The Devil You Know: A Novel (35 page)

The shot from a .22 will strip the pelt right off an animal that small. Something David told me years ago, when we were alone in his house on Rumsey Road.

I skimmed through the other contact sheets I’d pulled out of the box. More cottage pics. Lots of black-and-white. A few city views I recognized, panoramas of Yorkville in the ’60s. The Sears Tower. Kensington Market.

Hasn’t changed much, has it? Patton said.

I buy coffee there all the time. I showed him with a finger. This place on the corner. You can see the bins of stuff in front of the spice vendor next door.

The last sheet had four wide-angle shots on it, each one extending the whole width of the page. Crop marks drawn on in thick black marker.

What are these? I squinted.

I used to sell to local press, Patton said. Freelance this and that.

Neighborhood shots.

Kind of like that.

Each thumbnail was cut off, a smaller rectangle or square drawn around a given section to show which part of the photo to print. The rest of the shot had been blacked out with an X or scribbled line. I looked closer. The top two were street scenes. The two on the bottom were of a bunch of kids in front of a house. Printed small like that, the kids looked like heads on sticks. They looked like puppets. I angled the sheet to catch better light. More like teenagers than kids.

The drug raid photo from the newspaper. The same photo I had sitting on my desk at home.

You took all these, I said.

You caught me.

I twitched. Nothing about his face had changed. He looked like
a guy in a bar, trying to buy you drinks you don’t want. No. Trying to get you to want them. I shifted slightly away and looked back at the sheet in my hands.

Photo credit. That’s why Patton’s name had come up on the search. A thick crop line boxed off the part of the picture I knew. To the right of where my mother stood, a black X obscured whatever else had been in the original shot.

Whomever else.

I shuffled the page quickly to the bottom of the pile and held up the cabin pictures again. Something about his look made me want to hide.

These are nice, I said. You’re in Muskoka, right?

Fuck no. He shook his head like I’d said something laughable. No, Muskoka’s all city people. We’re up past Manitoulin. You take the boat over to Manitoulin and drive off, north, toward Sudbury. I’m between Espanola and Manitoulin.

I know Espanola, I said. Patton shrugged.

It occurred to me as I said it that Espanola was where the news of Cameron’s exhumation had been reported, that’s why it was familiar.

Little place up there, he said. Not in town. Near the Indian res. Place called Whitefish Falls.

My fingers went cold. Whitefish Falls. Where the dead man had been living. I got up and laid the pile of contact sheets back on top of the box where I’d found them.

Maxie! The dog got heavily to her feet and padded over to me. I can let her see me out, I said. I held on to the dog’s collar and led her down the stairs. David’s father followed me down and I held the dog between us.

Your cup, he said.

I handed him the coffee cup and he bent and set it down on the lowest step. I had to let go of the dog to pick up my coat and bag. As soon as I dropped her collar Maxie left me and went to the kitchen and started lapping up water from a bowl. The light had started to
flag outside. There were red stains on the wood floor next to my bag. I looked up the stairs, toward the landing window. The sun was lower in the sky now and it burned through the rosettes in the stained glass and the red light was projecting onto the hardwood. Patton wasn’t speaking. The sound of the dog’s tongue, slapping against the water in the bowl, and the bowl sliding around on the tile floor, drowned out everything in the house. I slung my bag over my head so the strap would cross my body and looked around to find my shoes. The backs were still pressed flat where I’d stepped on them in the escape from Holt Renfrew. Graham Patton stood and watched me.

Nice shoes, he said. How much you have to pay for those?

I stared at him.

They’re sneakers, I said. So, you know. Average cost.

Sneakers. But you must like grown-up shoes. Don’t you, Evie?

I slid the shoes on and bent down to hook the crushed backs around my heels.

He sat down on the steps and spread his feet out on the wood floor and cocked his head at me. Lucky you didn’t walk out of Holt’s in those heels, he said. Those high heels you tried on. Make you flip and kill yourself in that crowd. His voice dropped. You see? I worry about you, Evie.

My body stiffened. Patton rubbed his knees and stood up. He walked up two steps and stood there, looking down at me. He raised two fingers to his temple, like a salute.

Back door’s unlocked, he said. You look like someone who wants to leave.

He turned and walked up the stairs, leaving me standing in his living room.

I picked my used cup off the steps and walked over and set it down on the blue-tiled kitchen counter. There was a six-burner gas stove wedged in the corner and the espresso machine and a bar-sized fridge. If Graham Patton had a real refrigerator, it was hidden away in a pantry or down in the basement, next to the darkroom
door. With less sunlight now the gray of the walls could have been concrete.

A joist creaked in the ceiling overhead. I listened for his feet on the stairs but the sound didn’t come. Maxie hadn’t followed him up.

