“I’m not as old as I look,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve got much time left. So, you start looking back, and thinking, ’Well, nothing I can do about that shit now.’”
“And did you manage to contact her?”
“Nah. I’m out of the picture. Which I
get,
you know?”
She sits forward enough that her face slides into the light of the reading lamp behind her. All premature lines and poison spots.
“What was she like?” I say. “When she was young?”
Her hand crawls up her chest to grip the oxygen mask hanging there. “She was innocent.”
“Aren’t all children?”
“That’s what I’m saying. She was just like any other child.”
“That’s the past tense.”
She fits the mask to her face and takes a breath. The mist against the plastic obscures all her features but her eyes. And they blink at me, clouding over.
“She suffered,” she says.
“How?”
“Loneliness. She was left
alone.
I sure as hell weren’t in any shape to be taking care of her.”
“She liked to read.”
“She liked to
write.
Diaries. Piles and piles of stuff.”
“What were they about?”
“How do I know? I was just glad she had
something.
”
She pulls the oxygen mask from her face and I can see that she won’t hold up much longer. Just sitting and remembering draws fresh sweat to her cheeks.
“Angela’s father,” I say, glancing at the door.
“I haven’t spoken to that sonofabitch in twentyseven years.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Look in the penitentiaries. Least that’s where I
hope
he is.”
“What did he do?”
“What
didn’t
he do?”
“Was he violent?”
“Something he couldn’t control, then didn’t
want
to control. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“Tell me.”
“What he done…what he…with his
own
—” she says, coughing for air it will take the rest of the day to catch. “It’s a thing I don’t even want to talk about.”
“It’s important.”
“How could
anything
to do with that man ever be important?”
“It might help me find your daughter.”
She looks up at me and I can see that there’s no strength left in her. But she’s still a mother. Even in her, even now, there’s the useless wish for everything to have been different.
“Killing,” she says, teeth clenched so hard I can hear the chalky scrape of bone against bone. “Little children.
Girls.
He killed little
girls.
”
Before I left Michelle Carruthers’ trailer and stumbled, sun blind, to my Toyota, she had given me Angela’s father’s name. Raymond Mull. Which rang a bell the moment she said it, though specifically from where, and specifically for what, it took until I was able to get back to Toronto and start working my computer in the Crypt to discover.
Angela’s mother was right. Raymond Mull was a killer of little girls. He was charged for the
murders of two of them, in fact, a pair of thirteenyearolds who went missing almost two decades ago. Roughly the same age that Angela, if she is thirty today, would have been then.
What follows from this? Nothing, perhaps. Or possibly everything.
If Angela was a thirteen-year-old contemporary of the murdered girls, it supports the interpretation (along with her missing toes) that she actually was the narrator of her fictionalized journal. Further, given Raymond Mull’s relationship to her, it’s probably true that he was the direct inspiration for the Sandman. In her story, she even had Jacob, her foster parent, suspect as much when he stated he believed it was the girl’s father who was selecting victims. In the real world, odds are that Raymond Mull was the original terrible man who did terrible things.
What I discover next, however, suggests I wasn’t the first member of the Kensington Circle to figure this much out.
A search on the media database I still have a password for left over from my
National Star
days finds dozens of stories on Raymond Mull’s trial. There’s photos of him too: bearded, eyes set too close together, but otherwise his face absent of expression. He doesn’t look like Angela, but they share this. A half-thereness.
Judging from the initial reports covering Raymond Mull’s trial, his conviction was viewed as a foregone conclusion. The Crown’s evidence
included work tools—saws, drills, hunting blades—found in his motel room. And he was identified by witnesses as being in the area over the preceding weeks, following students home from school, standing outside the convenience store where kids stopped for candy. His long list of previous convictions said little of worth about his character.
And yet none of this could prevent the case ending in an acquittal. The tools could render no blood samples from which to make positive DNA matches with the victims. The police argued this was only because Mull had been careful in cleaning them, and that even without blood, there was enough to connect him to the crimes. On this, the court disagreed. Without calling a single witness, the defence filed a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the Crown failed in making a
prima facie
case. All that was left to the prosecution was to nail Mull for previous parole violations, which they did. His sentence was nine months.
Which means that, barring no other subsequent incarceration over the last eighteen years, Raymond Mull is a free man.
But what strikes me even more than this is the location where the murders took place. Whitley, Ontario. The same place where Conrad White and Evelyn drove their car off the highway.
It could just be coincidence. But I don’t believe that it was. Evelyn and Conrad White’s shared curiosity over Angela’s story had led them to
Raymond Mull, to Whitley. That’s what they had been up to all the time I’d come to assume them to be having a May-December, teacher-student affair. They were searching.
If I’m right in this, the possibility that Conrad and Evelyn’s accident was in fact accidental becomes considerably harder to accept. They drove into a cliff wall. But what made them turn? At that speed, what were they driving
from
? Even the police found the crash “puzzling”. One solution would be if it was a double murder. If their killer was Raymond Mull.
Angela’s father. The original Sandman.
Sam calls me.
I’ve been sitting in the Crypt all day, intermittently writing in my journal and trying Angela’s number over and over, as though persistence is all that’s required to bring back the dead. I even try Len, whose answering machine’s message is the creepy piano soundtrack from
Halloween.
All of them gone, or missing. Me too. It’s why the ringing of the phone takes me by surprise.
“Dad?”
“What’s up?”
“Are you coming to visit today?”
“Not today.”
“What are you scared of, Dad?”
“I’m not scared.”
“What are you
scared
of?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt for something I did,” I say finally. “You’re
it.
You’re all I have. There’s nothing more important to me than making sure I don’t screw up again.”
“What did you do?”
“I stole something.”
“Can’t you give it back?”
