The Devil You Know: A Novel (11 page)

D
avid and I followed the curve of the road, taking turns pushing a fingertip against the map. There are no sidewalks in a cemetery and you don’t need them. The gravestones bled into one another. David unpacked the camera and took pictures of whatever seemed oldest, or crumbling. We found the green lions and I posed against one, leaning back like I was Tawny Kitaen on a car hood and this was a music video instead of a graveyard on the coldest day of the year.

They shoot those videos when it’s cold, David said. For the nipple action.

What, I said. What is that.

So the girl’s nipples will stand out. It’s strategic. There’s a direct correlation between Tawny Kitaen’s nipple definition and album sales. I’m pretty sure you can read the stats on this. There’s pie charts, David said. He had the camera over one eye. It made him look squinty. I dropped my arms.

So some poor girl has to strip down and freeze her ass so her nipples can get guys off?

So her nipples can sell records, David said. Marketing. Now do that thing again.

I’m going to hell, I said. There was a white Mary Mother of Pietà shining her countenance down on me from the top of an Italian mausoleum. I pointed at her. There’s a witness and everything, I said.

Swish your hair more. You were already going to hell anyway.

About five minutes later we finally found one of the girls on my list.

We done? David said. I’d taken a bunch of shots. We stood there a minute, looking down at the map. What’s this other X? he said.

Lianne, I said. That X is Lianne. I just thought, I’m here, right?

I’d gone looking for Lianne’s grave once before. Sometime before high school started, or before I set a premium on learning how to feel totally normal in the cemetery again.

Her area doesn’t have the kind of tombstones that stand up straight so you can see them, I said. She’s in the poverty section. The stones are all small and dull and lie flat on the ground and then the crabgrass and the weeds grow on top of them.

Okay, David said.

I remembered walking up and down the rows of markers and kicking at the grass around the stones, but none of the stones said the right thing.

No matter what I did, her name didn’t show up, I said. It was like she’d disappeared. What kind of cemetery would move a little dead girl?

David looked pretty disappointed by all this.

I’m sorry, I said.

I get it, he said. It’s like, when in Rome.

But Lianne’s X was on the other side of cemetery. Not, as I had remembered it, down near the Bayview gate, but up in the opposite corner, closer to Moore, in the center of that other section.

Maybe they really did move her, David said.

Here, I said. I’ll go back and ask. I’ll run back to the office.

No, just wait, David said. I’ll go. I’ll be fast. Just wait here. He jogged off in the direction we’d come from.

I looked down at the map again and walked a little farther.

Hey! David called out. Hey, Evie! He’d stopped and turned back to look at me. Don’t wander off, he said.

I’m sure you’ll find me, I said. There was no one else around.
Helpful hint, I yelled back. I’ll be the one moving around and breathing. Okay?

He looked a little skeptical.

Just don’t go far.

I
n the year after she died, I used to dream I was visiting Lianne’s grave. I was always there alone, wearing a white dress and my good sandals. Sometimes I just talked to her about everything that had happened and told her all my secrets, which made me feel really good, like she was the best friend I’ll ever have. Sometimes I was just very quiet in the sunshine.

Off in one corner of the dream, there was a man. Half-behind a tree, watching me just as quietly.

I knew this man. He’d been there the day of Lianne’s funeral. He’d watched me looking down into her casket at the church, and followed us to the cemetery. He saw me fall into her grave. I knew I couldn’t stay in the cemetery for too long. He would push me into that grave hole and no one would pull me out.

I went a little farther around the bend in the roadway, toeing the edge of the grass line, or where grass would be if this were spring. My shoulder brushed up against a low-hanging branch and the whole tree lifted into the sky. A cloud of black starlings. Startled. They spread out thin as smoke and then curled again into a tight fist and settled in the forks of a new tree. It had been both snowing and windy. There was a two-inch layer of that glittery-light powder you get in February, with no footprints and no tire tracks. It could have been sand. It could have been sugar spilled across a table and it made the black trees look vulgar and lanky. I stopped moving and lifted my head. David was gone. I was somewhere in the center of the map, as far as you can be from either road. There weren’t even traffic sounds.

Ahead of me was a field of eroded limestone statues, angels and saints. Tall white grave markers, broken down over time. Somewhere
between them, something was moving. I froze for a second. The sway of a loping willow, hanging low between other branches and other trees. I tossed a quick look over my shoulder. Nobody. I turned back and the field of starlings rose up again, from within the willow this time, and fanned and turned with one body and then knotted themselves into a new shape. They were a whale and they were escaping a whale.

I thought of the clerk who’d marked my map so readily. As though people came looking for this one grave all the time.
Be careful.
Just ahead of me, at the edge of the path, a place where the snow was rippled. Rough ground or gravel underneath, or the marks of someone walking through, some time ago, now slurred by the low wind. Lianne’s grave was somewhere in there, beyond the white statues.

I can help you.

A man, standing just to my left. Six feet away.

I jumped sideways. A security guard: uniform, badge, stick. I did the inventory in a practiced way, before I’d even had a chance to ask myself: Who? What? Safe?

Doing my rounds, the guard said. Are you lost?

I looked around to see where he’d come from. The mausoleums? Behind me just more graves, trees, the fence somewhere far off, beyond my view.

No, I said. I like the quiet here. His uniform was buttoned wrong, like he’d been in a hurry. I could see the rim of a white T-shirt under his collar. There was a security badge but nothing identifying him as belonging to the cemetery and it occurred to me that in winter the guards probably coasted around in a car.

