The Devil You Know: A Novel

PROLOGUE

The first time I saw him it was snowing.

I was standing next to the stove, under the band of light shining down from the range hood, picking through a bag of spinach leaves and throwing the mushy ones into the sink. Outside it was white and pretty and there was just a little frost on the windows, along the edges. The kitchen faced out onto a patchwork of dark backyards sewn together with skinny, faltering fence lines. It was about nine o’clock but I hadn’t eaten dinner.

It was Sunday night, February 21, 1993. I have a sharp head for detail.

That winter I was a first-year reporter with a newsroom desk at a not-quite-national daily paper. Not even my own desk: I shared it with another new hire, a guy named Vinh Nguyen who sat out the overnights and left crumpled bags of Hickory Sticks in the pencil drawer. My mother loved and hated my job. She thought I got too close to it. Most news is bad news. Her opinion is that I lived a lot of bad news very closely as a child and enough is enough. When I was ten years old my best friend went missing and that’s what she’s talking about. You can look at this as bad news and it’s the understatement of your lifetime. It’s likely also the reason I started reporting the news. A balls-out way of handling trauma, wouldn’t you say?

My mother admits this is true.

I’d come on board as a summer intern with a year of j-school to go, but the job came up and I wanted to be working. The Free Press prides itself on its name: free to print whatever will sell this week. Larger type than the other dailies and all-color photos. None of that makes the newsroom any less exciting, though. There’s a soap-opera-addictive quality to the quick turnover. What will happen next? Reporters watch stories approach like heavy clouds. They roll up in fits and starts. The tension break is galvanizing.

A man named Paul Bernardo had been arrested four days earlier, and I’d spent the weekend camped out in front of his house in St. Catherines, watching the forensics team walk in and out the front door dressed in their disposable space suits. My job was to take notes on anything that looked promising.

It was a famous case. Bernardo had murdered two girls inside that house, teenagers he’d held captive for days before killing them.

The last girl, Kristen French, had gone missing back in the springtime—pulled into Bernardo’s gold Nissan 240SX in broad daylight, in a church parking lot, near a busy street. These are things we are told can’t happen. The police found her shoe, lying out in the open, as if there had been a struggle.

Kristen was the third in less than a year. Five months earlier, a fourteen-year-old named Terri Anderson had disappeared, her house only three blocks from the same church parking lot. Five months before that, Leslie Mahaffy, a girl from nearby Burlington, had also gone missing, but she was found within weeks, cut in pieces and the pieces encased in cement, in a nearby lake. One of the cement blocks had been too heavy to toss and lay resting near the shore. It was Leslie’s retainer that helped them identify her body, what was left of it. She was in ninth grade.

When Kristen French disappeared, the community shut down. Girls walked home only in groups of four and five. No one went anywhere alone. St. Catherines isn’t a big place. It’s not a rough town. The house that Kristen grew up in was middle class and ordinary. They found her body later in the spring, curled and naked and left in a ditch.

News of Bernardo’s arrest knocked the entire country to the ground. Back when I was in high school, the city had been haunted by a long, unsolved series of violent rapes. The media had given this attacker a nickname and the name was something I’d grown up with: the Scarborough Rapist, never caught, was front-section news for years. Now we learned that this, too, had been Paul Bernardo. The murders were only one part of a long, slow story that had taken years to roll in. He’d raped more girls than you could easily count.

In high school, the Scarborough Rapist was a thing we talked about, myself and my friends, teenaged girls. A presence larger than a real person, an eye that saw when you were alone and unguarded. Without knowing his name or what horror was to come, Paul Bernardo was the thing we thought about when we got on and off the bus in the evenings, or on our way home from dance class, or whenever a man walked behind us too long or too close.

I’d just spent my weekend watching his house from inside the locked doors of a blue hatchback. The part of the job my mother hates, on my behalf.

I wonder sometimes how much the thinking about it helps. I came home that night and stood in my apartment making dinner and listening for odd sounds, a creak on the stairs or hallway floorboards. You’re alone on a dark street and the impulse is to keep checking: Is anyone following me? How about now? Your anxiety spikes, but then tapers off. The constant checking becomes your way of controlling the danger. If I keep looking behind me, into the dark, then there will never be anyone there. There can’t be, because that’s something that only happens in movies.

