by Andrew Pyper
“One question,” Tim says as I shake his hand in thanks and check both ways along Front Street for a taxi.
“You want to know why I need to find this out.”
“No. I want to know what’s in it for me.”
“Nothing. Aside from a story.”
“A newspaper kind of story, or a funny-thing-happened-the-other-day kind of story?”
“Just a girl-trouble kind of story,” I tell him, with an embarrassed shake of the head. A gesture I know Tim Earheart will understand without going into the details.
Below us, another train pumps commuters and shoppers and ballgame ticketholders into the city. Tim and I look down and try to pick out individual faces in the windows. But they’re a little too far away, moving a little too fast, to see anything but a long row of silhouettes.
“I better get back,” Tim says, starting across Front Street.
“Me too,” I say in reply, and though the question occurs to both of us—Back to what?—he’s considerate enough to keep it to himself.
The first email on the Comment board at www.patrick.rush.com is from therealsandman.
Hope you liked the gift.
To cheer things up, Detective Ramsay rings with the news that he’s discovered Evelyn has not been seen by family or friends for over four years.
“Starting to add up to a lot of missing people from that group of yours,” he says. “Does that concern you?”
Is it illegal to hang up on a homicide investigator when he’s addressing you directly? If so, Ramsay can add it to the list of charges he’s tallying against me.
The phone rings again.
“This is harassment.”
“Are you not taking your pills again?”
“Tim. Thought it was someone else.”
“More girl trouble?”
“That would be nice. But no.”
“Your heart belongs to Angela Whitmore. Is that it?”
In the background, the sound of shuffled papers.
“You’ve found her,” I say.
“Not the person. But an interesting chunk of background. For one thing, turns out you were right about Children’s Aid taking her from her birth parents. ‘Acute neglect’ is how the file puts it. Malnutrition, lack of basic hygiene. ‘Indications of physical and emotional abuse.’ Something beyond your standard junkie-mom scenario.”
“The mother was an addict?”
“Lots of court-ordered rehab. Surprise, surprise: none of it worked.”
“You got a name?”
“Mom is Michelle Carruthers. Which makes Whitmore either an assumed name, or maybe the name of her eventual adoptive parents.”
“What about Dad?”
“No father on the scene at all, as far as the files show.”
“And I’m guessing Michelle Carruthers is six feet under.”
“Not as of a year ago. That was when she made an application to have Angela’s adoptive parents’ identities disclosed to her. They denied her, naturally.”
“No kidding.”
“Twenty-five years later and she wakes up in a trailer park on Lake Huron and goes, ‘Hey, where’d my kid go?’”
“Does your file say where Angela ended up?”
“The adoptive parents’ records are kept separate from the ones I could get my hands on. They’re very particular about it.”
“So you don’t know.”
“I still have a job, Patrick.”
“Sorry.”
“You want me to stay on this? Who knows, if I grease a few more wheels–”
“No, no. This is all I was really curious about anyway. Thanks.”
“Listen, I don’t usually put my nose into friends’ personal stuff, but, given her pedigree, I’d say this Angela of yours might not be an ideal reintroduction to romance.”
“Guess I’ve never known what’s good for me.”
“Tamara was good for you.”
“Yes, she was,” I say, the mention of my wife’s name forcing something up my throat I don’t want him to hear. “I’ll let you go now, Tim. And thanks again.”
I hang up. But before I pour myself a bourbon in a coffee mug (the glasses all look too small), before I even begin to digest the news of Angela’s fatherless past, it strikes me that if Tim Earheart is as worried about me as he sounds, I’m in worse shape than I thought.
Of course I look up Michelle Carruthers. Of course I find her after a few Google searches and process-of-elimination calls—a unit address in Hilly Haven, a “mobile home estate” on Lake Huron. And of course I make the drive to see her the same day without an idea as to what I want from her, or how it could help even if I did.
Hilly Haven isn’t hilly, and what the few spindly poplars and collapsed snow fence around its perimeter might offer haven from would be hard to guess. The whole place has the appearance of an uncorrected accident: a couple dozen mobile homes arranged in rows, some sidled close, others aloof in weedy double lots, all with their backsides facing the lake.
Michelle Carruthers’ place is the smallest. A camper trailer of the kind one used to see hitched to station wagons thirty years ago. Now, knocking on its side door and hearing the muffled greeting within (“Who the fuck?”), I wonder if Angela’s mother can be convinced to step outside. It doesn’t seem possible for there to be enough room for both of us inside.
When the door opens, however, I see that the odds of the woman hunched in its frame coming outside are slight. Her papery skin. An oxygen mask attached to her face, a tank on wheels by her side.
“Sorry to disturb you. My name is Patrick Rush,” I say, putting out my hand, which her cold fingers weigh more than shake. “I’m looking for Angela.”
“Angela?”
“Your daughter, ma’am.”
“I know who she goddamn is.”
“I was just–”
“Are you her husband or something? She run away on you?”
“I’m a friend. I think she may be in trouble. That’s why I’m here. If I can find her, there’s a chance I can help her.”
After what may be a full minute’s consideration, she pushes the trailer door open wide. Pulls the oxygen mask off and lets it necklace her throat.
“You might as well come in out of the sun,” she says.
But it’s hotter inside than out. And no larger than I’d feared. A stand-up kitchen smelling of canned spaghetti. A living room crowded by a giant TV in one corner and old combination radio-record player in the other. And at the rear, behind a half-drawn curtain, the tousled bunk where she sleeps. The only ventilation a rotating fan sitting atop a stack of LPs, though with all the windows closed, the best it can do is whisper hot air in my face.
“Have a seat,” she says, collapsing into her recliner and leaving me to crouch on to a folding chair that, even pushed against the wall, forces my knees to graze hers.
“What I’m interested in learning is any background information that might–”
“Hold on. Just hold on,” she says, putting her hands behind her head, a manoeuvre which offers me an unfortunate view of her armpits. “How’d you find me?”
“I’m a reporter. Was a reporter. We have access to information others don’t have.”
“They fire you, or you quit?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said you was a reporter. That’s the past tense, am I right?”
“They fired me. But it was for the best.”
“It’s all for the best.”
“I understand that Angela was put into the foster system when she was a child,” I continue.
“You mean was she taken from me? Yes.”
“That must have been difficult.”
“I can hardly remember it. My life was…busy then.”
“Nevertheless, I’m aware that of late you have made some efforts to locate her.”
She shows her teeth. A stretching of lips that appears more like the response to a dentist’s command than a smile.
“I’m not as ol
d 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 twenty-seven 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 thirteen-year-olds 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.