by Andrew Pyper
This is how Angela managed to live so completely off the grid: she made herself disappear and become someone else. And when the debts started to come due under Pam Turgenov’s increasingly bad name she was gone again.
There’s more support for this suspicion at the offices of the law firm where Angela claimed to work as a legal secretary. This time, I assume a cover—her jilted lover, which I suppose I am, among other things. It buys me enough sympathy with the girl at reception to find out that there was a Pam Turgenov working there for a time, not as a legal secretary but as a temp.
“Never got to really know her,” the receptionist says sadly, as though this was her life’s main regret. “Always had her nose in a book. Like, Stay away, I’m into this.”
“Do you remember what she was reading?”
The receptionist looks at her nails for an answer. “Actually, now that I think of it, she wasn’t reading. She was writing.”
“How long ago did she leave?”
“A while. Like, months. She was probably only here for a couple weeks.”
“Do you know where she went after she left? Another firm maybe?”
“It’s why they’re called temps.” The receptionist shrugs. “They come and go.”
When I give her the flowers I’d brought with me (“Is Pam here today? I have something for her birthday”) I’m rewarded with a blushing thank you.
“If I happen to bump into her, who can I say came calling?” she asks as I start toward the elevators.
“Try Conrad. Or Len. Or Ivan.”
It’s only as the elevator doors are almost closed that the receptionist raises her narrowing eyes from writing each of these names down.
Dusk. That pinkish light over the city that is the occasionally beautiful by-product of pollution. The chill that comes within seconds of the sun dropping behind the rooftops. I’m headed east for no good reason. Or no better reason than to avoid what I know awaits me at home: messages from the police reporting how they haven’t come up with anything yet. Maybe even the kid from the National Star camped out in my yard, a copy of The Sandman in his knapsack, the pages furry with Post-It notes. Better to keep drifting through the darkening streets than face that.
Yet it’s at this time of day, in this kind of light, that you see things. Twilight illusions.
Like the black van that slowly drives past me. A shadow behind the wheel. The outlined head and gloved hands that belong to whatever I chased into the corn rows at the Mustang.
As I start after it—noting again how the model name has been removed from the rear doors, a caking of dried mud obscuring the licence plate—the van picks up speed and chugs around the next corner.
I cross blind against the traffic. A station wagon screeches to a stop. Kisses its grille to my hip. The contact sends me spinning against a panel truck, but my feet continue to slap the pavement, righting my course on the sidewalk. There is honking and Hey! Hey!s behind me but I take the same corner the van took and all sound is gulped away. A man my age and in my shape can’t run like this more than a hundred yards without his breathing becoming the only thing he can hear. And his heart. His untested heart.
The van is gone. I keep running.
And then he’s there.
Up ahead, the shadow slides along the walls. Takes another turn into the grounds of the old Gooderham & Worts distillery. A few clustered blocks of Dickens’ London shoehorned between the expressway and condo construction sites. Long, Victorian brick barracks with smokestacks at their ends like exclamation points.
The past slows me down. It’s the cobblestone streets that turn anything faster than a walk into a tiptoed dance. During daylight hours, the doors on either side open into galleries and cafés, but they are locked now. No one else in the pedestrian-only lanes but me and the one who’s led me here.
And there he is. Slipping into a narrow alley. But slowly. As though waiting for me to catch up.
There are no lights between two of the vacant buildings, so that all I can see of the figure ahead is the rise and fall of its head against the dim brick. And then he stops altogether.
A bit further, the body language of his cocked head says. You’re almost there.
I come at him in what I intend as a rush, but there is little rush left in me. When I reach the point where he’d been standing I nearly trip over something on the ground. Heavy but with a liquid give. A bag of sand.
It gives him more than enough time. The black van is waiting for him in the parking lot. The extinguished brake lights turning my raised hands from red to pink as it shifts into drive and slides away.
Starting back, I nearly fall over the bag of sand a second time. Except now I have the time to see that it isn’t a bag of sand at all.
A body, more or less. No: less.
Propped against the wall like a sleeping drunk. Legless. Also armless, noseless, eyeless. A man dissembled into disparate parts laid out over the cobblestones. A human anthology.
It makes me grateful for the dark. Still, I can see enough. And what I can’t see my mind fills in with what it remembers from the night in the shed with Petra.
Time to go. Someone else will discover this by morning. There is nothing to be gained by lingering here aside from being seen.
And yet I stay where I am a minute longer. Partly because all the air has been sucked out of the world. Partly because the man scattered at my feet was once a friend.
We were the last ones. This is how I know it’s Len even before I use the toe of my shoe to open the wallet next to the body’s cupped hand and squint to read his name on the driver’s licence inside. If you didn’t know what I know, there would be no way of connecting the grinning face in the wallet’s ID to his corpse—there is no identity left in him, all of the features that mark someone for who they are cut away. This has likely been Angela’s lesson all along: you take a person’s story and what remains is nothing more than skin and blood. The body is worthless. What counts is what it does. The lies and truths it tells.
I’m on the news in the morning. Once again they’ve used my taped statement from the first day of Sam’s disappearance. Since then, I have continued to refuse the cameras, as it isn’t doing me any favours on the suspicion front. Not to mention that pleading for Sam’s safe return isn’t going to make any impact on the person I know has him now.
A couple of the investigators come by to give me an update on the search efforts, but their eyes now openly betray their doubts. In the name of thoroughness they ask again if I’ve told them everything. Even after I repeat the same details, they wait for me to go on. It’s alright, their seen-it-all faces urge me. Just tell us what you did. We won’t judge you.
I start packing the moment the door closes behind them.
Before I go, I put in a call to Tim Earheart at a payphone around the corner. It strikes me that he’s the only person in the world I have to say goodbye to. But I’m denied even this. He’s not home, so I’m left to stutter some nonsense into his answering machine. All I remember is attempting a joke (“You know you don’t get out enough when you’ve only got one name on your speed dial”) and asking him to “Look out for Sam if I—if it turns out Sam needs looking out for.” The kind of tight-throated message you wish you could erase as soon as you put the receiver down.
I stop off at home one last time after that, trying to think of anything else that needs to be accounted for. I look at the rows of children’s books Sam is too old to read any more and think A father and son used to live here. But that past tense takes all the life out of it. People used to live in every empty house you’ve ever stood in, and this makes them no less empty.
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 straight-aways, 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 child-stealing 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.