I figure it’s the one time you forget. Your mind is busy with something else and for just a moment you relax. You’re distracted by the smell of lilacs in someone’s garden or the look of the moon or some other daytime anxiety. That’s when he comes. And it’s your fault, for not playing by the rules.

There’s another way to look at this. Maybe it’s your own fear that calls him to you. You’ve imagined him so easily and so often, stalking you in the dark or hiding in your closet or in the backseat of a car in the parking garage. It’s like you want him. This fear sounds out into the night and somewhere, evil pricks its ears.

You’re ready for him. You’ve spent a lifetime practicing.

At home in my kitchen, my fingers were slowly thawing out. There was a dull pain down through my teeth and I noticed how hard I was clenching my jaw, or maybe had been all day, thinking of these things, and I worked to focus on the task at hand: the spinach I was picking over, and the promise of hot food.

There were other factors about that first night I saw him, but they were things I couldn’t put a finger on. The soft details. Things the police wanted me to know that hadn’t registered. That’s what they told me later, along with everything else. What sort of footwear did he have on? Boots or shoes, high or low, black or brown? Did the jacket have buttons or a zipper? Did I say he’d had both a hood and a cap? The hood pulled up or lying flat on his shoulders? I put their report, a thin yellow carbon, into the file box next to my desk where I keep all my other receipts and notes on stories.

I was living on my own for the first time and rode my bicycle from the office to assignments. I had to borrow a blue Plymouth beater from my boss so I could drive down to St. Catherines every day, to Bernardo’s house. My boss was the news editor, Angie Cavallo. Angie stayed downtown and loaned me the car because she knew the stakeout would take a long time and would largely be boring. She’d placed her own dibs on the courtroom and the press meetings.

My apartment was part of a chopped-up house just off Gladstone, in a neighborhood that was cheap and problematic. I couldn’t see Queen Street from my front door, but I could hear the sirens at night and the addicts yelling to one another, or to themselves. I had a side entrance off the street that led up a skinny flight of stairs. Inside my own door there was a hall and three rooms: to the right, the kitchen; to the left, the room where I lived and slept. Past the kitchen there was a bathroom with tiny black-and-white tiles all over the floor and wall, and a bathtub on legs where you could only take a shower. The tap had been co-opted, a long and slinky tube connecting it to a fixed showerhead above. Outside the kitchen a fire escape snaked up the exterior wall. Stairs from the back of the house and then a thin landing along my windows, then more steps to the third-floor apartment above. There were three guys living up there, Mexican medical students who always carried backpacks and avoided eye contact. One of them gave me a lift to the grocery store once, but he didn’t wait or come back for me and I never learned his name.

The main floor entrance was off the next street, around the corner, and it was occupied by my landlord, a mute Spaniard with three cats that were never allowed out of the house. When I first came to see the apartment he brought a notepad out of his pocket and wrote down his questions for me: Job? Parents? Money? Man?

He had a clubfoot that dragged behind him when he walked. He was dysphonic mute. That means he can make some noises, but the noises are like swallowed whines. He sounded like a barn cat that had been abandoned by its mother and learned to make sounds by imitating the lambs.

On my level, the black metal landing surrounded the back of the house. I could climb out and save myself in case of emergency. Next to the refrigerator, a door and a dead bolt led out to the escape. This was my way out. There were metal bars on the outsides of the kitchen windows, so nothing out there could get in.

I’d had a long, cold Sunday sitting in Angie’s car down in St. Catherines. On the way home I cranked up the heat until my fingers unfroze and my grip on the steering wheel slackened. I was driving against traffic. Office people were heading home to the suburbs or all the way down to Hamilton for the night. I drove over the skyway, past the steel factory exhaust towers. A line of cars led into the factory for the night shift, and then again at Ford in Oakville. I left the car at Angie’s place in the Annex and took the subway west and finally the Dufferin bus. There was an accident blocking the intersection at Dundas and the driver got out to buy himself a coffee while we were stopped, and I also got out and walked the last few blocks.

