by Andrew Pyper
“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?”
“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.”
I start out toward the Percy farm directly from Spruce Lodge, the afternoon light already showing signs of giving up. Although described by Marion Percy as only “a few miles—a dozen, or maybe a baker’s dozen—outside town,” there are moments when I wonder if the old woman has intentionally led me astray. Her directions are free of road names or numbers, and involve only landmarks (“right at the stone church”) and subjective distances (“a bit of a ways,” “straight for a good while”). After an hour, I crumple the page of notes I’d made from her telling of the route and toss them into the back seat.
It leaves me to make every turn on instinct. Eventually I’m headed down a private lane with branches scratching to get in on either side. “You won’t see a farm, or a house, or anything to make you think anyone ever lived in there,” is how Marion Percy described the entrance to her place. Well, this certainly qualifies.
It is by now the beginning of that stretched period of a northern autumn day that lingers in almost darkness. Almost, almost—and then it suddenly is. I turn on the headlights but it makes little difference, the snarled trees ahead flashing orange before clipping off the Toyota’s mirror. The lane continues, but does not yield to any sign of habitation. No fence, no gate, no rusting equipment enfolded in the forest’s weeds. I’m wrong: this isn’t a lane at all, and it doesn’t lead to anything. But it’s too tight to turn around, and too boggy to risk trying to reverse the whole way. The sole hope is that there is an exit on to some other road at the end.
I turn on the radio. Right away I get the weather forecast: the first storm of the season is coming in. Snow squall warnings overnight for the whole county, with accumulation of up to forty centimetres. Overnight lows of minus twenty. Road closures anticipated. If travel outside the home is not strictly necessary, all are advised to stay indoors for the duration.
Too late for me.
The cold licks in around the windows and brings with it new imaginings of where Sam might be. Inside or out? Tied up, hooded? Have they given him food? Can he see any light? Is he cold?
Is he still alive?
No. I won’t allow this one.
My attention must remain on the doing of things. Going forward—this alone might bring me to Sam. Or, in my case, going backwards. Because now I’m taking my foot off the gas, slapping the gear shift into reverse, turning around in my seat to see how I might slither out the way I’ve come–
An opening ahead. There just as I turn my head to start an inching reverse.
I shift back into drive, taking a run at the last branches drooped over the lane. There’s a thud as one hits the front windshield, splintering a web of cracks through the glass. I keep my foot down and the car fishtails sideways into the mud. The tires glued a foot into the earth.
Not that it matters now. Because I’m here.
A square, red-brick farmhouse barnacled with leafless vines. A lopsided barn off to the side. Beyond these structures, an open space that was once a cultivated field but would now go by the name of meadow, or whatever one calls land midway in its return to chaos.
I step out of the car and take in the farmyard as though a location from my own memory. It is not exactly as I imagined it while listening to Angela read, but this doesn’t stop it from being instantly recognizable. The wrought-iron weather vane atop the farmhouse roof, the buckled swing set in the yard, the partial log fence unsuccessful in holding the brush back from a one-time vegetable garden.
I start toward the house. The first flakes falling slow and straight as ash. I hold my arms out in front of me and there is already a thin layer of white over my coat, my shoes. Ghosting me.
An electric thrum travels up my legs from the earth. Is there an opposite to sacred ground? I suppose certain fields and farmyards in Poland and France store this kind of energy, the memory of horror held within the soil. I know it’s only my own apprehensions—however this is going to turn out, it’s going to happen here and now—but as I lift my feet up the farmhouse’s front steps the history of this place rushes to possess me.
I look skyward. Tongue out, eating snow like a child. But it’s to see if anyone stands in the upstairs window to the right. The window where the young Angela once stood, looking down at her father.
The door is open a crack. Something prevents me from touching the handle with bare skin, so that I enter by shouldering it wide enough for me to slip through. The new air rolls dead leaves and vermin droppings over the floor. It’s still not enough to hold back the rank odour of the place. Backed-up plumbing. Along with something sweeter, animal.
A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize.
“Sam?”
My voice silences the house. It was quiet as I came in, but now some previously unnoticed activity has been stopped. The plaster and floorboards held in the tension of a held breath.
I try to leave the front door open but the angle of the frame eases it almost shut each time. Although it is not yet dark outside and the curtains that remain are limp ribbons over the glass, the interior holds pockets of shadow in the corners, around every door and down the length of its hall. It is hard to imagine as a building that sunlight ever freely passed through. Bad things happened here because they were always meant to.
The main floor is arranged as rooms that open off a narrow central hallway that leads straight into the kitchen at the rear. A few feet in, the living room opens on the left, the dining room on the right. Both slightly too small for their functions, even now, unpeopled and with most of the furniture missing. In the living room, signs of a stayover: a trio of wooden chairs, a broken whisky bottle on the floor between them. The fireplace and the brick around it black with soot, charred logs too big for its hearth still teepeed on the grate. I bend to touch them. Cold as the snow collecting on the sill.
The house has darkened further still when I return to the hallway, so that I proceed half-blind down its length, hands sliding over the walls. David Percy must have negotiated this route in much the same way on the last night of his life. Old, his sight gone. Tormented by what he believed to be some demonic intruder.
I turn to see the front door standing open. As the gust from outside loses its force, the door retracts once more. Only the wind. But David Percy would have had such thoughts too. Explanations that didn’t quite hold all of his mind together.
The smell is stronger on the way upstairs. Warmer, humid. It makes each step a fight against being sick.
Something happened here.
And not just eighteen years ago.
Something happened here today
.
At the landing I see that I’m right.
Blood. A line of dime-sized circles leading to the room at the front of the house. Angela’s room.
And a book.
Lying face down on the landing, its spine broken as though to bookmark the page. I know the title before I’m close enough to read the text on the cover. I know what it means before I lift the brittle paper to my eyes and see that it is a paperback from my own bookshelf, a hand-me-down that Sam had chosen for his nightstand pile. Robinson Crusoe. The book he brought with him to the Mustang Drive-in the night he disappeared.
“Sam?” I try again, and will his voice to answer. But there’s only the squeak of the floor as it makes note of the book dropped from my hands, my shuffled steps toward the front room’s partly open door.
My boot kicks the door open wide. It lets the smell out.
A single bed with Beatrix Potter rabbits painted on the headboard. A wooden school desk. Animal stickers—a smirking skunk, a giggling giraffe—on the cracked dresser mirror. And blood on all of it. Thin lines crosshatched over the room, as though squeezed from a condiment bottle. Not so much that it is evidence of a butchering, but of a struggle. Something half-done and then interrupted. Or half-done to be finished elsewhere.
And then I notice the chains laid out on the mattress. Four links attached to each of the bedposts with metal loops at the end. Shackles.
I’m not sure what I do in these next moments. They may not be moments at all. All I know is that I’m tracing the lines of blood and looping a finger through a rusted link of chain. Everything still. Everything falling away.
That’s when I hear it.
Faint but unmistakable in the distance. From somewhere within the woods beyond the fields.
A voice calling for me.
The snow has gained weight over the last hour. The wind throwing it into my eyes. Dusk a black umbrella opened against the sky. My legs seem to know where to go. Out of the farmhouse yard and into the frozen ruts of the abandoned field.
Sam doesn’t call out for me again as I make my way toward the woods. It doesn’t stop me from hearing him.