The Devil You Know: A Novel (44 page)

I want to go home, I said. I went to steady myself against the counter and my hand slipped down into the sink. It was wet with spit and vomit and my stomach turned again. I twisted and leaned down into it. Patton grabbed my hair like he was holding it away from my face, but rough.

You want to know what I think? I think you’ve got a sick fascination. I think there’s a little part of you that lives what he did to Lianne every day of your life. Driving out here like the sheriff, he said. You want to know what happened? You want to act it out? Keep it up. He pulled back hard on my hair. He had his other hand on the counter for balance. His body so close that I could feel him pressing into me from behind.

I want to go home, I said. I shifted and my fingers slid in the
sink, bumping up against the wet wood handle of the knife. His mouth on my neck like I was his girlfriend. I could see my own reflection in the window and Patton’s hand next to me on the counter. I grabbed the knife out of the sink and stabbed it through the hand.

Jesus fuck! Patton tried to get a hold on the knife and I bore down with all my weight on the butt end of the handle, keeping it there, hammering it into the counter. I wanted to pin him down. He jacked his other elbow up against my shoulder, sending me back a few steps.

Blood seeped out from under the hand. He was already working the knife out.

I said I want to go home.

Outside, Maxie had stopped whining. Something slammed hard against the door. I turned and watched the door frame tremble.

Patton was hunched over the counter. His body jerked up all at once. He looked at me, the knife in one hand; the other hand was bleeding freely now. He had a fine sweat across his forehead. His hair was damp with it. From the door, another slam.

That’s no dog, doing that, he said. His lips curled up a little like he might laugh, but he didn’t. You expecting someone, Evie? Who else have you been tracking down.

I stepped back a little farther.

Who’s after you, Evie?

The frame shook again.

There was a different way out of the cabin, through the living room, but I couldn’t get to the car from there. Out front there was only snow and more snow. At least a hundred yards to the tree line. I looked at Patton. He was breathing heavy, hand pressed tight against his shirt.

The only sure way home was through that door. I spun around and pulled hard on the handle, throwing myself past whatever was out there. The dog rushed into the room and then, almost as fast, David.

David. David knew I was here. He reached for me and I stopped
short, grabbing at his arm, his wrist. My shoulder smacked into the door frame.

There’d been no flash of headlights, no crunch of tires on the ice. Or if there was I hadn’t noticed. I’d been aware only of the dog, scratching at the door. I held on to David’s wrist with both hands. I could feel the flush of his pulse through my fingertips.

Patton leaned hard on the counter and threw the knife back in the sink. The hole in his hand was ragged and bloody: a pinker, more watery look to the blood than I expected.

I got this feeling that I’m supposed to kill you now, David said. Or beat the shit out of you anyway.

Patton pulled a cloth out of the drawer and wrapped it around his hand a few times.

Over that? He gestured to me with the cloth.

Thing is, I don’t want to touch you, David said.

Let’s go, I said. Let’s get out of here. I let go of his arm and shifted my body a little closer to outside.

I don’t want to catch what you have, David said.

Patton looked up at him.

Get out of here before I beat the shit out of you myself.

Maxie whined and paced between us, pawing at the ground a little. Her nails on the wood floor.

I found your dog, David said. Hiding out from coyotes. He looked at me for a second, then back at his father.

Maxie, come on, I said. I snapped my fingers down low against my leg and the dog came over and rubbed her face on me and I grabbed on to her collar.

I’m going now, I said.

You think I won’t let you? Patton said. He kicked at my coat where it sat on the floor of the cabin. Shows how much you know.

H
ere’s the final score:

Robert Cameron crossed the border into Canada at Fort Frances on or about May 3, 1982, using a stolen passport and the name John James McMurtry. He slept the night in Thunder Bay before heading down to Toronto, where he spent several weeks locating and threatening a handful of people whom he thought owed him money, including but not limited to my mother, Annie Jones.

He wore a full set of false teeth.

He’d lost weight recently and his jeans hung off him and he needed a belt.

Annie paid the sum of two thousand dollars in secret. The money was given to her by Graham Patton, a man they both knew. She paid out the money in secret but made Cameron sign for it in Patton’s presence, for what it was worth. She wanted a guarantee that he would stay away from her and her family. This all happened early in the day on May 22, 1982.

A few hours later, Cameron approached two girls in the park surrounding a community library. He knew one of the girls to be Annie Jones’s daughter. He told the girls a story about a lost dog and solicited their help. The girls returned home safely. But sometime the next day, eleven-year-old Lianne Gagnon got into Cameron’s car and disappeared.

Her body was discovered twelve days later in the wooded area
of Taylor Creek ravine in Toronto’s East York suburb. Her leg had been severed from her body and was sticking out of a blue Anheuser-Busch duffel bag. There was a dog walker, and the dog found the leg.

