The Devil You Know: A Novel (41 page)

I pulled out the contact sheet in my bag, the photo of my mother and the house on Brunswick with its heavy crop marks. The key was hidden under those marks. Whatever Patton had chosen not to print, to keep secret. The town of Whitefish Falls and the cabin where he stored his photo archive were maybe twenty clicks up the road. Twenty-five years’ worth of photos, he’d said.

There was a good chunk of cloud in the sky. Georgina Smythe had told me to hurry it up if I was hoping to get ahead of the new weather.

Snow moves in quick up here, she said. If you’re not used to the driving. Big stretches between towns, and no one living in between. She asked where I was staying and I lied and said I had an aunt living in Kagawong.

Assuming city hall wasn’t also trying to get on the road before the snow, I had fifteen minutes before the district clerk went home for the day.

T
he clerk was sitting sideways in his roller chair and sliding a pair of rubber galoshes over his dress shoes. A bell rang when I opened the door and he looked up and then down again, sharp and disappointed. His overshoe was stuck and he tugged on it in a grim way. The sign on his desk told me his name was Albrecht Köhning.

Albrecht, I said. My man. I need a quick solid. Albrecht looked to be within three months of retirement, and without much interest in solids.

In ten minutes I am in my car, he said. The door will be locked. He stood up. He had a gold-colored pen clipped to the breast pocket of his shirt.

Fair. I plunked my bag down on the desk and pulled out a half page I’d ripped from my notebook. I need you to check some names against your property records for the district. Ready?

Albrecht pulled out his own notebook and removed the gold pen from his pocket.

Robert Cameron.

Lee Ellingham.

Len Lester.

John McMurtry.

Wade Oxford.

Arthur Sawchuk.

Albrecht paused. How many more?

Graham Patton, I said. That’s it. Those seven.

He went over to a sidewall lined with gray medical filing cabinets. It’s almost alphabetical, what you give me.

The drawers opened and closed. Albrecht checked his watch between each name.

Only one, he said. Patton. What you need to know?

Is it still registered to him?

He pulled out the file. What you need to know?

He’s offered it to me in a private sale, I said. But my instinct is he doesn’t own the land he says he does. Is there a survey on file?

Albrecht didn’t move.

This is my inheritance, I said. From my grandfather. I don’t want to blow it.

He put the survey down in front of me.

He owns this land since 1971. You have one minute.

If you give me a photocopy, I said. We can both get out of here right now.

I
could see the house for a full five minutes before I pulled around the back of it. It was a gray board A-frame with a slanting, mossy roof off the tip of Huron. Fields cut into the forest in patches. Hay
left out to freeze in bales. You could see the place where the lake ends. The road wound down to the north channel in quiet switchbacks and the house disappeared and reappeared between stands of bush as I followed it down. I hadn’t really meant to get close. I thought I’d have to leave the car and walk in from the road, but there was a tire rut through the snow and I followed that around the back of the property. There was a tire rut but no other car.

I got up on my toes and peered in the back window. I was losing the light fast now. My fingers and the tips of my ears buzzed with cold and when I leaned into the window it fogged with the wash of my breath. The place had been built for wind and bad winters and had only small windows giving onto the lake side of the property. The back door was frozen shut but unlocked.

I reached into my bag for the screwdriver I’d taken from Patton’s house in the city and jammed it into the door frame and threw my hip against it and then kicked back hard with my heel and it gave. I was inside. My fingers wrapped hard around the cast-bronze knob, burning through the laced-on frost. Nothing moved. No one.

The house smelled of dust and ash and wet wool and a little bit like dog, but not much. I leaned on the door to shut it behind me. It was dry inside. A collection of fishing rods and nets leaned up against one wall of the kitchen and next to it, a small birch table with a couple of chairs pushed in tight. There was a woodstove against the interior wall for cooking and for heat, and the stovepipe widened on its way up through the ceiling to the second floor. The woodbin sat near the door and there were only a few bits and pieces left in it.

I took a couple of steps into the kitchen. A film of light came in through the window and gave the counter a soft look. There were a few dishes upside down on a tea towel but nothing dirty in the sink. I could hear my own breath.

I wondered how often Patton came up in winter. There were a few personal things near the sink: a drinking cup, the case for a pair of eyeglasses. No toothbrush. In the cup, there was a little powdery residue. Toothpaste? Or denture cleaner?

I could hear my breath, but not see it. The dishes didn’t look dusty and I ran a finger along the edge of a teacup. It came away clean and my gut stitched up tighter.

There wasn’t much to the house. By the look of it, I figured Patton used it for a little fishing and hunting and not much else. From where I stood in the kitchen I could see the whole place, the back door where I’d come in, a couple of big windows across the living room, on the land side, looking into a mix of fields and bush. You could see the road from the windows there, standing out in black patches against the snow cover.

In the living room there was a stone fireplace with a low shelf next to it and another small woodbin. The ceiling was board and beam, like a farmhouse, with a set of notches in the beams so they fit together. The shelf with a few books on it, field guides to Manitoulin and Algoma, and a jigsaw puzzle in a box. I pulled the box down. The puzzle was called Heidi, and she stood there with the tips of her blond hair just long enough to reach her rosy nipples. Almost long enough. I remembered David making jokes about this, how his father had a puzzle of a naked woman called Heidi, and then once dated a woman named Heidi and brought her up to the cabin and she’d stormed out. She hitched all the way to Sudbury, David said. To catch the train back to the city.

