The Devil You Know: A Novel (40 page)

If they’d dug up the right body, Robert Cameron had been dead since 1985. I wondered how long the lump had taken to grow, how much it hurt, if he’d been afraid.

T
he waitress was wearing a blue Fight Like a Brave T-shirt with another long-sleeve underneath it, and jean shorts and black tights underneath those. It was almost eleven and the place looked like it was in the off-hour, before a lunch crowd came in. I sat at a booth and then changed my mind and moved to the counter and sat near the pie under a glass cover. I had a bacon sandwich and coffee and I opened up the sandwich and spread a layer of strawberry jam inside and closed it up again before taking a bite.

I never seen that before, the waitress said. She was wiping down the chalkboard with a wet dishcloth and then turned her back and
wrote out the afternoon specials. Soup:
Mushroom.
Sandwich:
Roast Beef au Jus
. Blue Plate:
Roast Turkey/Pots/Mixed Veg
.

How far to Espanola? I folded up the receipt and added it to my wallet.

Another hour to Sudbury, she said. And then an hour after that. She wiped her hands on her jean shorts and they left chalky finger marks there, like she’d been dancing with a schoolteacher, or been pickpocketed and they’d dusted her body for prints. Depends on weather, she said. Looks good now, but snow’s coming in this afternoon.

I plugged a handful of quarters into the pay phone by the door and called David’s number. It rang ten times and I hung up and all the quarters came tumbling out like I was playing slots. I plugged them all back in and dialed again. This time I let it ring twelve times, until the answering machine picked up. At the sound of the tone, I blanked a little and stumbled through another apology. There was a click but no tone.

Hey, I’m here, David said. I picked up.

Oh, I said. I just left you a message.

Yeah, I heard it. I’m lying here not answering Evie’s calls.

Got it, I said.

Where are you?

Two hours out of Espanola.

You alone?

David, I miss you.

Yeah? Because you’re really fucking me around.

I’m just going up there to figure this out, I said. I’m going up there, and if the coroner says, Yes it’s him, then I never have to think about this again.

What if it’s not him.

It’s him, I said. I’m ninety percent sure on this.

That’s a big fat leftover ten percent.

It will be so good if it’s him, David. Imagine how good that will be.

There was a silence and I threw another quarter into the phone to be sure it wouldn’t cut out.

David said: I don’t want to watch you do this to yourself. I don’t want you to put yourself through it anymore.

Someone broke into my place, I said. I went home and the door was broken. Who would kick in my door? Why would anyone do that?

I was staring out the glass door of the diner. There was a gas bar on the other side of the highway with a full-serve sign out in front of it and on my side the restaurant with about ten spots for cars. A silver sedan was parked at the south end, nearest the bridge. It didn’t have any snow cover on it. I couldn’t remember if I’d driven past it coming in or if it was new. Neither of us said anything and I threw in another quarter.

You think my father’s in this? David said.

I said I’m sorry, David.

I’m asking.

I don’t know.

He was quiet for a moment.

I’m worried about you, he said.

I don’t want to go home anymore.

Okay.

Okay?

Try and be careful up there, Sherpa, David said. Come straight here when you get back. Do that, okay? Come straight back here.

Okay.

For real.

I said okay.

Evie.

Yeah?

Don’t go snooping around up there after him.

Who, Cameron? That’s the whole point. He’s a dead man now, remember?

I mean my father, David said. My father’s still alive.

T
here was no one sitting behind the information desk at the hospital in Espanola. I almost walked in the emergency entrance because that’s the only place I’d ever aimed for at a hospital, then checked myself and found the main door. There was a map of the two floors pinned to the wall next to the desk and some pamphlets sitting on a rack next to that. The pamphlets looked like ads for pregnancy. Each one featured a pregnant woman or else a woman with a new baby and they were about all the ways things could go wrong: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Postpartum Depression, Pregnant and Abused? Along the bottom row someone had stuck some tourist brochures for cabins and the A.Y. Jackson Lookout. While you’re in town.

I could go to the switchboard and ask for someone or I could poke around till I found the right place. There was a set of elevators with a stairwell next to it and a red Exit sign over top and I half expected an alarm to ring out when I opened the door, but there was nothing. Half a level down from me, two women were hanging around on the landing. I heard the voices as though they were far away. As soon as I turned the first corner I fell into them. One of them had a real bathrobe on and black Nikes and she was sitting down and lighting a cigarette. The other was standing up, attached to an IV pole. She was wearing a hospital gown over a pair of green track pants. She was already smoking and tapped her cigarette into a tinfoil cup in the palm of her hand. I almost tripped over the
woman sitting down. I had to grab on to something and I was glad I hit the banister and not the IV pole. The women weren’t surprised to be tripped over.

Nothing downstairs but the morgue, said the one with the foil ashtray. And the janitor.

