The Devil You Know: A Novel (21 page)

I could absolutely be a Sherpa, I said.

I think you’d be happier as a Sherpa, David said.

I’m a clam.

You’re making yourself crazy.

I’m onto something! I said.

I know, David said. You got a Nexis pass for Christmas and you haven’t been the same since.

I turned the little notebook over in my hand.

How long are you going to be here? I said. Student grazing.

I’ll be here. Why?

I want to go down to the archives and flip through city records, I said. I want to look at pictures.

Of course you do.

Don’t be like that.

Like what?

I had the drug raid photo in my hand, with Robert Cameron’s alias—Arthur Sawchuk—written on the back of it. My mother standing on the front porch of the house. I looked at the two men in the picture, out on the front yard.

I just need an old mug shot of Cameron, I said. Something from the States. Then I could compare it to these two guys.

Here’s a wild and crazy thought: How about you just ask your mom?

We looked at each other for a hard moment.

I want to see what I can find by myself.

I stood up and David leaned over and hung his coat on the back of my chair.

You can’t control this, Evie.

I flipped the notebook open on the table and carefully folded the first page over and creased the fold with my hand, hiding his list.

They found Robert Cameron’s car in a factory parking lot in East York, I said. I didn’t know that before. A couple days after they found Lianne. Someone reported it abandoned, stripped like it was stolen. That’s information Nexis gave me.

You can’t own this, David said. You can’t research it away. It doesn’t matter how much you know or what new thing you find. You can’t write it over. You can’t make it not have happened.

He pulled a notebook of his own out of his pocket and tossed it on the table. The two notebooks matched. I closed mine up and slid it into my bag, then slung the bag over my shoulder. When I was at the door, David looked up and called after me:

Happy climbing, Sherpa.

I
still carried my expired j-school student card from the year before. I’d fashioned a fake registration date sticker for the back that showed I was a student for two more years, until 1995. A student card is a handy thing. Cheap movies, cheap transit, student rates at the Y. Library access on my day off. Where I had dial-up Internet at home, only the universities had high-speed service. I came down the escalator and flashed my card at the security guard and he leaned in and pushed the heavy door open for me.

Inside, there was a retrieval desk for archived paper and a wall of microfilm readers like I had at work, plus two computer stations. I sat down and reached around to the back of a monitor and flipped it on, then opened up the Telnet and waited to log on to LexisNexis. There was a dribble of traffic in and out of the room, picking up
holds from the archive desk. I pulled everything out of my bag and laid it all out in front of me: the photo, a few other printouts from home, bits and pieces of information about Robert Cameron. Taking stock. What might have happened versus What we know for sure. The screen blinked at me.

L
et’s say Cameron ditched the Mustang himself, behind the industrial mall on Laird Drive.

He could have busted in the windows with a piece of scrap he found lying around out there. He popped the hood and ripped out the battery, stashing it underneath an overturned grocery cart, then maybe he changed his mind and hauled the cart to its wheels, threw the battery inside, and pushed the whole assembly off into the ravine. It would have made more noise on the pavement than it did down in the bush. It was about three in the morning, but hot for May, and sweat ran down his back as he worked. He had another car waiting in the parking lot at the east end of Taylor Creek. A ’72 Caprice, olive green with beige panels that he’d bought off a Portuguese junk dealer in Etobicoke for three hundred bucks and a few cartons of American cigarettes.

This part we know for sure: He hiked out through the park, along the bike trails in the woods. There were a handful of teenagers drinking down in a gully. He walked along the ridge just above them. As he walked the branches brushed his shoulders and snapped back. He had heavy jeans on but his arms and face were getting scratched. The bag he was carrying caught in a bush and he heaved it forward.

He was moving steady, not turning his head. The soil on the trail crumbled away and dropped and rolled downhill, off the ridge. Cameron probably weighed two-ten, two-twenty. The group of kids flattened themselves to one side of their hiding place. Cameron knew they were there. He’d smelled the cheap pot they were smoking from a hundred feet away.

Shut up! Seriously!

The girls were afraid he was a cop.

He’d gone on another fifty yards or so when he decided to turn back. He was holding the bag on his shoulder with one arm over the top of it. The thing was getting heavy. He pitched it long and low off the trail, into the underbrush. The kids heard him coming back again.

He dropped down into the pit.

Who’s got a smoke for Smokey Joe?

They were caught red-handed with the weed and Cameron relieved them of most of it. One of the boys started making a fuss and Cameron cuffed him hard across the jaw and then he sat down and regarded them all.

He never said he was a cop, one of the girls said later. The only person she told was her sister, alone in their basement rec room at home. I thought we were all toast.

He stayed with them for maybe twenty minutes, puffing on a joint, then got up and climbed back onto the trail.

