The Devil You Know: A Novel (10 page)

What’s all this?

It’s for your dead girls, she said. On your way home, swing up and take a few shots of gravestones. See if you can find someone relevant.

I do everything around here.

We could use a stock photo, she said. But my impression is you like fresh air. Plus you may as well learn to operate the thing. Sometimes you got no choice. It’s a bugger if you can’t take a basic photo without fucking it up.

I can take a photo, I said. Are you sure that’s what you want? You want a close-up of some little kid’s grave from back when she
was murdered? I weighed my hands back and forth like they were scales. Maybe a big establishing shot of a bunch of graves, I said.

Angie looked up from her postmortem. Nah, she said. I want something specific. Your job isn’t establishing shots. Go break someone’s heart. Go break my heart with gravestones. Little murdered kid gravestones.
Capisce?

Sheesh, I said. Ca-peesh. I slung the strap of the camera bag over one shoulder like a pro. See what I did there? I said. The magic of rhyme, right to your doorstep. I’m like a treasure, Angie. I’m pure rhyming diamonds.

She had her head down in the paper again and didn’t offer any opinions pro or contra my rhyme value. I called David from my desk.

How would you like to spend an affable afternoon at the cemetery? I said.

M
ount Pleasant Cemetery is really close to the house where I grew up. It’s a place kids go to fool around. Lianne and I had used the trails as bike paths, which is odd to think of, given everything that happened later. When you’re in high school, kids jump the fence and go in there to make out, or smoke pot, or just to feel cool being in the cemetery at midnight, and I did those things, too. In a studied way.

I walked down from Davisville Station and stopped in front of the gates to wait for David to show up. There was a No Loitering sign on the fence and I tried to strike the best loitering-type pose I could think of, leaning up against an electrical pole. Like the cemetery was a fancy house and I was casing the joint. The camera bag was cutting hard into my shoulder and I put it down at my feet. I had a handful of lily of the valley that I’d picked up from the subway florist for no reason. Except that walking into a graveyard with a camera and an assignment, looking only to take something away, was mercenary.

Whatever trick I’d pulled on my own mind in high school had worked. I realized that I hadn’t thought of Mount Pleasant as a place for dead people for a long time. It was part of the neighborhood, like the Dominion store or Maurice Cody school or the Barmaid’s Arms. Lianne may as well have been buried in a different city. I didn’t remember any trees or grass or anything the day they buried her. I remembered it white and plain, as if it were wintertime, even though I know her funeral was in June and there was sun and it must have been warm because I hadn’t worn any stockings.

In the year or so immediately afterward I always wanted to go to the cemetery and bring flowers and say prayers. My mother said I was morbid. I wasn’t. It was more like a deal you make with God. If you do everything right, all the time, you’re protected. Nothing bad can happen to you.

I knew that there were certain expectations placed upon a sad person. Bringing a flower to your dead friend seemed no different to me than bowing your head when you touched your grandmother’s rosary: something that looked great, but you didn’t have to think too much about. I didn’t have a grandmother, of course, but Cecilia Chan’s grandmother kept her rosary in a dresser drawer that was crammed with Oil of Olay and costume jewelry. She lived in the back room at Cecilia’s house. While I handled the beads I took stock of myself in her vanity mirror. I liked to look very pious. Cecilia taught me the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed and parts of the Hail Mary. I wore big clip-on imitation pearl earrings when I prayed, and asked Mary to make Cecilia’s grandmother give me her white cold cream to smooth over my cheeks.

I brought a hand to my own cold cheek, remembering this, and then there was someone beside me.

Hey.

He touched my shoulder and I jumped back. David.

You okay? I said hello like three times.

I said I was. Okay, I mean.

Daydreamy, he said. He motioned toward the flowers. Nice touch.

I picked up the camera bag.

Let’s go, I said.

T
here’s close to no point trying to find a grave in winter. That bears mentioning. Everything is covered up. The snow kills all the flowers people leave. But there we were, anyway. Doing the right things.

The cemetery office is near the Mount Pleasant entrance, inside the gates. They have maps of the whole place and about a million filing cabinets, so you can give them the name of someone who’s buried there and they tell you the code number for their gravesite and mark your map with an X.

Lily of the valley, I told David. Because they’ll be hardy in the snow. Don’t you think?

There was a black-haired woman behind the counter and she had thin eyebrows and her blush had been put on with a sponge. She was wearing a blue blouse with one of those scarfy bows at the collar.