“It’s too late.”
“Like a…perishable item.”
“That’s right. Just like that.”
If you take another’s past and use it as your own it can’t be returned. It’s bruised. Perishable. You take someone else’s story and chances are even they won’t want it back.
That evening, I know something’s wrong even before I park the Toyota behind the house. The door to the yard is ajar. The one I’d remembered to padlock over a week ago. It keeps me in the front seat a couple minutes longer, hands on the wheel. A lick of breeze nudges the door open another foot. Even in the dark, I can see the pale cuts in the wood where a crowbar has wrenched it free of the bolt.
It’s rage that starts me running two houses down, through the side alley to the street. Unlocking the door and kicking it open with an underwater rush of blood in my ears.
Upstairs. Making my way down the hallway, stepping blind into each room, not bothering to hide my steps or even turn on the lights.
No sign of anything taken or touched. Nothing left behind.
The same goes for downstairs. Every door locked, every window intact. Whoever went to the trouble of ripping the back gate apart was apparently
interrupted on his way to the house. That, or the house wasn’t his destination in the first place.
I pull back the curtains in the living room and look out the sliding glass doors. The light from a single hanging bulb illuminates the inside of the lopsided garden shed. A surprise. First, because it’s been so long since I’ve been out there at night I didn’t even know it had a bulb that still worked. And second, because the light wasn’t on when I parked the car no more than four minutes ago.
I go down to the basement. Rummage through the neglected corner of sports equipment and find what I’m looking for at the bottom of the pile. A baseball bat. A Louisville Slugger that feels right in my hands, heavy but capable of decisive speed in the first swing. After that, if it works, I can take my time.
I’m opening the sliding door and shuffling through the uncut grass. The shed’s door left open a foot in invitation.
The shed’s window is small, maybe two feet square, the glass murky with cobwebs. I try to look in. At the angle I stand at, there are only the shelves and wall hooks that store ignored tools and unopened hardware gifts. A museum of the failed handyman.
I go to the door and bring the bat even with my shoulders.
For a moment, the traffic and air-conditioning thrum of the city is quieted. There is only me. A man standing in his back yard. Holding a baseball bat. Raising his foot to kick in a shed door.
It flies open. Hits the wall. Swings closed again.
Yet there is time enough to peek-a-boo what’s inside. The old rotary lawnmower I’ve yet to take out this year. The 1999 Sunshine Girl calendar Tim Earheart gave me. Red paint dotted over the floor. Petra.
Then: not red paint, but blood.
Not Petra. Petra’s body.
What did he use?
This is my first thought upon seeing what remains of Petra on my shed floor. Would a knife do that? A drill? Could you do it on your own?
Did he keep her in a freezer?
I think this too.
She looks fresh enough.
But this is shock talking. This isn’t me.
I stare at her. The unfamiliar pinks and coiled blues that normally lie inside a person. I sit on a can of paint and do the same thing I did after finding her Yankees cap once it made its way from Angela’s condo to my living-room coffee table. I just
looked
at it. Long enough for the morning to slip into afternoon, for a thunderstorm to come and go. And the whole time I was stuck on the same question as I am now: What do you do with evidence planted in your home that could put you in prison for the rest of your life?
There’s going to the police and telling them the whole story, an expensive lawyer by your side, hoping they’ll see it your way. Unavailable in my case, however. Not with all the connections that have even me wondering if I did it.
Next there’s enlisting help. Calling a friend for advice, a drive across the border. But who would I call? Tim Earheart? Hard to believe he could resist the temptation to print the transcript of my call on tomorrow’s front page.
In the end, you might do as I did: put on gardening gloves, wipe the Yankees cap for prints using a wet tea towel, cut the thing into ribbons and stick it in the trash.
Which is the same thing I do with Petra’s body.
Yet not right away. Not until after a couple hours of taking deep breaths with my head between my knees. Smoking a cigarette from the emergency pack I keep in the flour jar. A round of dry heaves into the compost bin. It’s not easy coming to a decision like that. But that’s still nothing. Deciding to do it is a breeze compared with the doing of it.
Not to mention getting
ready
to do it.
Here, finally, is some use for what I learned over the hundreds of hours of prime-time forensic cop TV I studied as the Couch Potato: How to best cover your tracks in the disposal of a body.
I begin by stripping myself naked (later burning the clothes I wore when I entered the shed, just to be sure). After the cutting, I wrap each smaller part in several garbage bags. Dry, air-tight. Place the resulting packages in a larger bag used for yard waste.
Once I’m finished, I cut nails, hair, shave. Shower. Scour every inch of skin with cleansers reserved for kitchen use only. Bleach the bathroom.
Then do it all again. And again.
What do I remember now, only minutes after it’s done? Bits and pieces. So to speak. The protective walls already going up in my brain. They won’t hold, of course. Not forever, and not entirely. But you’d be surprised. You keep the worst of it at bay and you can still pour yourself a drink, look in the mirror and recall your own name.
Let’s just say that cutting up a ballcap and doing the same to a woman’s body are two different things. The tools required, the time, what it leaves behind. It’s just
different.
And after the mopping, the bleaching, the wiping for toe prints on the concrete floor, I’m still left with six yard-waste bags.
I smoke the rest of the pack.
Today is recycling day. The truck arrives early on my street, usually just after eight. A little over an hour from now. The collectors who work this neighbourhood are used to the sight of me dashing out at their approach, barefoot and in boxer shorts, frantically hauling out the compost I’d forgotten to take to the curb the night before. Every time, they let me apologize for the delay and watch as I insist on swinging the bags into the back myself. Once I’m done, they pull the switch that compacts the load into the truck’s hold. Then they’re gone.
And today, they’ll be taking Petra with them.
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.”