The Devil You Know: A Novel (3 page)

L
ianne was the track star, not me. She went to the City’s every year for sprints: one and two hundred, hurdles, plus a few jumps. My legs are long, so I was a good high jumper when I didn’t panic and stop short of the bar. You have to think about the jump but not look at the bar. You can see this as a metaphor for your whole life: if you remember that you’re jumping over something that could crash and hurt you, you probably won’t do it.

The gym teacher always made me run distance in elementary school because I was tall and sturdy and could go for a long time. She was Czech. Her name was Mrs. Jacek; she wore black-stripe Adidas pants and her basic speaking voice was a loud yell.

You’re big horse! Mrs. Jacek said, pleased both with me for being bigger than the other kids and with herself for noticing. I was five-foot-four in the fifth grade.

I wanted to be a hurdles all-star. I wanted to make that L-shape with my leg curved back and barely touch down before sailing off again. Lianne was five inches shorter than me and weighed eighty-three pounds. Every night I’d go to bed and pray to wake up four-foot-ten.

Varsity Stadium was where the high school girls went to train on Saturday mornings. If you showed up at the right time, the hurdles would be all set up and you could use them while the older girls cooled down. Lianne knew the coach from Jarvis Collegiate. He was a friend of her dad’s, so he’d let us in and give us ice to suck on when it got hot.

I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t him. Track practice was canceled that weekend for a school camping trip, and there were lots of witnesses up in Algonquin Park with him when Lianne was abducted. This is a fact I learned from the newspaper.

Lucky son of a bitch, my father said. In the mornings he’d make
me a soft-boiled egg and do the crossword while I combed the front section of the
Free Press
.

She was missing for twelve days. The newspaper reported on what the police had to say, which was not much. At school we learned
foul play.
Sometimes they’d find a witness, someone who’d seen her, or a girl of about the right age and description. Once there was an interview with a man who’d been walking home along Bloor with his groceries. He said it was hot, and he wanted to stop near the Varsity gate in the shade, but there was a man there and a little girl, talking.

Something seemed off, he said, but my hands were full. What could I do?

They never caught the guy, which is a shame, because they know who did it and traced him back to a rooming house in the east end. By that time he was long gone. He was an American, so there was speculation he slipped back across the border, or else disappeared somewhere up north. Sometimes his name still comes up in the news, like when one of the cops on that case gets promoted or dies.
Officer So-and-So was a meticulous investigator. He was frustrated throughout his career that police never managed to track down Robert Nelson Cameron, the suspected killer of eleven-year-old Lianne Gagnon
.

The school sent in some counselors to talk to us all for a day or so. That’s something I know because there’s a record of it, my mother says she signed a form. I don’t remember anyone coming to our class. Up until they found her, I really believed Lianne would be okay. I had a dream one night that I was late for school, and walked up the empty stairwell and into the second-floor hall. It was wintertime, and there was a line of boots against the wall next to our classroom door, and Lianne’s boots were there, too, and her coat, thrown across the hall floor, and I started running to see her because I knew she was back. I was a great believer in positive thinking. Later on, Cecilia Chan told me she didn’t cry the day they found Lianne’s body because she’d already guessed that Lianne was dead.

I never cried when Lianne was missing. I thought the only sure way to kill her was to slip, to let myself imagine for one second she might be dead. Every night I double-checked my closet. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled right inside so that I could see and touch the corners. I made sure my shoes were in a straight line at the very back, against the wall, so nothing else could fit behind them, then I crawled out and shut the accordion doors tight.

When I got into bed I said a little prayer over and over again:
Dear God, Thank you for everything you give me this day and every day. Please look after Lianne and keep her healthy and safe.
If I started to wave off into sleep I’d sit up and start over. I had to say the thank-you part first, so that I wouldn’t seem spoiled and demanding. I needed God to do what I said. We knew enough, we knew she wasn’t lost, we knew someone had taken her. I had a hard-nosed faith in the world. I wanted her back, damaged and alive.

O
n June 4, a lady named Alice May was walking her dog through the trails in Taylor Creek Park and found Lianne lying facedown in the mud. The dog found her. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her body was all wrapped up in an Anheuser-Busch duffel bag and there was a leg sticking out of the bag. I read all of this in the newspaper. Where she was, who found her. There were other interviews: a Tamil family that lived in the same rooming house as Robert Nelson Cameron said they heard her screaming, but they were illegal and too afraid to call the police. Besides, who knows why a kid screams?