Lianne’s parents divorced a year later. Her mother moved to Vancouver Island with her remaining children, as far as she could get from Toronto without actually leaving the country behind. What happened to Lianne’s father is unknown.

Robert Cameron became the subject of the longest and most extensive cold case manhunt in Canadian history. There’s very little that’s complicated about his story. Despite repeated sightings and the exhumation of an unknown man who fit his description neatly, he was never seen again.

Lianne Gagnon was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. She’s easy to find.

W
e drove back down to the 400 in the early hours of the morning, David in the van he’d taken from his mother’s driveway and me in Angie’s Turismo with Maxie shedding and drooling on the seat next to me. That country is as much water as it is land. There was fog almost down to ground level and we drove slow till past Espanola because of it. Ice on the road. There were three deer standing at the edge of the woods at Willisville and I thought Maxie might see them and kick up a fuss but either she didn’t or she didn’t care. We went gliding by and none of us made a sound. It was that time of day, low light. About half a mile farther, another one, lying dead where a driver hadn’t seen it coming and the ice and road salt around it all stained.

Patton hadn’t moved to stop me while I gathered my things. He stared at his own son and wrapped the cloth tighter and tighter around his bleeding hand and knotted it firm. I almost wanted to apologize but I didn’t. There was no reading his expression. We didn’t talk. I left the photograph where he’d dropped it upstairs. He shook his head a little as we moved toward the door.

Outside, the deep freeze was on its way. David and I paused out back of the house.

You take the dog, he said. So you won’t be alone.

There was a temptation to just abandon Angie’s car and climb into the van, the three of us together, but neither of us said it out loud.

There’s a gas station in Espanola, I said. Texaco. With a coffee machine. And a diner near French River.

I’ll race you, David said.

I opened up the driver’s door and Maxie jumped in and flounced her wet paws all up and down the seats. David had his engine running and he was waiting behind the wheel of the van, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them. I threw my bag over into the back and looked up for a moment, just before getting in myself and driving away.

The one thing I’d always thought of as random, Lianne’s abduction, was the one thing that was calculated. It was no coincidence at all.

The speed of the clouds. Weather moves faster in the north. Ten times, a hundred times faster. You stand still and watch it streak in and it’s hypnotic and then it’s upon you. So fast that nothing can catch it.

W
e came back down through Sudbury, taking risks, as the light came up and no one else was on the road. We drove too fast or too slow, or side by side, waving to each other, David chancing the oncoming lane in the van. The dog barking and licking the glass. Once he slowed down and I passed him, kicking in the fantastic pickup that little car had and zooming way out in front. A game. To cheer us up, except for a second over a hill I lost sight of him and the Turismo skidded out faster, the road black and empty as if I’d driven out onto the middle of a frozen lake. I took my foot off the gas and let the car decelerate and spin a slow 360. A moment later David crested the hill, driving sensibly. A thing to make me laugh.

We stopped for eggs and greasy potatoes on the near side of French River. The same pay phone where I’d called David, maybe eighteen hours before. How could it be less than a day? There was a new waitress on shift wearing a different version of the same uniform. Tight jeans and a Dolly Parton T-shirt. On the back of the shirt there was a list of dates and places, none of them in Canada. She was a few years older. She’d dyed her hair red and had some trouble with the dye. While we waited for more coffee I played with the jams and the waitress sat swiveling on a counter stool and told David what she’d done.

I didn’t think enough dye was up top, she said. I just kept rubbing it in and rubbing it in!

Her roots were a wild salmon color. The rest of the hair hung plain and gingery and straight down off her head.

We didn’t talk about what happened at the cabin. I dipped my toast in a pool of cooling egg yolk and drew a smiley face to one side of my plate. David stood up and checked every table until he found a little rack with a grape jelly on it and he peeled off the seal and ate it with a spoon. On the way out he noticed the pay phone near the door and said, This where you called me from? And I said, Yeah, it was. That was as big as the discussion got.

Maxie stayed in the car. We had a bacon sandwich wrapped in a napkin and I made her get out, into the snow, and we fed it to her there in pieces.

Does this make us dog thieves? I said.

You don’t look unhappy, David said. Do you, girl? To the dog, not me.

Then Huntsville and Gravenhurst and past Barrie to the city and I couldn’t bear to drive home so we went to his house instead. We took turns in a hot shower and when that was done I sat and replayed the story for him in detail like it was a debt I owed him, like it was reparations.

Aside from everything else, I basically stole Angie’s car, I said.

You’re so fired.

David stood around in his boxers and made me drink hot, sweet coffee under a blanket. He shook his fist at me in mock frustration. You’ll never work for a paper in this town again! You hear me?

I felt quiet. Settled in my skin. I could see this reflected in David. Gleeful and relieved and ignoring the bigger issues we’d have to talk about later.

Maybe, I said. Maybe this job is not for me.

There’s still time to become a Sherpa, he said. He pulled a sweater over his head.

I said: David, I’m sorry.

I knew something was up when I got that call, he said.