Downstairs there was a set of heavy doors and a schedule on the wall in a plexiglass cover. I hadn’t known for sure the morgue would be in the basement but that’s where it is on television.

T
he regional coroner’s office is actually in Sudbury.

This was the doctor, looking down at me. I’d been sitting on the floor of the hallway waiting for her when she arrived according to schedule, at four. Normally I don’t come all the way out here, the doctor said.

I stood up and rubbed my pants with my hands and showed her my press card. Her name was Georgina Smythe. I was in luck because she was the right person to talk to, she said. Just in town filing some paperwork.

Inside the morgue there was a desk and she sat on one side of it and I sat on the other in the same kind of chair you might find in a regular waiting room, with metal legs and armrests and half-worn, royal-blue upholstery. The back of the room extended around a corner. When Georgina Smythe turned around, I leaned out of my chair a little but I couldn’t see much beyond the filing cabinets. It was a small place. I could see the wide doors that led into the cold room.

She was the right person to talk to, but there wasn’t much to tell, she said. They’d taken some samples and sent them off for DNA testing. That was another thing altogether.

It’ll be close to four weeks before I can get a positive ID, she said. You’re not the first person to ask about this. When I’m in Sudbury I get two calls a day from Toronto.

I only just caught wind of the story, I said.

Jumping the gun a little, Georgina said. She rolled open a file
drawer and pulled out a small stack of folders and flopped them onto the desk in front of me. Whoever he was, he was scared shitless.

Shitless how, I said.

He never came in for treatment, she said. No record of a visit here or in Sudbury or even in the community clinic on the Res. They found him dead in a room down in Whitefish Falls. Cancer all through him. She opened up a file and shoved it at me. Everything would have been shutting down. You’re talking about someone who couldn’t eat or pee or anything. Renal failure, liver failure. The biggest tumor was on his spine. That would have hurt like a mother.

What else, I said.

Poor general health to start with, probably. Hard to say because the cancer would have stripped him down.

So to be that sick and not want help, you have to want to keep a secret even more.

I’d say that sounds right, she said. Preliminary forensic reports are here. Teeth, mostly. I could tell she’d been expecting something different from me. She looked relieved and started to gather up her folders again. That’s how we know it’s not Cameron, she said.

I threw a hand out and stopped the folders on the desk.

What do you mean?

That was the first thing Toronto wanted to know: Is this guy Robert Cameron. Cameron’s wanted for a murder back in ’82. He—

I know, I said. What do you mean it’s not him. Everything fits.

That’s the ID they were pushing for.

I pulled the open file over and stared down at it. What she was showing me were dental maps. Notes. X-rays. How is this not Cameron. How. I didn’t know what I was looking at.

You just said you didn’t know anything, I said.

I thought you wanted an ID, she said. We don’t know who this guy is. We’ve got no clue.

Who’s this? I held up the X-ray.

The real Thomas Hargreave.

This is the guy out west.

Yeah.

And you know the dead guy’s not Cameron how?

Georgina pulled the folder back over toward her side of the desk and swapped it for another one.

They don’t know a lot about Cameron, she said. But they know he was circumspect. He was good at hiding and not being found.

He was an old hand at new aliases, I said.

That’s in all the APBs that went out at the time and it’s one of the reasons he’s been hard to track. She flipped open the new folder. A guy has bad teeth, she said, eventually he’s going to a dentist.

The open folder held a few original Wanted APBs from the United States and Canada, starting in the ’70s. Grainy mug shots and lists of physical attributes. Dark hair, six-foot-three, one hundred eighty-five pounds. Six-foot-three, dark hair and full beard, two hundred pounds.

Cameron didn’t want to be found, she said. He had every tooth pulled out of his head by 1975. It’s here, see? Subject wears false teeth, full set. That’s something they knew for sure. She opened the first folder again. This guy they pulled out of the ground down in the Falls? Bad teeth all right. But they were all still attached to his head. Georgina stacked up the folders in front of her. This is off the record until we get a release out, she said. But as far as Cameron’s concerned, I can give you a No. For sure. Robert Cameron made himself impossible to track. He may as well have burned off his fingertips.

I
came out the stairwell door into waning daylight. I was in an alley off to one side of the hospital, next to the service door, and I realized it was there to give access to the dead. This is where the funeral home comes for pickup.

I’d been expecting to walk out of that office clean and free and new. New Evie. Instead, nothing had changed at all. The list of options I’d fashioned for myself, lying on my bed at home, was waning fast. Robert Cameron was not dead. Graham Patton either knew
Cameron or he was Cameron, and Cameron was or else wasn’t the man stalking me on the fire escape. I’d driven six hours north in a stolen car and if I went home now, all I’d find waiting was the same list of unanswered questions. Everything was unsolved. Whatever my mother knew, she wasn’t telling.