Your father wouldn’t drive her?

Fuck no, David said. My dad took the boat out a few days later. He didn’t even watch her go.

Maybe he thought she’d give up, I said.

The puzzle had a hundred pieces. It wasn’t engineered to try your patience. I slid it back onto the shelf and drew the field guides out to have a look at them. The covers were worn at the corners, cottony with use. Peeling. I thumbed at them and the sound of the paper rippled out and surprised me and I turned back to the door for a quick second but no one was there. The stillness filled up all the space and I wanted to laugh, that kind of nervous laughing that makes you feel better and not so alone. It was like being underwater,
or in a house buried in a landslide. I found myself counting things to hear the tone of my own voice, whispering the numbers just under my breath: how many shelves, or fat chunks of firewood and splintered kindling in the bin, how many floorboards. Somewhere in the cabin Patton kept his treasure trove of photos. There was a set of thin wooden steps and I counted them before starting up. Heavy through both my feet. The stairs were sharp and steep to conserve space. They functioned like a stylized ladder, a railing on both sides.

Upstairs, there were two tiny rooms without curtains. I could see the room that had once been David’s, his skinny bed with a blue comforter, all jammed up under the little square window. A pair of old hockey skates in the corner, a cardboard LEGO box with a flattened lid. How long since he’d been up here? I took a step in and switched on the bedside lamp and the bulb spat a couple of times and then glowed out orange under its autumn leaves lampshade. The stovepipe ran up between the rooms like a chimney. I went to lean a hand against it and pulled back, expecting the sting of frozen metal, but it wasn’t cold.

I wrapped my fingers around the pipe, gauging how warm it was. Not hot, but kind to the touch. Someone had been here, stoking a fire, sometime in the last day.

Out the eastern-facing window, the sky was entirely black now. If you were outside in the night, this house and me in it would be the only light on the horizon. I dove forward and switched off the lamp. The highway was far enough away that there was no ambient light and I pulled out my key chain and lit the flashlight. The beam shone a spotlight on the floor and I got down and scanned under the bed, then froze there, crouched and listening. The tire tracks I’d followed in were recent enough. He was here, or had been. Was maybe on his way back. I sat up and glanced at the window for new light, some sign.

David’s room was spare and empty. No boxes, no closet. Nothing stacked against the wall or under the bed. There was a chest
of drawers and I wrenched them open one by one and rummaged under the clothes, running my fingers along the seams in the wood. The bottom drawer was empty. A few safety pins, the manual from an old humidifier, a broken coat hook. When I pulled my hands back I had tiny splinters in my fingertips and I sucked them out.

The answer to every question I had was hidden somewhere in this house.

In the second bedroom there was a nightstand with a stuck drawer and just one small, curtained-off closet. I pulled back the curtain and a few empty hangers swayed there with the force of it, as though someone had just grabbed the shirts off them. There was a ceiling light but I didn’t see a switch. There were no books in the room. High over the closet there was a wide cupboard that ran the length of the wall. I unzipped my coat and let it fall off me, then dragged the bed to one side of the room so that I could stand on the footboard and open the latch. I was moving too fast and the bed frame groaned and scraped against the floor. Every noise I made surprised me and I went faster and crashed into things.

Inside the cupboard, a crawl space extended back about five feet, into the eaves. A few dozen storage bins were pushed up to one side and on the other, an infant’s lifejacket hung off a nail sunk into the roof beam. Tufts of pink insulation where the mice had been at it. I dragged the closest bins forward and ripped off the first lid and it fell and rang out a little spiral on the floor and I jumped down after it.

Hold on now. I pulled back and stood there, holding my breath.

Be methodical. If he comes back, you’re done. There is no controlling this.

I climbed onto the footboard again. There was wallpaper on just one wall of the room and I could see where it was peeling, up near the ceiling, out of the corner of my eye.

The first bin was all emergency supplies: three flares, a first aid kit, candles. Behind the bins Patton had stashed two jugs of water and a bottle of Polish vodka. The second bin was heavier. I had to
use both hands to pull it closer and this time I pried up the lid and tossed it gently down onto the mattress. Inside, there was a cardboard box stacked with paper. Files or photos or Patton’s tax records. I rifled through it all, trying to get a feel for what might be in there.

What I wanted was hard evidence that Patton was or wasn’t actually Robert Cameron. Did or didn’t know his whereabouts. Was or wasn’t the man on my balcony. I thought about a man who’d have all his teeth pulled out rather than ever be tracked down because of a dental record. What else would you alter? What face would you hide behind?

There was enough paperwork in the box to keep me busy for a few hours and I pulled it down onto the floor with me and started sorting. The temperature in the house had been falling steadily and I shivered and pulled my coat off the floor and up over my knees like a blanket. The deed to the property was folded and stuck in between an envelope full of gas receipts and the brown cover of an old, unlabeled 45. I pulled out a stiff sheet of yellow construction paper and opened it out to show a greasy oil pastel drawing. King of the Dads.