The heat from the car had worn off by this time. My bones were cold, and under my hat, my ears stung. There’d been a thaw a few days earlier but the snow was back in force now, falling heavily, and occasionally suddenly drifting in one direction or another with a gust of wind. Down your back or against your cheeks. It was cold enough that the snowflakes froze to my eyelashes and then melted there. I was in a hurry to get inside and crossed the bit of white lawn, diagonal, and snow got down inside my boots. Later, I couldn’t remember whether or not the landlord had cleared the path to my door. It didn’t occur to me to look for footprints.

I got home cold and hungry and put a pot of water and rice on the stove before I’d even taken off my jacket. Bits of snow fell on the floor and I stepped on them in my socks and then peeled the wet socks off and put on two new pairs, one on top of the other. I went back out into the hall and shook out my hat and coat and hung them on an old hook behind the door. In the kitchen, my hand went in and out of the spinach bag and the rustle of the cheap plastic gave me a little jump each time.

I didn’t have any music on. The sound of the bag interrupted the other listening I was doing, a kind of keen attention through the quiet to whatever else is out there. Only nothing was there. This type of listening is common among women. You’re alone and there’s that baseline drone of electricity powering up your house, and your whole consciousness is taken up with witness to that noise, the hum of no humans. You catch your own hand moving out of the corner of your eye and it surprises you.

I had a tiny chunk of pecorino crotonese from Gasparro’s that I planned to grate into the spinach and rice. I’d been in to pick up olives and flirt with the dark-haired son, who was newly married but enjoyed a little call-and-answer over the meat counter. The father and the uncle either shook their heads or joined in, depending on the day. They were gray-haired but not really elderly. There was a sway-back wooden chopping block in the center of the shop. They were busy at the block, wrapping loins and strip steaks, and the son told me they had to do the offal separately and scrub the block down so there would not be contamination. Between us, under the glass, a pile of calves’ livers slouched and glistened.

I grated the cheese into a bowl. I was making myself hear things. Mice in the walls. The burble of water through the rads. Steam from the rice pushing up against the lid, the click-click of the pot as the lid rose and fell. Any floor creak sounds like something moving. It can’t really happen if you’ve imagined it enough.

There was a scrape outside and the chime of something heavy rang off the metal fire escape and my heart flipped up. A heavy icicle falling from the eaves. A hardy raccoon. I turned my body to the window.

There were two black stumps on the snowy landing.

The stove light shone off the glass and made it hard to see anything else. I could see my own reflection, my own fridge and stove. One of my hands was full of spinach and I held it out in front of me with the fist tight and the raw leaves sticking out between all my knuckles. The stumps were not stumps. They were black boots.

One of the guys from upstairs. Right? If you forgot your key, you’d climb up the escape and try to get in some other way. I counted in my head, waiting for him to move on, a friendly knock, something. The boots just stayed there.

My breathing stopped and I squinted, but the window shone back only a pale and cloudy version of my own kitchen, like a wet painting folded in half. On one side of the glass, real white table, white wall, desk in a corner, two chairs. On the other, the mirage: table, wall, desk, chairs, and under the stove light, girl, spinach-fisted, staring. For a moment I didn’t recognize myself. I took two long steps forward.

Aggressive. Get off my escape. I could see the boots on the landing where a thin periphery from the streetlamp was casting some light. They ended at my kitchen table. Above that, my own long hair brushing my shoulders, the V of my sweater, my collarbone standing out white. In another yard, a cat or a raccoon screamed and the neighbor’s motion sensor kicked on. The outside lit up all at once.

Replacing me, a man. Taller than me. Black hoodie, black jeans, stocking cap pulled down close over his ears. Eyes shadowed or else deep set, and his hands hanging there, huge and gloved, black against the snow balanced on the rail behind him. The raccoon scrambling across the top rail of the yard fence.

The light held for the count of five. Long enough for me to see him there, two feet from the window. For him to see me looking. Then it turned off, leaving just the white walls again, the hazy girl in the glass. There was a silhouette where I knew he must be standing, a few feet away at most, dancing spots where my eyes were trying to adjust to the sudden swell of brightness and then the dark again. The window between us. The silhouette becoming an outline, part of my eye’s reckoning.

