The Devil You Know: A Novel (24 page)

A
t the end of the day I drove Angie’s car back up into the city and left it parked on Sussex Avenue, a few doors down from her house. I threw the keys into her mailbox. The temperature had been dropping solidly since noon. It was snowing now and I remembered that usually means things are getting milder. The worst February days in Ontario are snowless, dry and clear and injurious with cold. I walked up past the Jewish Community Center and down into the
subway at Spadina. It was well past rush hour and the platform held only scattered groups of people. A draft blew down the stairway and the farther I wandered down the platform, the warmer it got. I stopped and watched the tracks for rats. David said he often saw rats, running along just parallel to the live track. Some days you see one that’s been accidentally fried. It was only three stops to Dufferin Station and then a long wait on the platform for what is arguably the worst bus in the city. Four or five inches of snow on the ground now. When we got down to Dundas, the intersection was blocked off by two cars in a T-bone and one local squad car with an officer trying to stop traffic in all directions. The bus driver levered the front door open and stepped out.

After a few minutes, my compatriots on public transport started getting restless. There was a guy wearing wet sneakers and a track jacket alone in the back row, his arms spread out wide under the window, yelling curses in Portuguese. It doesn’t take much to turn the bourgeoisie into the mob. The driver returned with a coffee and a bag of pastries from the Brazil Bakery. I walked up to the front of the bus and asked him to let me off and I hopped down into the snow. I cut along Dundas, down to Gladstone. Stores were closed now and the street was quiet. On Gladstone every second streetlight was out. The silence made it feel close. I wanted to look behind me and make sure I was alone, but it wasn’t even nine o’clock and that seemed crazy. The tiny lawn at the side of my house was ridged and icy. The snow crumbled down into my boots and burned my ankles. I don’t remember if the landlord had cleared the path or not. I crossed the lawn and came into the house quickly because I was hungry and cold and the urgency of the past two days, spent alone and waiting for something grisly, pressed down hard. I know I used my key to get in. The door closed heavy behind me, clicking into place. I couldn’t tell you if there were footprints outside the house that were not my own. It did not occur to me to look.

I
nside, I flipped on the hall light and pulled off my hat and boots and went into the kitchen still wearing my coat. Bits of snow came off the cuffs and fell onto the floor and when I stepped on them, my socks soaked through. I threw a pot of water and rice onto the stove and lit the gas, eager to get to anything hot and meal-like. The stove light from the overhead exhaust spotlit the kitchen and made it seem warmer in the night. I got my coat hung up in the hall and stopped moving for a moment. The larger house was still and quiet. I was the only one at home.

There was a bag of spinach and some cheese in the refrigerator, and I pulled these out along with a container of calabrese olives and ate three of the olives in a row and poured a glass of red wine. The door to the apartment above mine opened and shut and one of the guys upstairs came heavily down the steps. The door downstairs slammed. I picked through the spinach leaves, tossing out any that had gone black or wet looking. I’d thought I was alone in the house. I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d had out in the street, of wanting to turn and look behind me.

I’d stopped in at the office the past two evenings and filed whatever bits and pieces I’d seen at the house. There was more ahead all week. My notes centered mostly on the effect on the community, the strangeness of the forensics team. I hadn’t spoken to David for two days, not since the night he walked out, and I missed him. I needed to thrust the stories onward, to push them over to someone else’s consciousness and get them out of mine. There were things I’d heard early in the day, the shoptalk in the diner, that I couldn’t rid myself of.

The cop had said when they found Kristen French they knew they had a psycho on their hands, but one with an education. There was some knowledge of basic anatomy there. Her Achilles tendons had been sliced through, to make it so she couldn’t get away.

The wife, the waitress had said. The wife was a vet assistant and would have known such things.

I had no trouble putting myself in that girl’s body, crawling on her elbows because she could not stand.

I
had a handful of spinach leaves in one hand and the other swirled through the bag, fishing for good ones, and I stopped for a moment and felt how still the place was. A ticking inside the wall that was mice or the tremor of the hot water pipe. I flicked three blackish leaves from the bag to the sink. Outside, something heavy chimed off the metal fire escape and I froze.

A heavy icicle falling from the eaves. A hardy raccoon. I turned my body to the window.

The stove light shone hard and white off the glass, bleaching it. I could see my own reflection, my own fridge and stove. One of my hands was full of spinach and I held it out in front of me with the fist tight and the raw leaves sticking out between all my knuckles. Where the reflection faded, I could see the landing outside my window, a couple of solid black stumps. Boots. Black boots and legs. Someone out on the fire escape, looking in.

