The Devil You Know: A Novel (36 page)

Hidden on top of the porch light.

And voilà. We have contact.

The click of the latch. The many clicks of Maxie’s nails on the kitchen tile, dancing out a greeting. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. The place was dark. There was light from outside, from the street, filtered through the blinds and landing in stripes on the wood floor of the living room. I passed by the kitchen counter and the door to the basement and aimed for the stairs to the second floor. No lights on up there, either. A kind of incandescence from the stained glass, the streetlight glowing through the rosettes. Not light, exactly. A glimmer. Embers.

There was no one upstairs. Maxie followed me and I dropped down and aimed my key ring flashlight at the box of contact sheets. The sound of Maxie’s panting in my ear. Uneven. Her breath regular but then studded with pauses. My pile from the afternoon was still on top and I pulled the sheet with the drug raid shot and set it aside so I wouldn’t forget. The second box held single prints, eight by tens. I turned my head to look at the dog.

What else has he got for us, Maxie? I started from the back, hoping the photos were chronological, not random.

David’s mother. The same series of country house pictures. Graham Patton himself in some of the shots. Patton in hip waders in front of the cabin, the wood facade. An A-frame. One floor with a tiny loft, the tip of the A.

David’s mother in black and white, in an evening dress, cooking in a house I didn’t know. Cooking because she was wearing an apron. Then with no apron, wearing nothing but splayed comfortably on a floor, on a bed. Her eyes wide, smiling for the camera. And then less easily lain out, blindfolded. David’s mother again? The blindfold made it harder to identify. It could have been any woman.

He hadn’t stopped me from looking through these. Knowing what I’d find.

I went back to the shots of Patton and pulled out a few that looked best—close-ups where his face was clear and a wide angle that showed the look of the house and the gravel drive. I had what I’d come for but I ran my hand over the second box again to be sure. Near the front of this box the photos were older, the women in them all different, thinner, their hair longer and center parted. A row of men at a long table in a beer hall. The women to one side. Everyone smoking, thin cigarettes in every hand. The packs out on the table along with the bottles.

The aftermath of a few parties. Girls on a porch. Girls swinging in a hammock on the front porch of a house. The lawn and porch of the house on Brunswick, and my mother in the hammock, my mother at seventeen, holding a cigarette in one hand and posing for the camera. I pulled that one, too. Then the same picture I’d found from the paper, the house on Brunswick, my mother and Ted Fanning and Mary Bramer. Cropped according to the marks on the contact sheet.

Wedged in the bottom of the second box, a different picture of that front porch. Patton and another man. I squinted and tried to direct the light more keenly on Patton’s face. Younger. A little more meat on him, maybe. His eyes dark and hard. Both men with beards, longish hair. Nothing excessive. I laid the two photos side by
side. In the new photo, the second man had a black, fringed leather jacket over his shoulder. His face was turned away from the camera. He could have been anyone. Ted Fanning again.

Graham Patton standing next to him. Also living there? Or the house simply known to him?

I set the three pictures, Patton and my mother and the drug raid one I knew so well, on top of the contact sheet and gave the boxes a little shake to make them look more natural. Less searched. There was a hum and the heat came on, warm air suddenly moving up through the ducts. I sat still a moment, listening, and then moved quickly into the other room, the studio. The umbrellas and soft box I’d seen earlier made big, grotesque shapes in the dark.

The file cabinet. I pulled at a drawer but it wouldn’t budge. There was a lock on the top drawer that I knew would control all the rest of them. Trip the one lock and the whole cabinet is your oyster. One of those times I wished I were the sort of girl who wore hairpins. I dug into my bag and rooted around. Something brushed my leg and I pulled in my breath. Maxie’s tail. She went where I went. Wagging.

There was a small blue toolbox against the wall, down underneath the umbrellas. I flipped it open, looking for something usable. A file cabinet lock is not a complex thing. You can jimmy it with a butter knife. I found a small flathead screwdriver and spent a minute or so playing with the lock before it gave. You want to go in carefully. You don’t want to leave marks on the lock.

The top drawer was contracts only, and in the next one there were no files at all but small, stacked boxes of negatives. I didn’t know how long I’d been in the house already. It could have been ten minutes or an hour, and I didn’t want to put the light on or waste time holding negatives to the bulb, trying to decipher content. Third drawer down was where the photos started, more contact sheets and full prints, mostly work for hire, nothing exceptional. I found a few family pictures and the same blindfolded mystery woman in the bottom drawer and got down on my knees to take stock. David’s mother but not only her: other women, too. I shuffled through with
my thumb, like they were a deck of cards. Black-and-white mostly, or that high-grain fade-out that’s left from color film shot in the ’70s and ’80s. Naked and curled into a hammock, sitting on a wood floor and painting her toes. Seminudes in black-and-white. A blonde wearing a kerchief and unhooked garter, no stockings, legs folded demurely on a rolling office chair. Shading her eyes with her fingers, like a toddler’s game of peekaboo. They were lovely. A little art house porn in sepia tones.

My thumb stopped. There she was.

My mother. Sitting on the corner of a bed, a wry and patient look to her lips. Smoking. Liking and not liking being photographed. Not my seventeen-year-old mother. In color, her nipples faded out to a brick brown. The mother I knew. Patton had a date stamp on all his photos. My mother in 1982.

