The Devil You Know: A Novel (16 page)

Hold on a sec, David said. His name isn’t here.

I know. I figure he’s in the picture. See? There’s supposed to be an image.

Where is it? David said.

No pictures on Nexis, I said. I have to look it up at work.

I
took my sheaf of printouts into the office with me the next morning. The goal was to finish Angie’s list, and maybe dig up a few photos while I was at it.

I switched on my headlamp and held it out in my hand like a flashlight, pushing hard with my shoulder to get the archive door to swing open. Inside it was cool and dark. The door to the archives is never locked, because there’s always someone at work on the news. The building is never completely empty. There was no sound. The soles of my shoes squeaked a little against the linoleum floor tiles and then the sudden hum of the furnace kicking in next door.

I had the lion’s share of the list on a floppy disk in my purse upstairs.
There were still a few things I wanted to check out on the film reader. I tightened the hiker’s lamp around my head and walked back through the stacks. It kept my hands free and I was happy to have the spotlight. It felt safer. I’d know if someone else was in there with me. They’d have to carry their own light.

The dead girls’ names had changed over time like a most-popular name list from each year. Linda and Karen and Susan in the ’60s and ’70s, Jenny and Heather in the ’80s, Kristen and Amber in the ’90s. There were girls found in ditches or lost from bike rides home after school, girls taken to movies and never seen again, girls lost at the playground. Girls taken by their uncles or neighbors, or sometimes their own fathers. It’s almost always someone you know. Except in Lianne’s case, where Robert Cameron is really just some random drifter. Leave it to me to know the one little girl who was actually abducted by a stranger with candy.

I skimmed a finger along the shelves, shining the light on the date stickers: 1970 January, 1970 February, 1970 March, 1970 April, 1970 May, and etcetera. I pulled a stack of files off the shelf and rifled through them in my hands, keeping them in order. Basically the list I had was ’80s and ’90s heavy and I needed to flesh it out a little, so to speak, in the earlier decades. I knew Angie’s point was to show things getting worse—not better, not just the same—but I wasn’t sure that was true. I’d already learned that I could pick any year, any time, any place, and run a search that included the term “missing girl” with good success. With the history of national news wide open before you, all you need to do is close your eyes and let your finger fall on a random date.

There was a noise near the floor, one row over. My light jerked in that direction. My hands were full.

Mouse, I said out loud. The sound of my own voice surprised me.

I picked one of the readers in the center of the room and threaded a reel through the machine. It clicked heavily into place
and the machine whirred as it warmed up and I sent the film spinning through.

O
ctober 1970. A girl named Katherine May Wilson goes missing in Kirkland Lake. She’d been sent out to pick up a few groceries and called home from the store to ask her mother if she was allowed to spend the leftover change on a treat for herself. A can of pop or something. Her mom says yes. Katherine is twelve.

She has some younger sisters who walk out to meet her halfway, but when Katherine doesn’t show up, I guess they go home. I don’t know how long those two little girls stood around waiting, or playing by the side of the road.

When they got home, did they tell the mother immediately or did they just resume their game in the yard? Did the mother know to worry right away? Or was she irritated that Katherine had dilly-dallied instead of walking straight home? It was 5:00 p.m. when she called from the store. Her mother would have needed the groceries for supper. They never found Katherine’s body.

The case went cold. It’s the second-biggest cold case since the ’50s. What makes Lianne’s case larger is only the fact that they know who did it but never tracked him down. In Katherine’s case, there were no leads, no warrants, no arrests. Every news report about an unsolved case of a missing girl includes the insinuation that police botched the investigation. For an anxious public, it’s a good trick to blame investigators. Of course public safety doesn’t depend on well-executed arrests. It depends on girls not being killed. Which depends on men not killing them. Every cold case at one time or another headlines as the country’s biggest.

Someone reported last seeing Katherine in the passenger side of her cousin’s pickup truck. If we believe Report Femicide, this is the most likely scenario. Someone she knew, something familiar. Maybe he’d offered her a ride home before.

Kirkland Lake is way up north. Today, it’s got a population of just over eight thousand, down from a high of almost twenty-five thousand before World War II. It’s famous for forests and open-pit mining. Driving, they would have been well out of town in a couple of minutes. Maybe he asked nicely. Maybe he just wanted a blow job.

But then she said, No. She said, Take me home. She said she’d tell her parents.

Maybe Katherine kicked him off. She got the door of the truck open. She started running. It’s October so there’s a deep layer of fallen leaves on the ground, and under the leaves, tree roots trip her up. She’s wearing sneakers and the toes of the sneakers are catching under the roots. The thin, bare branches whipping at her as she runs. She has lash marks on her face and arms from the branches. Katherine is only four-foot-nine and her cousin is already a grown man and faster than she is. She is running and the branches hurt her face and her lungs are burning. What she’s thinking about is her mother.