I’m trying to locate a few graves, I said. I went through my list out loud: Alison Parrott, Sharin’ Keenan, Lizzie Tomlinson . . .

I figure in high season a cemetery clerk probably has to deal with about a hundred people every day.

In high school we used this place as a running route, David said. I guess lots of people do, hey? I realized he was talking to the clerk, not me. I stepped back.

You mean us? Like me and you?

You don’t remember that? You used to steal my yellow sports Walkman and run up ahead and not talk to me.

Sort of?

I’m finding you weird right now, he said. He turned to the clerk: Don’t worry about her, she takes me for granted all the time.

Har, I said. For real. This is something I wanted to do?

For real. We used to follow the paths all the way from Bayview
up to Yonge Street. There’s a lot to look at. All the big Chinese mausoleums, you know? Seriously, you don’t remember this? You loved those things.

The clerk looked at me with her lip half-curled, but in a nice way. The way you smile at a little kid when they’re being funny and they don’t even know.

The jogging seemed vaguely familiar. And the mausoleums. They’re all green and gray and raw looking, with lions outside them. I’d kind of forgotten.

The clerk leaned over the desk and handed me a map of the cemetery. Here, she said, drawing in a couple of X’s in red pen. Can you find your way?

I didn’t move, or say thank you or anything. David went over to the doorway and held it open, waiting.

Anything else? She had her red pen in hand, ready for action.

And Lianne Gagnon.

I hadn’t planned on this, but as soon as I said Lianne’s name the clerk gave me a nice smile and marked the map in a third spot. She didn’t even have to look it up. People must come looking for murdered girls all the time.

Thanks, I said, turning back toward the door. David was half out already, with his hand up in the air like he was checking the weather.

Be careful, the clerk said.

I turned to look at her. She had her head down in a Rolodex of the dead, and didn’t look like she’d said anything at all.

L
andscaping-wise, a cemetery is just a big, gentle park. That’s why kids like them. If this were a movie, right now we’d have a sunny moment of children bike riding up the path, between the grass and the tombstones. The music would be a little off. Or else it would just be happy music, but with the sound of bees mixed in really low to give you a feeling of dread like in
The Exorcist.

Lianne and I used to play all kinds of places that weren’t for playing in. We climbed the crab apple trees in the Bethel Baptist churchyard after Girl Guides. The church was across the road from Cecilia Chan’s house. Her sheepdog, Dusty, raced around scaring the other girls while Lianne and I scraped our legs up sitting in the branches. We made Heather Bowman stand guard under the tree. We were climbing in our blue uniform dresses and didn’t want anyone coming along and looking at our underwear.

We walked along the tops of the garages in the alley behind Lianne’s house, and lit matches up there when we could get them. The garage roofs were all shingled with tar. It was a soft, warm place to sit in the summertime. When you got up, you had black smudges all over your fingers and on the bum of your shorts. Lianne said if we held our hands against the hot tar for long enough, our fingerprints would burn smooth. You could commit any crime and never get caught.

My parents thought Lianne’s family were a bunch of hippies. In the first grade, she came to school on picture day with a rip in her pink nylons and the teacher told her she looked like a welfare kid. Doesn’t your mother have any clean clothes for you? She had three brothers and a baby sister and when you went to her house, there was always old food and plates on the kitchen counter, like they were all in the middle of making dinner when a tornado warning happened and everyone had to go sit in the bathtub. Her parents were the superintendents of a nice low-rise, which gave them free rent. The kids shared the bedrooms and the parents slept on a pullout couch in the living room. All the boys in her family were named after famous cowboys: Jesse, Cody, and Wyatt. Lianne said, Why didn’t her parents give her a cool Old West name? Like Zerelda after Jesse James’s mother, or Bonney, which was Billy the Kid’s last name. The baby’s name was Clementine. When she turned seven, Lianne had a sprinkler party. I wasn’t allowed to go because my mother said no one would be watching us and we’d run out in the street and get smacked by a bus.

In the springtime, right before Lianne disappeared, her mom gave us her Bay card and told us to take the baby for a walk and buy ourselves cheeseburgers in the store cafeteria. We walked up Davisville to the subway and bumped the stroller down the stairs to the train platform. Downtown we used the credit card for lunch and tried on lacy bras and pretended we were teen moms. At my house, I couldn’t go into my own bedroom for longer than five minutes without someone knocking on the door and asking if I was okay.