The Devil You Know: A Novel (45 page)

T
he search at Bernardo’s house in Niagara went on for seventy-one days, but Angie pulled me off the story and swore she’d never loan me her car again. Within a month I’d left the job and moved on to a different city in a different province, anyway. A judge handed down a publication ban that meant that for almost two years only police, media, and the victims’ families had any real awareness of what would be uncovered in that house. People were dying to know the details. My father’s hygienist drove from Toronto to Buffalo for a copy of the local paper because she’d heard they were publishing what Canada couldn’t. A kind of horror the public only thought it wanted access to. Mike Nelligan, the other first-year reporter, stayed on the story and told me later he became a fast alcoholic, drinking hard every night of the trial.

Despite a handful of updated warrants, that search squad never found a thing. In late April they called it quits. On May 6, Bernardo’s lawyer, a newbie with little experience in criminal law, retrieved a set of videotapes Bernardo told him were hidden behind the light fixture in the bathroom of the house. They’d been there the whole time. It would be more than a year before these tapes were finally handed over to the presiding judge as evidence. By that time Bernardo’s ex-wife had brokered a successful plea bargain. Paul
Bernardo himself was sentenced to life in prison in 1995. For what it’s worth, they declared him a dangerous offender. He goes by Paul Teale now, a name he stole from a fictional serial killer in a movie he used to like.

The house in St. Catherines was bulldozed. They’ve built a new house there instead.

A month after that night in his father’s cabin, David left to train as a wildfire fighter in northern Quebec and I quit my job and went along for the ride. The ride was a blue VW van with a pop-up bunk built into the roof. He found it in a parking lot on Dundas West with a For Sale By Owner sign in the window. If you wanted to lie down you had to step up onto the driver’s seat and hoist yourself up like you were hopping a fence.

We went back to the apartment on Gladstone just once, with a vanload of empty boxes and garbage bags and I folded up my clothes and fit them tightly into two suitcases. I had a few boxes of books. We left the shelves and the old bed frame on the curb and when we drove by the next morning I saw that someone had already hauled them away. There was no damage, no evidence of any new break-in. A few months after I left the city Angie sent me a clipping from the
Free Press
: Balcony Stalker Attacks Two Women in Parkdale. There was a police sketch and a limited statement from police that used vague terms to describe the assaults. Angie had written in the margin in pink pen:

Your guy?

I don’t know. It seems hard to believe I’ve walked away twice.

T
here are things I’ve kept to myself, parts of the story I withheld when I was relating it, later on, to my parents. Whatever the truth is about my mother and Graham Patton, for one. Whether it was a simple exchange of goods, money for a set of nudie pics, or a more complicated affair. This has required careful reconstruction on my part. Some secrets are worth keeping.

It’s possible my mother is aware that I know.

The day we drove home from Whitefish Falls, David and I curled up under the blanket at his house, down in the basement, and slept for three hours straight. Then we got up and went to see my parents. The house was warm. They had all the lights on, like they were expecting a visit from strangers. I shouted a warning as we came in, because of the dog, but their cat was already high on a bookshelf, hissing back. Maxie lay down with her ears flat and they watched each other.

My parents were making dinner and we sat at the table near the kitchen window and David reached over and drew little pictures on the steamed-up glass with his finger. I said we’d been to Espanola and back and my father was surprised. My mother had her back to me, stirring a pot of water so the noodles wouldn’t stick, and when I said this she turned slightly in my direction. Her head over one shoulder. Wary.

It’s not him, I said, and her eyes closed a moment and she turned away.

The radio was going on top of the fridge and it was someone talking about the symphony, what to expect, coming up next.

I told them what I knew: that the real Tom Hargreave had surfaced out west but this other man in the ground was not Cameron. The dead man was unidentified, at least for the moment. My father had been sitting at the table with us and he got up and pushed in his chair and moved closer to my mother.

The description fit, I said. Everything fit. Height, weight, personality. The timing of his arrival, even. Everything.

That doesn’t make him Cameron, my mother said. A description.

The coroner told me it’s not him, I said. It turns out the north is just a good place to hide.

More than one guy’s thought of it, David said. Over time.

My father reached over and around my mother’s body to get
a cutting board and they stood at the stove for a moment with their backs to us but slightly touching at the arms and shoulders, working on their separate tasks. My father inclined his head and said something to her that I couldn’t hear. On the radio there was music now, something loud and happy and Austrian-sounding, a waltz. My mother let her spoon rest on the pot’s edge for a moment and turned to him and touched his arm at the elbow. She let her forehead rest against his shoulder. They stayed there a moment and then she picked up the pot and poured the noodles and boiling water out over a colander in the sink. The steam rising fast enough that for a moment her face disappeared. She surfaced out of it like a long-held breath, her hair curling here and there in tendrils, at her ears and the edges of her cheeks.

