The Devil You Know: A Novel (19 page)

The wider extension of this is how tragedy affects a community. You could see a low tremor run through the neighborhood—after Lianne, I mean. Kids didn’t play outside on their own anymore. Nobody said, Why don’t you go down to Trace Manes Park and see who’s there? Nobody wanted to know that
who’s there
was some guy in a long coat, or a man just hanging around in his car with a Polaroid.

Our spring fund-raiser at school was a raffle. Kids competed to sell the most tickets and went door to door. You’d sell a ticket to anyone: your mom’s dry cleaner, the cashier at the corner store, other parents at the park. When the police called and talked to me in the middle of the night, they wanted to know, was Lianne selling raffle tickets? This is what her mother thought might have happened. That she went into someone’s house, someone who told her they had money for her just inside. Later on, the school canceled the fund-raiser. Now they just ask parents to straight-up donate instead. Who knows? Maybe she did sell a ticket to the wrong guy. Maybe it happened on the way to the track, like everyone thought.
There were multiple theories. The police ask you a lot of very specific questions and all the questions need to be answered yes or no.

In the end, three families moved away—mine, Allison Lockyer’s, and Herbert Wong’s. Three-and-a-half, because a couple of years later, David Patton’s father Graham moved out. David saw him on weekends, and then every second weekend, and then in the last few years, only once every couple of months or so. All I ever heard was that he’d moved downtown, but I couldn’t tell you where, and it wasn’t the kind of divorce where the father still comes over for dinner sometimes or hangs around the old house, having coffee. I never saw him again.

I
grazed another couple coming down the stairs as I was going up. All our sock feet on the carpeted landing at once. A tall, real-looking blonde and a man in a crew neck sweater with a tiny polo player over his heart. The man had a back-to-front comb-over and was so much older that I hoped he was her father. I noticed the woman had not removed her shoes and I secretly cheered this act of insubordination. Maybe Antonina had come on to her fake husband, too.

Bathroom, she whispered. You gotta add ten grand for that. She passed me a little card and I saw that her name was Laila Bawshyn and that she worked for a different real estate firm. The fake husband had a line of pinprick holes across the toes of his navy socks.

Upstairs, the aesthetic wasn’t much different from what you’d expect. Carpets over wood floors. Curtains instead of blinds. It was another one-child family. A crib in one bedroom, two desks in another. The baby’s window, looking out on the backyard. I moved the crib gently against the wall, to get it out of my way. The yard was landscaped, with perennial beds at the edges and a central patio instead of a vegetable garden. I counted two lots over, to what must have been my old house, and saw that the yard there had also been converted to a patio. My parents had always let the grass grow long under the crab apple tree and for a moment I could almost see
myself and Lianne out there, building a tepee out of loose sticks for the cat to live in, then letting it collapse into firewood, a campfire my parents wouldn’t allow us to light up with matches. The better part of a day spent rubbing sticks together and the warm blisters on our hands. I turned back to the room.

The closet. Lianne the way I’d imagined her once, knees drawn up high, hidden away behind those doors.

There’d been a house-to-house search that extended over to the next street when Lianne was missing, but not quite to here. Our street, like Bernardo’s in Guildwood, was occupied by professional people. Large driveways and garages. It occurred to me that if I went back and searched the archives, I’d find basically the same door-to-door piece I’d done the night before, only about a different murder and written by a different reporter. I wondered if my mother had let her in.

T
he bathroom was plain and clean, and there was a queen-size bed in the room the parents used. The place was antiseptic. It offered nothing about the occupants. This is purposeful, so that a new person can inject themselves into that space and not be bothered by questions or nagging ghosts, but there’s an aspect of that kind of whitewashing that verges on sinister. I was thinking of the scene in
Lolita
where she’s got the money hidden in a hole behind a painting, and he finds it and takes it away, and how awful that is and I stopped and unhooked a plaque-mounted replica of a Kandinsky and pulled it down off the wall. No holes behind the art.

There were no big indicators, no obvious reasons for the move. New baby on the way? Job transfer? Divorce? There must have been an open house when we moved away, too, and I realized other people walking through would have asked these same questions about my own parents.

I ran my fingers around the window ledge, looking for loose edges. The flats of my hands smooth against the wall, looking for
anything, any lip, a painted-over trace. An odd, uneven panel. I crouched down and checked the wood parquet floor for any pieces out of place. The edges were all flush. Out in the hall, the walls were smooth and vacant. Just faux Parisian prints from the poster shops on Bloor Street and etcetera. No real art. No secrets.

I turned and started back down the stairs. From the landing I could see into the living room: a bowed window overlooking the front yard on one side and on the facing wall, a long mirror. My father had bought a similar thing for our old living room, a mirror to catch the light and open the room up. We’d left it behind. Too heavy to move. In this mirror, from this perspective, there was someone familiar standing in front of the window. David, waiting for me, stalling with Antonina. Rubbing at his dumb beard.

