The Killing Circle

“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?”

“Beg pardon?”

“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.”

33

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