The Devil You Know: A Novel (6 page)

She locked up but I just stood there with my legs straddling the bike.

Which street did you live on, again? I said. On Brunswick, right? When you met Dad.

Brunswick, she said. She pointed across College Street. Up past the medical building. That wasn’t there then, she said. Up next to the parkette. Number 102.

You’re on my walk to work, I said. I took the copy of
Helter Skelter
back out of my purse and turned it over in my hands. I might just go get a coffee.

She clipped the helmet to her bike lock.

You have to thread it through, I said. So that it’s locked on.

No one is going to steal this helmet, my mother said. She stood back a moment, then slid the key back into the lock and rejigged the helmet anyway.

I, for one, could eat a blintz, she said. Three, in fact. Sure you’re not coming?

I’m sure, I said. Sorry.

It’s not a sorry thing. She gave me a quick salute, then nodded toward the book. Just be kind to yourself. You know why women read that stuff.

I know, I know. Vicarious living.

Don’t kid yourself, she said. It’s so we learn how to get away.

I
need you to compile some stats.

I’d been sitting in my cubicle at work, filling in the blanks in an article about city zoning issues infringing on existing businesses on St. Clair West. Newbie reporters are like caulking: stuffed into the cracks for the City page, or Lifestyle, or wherever the holes are big enough to be noticed on a daily basis.

Angie Cavallo was the news editor, this second-generation Italian tough cookie who kind of clawed her way through the glass ceiling. She didn’t so much break through as smash it with her skull. Then she crumpled a beer can on her forehead. Angie wrote the Page Three Opinion column and did more than her fair share of violent-crime reporting. It was also her job to assign me as required.

She leaned over the cubicle wall. She was eating an apple fritter out of a box and bits of white icing fell off the doughnut and onto my shoe.

I want to do a feature on women’s safety, she said. When Did Toronto The Good Go Bad? Go down to the archives, get together a dateline of every girl who’s gone missing since ’83. That Keenan girl right through to now, to the girl in Burlington and Kristen French last year.

Two summers before, a girl had gone missing near Niagara Falls. When she turned up later, it was her chopped-up body they found, in cement blocks in the lake. That’s who Angie meant by
the girl in Burlington
. Leslie Mahaffy. Kind of her own fault: she’d missed her curfew and gotten locked out of the house. There are remarkably
few places for a fifteen-year-old to go at three in the morning. She probably sat out on her own curb in the middle of the night. Tough love. The wrong person offered to give her a lift and she said yes.

This new girl—Kristen French—was from the same area and that always makes everyone nervous. Her tenth-grade school picture was on all the news reports: brown hair, big smile, blue background. It’s hard not to think about Lianne whenever stuff like this happens. Things got all mixed up in my brain, and I started thinking how much Kristen and Lianne really looked alike. I guess any smiling girl looks basically the same, if you think about it.

Those last two aren’t really the city, I said. More like St. Catherines.

Still counts, Angie said. She wrapped the doughnut up in a napkin and squeezed hard to compress it back into the little box. She closed up the box and dropped it on the floor. Then she stepped on it.

So I won’t eat the rest, she said. She looked down at the smashed box for a second and then bent low to pick it up again, letting it play back and forth in her hands in a contemplative way. Also do another list. From, say, 1960 to ’82. Just to show the trend. Maybe we can make a chart or a graph or something.

That’s a whole lot of time in the basement, I said. The archives were in the bottom of the
Free Press
building, in a kind of infinite, windowless room. I looked from the smashed doughnut box back to Angie. What did I ever do to you?

Get started down there, she said. Find something interesting, maybe I can get you better research privileges.

What about the Scarborough Rapist? I said. That’s not exactly missing girls. Still counts?

Sidebar, Angie said. See what you can find. She turned away, then stopped and handed me what was left of the apple fritter.

For God’s sake, she said. Save me from myself, would you?

B
asically what Angie wanted was a dead-girls feature. Which is awesome, for obvious reasons. There are two categories: solved
cases and cold cases. The cold cases are interesting but you have to watch how far down into the news file you read. As you go back in time, there’s less care for the reader’s soul. There’s a six-year-old who was killed in 1980, two years before Lianne. I know it happened but I’ve never read about her. It’s a case I’ve been encouraged to avoid. I generally catch myself just in time. I have a mental list of stories to steer clear of, as handed down to me by the therapist and my mother and David over time.