He had these awful ragged fingernails, the girl said. I couldn’t stop looking at his hands. He was just dirty. I don’t know if he lives out there or what.

Lives in the park? the sister said.

He’d climbed back up onto the trail and looked down at them all. The girl said she was halfway home in her mind. As soon as he leaves, we’re outta here, that’s what I’m thinking.

He just stood there stoned.

Lotta pretty girls out in the woods tonight.

That’s what he said.

NEXIS SEARCH:
ROBERT NELSON CAMERON ARREST 1969

I fooled around like that for a while, moving backward and forward in time. Nothing Cameron did prior to 1975 was big news. Every search led to a stream of birth and obit pages, other Robert Camerons, born in other cities to other parents, but no A-section
items. A single image, but it turned out to be a photo of the list of inmates released from the American prison Terminal Island in 1967, and the article itself was about one of the other prisoners on that list: Charles Manson.

I hadn’t been able to talk myself into reading my own copy of
Helter Skelter
yet. There was a fat photo section in the middle of the book that I’d spent some time with, mug shots and press clippings and court evidence photo records, the weird white outlines when the victims’ injuries were too graphic for a paperback you could buy off any newsstand in the country. They’d found a copy of the same book in Cameron’s room, stolen from the library, I remembered. After Lianne died. Just his way of catching up with an old pal?

New slogan: All the best psychos do time at Terminal Island.

I pulled out the photo I’d shown David and gave it another look. Chewing on it. The corners were already a little ragged. In 1970 my mother was seventeen years old. The age of bad decisions, I guess. Her hair seemed lighter or straighter than now, or maybe both. Would she have known my father yet? Yes, almost certainly. Although maybe not quite.

I tried to imagine a pre-motherhood version of her, stomping cockroaches and going on dates and listening to music and making rent month to month. The way she talked about those days, like a place she’d rather put behind her. It occurred to me she must have been frightened. Seventeen is young. The kind of fear she’d lived with on Brunswick linked up in my mind with how she’d seemed after Lianne died. Disappearing for hours. On high alert. She must have been scared then, too. Not a thing you associate with adults, until you are one. I couldn’t picture hitting her straight-up with all my weird questions, the way David suggested. Hey, Mom? So, remember Robert Cameron? The guy who killed my friend Lianne? Was he by any chance your roomie? Oh, and while we’re here on memory lane: I don’t suppose you can recall having a screaming fight with David’s bad dad in our living room, one time?

I didn’t want to open her up to that again. Not unless it was necessary. If I was honest, I didn’t want to open myself up to it. I needed her on my side.

I folded the photo in half and tucked it inside the notebook David had given me. My bag was in my lap. It was a little past noon. I leaned into the keyboard. I figured there was time for one last kick at the can.

Without a birthdate or middle name or mother’s maiden name, my search on David’s father came up like this:

NEXIS SEARCH: GRAHAM PATTON, TEACHER, TORONTO

MARCH 4 1991:
Local school hosts western science fair winners

OCTOBER 10 1990:
Secondary school teachers’ strike looms for Toronto

FEBRUARY 17 1989:
Computers in shop class? New world order for Toronto high schools

AUGUST 27 1984:
School renovations a boon for industrial arts teacher

JUNE 3 1983:
Inner City Angels balloon race lights up summer sky

MAY 11 1978:
York grads whoop it up on Alumni Day

Nice. Nothing I didn’t know.

NEXIS SEARCH: GRAHAM PATTON, LEASIDE, TORONTO

OCTOBER 10 1990:
Local teachers on strike

Thank you,
Town Crier.

NEXIS SEARCH: GRAHAM PATTON, TORONTO

Nil.

NEXIS SEARCH: GRAHAM PATTON, TEACHER, TORONTO, CRIMINAL RECORD

Nil.

NEXIS SEARCH: GRAHAM PATTON, TORONTO POLICE

MARCH 4 1970:
No charges in Kensington area raid

Hold up.

I looked over my shoulder like someone was playing a joke. There was a printer behind the archive desk and I added a new copy of the drug raid news item to my growing collection.

L
ook at this, I said.

David was poring over a thin-leafed course calendar in the study room where I’d left him a couple of hours before. He waved me off.

Let’s get a coffee, he said. No. A falafel. Let’s get a shawarma.

I waited while he packed up and we came out of the building and walked north to Bloor Street.

Remember how I’ve been running those searches on Robert Cameron?

Wait. David stopped cold in the street. Are you telling me you have an interest in Robert Cameron, too? he said. Man! I love that guy.

I know, he’s the best, I said. And you’re a master of sarcasm.

All whimsy, all the time!

Now listen.

What’s next for us, Evie? David said. He strolled out ahead, opening his arms up wide and almost clotheslining a couple of old ladies out for their daily. Don’t tell me. You also like long walks on the beach? Piña coladas?