The Devil You Know: A Novel (26 page)

Come on, I said to the window. I said this out loud.

I dare you.

D
avid called me at the paper first thing Monday morning.

I’ve been down in wine country, I said.

I’ve been reading about it, he said. Jesus. You okay?

Angie had just left for Niagara herself. Press conferences were being held in Beamsville at Task Force headquarters, plus she wanted to go see the house, live and in person. I told David about the truckers and the old lady who’d demonstrated the ill value of high fences.

But are you okay, he said.

Do you remember Mitten Guy? I said.

Your secret admirer?

I think he came and saw me last night.

What’d he leave you this time? A scarf? A fur muff?

Nothing, I said. He didn’t bring me anything. He saw me.

What do you mean?

I came home last night and there was a guy on my fire escape, I said. Just looking in. He was just standing there.

Why didn’t you call me?

I called the police.

So they got him.

No, I said. There were some footprints but the snow covered them up. They said I should call back if I see him again.

I’d told Angie about it early in the day and she’d said to run a
quick search on recent police files, but there was too much going on and I hadn’t had a chance.

Can I come by and see you later? David said. What time are you getting home?

I don’t really want to know if there’s some guy in my neighborhood who does this, I said.

There was a little pause.

Evie? Are you sure you saw something?

What do you mean?

I mean, you’re reading about murdered girls all day. They’ve got you staking out some psycho’s house. I’m watching you go through this. Every day you’re a little more fixated, it’s all Lianne and Robert Cameron and Paul Bernardo and who knows what else. This is a massive trigger for you, right?

You sound like a therapist, I said.

It’s just. It’s like you’re looking for this stuff. This is what you do. You work yourself up. You’re spinning.

We were both quiet for a moment.

Spinning, hey? Don’t candy coat it for me. Tell me what you really think.

Spinning’s a harsh word, David said. I don’t mean that. I’m just saying, are you sure there was someone out there? For real?

You think I’m making it up?

I wouldn’t say it that way. I’d say, freaking yourself out.

I stopped and looked out the window. My cubicle was on the sixth floor of a thirty-two-story building. There were tall towers all around me, the kind of mirrored windows that kill a thousand birds a year. In a building that size it costs too much to turn the lights off and on every day, or it’s just easier to leave them on, and the lights create that shine. I could see a sliver of the lake from where I sat, and then the same sliver a hundred times over, reflected and multiplying off other windows of other buildings.

No, I said. He was right there. I saw him. And then a minute later, he was gone.

A
gag order had come down from the attorney general’s office over the weekend, meaning we weren’t getting much new information out of prosecutors or police. Also meaning there was lots to tell, Angie said.

So sit pretty, she told me.

I’d been mucking about in the newsroom all day. Word was that Metro police had jumped into the arrest too soon and now the Task Force was scrambling to catch up. Too many charges laid all at once. With a public that’s so invested, you can’t really afford to fuck it up.

Angie was back from Niagara early in the afternoon, stopping in at a quick press con with the chief coroner.

The wife’s sister, she said. Wifey’s little sister dies over Christmas a couple years ago. She’s like fifteen. Choked on her own vomit. They know he was in the house at the time, so now they’re opening that back up, too. She pointed a finger at me. When they exhume her, I want a picture of that, the digger in the cemetery.

What, I take pictures full-time now?

Just don’t let me forget I said it. Angie pulled her hair back and wrapped a plain elastic band around an uneven knot on the top of her head. She shoved me aside at my own desk and flipped on the monitor.

Now, she said. I’ve got five minutes. Let’s find your Peeping Tom.

T
here’s no one there, I told David.

We were sitting in front of the same screen, this time at my kitchen computer. He had all the lights on and every now and then he’d get up and stride over to the window, leaning across the little table or near the fridge, double-checking the dead bolt on the door to the landing.

I’d called up the Peeping Tom search Angie forced on me earlier in the day.

It’s less of a downtown thing than you think, I said. Guys in the
subway, sure. Or apartment buildings, the ground-floor units with patio doors. But there’s way more reports out in the suburbs. Kitchener, Cambridge. It’s like these guys need yard space. More bushes.

More bush in the bushes?

Har, I said. I read out a few victim impact statements, girls who were getting out of the shower in their basement apartments, looked up and saw a guy jacking off in the window. If it’s summer, he might cut the screen.

But that’s for effect, I said. These guys don’t want in. Sometimes they’re addicts or sometimes they’re just mental.

Come on, David said. That would totally freak you out.

