The Killing Circle

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 childstealing 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.

“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?”