I counted in my head, waiting for the boots to move on, a friendly knock, something. Someone from upstairs, having forgotten his key. The boots stayed there. My breathing stopped and I squinted. The window shone a pale and cloudy version of my own kitchen: table, wall, desk, chairs, and under the stove light, a girl, staring. For a moment I didn’t recognize myself. I took two long steps to the window.

It can’t happen if you’ve imagined it enough.

My own long hair brushing my shoulders, the V of my sweater, my collarbone standing out white. In another yard, a cat or a raccoon screamed and the neighbor’s motion sensor kicked on. The outside lit up all at once.

The raccoon scrambling across the top rail of the yard fence.

The light held for the count of five. Long enough for me to see him there, only a foot or two from the window. Tall, black cap pulled down close, coat, boots, hands huge in black gloves. Eyes deep set. Face half in shadow.

Long enough for him to see me watching.

Then the light flicked off again, leaving just the white walls. Dancing spots. My eyes trying to adjust to the sudden swell of brightness and then the dark again. Just a silhouette where I knew he was standing, a few feet away at most, the window between us.

I tripped backward and switched off the stove light. The clink of breaking glass: I’d knocked my wineglass into the sink. The spinach leaves tumbled out of my hand and my reflection disappeared, the window opening up to a mute view of the backyard, the black fire escape landing. There was nobody there.

I shut the kitchen door and shoved a chair up under the doorknob. Outside, the fancy ironwork over the outside of the windows, and beyond that the snow-covered landing, the steps, the black railing. I was in the dark now.

Could he be inside? Or still out there, watching me do this. I walked over to the window and raised my fist and slammed it. Forehead against the glass, eyes shut.

I know how to work myself up. Heart beating hard through the brain.

They’d cut through her Achilles with a knife, with a band saw, and this slowed her down. It made her easier to hold. She crawled on her knees, on her belly. She wanted home. They held her by the hair.

No. The cop had said they’d cut her long hair off with the same knife.

I opened my eyes.

Fuck you, I whispered. You’re so fucking paranoid.

No one there.

The snow put everything to sleep, white and muffled. The raccoon was gone. Outside was clean and gorgeous and I looked down and saw the tracks: boot prints, all up and down the landing, the heavy marks in the snow where he’d stood and stared.

I was still standing against the window, with my back to the blocked kitchen door. I looked at my hands. My fingers were splayed out on the frozen glass.

You don’t have David, I said to the hands. You don’t have him. Now what?

I turned on every light in the kitchen. While I was doing it, I called out like I was talking to someone in just the next room: Hey, what are you up to? I said. That’s hilarious!

I yelled a bunch of stuff like that and tried laughing really loud, so anyone listening would know what a great old time we were having, me and this other person I live with, some other person who loves me to pieces and will never leave me alone. The chair was still wedged under the kitchen doorknob.

If I unwedged it, whoever was out there in the dark apartment would come in. He’d broken in while I was yelling: I was making so much noise I hadn’t heard him lean into the crowbar, the soft splintering of the door frame. Now he was inside with me. A guy like that will wait you out.

You can see I have a lot of practice scaring myself.

I thought of walking down to Queen Street and along to the Skyline and ordering some pancakes from the all-night kitchen. I’d be happier if I wasn’t at home. The Skyline is owned by a nice old Greek couple who get upset if you don’t eat meat, and the idea of being out in the street felt much safer than being trapped in my apartment where someone knew I lived. My head had that pins-and-needles feeling you get in your feet if you sit on your knees for too long. I put on the radio, then turned it right off. The noise of the radio made it so I couldn’t hear what was really going on. I wanted the old Greek lady to put her hand on my shoulder and make me eat bacon. The imagined weight of her hand on my shoulder felt so good to me that I started to cry.

I leaned over the sink and gagged a little. Then I sat down on the floor in the middle of the kitchen and called the police.

The problem with leaving the apartment is that you have to come back.

I
t took dispatch a few hours to send anyone over because in that part of Toronto there’s a lot of drugs and sex work, even on a quiet Sunday night. Other problems that are considered high priority. I sat in the bright kitchen on the floor with my knees tucked up to my chest and my back against the cupboard so I could see everything: all the windows, every corner, the door to the hall, jammed shut.

After I’d hung up with 14 Division, I called my parents, and they were the ones who arrived first. I heard the click of a key prying open the front door lock, out in the hall. There was a moment of quiet when their eyes must have been adjusting to the dark. I pictured my mother running her hand along the wall, looking for the light switch. My heart flew up into my throat. What if it’s not them?

My father’s voice: Where the hell is she? And then a soft knock at the kitchen door, still barricaded with a chair up under the doorknob.

Evie? Evie, we’re here.

I had a sudden flash of how foolish this was. How shameful. Trapped in my own kitchen. I stood up and pulled the chair out and my mother pushed the door open and grabbed my shoulders and hugged me.