The Devil You Know: A Novel (12 page)

Have you checked the children? And the phone keeps ringing, and it’s always the same voice.

Quit it, I said.

David’s voice got higher and louder. He sounded out of control. Have you checked the children? He was yelling now. So finally the girl is really mad and she calls the operator to report a crank caller. She tells the operator what’s going on and the operator says, Hold on. I’ll trace the call. And the girl hangs up.

David leaned back a moment and stared at me.

One minute later the operator calls her back. She says: Get out of the house. Get out of the house! The call is coming from the third floor.

What? I said. Oh, ew. Oh, yuck. Thanks for that. I wrung my hands like I could shake the story out of them. David just smiled a quiet smile, the kind with no teeth.

I
got up and went downstairs. The Pattons didn’t have a TV in their living room: it was down in the basement rec room. I opened the basement door and the stairs were dark and soundless and caked in soft pink shag. I closed the door again and sat on the couch instead. There were windows on both ends of the house but just a wall in
front of me. I looked at the wall, at a painting of a boat on a moonlit night, at the tall bookshelf. They didn’t have a dog. There was a sound in the stairway, a creaking noise, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming from the stairs above me or the ones down to the basement. I’d already decided the basement was bad news.

Have you checked the children?

David’s feet on the stairs.

Don’t do that! I said.

Evie? Did that really scare you? Did I really?

I’m all creeped out now, I said.

I can’t sleep, he said.

You have to go back upstairs, I said. No. Wait.

Do I have to go back to bed?

I wish you had a TV here in this room.

David came the rest of the way down the stairs and stood on just the last one, looking at me and holding on to the railing with both hands.

Want some ice cream? he said.

There’s no question that it was much, much nicer with another person in the room, even if that person was too small to help me in the event of a psychopath. David on the stairs made me stop thinking about a psychopath.

He scooped two bowls of ice cream and I combed through the records and put on Carly Simon and tried singing like I was having a great old time. I pointed at David:
I’ll bet you think this song is about you.
He spun me around so I was singing to the black windows.

We sat down on the carpet in the living room with our backs against the couch.

I didn’t think you’d really get scared, David said.

It’s stupid, I said. It’ll pass, I’m just being stupid.

Is it true your friend got killed? Evie?

Who told you that?

My dad says you’re jumpy because your friend got killed.

I’m jumpy? I said. I mean, it’s true. I was jumpy, but it’s not the
kind of thing you want other people thinking about you. You want other people to think you’re super together all the time, and just be jumpy in a secret, private way.

My mom wants a different babysitter.

Your dad’s a creepo, that’s why, I said.

My cousin drowned when I was two, David said, that’s why I have to do swimming lessons until I’m eighteen.

Well, my friend didn’t get drowned, I said. Someone stole her off the street and killed her and left her body in a park.

The Penetang Maniac, David said.

No, I said. It wasn’t. It was just a regular maniac and they never caught him. It was the Unknown Maniac. It was the Maniac Who Won.

David considered this a moment.

I hate getting in the car with your dad, I said. I wish my dad would come pick me up.

We sucked on our spoons. I thought about, How mad will his parents be to find David still awake when they get home? versus, How freaked will I be if I have to sit down here alone?

Am I going to get in trouble for letting you stay up late? I said.

We’ll see the headlights, David said. I’ll just run up when I see the headlights and pretend to be asleep. That way I don’t have to see them. He stopped for a minute. Are you afraid of my dad? Is that what you mean, about getting in the car with him?

I’m not
afraid
of your dad. He’s just creepy. He’s always asking me stuff like we’re pals.

It’s okay if you are. My mom is. My mom’s afraid of him. He makes her cry a lot. David had his eyes down and he scraped back and forth against the ice-cream bowl with his spoon.

My mom’s not really a crier, I said.

Yeah. Your parents aren’t like mine.

They fight, I said. I mustered up all my kindly babysitter tone for this. Everyone’s parents fight sometimes.

Nah. Not like this. My dad does some stuff downstairs. David
stopped for a moment. He takes pictures of girls, right? He says it’s like a job. I’m not allowed to tell my mom but sometimes she finds out. They scream and scream at each other, like he’s pulling her hair or something.

David had the spoon wrapped in his hand and he stabbed away inside the empty bowl and didn’t look at me.

But he’s not pulling her hair, right? I said. Not actually.

I thought of my own father, who was probably doing a crossword puzzle in front of the hockey game at home.

I don’t know, David said. Sometimes he gets mad. I mean, I get hit. I guess just like any dad hits a kid. This one time he pushed my mother and she fell down the stairs, but he ran right down after her to make sure she was okay. David set the bowl down on the floor and it rolled to one side because the carpet was so soft.

I should stop him, he said. When he yells like that. My mother cries so hard. I should do something, but I just stay upstairs.

I’m sorry, I said. David looked up.

I’d save you, Evie, he said. If anyone ever tried to hurt you.

Even if they were pulling my hair? I flipped my bangs. I have extra nice hair, you know.

Especially that. David dropped the spoon and it clinked in the bowl. Except my hair might be nicer than yours. He shook his head around. Seriously, check it out.

I put my own empty bowl down on the carpet and leaned in.

