The Killing Circle

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 changes. 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—”