And then one of those strange sensory blips, a memory laid down over top of what was really there. Another time I’d stood on the stairs and seen a man reflected in the mirror, a man standing in my living room. Like that moment in the girls’ bathroom at my old junior high, I could almost hear his voice. I took the rest of the stairs nice and slow, allowing the rug in the living room to blur and spread out into the red Persian that had been there in our house. Our red carpet, our couch, our mirror. My mother’s things.

The day before Lianne disappeared, I’d come running home to find the front door locked, my mother arguing with a man in the living room, someone I didn’t know and never saw.

Only I did see him.

For just a moment, just like this, I saw him reflected in the mirror. I could see him now. This memory of a man’s face in the mirror. I stopped and squinted at it. Someone who wasn’t really there. Not-David.

David’s father. Graham Patton.

B
ut you didn’t start babysitting for me until you were twelve, David said. He pulled the zipper on his jacket up against the
wind. He’d had to practically chase me down the street. That’s the whole point, he said. Remember? You were twelve and I wasn’t. My mom wouldn’t let me stay alone, so why would she let some ten- or eleven-year-old kid babysit for me?

She didn’t, I said.

I still don’t get it, David said. You’re saying you remember my father in your living room. You met me when you were twelve. You didn’t meet me until after you moved out of that house.

We were hustling back toward the subway now. I stopped and grabbed David’s arm and the skates slid down off my shoulder and landed hard on my bent wrist.

So I remembered something. I remember your father, I said. I remember him from before I used to babysit you. In the house, arguing with my mother.

What are you even talking about?

He was in the living room and they were fighting about something. I wanted to ask my mother a question and she told me to go back upstairs. I wanted to go someplace, Lianne was going and I wanted to go, too. Lianne got to do everything cool.

Evie? Do you think this could be another one of those, what do you call them? Reconsolidations. Maybe you’re reconsolidating my father.

We’d started walking again, only slower. David switched sides so that he was walking closer to the curb and I was on the inside.

It’s not, I said. It’s not, I know it’s not. That kind of memory trick is there to make you feel like you’re answering a question. Confabulation, reconsolidation—that’s to give you a solution.

I think you’re looking for solutions, David said. You had a bad night at work. You found an old picture of maybe-your-mother and now you’re tying her down to anything—first Robert Cameron, now my father. That wasn’t even your house! You’re just working yourself up. Evie. This Bernardo shit is fucking you up, that’s all.

I know I saw your father there, I said. I know because it’s making me more confused, not less.

H
ere’s what happened. Not the way I’d remembered it the week before, or the month before, or any month in the past eleven years, but the way I remembered it standing on the landing halfway between the bedrooms and the front door in that house on Bessborough Drive, looking down at the reflection of a man in the long, wood-framed mirror. A man who looked like David, but was not David. A man in the living room who was not my father.

I’d been out around the neighborhood with Lianne. It was springtime, Toronto spring. We were wearing cutoff shorts and jelly bracelets. Saturday morning, the real beginning of the weekend. We took a couple of grape Popsicles out of the freezer and went out wandering. The purple juice stained our lips and we used the Popsicles like icy Magic Markers, like lip gloss wands to make sure the stain set. We walked down past the library to visit the ocelot at the Endangered Animal Sanctuary on Millwood Road, and almost had to leave because the smell in that place, the pet-store smell, wood shavings and animal poop, was making me gag. Lianne would have stayed for hours. Lianne wanted a houseful of endangered animals. The owner was a thin, quiet man who seemed old to us. He probably wasn’t even forty. He wore a baseball cap and his hair stuck out of it on all sides. He smoked. You could smell it on him, even over the animal smell.

What he had at the shop were animals that had been adopted
or smuggled into the country as pets, but then grew unruly. Too hard to tame. The ocelot in its square glass enclosure, tarantulas, a few big snakes. Furry creatures that looked cute and came with sharp teeth: ferrets, minks. Once, a chinchilla. The owner’s name was Frank Churchill. He pulled the mink out of its cage, one hand gripping it behind the ears, where the jaw connects to the skull, so he could control the movement of its teeth. With the other hand he brushed wood shavings out of its fur. Then he stretched the animal’s full length out in front of us.

That, girls, is the cat’s meow, Frank Churchill said. You know how much money changes hands over mink coats? Number one Valentine’s Day gift you can get a lady, that’s a mink coat.

Lianne said she’d never wear a coat made of anything living.

How about cow? Frank said. You wear leather shoes, don’t you.

Lianne said she didn’t. This was true: she wore hand-me-down sneakers and rubber boots in the spring and fall, and snow boots in the winter. I doubt she’d ever had to buckle up a pair of Mary Janes in her life.