The way her body looked told the police a lot about what had happened. Last year I asked my mother how she could possibly have thought that was a good idea, letting me read the news.

T
here was a funeral that we all went to. I went along with Cecilia Chan, in the back of her mother’s Pontiac, and we spent the
whole ride there turned around in our seats, making faces at Alex Hsu in the car behind us. Alex sat next to me in class and we were going out in the way that fifth graders go out: so, barely talking but making each other miserable all the same. When you think about the shock of grief, the way a funeral is just a shit show for others to look in on, how you’re not even in mourning yet, you can’t be, but there’s that immense pressure to look the part? That goes about a hundred times for kids, but with a hundred times less awareness. I’d never known a dead person. I’d been to two Jewish weddings where the brides wore hot pink and one regular wedding where my uncle married a Mexican girl and my father got drunk and did a hat dance. That was the closest I’d come to ritual. Cecilia’s mother had to go to the funeral because she taught at the school and Lianne’s little brother was in her class. It felt very similar to a field trip: we were there all together, with parent volunteers, and teachers telling us to please be serious.

In the course of the ceremony, the minister asked Lianne’s friends to come and pay their last respects at the coffin and I got up and walked to the front of the church. The only other kids who came up were Alex Hsu and this Australian kid, Lachlan Armstrong. Neither of them had been particular friends of Lianne, so I was surprised. Later Mrs. Chan told me that the school principal had chosen just those two to represent Lianne’s friends, because they were less likely to be traumatized. Once I was up there, I wished I hadn’t gone. We were on stage. Lianne was dead and everyone thought I was trying to show off. I remember I was holding a red candle and the boys were standing next to me moving their feet around and making a noise against the thin carpet. I looked down and Lianne was lying there in her Christmas dress, polished white and still.

That last part is another confabulation. She screamed and screamed, and he stuffed an old shirt in her mouth and then he strangled her until her neck broke. The casket must have been closed.

W
here were my own parents in all this? They got up with me on the funeral morning and my father ironed my navy-blue dress and then he went to work. My mother had a fierce self-protective instinct. A firm believer in auto-determination. That means she thought I’d better learn to deal with this on my own. She’d seen a lot of harsh things growing up in northern Ontario and then as a teenager alone in Toronto that she’d never gotten over. When I asked her, last year, why they had allowed me to spend months reading the details of my friend’s rape and murder in the daily newspaper, she said: We couldn’t stop you.

It’s likely that she really does think this. I was a precocious reader and following the story would have given me a sense of control over what had happened. Knowledge is power, right? There’s a basic neglect inherent to this style of parenting. I was a small adult from an early age. The same therapist who explained what
confabulation
means also advised me to never read the news when it’s about little girls getting abducted, or older girls like me getting raped or killed. She told me this while I was in j-school.

I write those newspaper stories, I said.

She shrugged. That’s all about control, too.

All through high school I could barely cope with riding the bus, even during the day, because out in Scarborough that’s where girls were getting raped. At bus stops.

I walked everywhere. It’s like when you go to a movie: they talk about suspension of disbelief. I don’t have any disbelief, it’s in permanent suspension. The good thing about working in the newsroom is at least now I’m the first to know. Any kind of awful thing humans do to one another seems plausible to me.

It must have been a tremendous relief for my parents when Cecilia’s family offered to take me to Lianne’s funeral along with them. There’s not a lot of reality wiggle room at an event like that. Kids’ funerals tread a funny line: people bring flowers and teddy bears and balloons and everybody eats cake afterward. It’s a lot like a baby
shower, except for the horror. It was a well-publicized case, so the church was packed with strangers.

After the memorial we drove to Mount Pleasant Cemetery and watched them lower the coffin into the ground. The funeral director gave all the kids white flowers. You were supposed to toss the flowers onto the coffin as it was going down. There was a ring of children standing around the grave. Some of them were Lianne’s real friends from school and some of them were her cousins from Quebec, and some of them were just kids who’d read the story in the newspaper but didn’t know her at all, and we were all standing there holding the same pretty white carnations. I was counting the faces in each row and how many rows there were and doing multiplication. In my own hand, the flower stems pressed tight against the insides of my knuckles so I couldn’t lose them and then it was too late: the coffin was already down and a couple of men with spades were throwing great shovelfuls of dirt onto it. We’d spent all morning waiting. The dirt knocked the other kids’ carnations off. The flowers looked like dirty Kleenexes, like someone had kicked over a garbage can.