I
t was February 28, 1993. Early that morning, while David and I cruised down the highway, a hundred and fifty federal agents stormed a compound in a place called Waco, Texas. This is what we watched on television in my parents’ living room that night, eating bowls of chicken Marengo and my mother’s buttered noodles off our laps. David and I cross-legged on the floor like children.

The agents had trained for the assault for eight months and they approached undercover, hiding out in livestock trailers. The siege was not a surprise. The cult leader, a man who went by the name David Koresh, had been tipped off by the presence of a hapless reporter who’d lost his way and stopped to ask directions. We didn’t know it that night, but the result would be a fifty-one day standoff.

On April 19, an M-728 tank with a battering ram punched an eight-foot hole in the front of the cult’s base of operations, a place known as Mount Carmel Center. The tank broke through and pumped tear gas directly into the building. There were undercover operatives in place at Mount Carmel Center and David Koresh himself could easily have been arrested by one of these men. He’d
thought of them as his friends. The Davidians had no clean water or electricity for six weeks and the gas and subsequent explosions killed at least eighty civilians, twenty of them children.

That kind of fear, the power of the word
cult
, is Charles Manson’s legacy.

Later still, a famous chemistry professor testified at the Waco hearings, comparing the resulting conditions to a Nazi gas chamber. He said the kids would most likely have been suffocated by the gas right away. Little was ever reported about the manner in which these children died. What you’ll mostly find are accounts of Koresh’s depravity, his child brides and guns. How young the girls were when he married them, how many there were, what kind of sex acts the little girls were told to perform.

We were still getting used to the narrative that constant, live coverage affords. A year earlier, we’d learned to watch missiles striking Baghdad targets in real time.

After a little while, David got up and took his plate into the kitchen and put Maxie on her leash. My father followed him out into the yard, and then David poked his head back in for just a moment like he was worried about leaving us alone.

Koresh himself was interviewed by CNN from inside the standoff before nightfall. I was in the living room with my mother when the broadcast aired and I saw her lean forward for just a moment and I realized she was studying his face.

He’s too young, I told her.

She shrugged.

Bad teeth, she said.

Touchstone Read Group Guide

The Devil You Know

This reading group guide for
The Devil You Know
includes an introduction, discussion questions, a Q&A with author Elisabeth de Mariaffi, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

In the vein of Gillian Flynn’s
Sharp Objects
and A.S.A. Harrison’s
The Silent Wife
,
The Devil You Know
is a thrilling debut novel about a rookie reporter, whose memories of the murder of her childhood best friend bring danger—and a stalker—right to her doorstep.

The year is 1993. Rookie crime beat reporter Evie Jones is haunted by the unsolved murder of her best friend Lianne Gagnon, who was killed in 1982, when both girls were eleven years old. The suspected killer, a repeat offender named Robert Cameron, was never arrested, leaving Lianne’s case cold.

Now twenty-one and living alone for the first time, Evie is obsessively drawn to finding out what really happened to Lianne. She leans on another childhood friend, David Patton, for help—but every clue they uncover seems to lead to an unimaginable conclusion. As she gets closer and closer to the truth, Evie becomes convinced that the killer is still at large—and that he’s coming back for her.

1. What was your first impression of Evie Jones? How did your trust in her account of things andher reliability as a narrator shift as her obsession with the missing girls’ cases and Liane’s murder deepened?

2. How is Evie affected by Lianne’s murder? How does it continue to affect her and the choices she makes as an adult? Do you think Evie’s fascination with serial killers is because of or in spite of her proximity to Lianne’s murder?

3. Compare and contrast the different parent-child relationships in
The Devil You Know
: Evie and her parents, Lianne and her parents, David and his parents. How does each parent’s decision affect the outcomes for his or herchildren? Think about the decisions about protection and safety versus independence and wanting what’s best for one’s child.

4. On
page 60
Evie comments on the seed of missing child cases: “You just need one adult to look away, and another one to look too closely.” How do you think parenting behaviors, such as letting your child walk home from school alone, have changed since the ‘90sin response to the dangers presented by adult predators?

5. How is Evie’s mother, Annie Jones, shaped by her tough upbringing? How does this change her behavior as a mother?

6. Consider the theme of public spectacle and media sensationalism: what does it say about our culture that we’re all obsessed with these violent crimes and missing girls cases?