The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  I raise my eyes from the page. Squint into the lights. Dust orbiting like atoms in the white beams. If there are people out there, I can’t see them. Perhaps they have learned that I’m not what I’ve claimed to be, and have left the hall in disgust. Perhaps they are still here, waiting for the police to click the cuffs around my wrists.

  But they are only waiting for me. For the words every audience to Angela’s story requires to lift the spell that’s been cast on them.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Yellow, flickering movement like the beating of hummingbird wings. Hundreds of hands clapping together.

  Sam is there at the side of the stage, smiling at his dad with relief.

  I pick him up and kiss him. “It’s over,” I whisper. And even though there’s people watching, he kisses me back.

  “We should make our way to the signing table,” the publicist says, taking me by the elbow.

  I put Sam down to be driven home in the waiting limo and let the publicist guide me through a side door. A brightly lit room with a table at the far end with nothing but a fountain pen, bottle of water and a single rose in a glass vase on its surface. A pair of young men behind a cash register. Copies of The Sandman piled around them in teetering stacks. A cover design I’ve looked at a thousand times and a name I’ve spelled my whole life, but it still looks unfamiliar, as though I’m confronting both for the first time.

  The auditorium doors are already opening as I make my way around the velvet ropes that will organize the autograph seekers into the tidy rows that always make me think of cattle being led to slaughter. In this case, all that will await them at the end is me. My face frozen in a rictus of alarm, or whatever is left of the expression that started out a smile.

  And here they come. Not a mob (they are readers, after all, the last floral-skirted and corduroyed, canvas bag-clutching defenders of civilization) but a little anxious nevertheless, elbowing to buy their hardcover, have me do my thing, and get out before the parking lot gets too snarled.

  What would this labour feel like if the book were wholly mine? Pretty damn pleasant would be my guess. A meeting of increasingly rare birds, writer and reader, acknowledging a mutual engagement in a kind of secret Resistance. There’s even little side servings of flirtation, encouragement. Instead, all I’m doing now is defacing private property. More vandal than artist.

  I’m really going now. Head down, cutting off any conversation before it has a chance to get started. All I want is to go home. Catch Sam before Emmie puts him to bed. There might even be time for a story.

  Another book slides over the table at me. I’ve got the cover open, pen poised.

  “Whatever you do, just don’t give me the ‘Best Wishes’ brush-off.”

  A female voice. Cheeky and mocking and something else. Or perhaps missing something. The roundness words have when they are intended to cause no harm.

  I look up. The book folds shut with a sigh.

  Angela. Standing over me with a carnivorous smile on her face. Angela, but a different Angela. A professional suit, hair expensively clipped. Confident, brisk, sexy. Angela’s older sister. The one who didn’t die in a car crash with a dirty old novelist, and who could never see the big deal about wanting to write novels in the first place.

  You’re dead, I almost say.

  “What, no ‘How’s the writing coming?’” the living Angela says.

  “How’s the writing coming?”

  “Not as well as yours, by the looks of things.”

  The publicist makes an almost imperceptible side-step closer to the table. The woman next in line behind Angela shuffles forward. Coughs more loudly than necessary. Taps the toe of a Birkenstock on the floor.

  Angela remains smiling, but something changes in her pose. A stiffening at the corners of her mouth.

  “Have you–?” she starts, and seems to lose her thought. She bends closer. “Have you seen any of them?”

  “A couple. Here and there.”

  Angela ponders this response as though I’d answered in the form of a riddle. The woman behind her takes a full step forward. Her reddening face now just inches from sitting atop Angela’s shoulder.

  “Perhaps you’d like to speak to Mr. Rush after the signing?” the publicist says, as pleasantly as an obvious warning could be stated.

  “I think–” Angela starts again. I wonder if she is steeling herself to launch some kind of attack. Slap me across the face. Serve a court summons. But it’s not that. With her next words she reveals that she isn’t angry. She’s frightened.

  “I think something’s…happening.”

  The publicist tries to squeeze between Angela and the table. “May I help you?” she asks, reaching toward Angela’s arm. But Angela rears back, as though to be touched by another would burn her skin.

  “Sorry. Oh. I’m sorry,” she murmurs, nudging the book another inch closer to me. “I suppose I should have this signed.”

  Now the entire line is getting antsy. The woman behind Angela has come around to stand next to her, an act of rebellion that threatens to create a second line. Fearing the chaos that would result, the publicist pulls back the cover for me, holds the book open to the title page.

  “Here we are,” she says.

  I sign. Just my signature at first. Then, seeing this as too hopelessly impersonal, I scribble a dedication above my name.

  To the Living,

  Patrick Rush

  “Hope you enjoy it,” I say, handing the book back to Angela. She takes it, but remains staring at me.

  “I’m sure I will,” she says. “I’m particularly intrigued by the title.”

  The Birkenstock woman has heard enough. Drops her copy on to the table from three feet in the air. A single crack on impact that draws gasps from the line.

