvement in the events of the night that changed everything for her. She has ideas of what happened. But that doesn’t mean she’s about to share them.

“Does she ever come to visit?”

Mrs Percy squints at me through the smudged lenses of her bifocals. “Who are you?”

“My name is Patrick Rush.”

“And you say you know our girl?”

“Yes, ma’am. I do.”

She nods at this, and I’m expecting her to inquire as to Angela’s whereabouts, the events of her intervening years, her health. But she only returns to staring out the window.

“What happened to your farm?” I ask. “After you retired?”

“The land took it back. Not that we ever made much of a claim on it. No good for growing more than rocks and trees. Potato mud, David called it.”

“Who owns it now?”

“She does.”

“Angela?”

“That’s the thing about children. Without them, there’s no one to say you were ever even here.”