I wanted this list to be an honor roll, but every girl was only famous for what someone else did.

I
finished up my notes and stripped out the film and loaded a new one: 1970, March 1–15. I was keen to see the image that went with the news item I’d shown David the day before, the drug raid. The reel sped up as it wound backward, making a progressively louder whining noise through each date start to finish until I got back to March 4. It’s a steady enough noise when it’s right next to your ear, loud enough to dull any other quick sounds. I hadn’t noticed the furnace shut off. When I stopped the film, the silence was sudden and hard around me and my breath tightened up. I glanced quick over my shoulder and the light from the headlamp swept across the room, lighting up a streak of floor and another table and chair to the left of me. I took off the headlamp and laid it on the desk and
stood up. On my feet for a moment I turned slowly around. No other lights. I sat down and threaded my wrist through the strap on the light.

I found it on page A27.

It was a small piece toward the back of the front section, bordered by ads and business information for the paper. The bottom third of the page is just the detailed weather map. There’s a large black-and-white photo accompanying the article and this is the thing I’m looking for.

NO CHARGES IN KENSINGTON AREA RAID

FREE PRESS
,
MARCH 4, 1970

Caption: No arrests in Kensington raid. The house is registered to one Arthur Lewis Sawchuk.

It’s a picture of a semidetached brick two-story. There’s an alley on one side and a strip of sidewalk, and it’s a familiar place. It looks like downtown Toronto. There’s what seems to be the remains of a party on the front lawn, bottles and some dirty-looking guys with long hair and a few girls, too, also with long hair. One of the men has a black ponytail. One has lighter, tangled hair that he’s tucked just behind one ear on the left side. He’s got a beard, and fringe coming off his arms and shoulders. A leather jacket. It’s a grainy photo.

This is supposed to be a photo of Arthur Lewis Sawchuk. Also known as Wade Oxford, Lee Ellingham, John James McMurtry, Len Lester, Robert Nelson Cameron. It’s a picture of the man who killed Lianne.

I didn’t know what he would have looked like in 1970. I leaned close into the screen. What I needed was the photo of Cameron from later on, something to compare this one to. His mug shot, the have-you-seen-this-man photo the paper ran a dozen years later, when Lianne was killed.

I didn’t see him, but I was squinting hard enough to make out the house number, 102, on the front door. Which is why the place looked so familiar.

The house my mother once lived in was 102 Brunswick, next to the alley near Kensington Market. Just out of the frame, to the left, was the parkette I’d sat in a few days earlier.

I picked up my light and held it over the screen. Three girls with long hair were standing on the front porch. One of them, a tiny blonde, held one hand lightly against her face, a pose I’ve often seen my mother strike when she’s feeling tired. Her eyes, too. My mother’s eyes take up half her face, you’d say. They’re that big. She has high, Finnish cheekbones and the kind of brow line that makes her look as though she’s always a little surprised. I sat still, my fingers curling around the strap on my lamp.

Maybe I was wrong.

I hit Print, capturing the entire page, then focused in on the text of the article and then just the picture and printed those off, too. The printer, housed on a lower shelf at my right knee, pulled three sheets of paper through, one after the other, and I stripped the microfilm out of the reader and snapped it back into its case. I still had some work I was supposed to finish up, but staying seemed unimaginable. I wanted to go home.

I pulled the prints off the machine and aimed my light straight down on the close-up photograph. The zoom had made it impossibly blurry. The girls on the porch had rope for hair. Their eyes and mouths were smeared. Someone had dragged a hand across their faces, long smudged lines of mascara and lipstick. I folded the papers in half and in half again and stuffed them into the back pocket of my jeans. Carrying the light in my hand, I walked quickly back to the stacks to reshelve the pile of films I’d pulled out. I had to set the light down on the shelf to sort them. The light shone off, distant and ambient, and I was sorry I hadn’t just left the thing on my head.

There was a heavy thud from the back corner of the room. A
door swinging shut in the furnace room next door. Something falling to the ground. Someone.

My hands shook as I pushed the films back into their slots on the shelf. The light knocked to the ground and shone off down the row, illuminating a long, slim triangle of floor. Shadows rose up on either side of the beam, the shelves growing taller, white to gray to black. I dropped to my knees to get the light and there was a scuffing sound from behind me. I spun around, flashing the light in a wide circle.

If someone was in there with me, he’d been there since before I came in. He’d been there the whole time, waiting, from the moment I first opened the door. I remembered the mouse sound from when I’d stood in the stacks before. He’d been watching me quietly since then. I raised the light so that it shone across the row of film readers and tables to the doorway. The light switch on the wall. I needed to get to the light, to the door, to get out.

Another sound from deeper into the stacks. Behind me, the tick or creak of the shelves settling. Then again in the next row over.