I said I didn’t know. At least if a guy’s spanking, you know what he’s about, I said.

Anyone slices through your screen, you’d be upset.

I’d interviewed an ex-stripper-turned-sex-workers’-advocate back before Christmas. She told me she liked the jocks and the frat boys best. Guys come in hooting and hollering and ordering drinks, they’re there to have a good time. Nothing wrong with that, she said. It’s the hard tickets you watch out for. Guy comes in every day and sits and drinks slow and steady and doesn’t talk to nobody and just watches you with his dead eyes. That guy? You point him out to the manager. You watch your back at the stage door.

The guy in the screen-cutting case confessed that he’d been looking in windows at women undressing since he was twelve.

What about your guy? David got up again.

Just standing there, I said.

But was he getting off?

I tried to reimagine him standing there. Everything would be easier if he’d had his dick out. There’s something almost benign about a guy like that. It’s sad and gross and yeah, the guy should be in jail, but manageable. It’s kind of retarded. There’d been nothing easy about the guy on my escape. I realized that while David had paced the room, checking and double-checking, I’d avoided even glancing toward the window all night.

No. It wasn’t like that. He was here, I said. It’s like he wanted me to know.

David hung around for a few hours trying to find things to do for me. Stuff he could do with his hands, fixing or building or cleaning things. I still had the old sink sitting in my entranceway and he offered to bolt it to the wall.

With what, I said.

Bolts.

I have to rent a drill, I said. Drill-for-hire. Plus I haven’t even painted it yet.

The drug raid photo I’d printed from the newspaper was sitting out on my desk. My teenaged mother and the other unknown girls standing next to her on the porch, the two mystery men down on the lawn in front of the house. David glanced at it and then looked away. We didn’t talk about the fight, or my accusation about his father, or even the idea that my Lianne investigation was somehow pushing me over the edge. When he first came to the door, I could tell he was turning something over in his mind. The only thing he asked me about was my secret admirer, the details. He made me walk him through.

And now you’re standing here, like this?

Yeah.

And then you jammed the door? With a chair?

I nodded.

Why?

Why what.

What’d you do that for? What if he came in your exit? He pointed at the bolted door to outside, next to the fridge.

I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking that.

That’s a trap.

I wanted to know what space I had to worry about, I said. I wanted it to be something I could control.

Around midnight David put on his boots.

You want me to stay?

It was the first thing he’d asked all night that I wanted to answer.

You’re already wearing your boots, I said.

I can take them off, David said. If you’re worried.

I looked down at the sink on the floor.

I like this place, I said. I like the walls. I’ll be sad to punch a hole in the wall to put that thing up, but I’ll be glad once it’s there.

You can’t win, David said.

You really going out to live in the bush and fight fires?

More bush in the bush. Remember? Har har.

Har, I said.

Plus I got to take a break from my mother. I need a new Dave, David said. He slapped his hands to his sides, at attention. New Dave. Different Dave.

I couldn’t wait to get out of my parents’ house, I said.

New Evie.

New Evie! I said. I’m fucking sick of old Evie. Lianne’s friend, alive for now. Sleeping with a butcher knife under my pillow.

Old Evie is still a decent model, David said.

You think you can will yourself to be a different version, I said. Guess what? Turns out you can. You can turn it on and off. Or, it comes on like autopilot, but you can override it. You can switch to manual.

So you’re not worried.

About you and the fires?

About you and your special friend on the balcony there.

Nah, I said. I’m not worried.

I won’t touch you, David said. That’s not why I’m asking.

I said I wasn’t worried about that, either.

I
wrote up a pro and con list one time, in an effort to figure me and David out. I wanted to contain my range of feelings about him in one neat package, simple and codified. The list only served to prove what I already knew. Some nights nothing made more sense than David’s hand on a table next to mine. But the centripetal force of changing the code now, from pal to lover? Thrash us both senseless. I swore off.

The last time we’d kissed had been about a year previous, just after I’d been glamorously dumped by a bike courier named Cort Lindstrom. Cort had a long silver-bleached ponytail and a ropey body from being on the bike all day, and he left a toothbrush and an expired passport at my place when he went to visit his ex-girlfriend in Alaska. They eloped on the black sand beach at Prince William Sound and then sent me a postcard with pictures of ice floes on it.

Sometimes a thing like that happens, you get good and drunk and kiss your best friend. Or you find yourself morbidly stressed by childhood trauma, and ditto. But no sense making a habit of it.