  At the same time, Angela grips the front of the table with her free hand. Whispers something so low I rise out of my chair to hear her.

  “I need to talk to you,” she says. Opens the palm of her hand so that I have to reach into it and take the card she’s offered me.

  Then all at once she pushes aside the publicist who attempts to usher her toward the exit, makes her way unsteadily around the corner and is gone.

  “I liked it,” the Birkenstock woman says when my hands steady enough to open her copy. “Didn’t totally buy the ending, though.”

  Part Three

  Story Thieves

  SUMMER, 2007

  You wouldn’t say climate is Toronto’s strong point. Not if you appreciate seasons as they are normally understood as quarters of transition. Instead, the city endures long months of swampy, equatorial heat, and longer months of ear-aching cold, each separated by three pleasant days in a row, one called spring, the other fall.

  This morning, for instance, the clock radio woke me with news of the fourth extreme heat alert so far this year, and it is only the first week of June. “Emergency Cool Down Centres” have been established in public buildings, where wanderers can collapse on to chilled marble floors until nightfall. The general citizenry has been advised not to go outside, not to allow the sun to touch its skin, not to move, not to breathe. These are empty warnings, of course, as people still have to work and, worse, get to work. After I’ve dropped Sam off at the daycare, I make my way back along Queen, lines of sweat trickling down my chest, glaring at the passengers on the stalled streetcar, all of them struck in poses of silent suffering.

  From here I turn up toward College, past the semi-detached Victorians, each with their own knee-high fencing protecting front lawns so small you could mow them with a pair of tweezers. I stick to the shady reach of trees as best I can. But the heat isn’t the only thing that slows my steps: I’m on my way to meet Angela.

  The card she’d slipped into my hand at the Harbourfront book signing was blank aside from a scribbled cellphone number, and beneath it, a plaintive Call Me. I didn’t want to. That is, I was aware that pursuing any further contact with a woman I had actionably wronged and who, if pub
lished reports were to be believed, was no longer among the living, could lead to nothing good.

  Even now, my legs rubbery from the heat, zigzagging up the sidewalk like some midday boozer, I’m not sure why I called. It must have been the same impulse that had me press the Record button the first time I heard her read. The reason I kept going back to the circle’s meetings when it was clear they were of no use. The ancient curse of the curious, the Nosey Parkers, the natural-born readers.

  I needed to know.

  We decided to meet at Kalendar, a café where we can sit outside. Now, selecting the one remaining table (only half covered by the awning’s shade), I wish we’d opted for a cellar somewhere instead. I’m here first, so I take the darker chair. Later, when the sun slides to a new angle that allows it to fire lasers through the side of my head, and the chair across the table from mine is comfortably shielded, I will realize the error of my positioning. But for the time being, I order an intentionally fun-free soda water, believing I am still in control of the events barrelling my way.

  At first, when a young woman arrives and, spotting me, comes over with a shy smile below her State Trooper shades, I assume it’s a fan. Over the last few months, it has become not entirely uncommon for strangers to approach and offer a word about The Sandman. Some will stick around for more than this—the lonely, the tipsy, the crazy. And I’m trying to decide which this one is when she joins me at my table. I’m about to tell her I’m sorry, but I’m waiting for someone, when something in her face changes, a trembling strain at the tops of her cheeks, and I see that it’s not a stranger at all.

  “I guess we’ve never seen each other in the light of day,” Angela says, studying me. It makes me wish I’d brought sunglasses of my own.

  “You’re right. We haven’t.”

  “You look different.”

  “That’s just heat stroke.”

  She looks at my soda water. “Are we having real drinks?”

  “We are now.”

  Once a shot of vodka has been added to my drink and a glass of white wine placed next to Angela’s hand, we talk a little about how she’s spent the last few years. Following a period of clerical odd-jobbing, she decided she needed something more permanent. She went back to community college and came out with a certificate in legal administration, which landed her a position as an assistant at one of the Bay Street firms. It was this job she was stealing an extra hour away from, having told her boss she had a dental emergency.

  “That’s why I can afford to have a couple of these,” she says, raising the glass of wine to her lips. “Laughing gas.”

  The waiter arrives to take our order. Angela asks for some kind of salad and I have what she’s having (my nerves won’t let me eat, only drink, so it doesn’t much matter what prop is put in front of me). When he leaves, Angela looks at me. That same measuring gaze I caught her at a couple times in the circle. I don’t get up and walk home, or turn my face away, or run to the men’s room to hold my wrists under the cold water tap (all things I’d like to do). She knows too much already. My crime, of course. But other things as well. What had she whispered to me when she appeared out of nowhere, risen from the dead?

  Something’s happening.

  Yet for a time the sun, the rare treat of dining outside in the middle of the day, the first edge-numbing blur of alcohol leaves us chatting like a pair on a blind date, one that has so far gone better than expected. In fact, Angela seems almost pleased to be here. It’s as though she is a prison escapee who’d never guessed she’d have gotten as far as she has.

