The Devil You Know: A Novel (39 page)

I had a quick flash of fire escape man as I’d imagined him, pacing the hall, waiting for me to get home.

He was behind me. Any moment I’d feel him there, his hand over my mouth. Quick. What will you do then. Bite down. Get your elbows back. If you can turn around, you can break his nose with the hard base of your hand. You can go for the eyes. The eyes are soft and will hurt him.

He was in the bathtub, bleeding to death. He’d sliced himself open in my house, knife marks scored long down the veins from inner elbow to wrist.

Deep breath.

I
checked the kitchen first and then the bathroom. Everything was in order. Soap in the soap dish. The floss I’d used a few nights earlier still in a tangled pile on the edge of the sink. The kitchen just as I’d seen it from outside. Untouched. The little red light on the answering machine blinking. Five missed calls.

In the bedroom the dresser drawers were all shut and inside, the shirts and pants and underwear in piles. Folded. Nothing taken from the closet. All the CDs in the rack, or strewn on the floor near the stereo, wherever I’d left them. Not a thing was out of place. If he’d picked up a trinket to feel the weight of it in his hand, he’d put it back exactly where he’d found it. Nothing was missing. It was like someone had broken in just to teach me a lesson, and the lesson was,
I can
.

Or the lesson was,
You break into my house. I break into yours
.

If Robert Cameron was dead in Whitefish Falls, then he wasn’t hiding out as Graham Patton. Then the man on the fire escape was just a Peeping Tom, then the break-in was a crackhead. There is such a thing as coincidence.

I lay down along the edge of the bed.

This is fucking stupid, I said. You probably left the door open yourself. I said this aloud, to test the theory.

Option A: Graham Patton is actually Robert Cameron and has been stalking me on my balcony. Hiding in plain sight for eleven years. Until now. My mother knows this, or at the very least, suspects it to be true.

Option B: Graham Patton knows both Robert Cameron and my mother. My mother knows Graham Patton awfully well. The dead man in Whitefish Falls is not Robert Cameron. Robert Cameron has returned and is stalking me, and has maybe broken into my house.

Option C: Robert Cameron is dead and has been so since 1985. Whatever exchange occurred between my mother and Graham Patton, over past debts, is old news. The guy on my balcony is a coincidence. The break-in is also a coincidence.

Option D: I could keep going but what’s the point. If Robert Cameron is dead, shouldn’t I feel safer?

At that moment, the phone rang next to my head. I sat up and stared at it. I’d forgotten I keep a phone in the bedroom.

T
he first thing Job said was, I’ve been trying to reach you since last night. He said he’d spoken to my landlord. And the guys upstairs, he said. I thought you should know. In case any of them change their behavior.

This didn’t make a lot of sense to me, since if he’d wanted to warn me about it, he would have done it in advance. But it felt nice to have a voice on the other end of the line. My front door was still standing wide open.

Yeah, I said. I saw my landlord. He doesn’t like having the police around.

I wanted to give you the heads-up yesterday, Job said. So you wouldn’t be surprised.

I’ve been away, I said.

I almost said: I crashed at my friend’s house instead of coming home, but suddenly thought better of it.
Away
seemed like enough information.

I banged on the door, Job said. But you didn’t answer.

Hold on, I said. You were here yesterday?

Yeah, he said. On my way into the station. You sure you were away? You’re not afraid to answer the door or anything, are you?

What door, I said.

Your door. Do you answer the door still?

No, I mean, what door did you bang on, upstairs or downstairs.

Down on the ground. Right? Even in uniform I can’t just go walking into houses like that.

Okay.

So, do you answer your door?

It took me a second to register this.

What? I said. Oh, yeah, I guess I do. Yeah.

This was a lie. If I’d been home the night before and he’d banged on the door without calling first, no way would I have gone downstairs to answer it.

Someone forced the door here, I said. But it’s the upstairs door. I don’t know. I might have left it open myself, but I don’t think so.

Did you file a report?

I didn’t answer.

Evie? There was a kindness to his voice that made me uncomfortable, the way a guy can sound before he touches your hair or tries to put a hand on your shoulder.

If someone was in here, I said. He didn’t take anything. So there’s nothing to report.

We can’t do anything unless you file a report, Job said.

I wanted off the phone.

Any more information on the guy up in Woodbridge?

We’re working on it. This is why filing a report is really useful.

I’m sick of feeling like this, I said. I just made a mistake. Forget I said anything at all.

I hung up. It was almost 7:00 a.m. An hour from now, a team of men in paper suits would be hard at work, paring away at a house in Niagara. That was where I was supposed to be. I was already late for that show. The break-in had delayed me. They start work early.

Six hours north of the city, there was a coroner who’d been assigned the job of figuring out once and for all who the dead man buried as Thomas Hargreave really was.

I picked up Angie’s keys.