The door closed behind me with a click. There was a rough path to the back gate tramped down in the snow. The worn tread on my shoes slid. Halfway across the yard I stopped and turned. Maxie had her paws up on the kitchen windowsill, nose against the glass. The second-floor window was dark. The dog threw out a couple of warning barks. If Patton was up there, watching me leave, I couldn’t see him.

A
ngie wasn’t in the newsroom. Vinh was stretched out at my desk, listening to the police scanner. It was after six. There was a half-empty two-liter bottle of Pepsi on the floor next to his chair. Condensation had loosened the label and he’d been peeling away at it piece by piece. It said PEP. I knew I was on deck to go back down to Niagara the next day but I wanted to talk to Angie first.

Nah, she’s home for the night, Vinh said.

He handed me two phone messages, scrawled on the little pad in his all-caps style and written using the last dying moment of a pen, by the looks of it:

Call Police Constable Job at 14 Division. He likes walks along the beach and wants to get laid.

Job from 14 Division. Dude seriously wants to see you naked.

Thanks for these, I said. You’re extraordinary. She leave me her keys?

He pulled open the desk drawers one by one. Take a look yourself, he said. I don’t see keys.

I rifled through the jumble of pens and paper clips and notecards in the top drawer.

Maybe we should divide up these drawers, I said. You take three and I’ll take three. Make it easier to keep stuff organized. We’d been sharing the desk since Christmas and this was the first time the idea had occurred to either of us.

I hear you got a peeper giving you a hard time, he said.

I looked at him. Oh?

He pointed at the scanner.

I hear all, I know all, Vinh said.

They say my name?

I just put two and two together, he said. You’re near Gladstone, right?

You’re really creeping me out right now.

Vinh threw his legs up on the desk.

I’m just fucking with you, he said. Angie told me.

I
found a spot a few cubicles over where I could make some calls, the phone cradled between my ear and shoulder. I laid the two messages from Police Constable Job side by side. Along the far edge of the desk there was a row of paper cups turned upside down, each with a pencil stabbed down through it. I didn’t remember who the owner of the desk was. The cup installation piece made me want to root through the desk drawers to see what other treasures might be hiding, but everything was locked up tight.

Where were you last night? David said.

Out ripping it up with my mom, I said. I slept at their place.

I would have come over, he said. What about tonight, what are you doing now?

There was a minimal evening crew in the newsroom. I’d offered to stay late and write a firsthand account of the bomb scare, but Angie said a pretend bomb at a Bloor Street department store wasn’t a high-urgency story. She’d told me this also by phone, from her house. Traffic terrorism, she called it.

Took me an hour and a half to get home. They wouldn’t let us out, she said. I could have walked in less time. We’re running a single paragraph about the subway shutdown. It’s A7, A6 tops. This isn’t New York. And I need you on Bernardo.

I told David about the bomb scare and he laughed.

When’s the last time you saw your father?

Silence.

I told you, David said. A week ago? Two weeks? And also: fuck you with this. Don’t do this.

I hadn’t mentioned seeing Graham Patton or being at the house or any of it.

I’m slammed here, I said. Can we do tomorrow?

Are you going to be able to sleep?

I crumpled the two messages from Job in my hand and fired them into the trash.

I’m a prize-winning sleeper, I said. Sleeping is actually the thing I do best.

I
left the newsroom and meant to head home. With the safety of a few hours between us, I kept looping the visit at Patton’s over in my mind. His cabin up in Whitefish Falls: the coincidence was upsetting. If Robert Cameron was the dead man they’d just dug up in northern Ontario, then there was nothing to worry about. Then it really was coincidence. So what? Patton has a cabin in the same place. So what.

Suddenly I was sorry I hadn’t found a way to pocket that contact sheet. If Patton was the kind of player he made himself out to be, he wouldn’t be sitting home on a Friday night. And if he wasn’t at home, then there couldn’t be much harm in checking to see if that sheet was still available. Plus whatever else I might find in his studio. A decent shot of Patton himself, something from the ’80s, something to compare against a mug shot of Cameron. I stopped thinking about where I was going and just went.

T
here was no car in the alley behind Patton’s house in the east end. The lights were all down.

I picked my way through the backyard. With evening, the
temperature had dropped a few degrees. All the slushy places had turned to ice and my feet slid around and caught in the ruts. There was a bang and a face in the door, but it was only Maxie. I tried the backdoor knob and it clicked a few times but stayed firm.

Two possibilities: find a hidden key, or else something more drastic. A crowbar. A garden implement. One of those fork things.

I had a mag light attached to my own key ring and I cast about near the doorway. Where do people stash keys? Under the mat. In the garden gnome’s mouth. Behind the smoothest rock in the garden, next to where the peonies come up in the summer. Maxie jumped around on her side of the door. If Patton was home, he’d have heard me by now. I stretched high on my toes and groped around above my head. Taped to the upper edge of the door frame. Under a loose piece of siding.