The Killing Circle

news channel down in the Crypt in disbelief. That’s not how I feel. That’s not even me. Here: this fellow sobbing into his hands, throwing a rock glass against the panelled wall to avoid pouring anything into it, and a minute later cutting his feet on the shards when he gets up to check with the police for the fifth time this hour. I’m your man.

It appears the police might think so too. They’re coming around to “go over things” again, and though they once more offer the services of a “family crisis counsellor”, I can tell their initial sympathy is already starting to dry up. There are fewer questions about the figure I’d seen at the back of the drive-in’s lot, and more about my emotional condition over the last few years. First, there was the loss of my wife to cancer. Then the messy business of the William Feld murders, which, as one investigator puts it, “We had you on the longlist for the whole kaboodle.” Plus all the other layers: my son taken at the screening of a movie based on my own book, a book in which a shadowy figure takes the lives of children. “I mean, you can’t write that kind of stuff,” another cop tells me, shaking his head. “But then again, you did.”

By Sunday evening, they’re suggesting I call a lawyer. When I tell them there’s no need, they look at me as though that’s just the sort of thing a guilty bastard would say. Out there in the night a search for my son is still under way, but in here, at the father’s house on Euclid Street, they’ve already found the guy they’re looking for, and all there’s left to do is wait for him to break. In time, the ones like me always do.

With my permission, they’re listening in on every phone call. They say it’s in case a ransom demand comes in, but I can tell it’s more likely evidence collection. A message from an accomplice. A midnight confession.

And I don’t blame them. In such cases, the parent is always the prime suspect. Statistically speaking, shadows are merely shadows. Harm tends to come from the ones you know best.

There are always exceptions, however. There’s always a Sandman. And when he strikes, don’t be surprised when you’re the only one who believes it was him.

For the first twenty-four hours, there isn’t time to suffer. There’s only the same answers to the same questions, showing complete strangers where everything’s kept around the house, letting a nice woman straighten your collar and wipe toothpaste from the corner of your mouth before the press conference.

In the end, however, these distractions only make everything worse. In my case this comes on day two, upon awakening from a sleeping-pill nap and collapsing to the bedroom floor—one pant leg on, the other off—under the weight of facts. Struck by the truth. I’d never realized how literally this cliche could be taken. It’s the truth that leaves me splayed out over the hardwood, blinking at the dust bunnies under the bed, both hands reaching around to the back of my skull to check for blood.

Sam is gone.

They’re not going to find him.

I’m the only one who stands a chance of getting him back.

If it weren’t for this last thought I’m not at all sure if, an hour later, I would have been able to finish getting dressed. A good thing, seeing as there is the press to be dealt with. Take a peek out the curtains: a pair of TV news vans, their hairsprayed correspondents practicing their serious faces, along with a gaggle of beat writers from the papers, sharing dirty jokes and flicking cigarette butts into my neighbour’s garden. If life is to be carried on with— even whatever brittle simulation of a life that might be available to me—they will all have to be satisfied enough to leave me alone at least until their next deadline.

I decide the best way to proceed is to grant an exclusive. It’s a reflex that prompts me to choose the National Star. And who does the police’s media relations person bring in but the kid from Swift Current.

“So you’re in hard news now?” I ask him, and despite the wilfully clenched jaw, he allows a grin at my recognizing him.

“No future in arts.”

“You’re right there.”

“Guess they promoted me.”

“The Editor-in-Chief knows talent when she sees it.”

“This must be a very difficult time,” he starts. It’s how all of them start. The cops, the counsellors, the wellwishers, the hacks. Thank God for TV.

I follow with some televisual dialogue of my own. About remaining optimistic, asking whoever might know something about my son to come forward. Then the Swift Current kid asks the inevitable follow-up.

“What do you make of the overlap between all this and your novel?”

“I don’t make anything of it.”

“But isn’t it striking how—”

“We’re done.”

“Sorry?”

I reach over and click off his recorder. “Interview’s over. And remind the other vultures outside that you’re the only one to get any roadkill today.”

It works. Within a couple of hours, the vans have cleared off along with the shivering journos who will be forced to quote from the National Star’s piece if they want any comment from Patrick Rush. Even the police have honoured my request for a little privacy. They send over a social worker to sit vigil just in case Sam walks in the door. It allows me to go out.

I head up to Dundas Street and turn east on to the ever-lengthening tentacle of Chinatown. Before I know it was where I was headed I end up outside The Fukhouse. Anarchists. Evelyn told me this is where they met on the night I first saw her. Now it makes me wonder: Can anarchists hold meetings and still be anarchists? Then again, if the lawless can’t be flexible with the rules, who can?

A light goes on in Conrad White’s old apartment. Behind the gauzy curtains a pair of shadows move about in what is likely some domestic chore but, from out here, appears as a ballroom dance. The two figures circling, holding hands for a moment before casting off to the opposite sides of the room.

The bulb flicks off. The room lit for so short a time I doubt the shadows were ever there at all. More ghosts. Evelyn and Conrad glimpsed in an afterlife waltz.

But I’m still alive. My son too. He has to be. There’s no point in seeing ghosts any more. They have nothing to tell me other than what has come before. All that remains for the living is to pick up the mystery where the dead left off.

“So this really is your local,” a voice behind me declares. I turn to find Ramsay grinning at me through The Fukhouse’s gloom. “Would have pegged you for something a bit more tweedy.”

“The drinks are cheap.”

“They ought to be,” he says, surveying the room. “Let me buy you one?”

“Buy me two.”

Ramsay orders bourbon with beer chasers. We get the former inside us as soon as they arrive.

“Just dropped by your house,” he says.

“And I wasn’t there.”

“Went out for a stroll, did you?”

“You would know. You followed me here.”

“I’m a cop,” Ramsay shrugs. “Old habits.”

We sit looking straight ahead for a time. Our heads floating in the greasy mirror behind the gins, whiskies and rums.

“A terrible thing,” Ramsay says finally. “Your boy.”

I try to measure the sincerity in his voice, the regretful shake of his head. Seems real to me. Then again, I’ve gotten Ramsay wrong before. I may have never gotten him right.

“I’m told your best men are on the case,” I say.

“Then I’m sure they’ll find him.”

“I feel like I should be helping them look.”

“Why aren’t you?”