The Penetang Maniac was up in jail at Penetanguishene, I said. He was in the part of the jail that’s for the criminally insane. I heard this story when I was camping up near Midland, I said. So imagine we’re out in a tent.

I can make us a tent, David said.

It doesn’t matter. I picked up my spoon and held it out in front of me. He has a sharpened hook on one arm instead of a hand, I said. He can slice a tent open. After he escaped they found him in the woods, huddled over a deer, eating its guts raw. He had to lead them to the bodies. He’d chopped them up that small.

David sucked on his teeth. He was wearing pajamas with cars on them. I was wearing jeans and shoes inside the house, like a grown-up.

If you have to get into this kind of competition, you want to make sure you win.

E
ventually even David’s parents had to admit he was too old for me to be babysitting him. When he was twelve they split up. For a while he barely saw his father at all, but as David got older they started meeting up more often. Every now and then I’d hear about it: My dad called. I have to go drink my bimonthly lunch date.

We went to the same high school and David still hung out with me, but secretly. He came into the ninth grade when I was in eleventh. The first day of school he walked over and gave me a big smile, and I had to remind him that our friendship was more of a private-type friendship, and not a public-spaces type friendship.

At home, he’d double me on his bike up and down the alley and through the side streets. I sat on the seat and he stood on the pedals with his skinny body curved around me like a banana. David always made me feel like a kid, a real kid, not a my-friend-got-murdered kid. The bike swung back and forth across the road in wild zigzags and old ladies honked and swore at us. We crashed on the grass, on other people’s front lawns. In a bush, once. Minor injuries. I was getting ready to apply to university.

Almost all the rest of the time I was pretending to be way older than I was. In the most basic ways I grew up anxious, with an anxious family. That makes it tempting to be a show-off and prove how brave you are all the time. This is how my mother has lived her whole life, like the best way to show you’re not afraid is to pick the scariest situation and purposefully put yourself right in the middle of that. Then you can save yourself.

Compared to everything else around me, David was relief.

W
hat kind of psycho would assign you a research piece on little dead girls?

My mother had the long-handled garden spade in her hand and plunged it into the slushy ice lining the driveway, then stepped down on the edge of the blade to break it into chunks. I’d been telling her about LexisNexis and how my finger was now on the pulse of international happenings.

You’re missing the point, I said. I can find out anything now. I’m like the ultimate snoop. I stomped some ice for her like I was Godzilla. I’m She-Ra of the News, I said. And I’m fine. Plus it’s my job. Plus? I’m fine.

Your father worries about you.

Well, I said. It’s a good thing you don’t. Otherwise I’d have no one to talk to.

Grab a shovel, my mother said. There’s a bottle of Baileys inside the house with my name on it. I’m willing to add yours, she said.

There are two kinds of snow shovelers in this world: meticulous, pickax shovelers like my mother, and then high-efficiency shovelers. My mother would be fine to stay out in the fresh air, working away for hours, so she uses a small shovel. The only other shovel my parents own is trademarked for maximum capacity. It’s capable of moving upward of thirty liters of snow at a time. I mean, if you can find someone with the muscle to push it.

It’s the Back-Breaker™.

My father’s car was missing, leaving a bald patch in the snowy driveway.

I’ll start there, I said.

He went in to deal with an emergency, my mother said. Six-year-old knocked his new tooth out ice-skating and your dad’s yelling, Throw it in a glass of milk! Throw it in a glass of milk! And this poor woman is on the other end of the line. Milk? Milk? They never speak any English.

I gave a solid push to the mound of snow I’d collected and tried to heft it against the side of the path, next to the garden. The shovel flipped up to show its underbelly: frozen garden earth, some limp chives, a dead sparrow.

Bird, I said.

My mother came over for a peek.

Still got its head on, she said.

My parents own a cat that’s famous for bird decapitation. You wake up with a chickadee’s head next to you on your pillow, like the cat is some kind of sharp-nosed feline mafioso and this tiny bird is his way of calling in debts, the warning before he blows out your kneecaps. Once my mother found him with a goldfinch cornered in the back pantry. The finch had two broken wings but it was still alive, bobbing and weaving like a shaky Muhammad Ali fighting The Hulk.

She scooped the stiff little body up with her spade and moved it off the path, dropping it into the softer, fresh snow in the flower garden.

So who’ve you got, she said. She gave her shoulders a little stretch back. Her head tilted up toward the sky. Besides Lianne.

Lianne is old guard, I said. Lianne is from the time before. Toronto officially goes bad in 1983. Did you know that?

Long list?

I skim through, I said. I don’t read the details. Names and dates and basics. I only read the stuff I need to report, I said.

Basics, she said. Just the facts. She took hold of the spade with both hands and shook the snow off it a little. Just the facts ma’am, she said. Okay, let’s finish up and go inside. You going home to work?

I have this standard, amiable-type nod I can pull out at a time like this, where people know Yes I have to work, but also Yes I’m still good for one drink.

The look on your father’s face when he walks in and finds us rip-roaring drunk in the middle of the afternoon. She threw her shoulders into a final, radical ice-chopping pose.

I scooped another shovelful of snow off the sidewalk and glanced over to where my mother had set the sparrow. It was gone. In its place there was a little sinkhole in the snow where the weight of the body had borne it down and away, through the top layer of powder. Out of our sight.