  Our salads appear. Aggressively healthy-looking nests of radicchio, beets and chickpeas. Normally the sort of thing I’d lay a napkin over to not have to look at, let alone eat. But the illusion of immunity has given me a sudden appetite. I swing my fork down, and it’s on its way mouthward as Angela speaks the words I thought we’d decided to leave alone.

  “I read your book.”

  The fork drops. A chickpea makes a run for it.

  “Well, yes. Of course you would have. And I suppose you saw that I…borrowed certain elements.”

  “You stole my story.”

  “That’s debatable, to a point. I mean, the construction–”

  “Patrick.”

  “–required a good deal of enhancement, not to mention the invention required in–”

  “You stole my story.”

  Those sunglasses. They keep me from seeing how serious this is. Whether I am to now endure merely hissed accusations, or whatever wine is left in her glass thrown in my face, or worse. A knife impaling my hand to the table. The naming of lawyers.

  “You’re right. I stole your story.”

  I say this. I’m forced to. But I’m not forced to say what I say next. It comes with the unstoppable breakdown, the full impact of facing up to the person you’ve done injury to, sitting three feet away.

  “I just wanted to write a book. But I didn’t have a book. And then I heard you read at Conrad’s and it wouldn’t leave me alone. Your journal, novella, whatever—it became an obsession. It had been a while since my wife died—oh Christ, here we go—and I needed something. I needed help. So I started writing. Then, when I found out about your car accident, I thought…I thought it was more ours than just yours. But I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. So now…now? Now I’m just sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

  By now a few heads have turned our way. Watching me blowing my nose on the napkin I steal from under the next table’s cutlery.

  “You know something?” she says finally. “I rather enjoyed it.”

  “Enjoyed it?”

  “What it said. About you. It made you so much more interesting than before.”

  “What I wrote.”

  “What you did.”

  My puzzled look nudges Angela further.

  “In the circle, you were the only one without a story to tell. Most people at least think they have stories. But you assumed all along that there wasn’t a character-worthy bone in your body. And then what do you do? You steal mine. Tack on an ending. Publish it. Then regret all of it! That’s almost tragic.”

  She takes the first bite of her salad. When the waiter comes to check on us (a look of phony concern for me, the messed-up guy with the already sunburning forehead) Angela orders another round for both of us. There is no talk of retribution, settlements, public humiliation. She just eats her salad and drinks her wine, as though she has said all she needs to say about the matter.

  When she’s finished her meal she sits back and takes me in anew. My presence seems to remind her of something.

  “I guess it’s your turn to get an explanation,” she says.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “I don’t have to. But you probably deserve to know how it is that I’m not dead.”

  She tells me she heard about Conrad dying with a girl in a car accident, a girl believed to be her. Angela had been seeing him a bit at the time (“He was doing a close reading of my work”) and left her purse in his car—which is how the authorities established their identification of the remains. The police didn’t look into it much further than this, and had little reason to. The female body had been especially savaged in the crash, so there was no apparent inconsistency between it and the photos on Angela’s ID. The accident was circumstantially odd, but there was no evidence of foul play. The presumed victim, Angela Whitmore, was known to have moved around a lot over the preceding years, job to job, coast to coast and back again, so that the authorities weren’t surprised they couldn’t discover her current address, as she likely didn’t have one. Her relationship with Conrad White wasn’t looked into either. The old man had a history of enjoying the company of much younger women. It was likely that Conrad and Angela had set out on some cross-country journey together, a sordid, Lolita-like odyssey, and hadn’t made it through the first night on the winding highway through the Ontario bush.

  After she has related all this to me, Angela’s posture c
hanges. Shields her face from the street, hiding behind her hair. The playful ease with which she’d introduced and then promptly dismissed the topic of my story-theft has been replaced with a stiffened back.

  “So if it wasn’t you, who was in the car with him?”

  Angela’s hands grip the table edges so tight her knuckles are pale buttons.

  “Nobody’s certain,” she says. “But I’m pretty sure it was Evelyn.”

  “Evelyn?”

  “They were hanging out together a lot around the time of the circle. And she was coming around to his apartment even after the meetings stopped.”

  “Were you following her?”

  “If anything it was her following me.” Angela lifts her wine glass but her shaking hand returns it to the table before taking a sip. “I was there too sometimes. For a while I liked the attention. Then it just got weird. I stopped going. But before I did, Evelyn would come by. I didn’t stick around long whenever she showed up. It didn’t feel like she was too happy to see me.”

  “Did you get a sense of why she was seeing him?”

  “Not really. It felt like a secret, whatever it was. Like they were working on something together.”

  “And that’s why you think it was her body in the car.”

  “I looked into it a bit more. After the initial report in the local paper–”

  “The clipping you sent to me.”

  Angela cocks her head. “I didn’t send you anything.”

  “Someone did. In the mail. Unsigned.”

  “That’s how I first found out about it too.”

  I can’t help wanting to know more on this point—if she didn’t send the clipping, then who did?—but diverting her any further might shut her down completely. Already she’s looking at her watch, wondering how much longer she has.