T
he day after he dumped Lianne’s body in the woods, Robert Cameron drove the Caprice up to Tobermory. Let’s imagine the plan had been to jump on the ferry to Manitoulin Island and head off toward the Sault from there—this would be the fastest route—but the heat and good weather had meant a shotgun start to tourist season. Cameron wouldn’t have liked the idea of sitting in a long ferry line. Maybe he’d passed three cop cars between Little Cove Park and the ferry dock and skimmed through a speed trap before he knew it was there. He changed his plan and backtracked all the way down to Owen Sound and around the harbor and came up the long way, on the road, through Sudbury. About five miles out of Tobermory he’d passed a sign for a place called Cameron Lake. The name must have given him a smile. He got off the highway, stopped the car, and threw his old ID into the water. We know this part for sure. Cameron’s American driver’s license was found washed ashore when the lake receded later that summer, the hottest on record for forty years.

Let’s say he stopped at a diner in Espanola around twelve or one o’clock and ordered a hot hamburger with gravy. He’d been driving since maybe 4:00 a.m. on a few cigarettes and the remains of the pot he’d taken off the kids back in Toronto. He finished his plate and ordered a second and a side of onion rings. When the waitress brought him his bill he pulled out a wallet he’d been saving in his
back pocket for a few weeks. The stolen credit cards had gone into the lake with his own ID but he was holding on to the driver’s license and anything else with a name on it. He counted out the girl’s money in cash.

Thanks, mister.

I’m Tom, he said. Tom Hargreave. Practicing the new name. But keep on calling me mister. He curled his lips up at her like he was friendly. The girl was maybe fifteen or sixteen and had been waiting on truckers for a year already, so bad come-ons didn’t faze her. Bad tips did.

We know from recent police files that a man named Thomas Hargreave was in the diner that day and that he stopped to gas the car on his way out. We know because he got to chatting with the man at the next pump over. Jim Loney needed a driver for long runs north, into Quebec. Rouyn-Noranda, Abitibi, mostly. Mining supplier. Did Hargreave know of anyone looking for that kind of work?

Loney gave Tom Hargreave the job on the spot and rented him a room besides. The Loneys lived in Espanola but they had a place in Whitefish Falls and that’s where the room was. Hargreave drove for Loney for almost three years. Then he got unreliable and Loney contracted the trucking out to a guy in Timmins, name of Mario Laplante. Laplante got on better with the Frenchies anyhow, Loney said.

About four days before he died, Hargreave walked into Loney’s office looking for him to sign some disability forms. He needed money.

Hargreave turned around and pulled up his shirt, Loney said. He’d told his wife, Marietta, about the visit when he got home that evening. Marietta was shoveling creamed peas into the baby’s mouth. When Loney told her about Hargreave pulling up his shirt she made a face.

Man’s got a lump half the size of his own head, Loney said, growing out of his back. Right here. He twisted an arm around to his own spine to show her where the lump was.

He’s only just applying now? Marietta said. Government’s in no hurry to help you out. It’ll be six weeks before he sees a check. How’s he going to pay the rent?

Jim Loney dropped into a chair and took the spoon from Marietta’s hand. He made the spoon an airplane for the baby’s peas. He said they might as well start looking for a new tenant, anyhow.

Hargreave didn’t have six weeks left in him, Loney said.

S
etting out for Espanola, I had a case of nerves that was not much different from playing hooky in high school, where every time you start to relax you think you see your mother or your vice principal out of the corner of your eye and your whole body freezes up again. In senior year we’d skip school and ride the Queen car all the way out to the Beaches for the day so there was no chance of getting busted. We sat in the bandstand in Kew Gardens and did party tricks. Melissa learned to hold a lit Zippo lighter to her open mouth and inhale so the flame sucked back into her throat and circled around and came out again. It was a thing the boys wanted to learn. She called it Breathing Fire. Fear me, she said.

Traffic was crawling down into the city on the other side of the median. Fifteen minutes north a high, looping silhouette rose into the sky, and another swell behind it. An outline of waves, curling and rolling, backlit. I came up on it fast. Roller coasters. The Minebuster. The Bat. There’s a moment where you think the road will take you through the amusement park, right under the spiral of track. In winter, the coasters draw a line between ghost town and city’s edge, white and skeletal and abandoned, but once you get up beyond Newmarket it’s easy to settle in.

The commuters slowly disappeared. There are ski hills near Barrie; the lifts were moving like worker ants, up and then back down in an even stream. You could see the moguls, with specks starting and falling back; the specks were early morning skiers. Farmers’ fields on both sides of the highway. They hadn’t had the
same thaw up there and where there was no stand of trees to one side or another a sheer and equal curtain of light snow blew across the windshield.

The fastest way to Espanola is to take the boat to Manitoulin and then drive off the land bridge on the north side, but the boat doesn’t run over the winter. The other way is to stay on the 400, up past Honey Harbour. You let it turn into the 69 at Killbear, and then on and up through Sudbury. It’s close to six hours if you drive straight through. At French River I pulled over on the big bridge and got out of the car and looked down. There’s another bridge farther down inside the park. Two snowmobiles zipped along it and I could see them because they were red in all that snow, but I couldn’t hear them. The river was frozen, with a thin current of running water straight down the center of it and more snowmobile tracks at the edges. A transport truck blared past me going highway speed and I turned around and held my back to the bridge rail and stretched my arms out. There was another truck in the distance and I stayed like that and let that one rush past me, too, stray snow swirling off the top of the cab. The snow looked like confetti but it stung.