The Killing Circle

CRASH KILLS TWO ON TRANS-CANADA

Author and Companion in ’Puzzling’ Auto Accident

By Carl Luben, Staff Reporter

Whitley, Ont.—An automobile’s crash into a stone cliffside on the Trans-Canada twenty minutes outside Whitley has resulted in the death of both its passengers early Tuesday morning.

Conrad White, 69, and Angela Whitmore (age unknown) are believed to have died on impact between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. when their car left the highway.At press time, Ms Whitmore’s place of residence has yet to be determined, but it is believed that Mr White’s current address was in Toronto. It is unknown what purpose had brought them to the Whitley area.

Mr White is the author of the novel Jarvis and Wellesley, a controversial work at the time of its publication in 1972. He had been living overseas for the last few decades, and only recently returned to reside in Canada.

So far, the police have yet to contact Angela Whitmore’s immediate family, as available identification did not contain next-of-kin information. Readers who are able to provide more information on Ms Whitmore’s relations are asked to contact the Ontario Provincial Police, Whitley Detachment.

Police are still at work determining the precise cause of the accident. “It’s a little puzzling,” commented Constable Dennis Peet at the scene. “There were no other cars involved, and no skid marks, so the chances they went off the road to avoid colliding with an oncoming vehicle or animal crossing seems unlikely.”

Investigators have estimated the car’s speed on impact in excess of 140 km/hr. This velocity, taken together with the accident occurring along a relatively straight stretch of highway, reduces the possibility of the driver, Ms Whitmore, falling asleep at the wheel.

“Sometimes, with incidents like these, all you know is that you’ll never know,” Constable Peet concluded.

My first thoughts after learning of the accident weren’t for the loss of the two lives involved, but who might have sent me the clipping. I was pretty sure it had to be someone in the circle, as my connection to Angela and Conrad White would have been known to few outside of its members. But, if one of them, why the anonymity? Perhaps whoever sent the envelope wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings and nothing more. Petra, maybe, who would feel obliged to share what she had learned, but didn’t want visitors showing up at her door. Or Evelyn, who would be too cool to write a dorky note. And then there was the odds-on favourite: Len. He’d have the time to scour whatever obscure database allowed him to learn of such things, and would appreciate how leaving his name off the envelope would lend the message a mysterious edginess.

Yet these practical explanations inevitably gave way—as all speculations about the circle eventually did—to more fanciful theories. Namely, to William. Once he entered my mind, the secondary questions posed by the article came rushing to the forefront. What were Conrad White and Angela doing travelling together through the bush outside Whitley in the first place? And why did Angela drive off the highway sixty kilometres over the speed limit? By factoring William into these queries, the notion that he was not only the sender of the clipping, but somehow the author of the crash itself, became a leading, if unlikely, hypothesis.

It was only sometime later, sitting on my own in the Crypt, that the fact Conrad and Angela were dead struck me with unexpected force. I lowered the three-month-old Time I’d been pretending to read to find my heart drumrolling against my ribs, an instant sweat collaring the back of my neck. Panic. Out-of- nowhere, suffocating. The sort of attack I’d succumbed to on more than a few occasions since Tamara died. But this time it was different. This time, my shock was at the loss of two people I hardly knew.

Hold on. That last bit’s not quite true.

It was the thought of Angela alone that stole all the air from the room. The girl with a story I would now never get to the end of.

After the night at Grossman’s Tavern, the murderer I’d come to think of as the Sandman stopped killing. The police never arrested anyone for the deaths of Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and the Vancouver woman eventually identified as Jane Whirter. Though a $50,000 reward was offered for information leading to a conviction and occasional police press releases were issued insisting they were working on the case with unprecedented diligence, the authorities were forced to admit they had no real leads, never mind suspects. It was proposed that the killer had moved on. A drifter with no links to family or friends who would probably continue his work somewhere else down the line.

For a time, though, I couldn’t stop feeling that the Pevencey, Ulrich and Whirter deaths were somehow connected to the circle. This is only a side effect of coincidence, of course. It’s the egocentric seduction of coincidence that personalizes larger tragedies, so that we feel what we were doing when the twin towers came down or when JFK was shot or when a serial killer butchered someone in the playground around the corner is, ultimately, our story.

I know all this, and yet even after the Sandman was declared to be retired I never believed he was finished. The dark shape I would sometimes catch in my peripheral vision could never simply be nothing, but was always the something of coincidence. The lingering trace of fate.

I spotted Ivan on Yonge Street once. Standing on the sidewalk and looking northward, then southward, as though uncertain which way to go. I crossed the street to say hello, and he had turned to look at me, blank-faced. Behind him, the lurid marquee of the Zanzibar strip club blinked and strobed.

“Ivan,” I said, touching my hand to his elbow. He looked at me like I was an undercover cop. One he’d been expecting to take him down for some time. “It’s Patrick.”

“Patrick.”

“From the circle. The writing circle?”

Ivan glanced over my shoulder. At the doors to the Zanzibar.

“Up for a drink?” he said.

We put the daylight behind us and took a table in the corner. The afternoon girls rehearsing their pole work on the stage. Adjusting their implants in the smoked mirrors. Smearing on the baby oil.

I did the talking. Asked after his writing (he’d been “sitting on” some ideas) and work (“Same tracks, same tunnels”). There was a long silence after that, during which I was waiting for Ivan to ask similar questions of me. But he didn’t. At first I assumed this was a symptom of strip-bar shyness. Yet now, looking back on it, I was wrong to think that. It was only the same awkwardness I’d felt the first time I spoke with Ivan, when he’d confessed to having been accused of hurting someone. His loneliness was stealing his voice from him. Driving the underground trains, staring at the walls in his basement flat, paying for a table dance. None of it required speech.

I excused myself to the men’s room, and to my discomfort, Ivan followed me. It was only standing side by side at the urinals that he spoke.

Usually, exchanges that take place with another fellow in such a context, dicks in hand, requires strict limits of the subject matter. The barmaid’s assets or the game on the big screen are safe bets. But not Ivan’s admission that he’s been afraid to get close to anyone since he was accused of killing his niece fourteen years ago.

“Her name was Pam. My sister’s first born,” he started. “Five years old. The father’d left the year before. Scumbag. So my sister, Julie, she’s working days, and because I’m driving trains at night, she asks me to stay at her place sometimes to look after Pam. Happy to do it. The kind of kid I’d like to have if I ever had kids. Which I won’t. Anyways, I was over at Julie’s this one time and Pam asks if she can go down to the basement to get some toy of hers. I watched her run off down the hall and start down the stairs and I thought That’s the last time you’re ever going to see her alive. I mean, when you look after kids, you have these thoughts all the time. Yet this time I think Well, that’s it, little Pam is gone, and it stuck with me a couple seconds longer than usual. Long enough to hear her miss a step. I go to the top of the stairs and turn on the light. And there she is on the floor. Blood. Because she came down on something. A rake somebody’d left on the floor. One of the old kind, y’know? Like a comb except with metal teeth. Pointing up. But that’s not where it ends. Because Julie thinks I did it. The only family I got. So the police look into it, can’t make any conclusions, they’re suspicious but they’ve got to let it slide. But Julie hasn’t spoken to me since. I don’t even know where she lives any more. That’s how a life ends.