I can help you, he said again. You looking for someone? Famous people in this cemetery: Billy Burch, Glenn Gould. I give tours on the side. Billy Burch, you know him? Hall of Famer. The guard had both hands in his jacket pockets and gestured down the pathway with his body, with one elbow and a shoulder.

Nah, I said. My boyfriend’s grandfather is buried here. We
parked at the center. He just went back. He forgot his flowers in the car and went back to get them.

The guard flicked his chin at me.

Got your flowers right there, he said. I was still holding the lily of the valley. Why can I never just put flowers down on a grave?

He’ll be back in a minute, I said. So. No tour.

I was betting on standing there until someone came along in a car. It was after four and the sky was already dull: another hour and there’d be no light left. The guard shrugged but didn’t smile. He was tricky to place. Some people look like hard living.

I turned and walked back the way I’d come, slowly, using strong, long strides. I watched myself go, all the way toward Merton Street. When I got to the walkway tunnel that passes under Mount Pleasant Road, I turned and looked back. No one was there. If the guy was a guard, and the guard was on his rounds, he’d kept moving.

I walked back toward the visitor’s center. There was a security vehicle behind the building, and two guards smoking cigarettes. One of them lifted a foot and stubbed out his butt on the bottom of his shoe.

A door opened and David came out of the building. I waited while he jogged over.

The gates are closing in about twenty minutes, he said. So we need to be fast.

No, I said.

What? We were almost there! X marks the spot, David said. He held the map out at me.

I think we don’t want to get locked inside, I said. I wasn’t looking at the map. I was watching the guards over next to the car. Did you get a look at those guards? I said.

Sure, David said. What about them?

They look okay to you? Security tag, photo ID? Up and up? I said.

Yeah, sure. David said. What about it? Big business, burying the dead.

I talked to one of them when you were gone.

One of those guys?

No, I said. No, some other guy. Didn’t seem right to me.

It’s a graveyard, David said. And it’s getting dark. You spooked yourself. Here, he said. He took the camera bag off my shoulder. I’ll sling your pack, Pancho.

We turned and walked up the main path to the road. It was rush hour. A steady stream of cars moved efficiently along, north from downtown, heading home. For a moment I watched us go. What we would look like, if someone else were watching. We went through the gate and then paced the whole length of the wrought-iron fence, south to Moore Avenue. I watched us just like the man in the cemetery dream had watched me. I watched my every move.

I
met David when he was only ten years old. You kind of have to keep that in mind. I’ve known him longer now than any of my girlfriends, aside from maybe Melissa. David took the babysitter thing really seriously in those days. He lay in the bottom bunk at night and conned me into reading three or four chapters of a book. Out loud. In some ways he acted a lot younger than he really was. He peeled back the covers and said, Why don’t you get in, Evie? Like I was his mom. He said it in a really soft way that made me want to back out of the room slowly, before he could grab my wrist. One time my fingers started shaking and I actually had to get up and leave.

I didn’t like the way he’d looked at me, like he wanted something. I didn’t feel like a grown-up and I was supposed to be in charge. I wished I were tiny, so tiny that I could curl up like a hard snail shell and fit into my own pocket. I wished I were anywhere else.

I stood out in the hall for a while, waiting for David to fall asleep, but he didn’t. He yelled: Hey! Are we finishing this story or what? When I went back in, I used my fingertips to draw an arc through the air, out from his shoulders to about six inches in front of my body.

David, I said. This is your umbrella space. Then I drew another arc out from my own body that stopped about six inches in front of him.

This is my umbrella space. You stay in your space and I stay in mine.

Do you know any ghost stories? David said.

I know about the Penetang Maniac, I said. I knew that one off by heart from Girl Guide camp. I know one about Hamilton Mountain, I said, and a guy with a hook for a hand and something about a car window.

Do you know the one about the babysitter? David was sitting up now, cross-legged, covers thrown back.

Is it lame? I said. I actually didn’t want to hear a scary story about a babysitter. I hadn’t liked the Penetang Maniac story when I first heard it and the last thing I wanted to do was get into this, alone in a strange house.

My friend told me this one, David said. Okay, so there’s this girl, she’s like thirteen and really pretty with skinny legs and long brown curly hair, and she’s babysitting late at night.

He pulled a pillow into his lap and pressed down on it with his fists, hard.

The parents have gone away for a wedding, he said. They won’t be back until the morning, but the girl is used to that, she stays overnight places sometimes. The baby is asleep on the third floor. The girl is in the kitchen getting some ice cream. There’s a big storm outside, so she can’t watch TV and it’s really quiet in the house. There’s just these big black windows all around the kitchen and living room.

David paused for a moment, like he was looking out through those windows. The house is an old farmhouse, he said, it’s at the edge of the suburb, so outside the windows there are no other houses. Just fields and fields and sky. And then the lights go out.

He leaned out to switch off the light and I grabbed his hand.

Nope, I said.

David curled his hand up, away from mine, and flicked the switch. We sat quiet for a minute, our eyes adjusting. There was a thin blue linen curtain draped over his window and it let a sheen
of streetlight through, plus the crack where the door to the lit-up hallway wasn’t quite shut.

The phone rings, he said. And it’s a high, high man’s voice that says just one thing: Have you checked the children?

Umbrella space, I said. You’re leaning.

So she hangs up the phone, because it’s a crank caller. People do that when it’s a stormy night. But then the phone rings again.

David stopped for a second, then twisted his face a little:

Have you checked the children?

I don’t know this one, I said. I realized I’d grabbed his hand again and I was squeezing it in my own two hands, high up against my collarbone. I let go and the hand dropped down onto my knee.