Back behind the nudes he’d jammed a large manila envelope and I unfastened the string tie closure and shook out another set of photos. No faces in these ones. The same unfastened garters, ankles bound tightly to a headboard, to a radiator; a torso, breasts, leather strap pulling at her neck. Ass and pussy, fingers spreading her own thighs, or wrists tied behind her back. No faces.

I pulled the photo of my mother and stacked it with the others in my collection, sliding them carefully into a notebook to keep them flat and put the whole thing away in my shoulder bag and slung it over my head, across my body. I paused for a moment with the screwdriver in my hand, then slipped that into the bag, too. I looked around. Maxie was gone.

Maxie had gone downstairs while I was busy with the pictures and now I heard her toenails on the tile floor, her slight whine from the kitchen. On the landing the stained-glass rosettes flashed with a passing car. I came down the stairs soft and fast. In the backyard there was a burst of white and then darkness again. Not the backyard. Back behind the house, in the alley. The headlights of a car as it parked. The darkness when the driver killed the motor.

Maxie jumped up against the door. I froze. Outside I saw the
gate swing open and bang shut again and the crunching sound of someone navigating the backyard, the ridges of frozen snow.

The front door was too far away now. There was an expanse of open floor I’d have to cross to get there and it wouldn’t work, I’d be seen and trapped. Beside me the door to the basement was shut tight. I grabbed the doorknob and pulled and I was down on the wooden stairs, door closed firm behind me. The furnace thrummed on. The sound of it lighting up. There were a few small windows at the other side of the room and the darkroom door with its fat, red bulb. I lowered myself to sitting and slid down the stairs like that, so that I wouldn’t lose my footing in the dark. Just above me I heard the door open, footsteps and the dog whining and barking, a man’s voice. I got to the bottom of the stairs and crossed the room. There was a row of basement windows here, up at street level, giving onto the path at the side of the house. They were high up. Underneath them a row of tool shelves, and then a chest freezer.

The footsteps were all right overhead. He was right above me but it sounded like he was on the stairs. He was on the stairs and the light would go on and I’d be caught. I heard voices and every voice was a man. I climbed up on the chest freezer and pulled out my key chain with the flashlight on it and it dropped and bounced off the freezer onto the floor. It made a noise doing this and I dropped down, too, running my hands back and forth over the concrete floor in the dark. The floor was covered in something, dirt or grime or sawdust, something dry and gritty. My hands on something cold and sharp. The keys. My key ring. I switched on the flashlight and got back up on the freezer and worked on the window latch. If he went up to bed I could get out. The footsteps came and went on the main floor. Once he stopped just over my head and I stopped, too, afraid that he could hear me. The latch was frozen and stuck in the cold and I held my hand against it to thaw it out until my skin burned.

I pushed and the window slid open suddenly, banging against the frame. The footsteps had moved on. I heard the door to the basement open and suddenly he was on the stairs and then he was
down there with me. The light flipped on. I heard Patton call out but he sounded far away.

It was David on the stairs. He didn’t move. He looked at me like I was stealing from him. He looked at me like I’d taken off a mask and he didn’t know my name.

My breath came back to me.

I’m so sorry, I mouthed at him. I’m sorry.

Patton at the top of the stairs, calling down:

Hey, Dave. What’s up. Is there a raccoon down there or what?

David stared at me.

There’s nothing down here, he said. His voice was flat. Nothing at all. He turned and walked slowly back up the stairs. The basement door shut hard.

I listened to the steps retreating, toward the front of the house. The TV went on. I turned back to the window.

There was a screen and I plunged the end of my house key into the top of the mesh to rip it through, then ripped out the rectangle with a few clean strokes. I took off my shoulder bag and shoved it out onto the path. It was a tight fit. My hand slipped as I levered my body through and my cheek hit a chunk of ice and scraped up against it as I pulled myself out. The side of the house was quiet. I stood there a moment to catch my breath. The back door slammed shut. I leaned up against the wall to stay hidden. The back of David’s head, walking past the swing set, through the gate and away.

I
found my way down to Gerrard Street through the alleys and blew twenty bucks on a cab to my parents’ house, riding the feeling that if David ever spoke to me again, I could at least say I’d done what he told me in the first place: Just ask your mother. On the way there I pulled the photos out of my bag and looked them all over. The print of the drug raid shot was crystal clear. If there’d ever been any doubt, it was put to rest. My mother’s wide, sad eyes and fair skin
were unmistakable. She was wearing a sleeveless dress. You could see the freckles on her arms.

I traded it in my hands for the nude portrait. It was taken the year I turned eleven, and my mother was still a young woman, even then. Twenty-nine. The same pale freckles across her collarbone, her breasts. The photograph walked a weird line. Not quite artful. But not candid, either.

I tucked the pictures away and paid the cabbie and climbed out. There were two cars in the drive and lights on in three rooms. It occurred to me for the first time that my father, too, would be home at this time. There were some cat prints on the porch in the snow and I tried the door before searching for my key. It gave. I shook my hair and called out.

Evie? My mother came out of the kitchen. She was wearing jeans and a soft sweater with the sleeves rolled high. In her sock feet, she barely made five-two. You missed your dad, she said. He’s out for his walk.

I didn’t say anything and pressed my lips together.

Sweetie, what’s wrong? Did something happen? Did that guy come back?

No, I said. No, I just need to talk to you.