A lot of what I did for the
Free Press
was background research. Statistics. The archives were my playroom. Whenever you see a feature article that has a split byline—by Walter Smith, with files from Joe Blow and Arlene Black? My job was the “with files from.” I liked to think of myself as a context provider. You end up looking at a lot of lists.

Report Femicide, that’s a good one. Femicide started keeping track of women killed by their intimate partners—husbands, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends—after the shooting in Montreal, at the engineering school. I haven’t run a stats analysis on this, but I can tell you just by eyeballing it, having a boyfriend who hits you makes you way more likely to get killed. And if you’re going to get killed, chances are it’ll be via stabbing. Among violent ex-boyfriends, stabbing is numero uno.

It’s more about damage than death. It’s hitting with a knife. It’s about wrecking the thing you can’t have. Death is a side effect of the wrecking.

The ’80s had their fair share of dead girls, it turns out.

S
harin’ Morningstar Keenan in 1983. That one they found stuffed in the fridge, after a long morning on the last day of a house-to-house search. She was in the last room they saw before lunch break. One of the cops stopped to talk to a neighbor in the hall and his partner noticed that a corner of the carpet was jammed up against the fridge. He almost missed it.

The room was empty, he said. The bed was made. I just went to open the fridge like you would. Casually.

The door was jammed and he could only open it a few inches.

Right away, he said. Right away I saw a garbage bag with a white shirt in it. I thought, Who keeps their laundry in the fridge? The little light didn’t go on inside, when I opened it. So I had to force it a little more, you know, and then I saw her hair.

You can’t believe how shiny her hair was, he said.

Sometimes I don’t stop myself in time.

M
ost of the time I was down in the basement, I was on my own. Sometimes you got another newbie reporter doing someone else’s research, or else one of the veteran columnists—newsbrats, guys who grew up writing stories. They don’t like anyone else touching their byline. Angie was only like that about her column. She’d come down here and stretch out on the cold linoleum when it was hot in the summer. The floors were speckled and smelled vaguely of bleach. In the winter there was that smell of burning dust as the heat burned through the ductwork. It wasn’t a social space. There was no library coziness. It was a warehouse for old stories.

The door opened onto a set of work tables, set loosely in rows. Most of these held microfilm readers, but a few had computers sitting on them: boxy, plastic monitors on top and the motherboards hidden underneath, off to one side where you wouldn’t kick them by accident. The archive spanned back, far behind the desks. Rows and rows of those gray, metal shelves you expect to see at the hardware store or in the tool room at an auto body shop, only instead of jars of nuts and bolts and piles of cleaning rags, these shelves had a hundred years of newspaper records sitting on them in microfilm canisters. There were a few freestanding rolling ladders, so you could reach the top shelves. Overhead fluorescent lights, but I liked to leave them off. A big room like that feels emptier with the lights on. I had a camping headlamp that I used to comb the stacks. It was
my claim to fame: other reporters walked into this giant dark room and saw only my roving spotlight, searching for a file. When I sat down at a film reader, I brought a clip light from my desk upstairs and lit up just the area I was working in.

We all had our thing. My deskmate Vinh found an old wheelchair somewhere in the building and dragged it down here and it was the only chair he’d sit in. He wheeled around in tight circles and smoked cigars while he worked. He wouldn’t answer any questions. You’d say: Are you looking for World Series stats? And he’d just wheel around left or right, puffing away.

Clockwise means Yes, he told me upstairs. Counterclockwise means No.

The building’s giant furnace sat in the mechanical room right next door. So there’s the gurgle of the oil tank and the furnace thrums on and then the hot water moving up through all the pipes. I told Angie that when I was little I thought wolves lived in our basement at home and I’d run up the steps two at a time before they could grab me by the heels.

Then when I was twelve, I said, I read in
Tiger Beat
that Madonna grew up imagining devils lived in her basement. So she also ran up the stairs two at a time.

What are you guys, twins? she said.

Angie started working for the
Free Press
when she was a teenager. She walked into the mailroom on a Friday afternoon and never went back to school the next Monday morning. It was 1961, when people did stuff like that and got away with it. If I’d set out to impress her, dropping out of j-school and taking the job at the
Press
was kind of the best thing I could have done. Angie must have been in her late forties somewhere, but I found it hard to know for sure. She really came of age in the newsroom, so she walked and talked a lot like a guy. She wore golf shirts. The year before I met her, she’d gone to this Bulgarian cosmetician in Cumberland Court who tattooed permanent eyeliner onto her eyelids with a shaky hand—the result was a little slurry, like Angie had woken up hungover and put
her makeup on too fast. You could say this made it more natural looking.