If he was still there.

I reached up and turned off the stove light. The spinach leaves fell all over the range, into the elements.

Nobody. My own reflection disappeared, but now the man was also gone. I went over and shut the kitchen door and shoved a chair up under the doorknob. Out in the night, I could see the shape of the thin bars on the outside of the windows, and beyond that only the snow-covered landing, the steps, the black railing. I was in the dark now.

What if he was somehow inside the house with me. Could he be inside? Or out there, watching me do this? I walked over to the window and knocked on it with a fist to warn him off and then pressed my forehead against the cold glass.

Outside, fat snowflakes were still drifting down against the fence. A little piece of moon came out from behind a cloud.

No one. No trace.

You’re making this up, I said. Ridiculous.

I said it loud enough that someone would have heard me, if he was there, around the corner, just out of sight.

I know how to work myself up. Panic, and then it’s nothing, and the relief of it is so good. There’s no one there. There is no better feeling than suddenly realizing you’re not going to die.

Outside was clean and gorgeous. I could see everyone’s sloppy backyards, white and muffled. The raccoon was gone.

I looked down and saw the tracks: boot prints, all up and down the landing, the heavy marks in the snow where he’d stood and stared.

CHAPTER 1

On May 23, 1982, the week after she turned eleven, my friend Lianne Gagnon took the subway to St. George Station to practice running the two hundred at Varsity track and never came home. Sometimes I think I was supposed to meet her there. Sometimes what I think is we had a plan to meet—I used to run relay with her, never fast enough to be last leg, but they’d put me in second or third—only that day I didn’t go, and Lianne stood around on the corner, waiting for me, until whatever happened next came along and happened.

I’ve had a few therapists, and my parents, tell me this isn’t true, but it’s a hard notion to shake. No one knows if she got to the track at all: maybe someone talked her into getting off the train early, or maybe she never even made it onto the platform. Kids didn’t carry phones back then. These were the days before Paul Bernardo or the Scarborough Rapist. The next winter a little girl called Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan would go missing from an Annex park. They found her a few weeks later stuffed in a fridge. People still remember that time as the moment the city changed. Up till then, Toronto was pretty safe. We used to ride bikes through Mount Pleasant Cemetery, all the way up to Yonge Street, and come home in the dark. They made you carry a quarter in case you needed to call home.

When I see it in my mind, Lianne is standing around near the track entrance at the corner of Bloor and Devonshire, waiting for someone (me), and that’s when the guy notices her. He probably told her he had some running tips. He probably said he was a track coach and could help her with her time. That’s how the cops painted it for us, later on. In the couple of days right after Lianne disappeared, my friend Cecilia Chan and I used to sit at the piano in her mother’s classroom after school and tell each other how it happened, how it was raining and Bloor Street was empty, and a long black car drove up and pulled Lianne inside. Then Cecilia played Jesus Loves Me on the piano. That’s the only song they taught her at Chinese Sunday School.

The other thing I picture, sometimes, is my bedroom closet in my parents’ old house on Bessborough Drive. The year before, I’d grown a plate of penicillin in the back of the closet, hidden so my mother wouldn’t know what I was up to and come and throw it away. Penicillin is just bread mold: Alexander Fleming was a slob who left old sandwiches lying around in his desk, and then one day—poof!—some mold got into his petri dish when he was away on vacation and killed a bunch of bacteria. (He made another startling wonder-drug discovery when his nose accidentally dripped into a different petri dish. You never hear about the stuff Fleming discovered on purpose.) I was growing the penicillin for a science fair, but once the bread got moldy I couldn’t prove it had antibiotic properties because I didn’t have ready access to bacteria. The closet was good and dark, though: easy to hide stuff in.

When I say I picture my closet, that’s also because of the cops. When Lianne didn’t come home for dinner, her dad drove down to Varsity to get her, but no one was there and the gate was locked. I guess he drove around for a few hours before they thought of calling the police. Everyone figured she was lost. I went to bed not knowing a thing, but later my parents told me her school picture was on the eleven o’clock news.

Right away, I had a terrible feeling, my mother said. Right here: she pushed a fist into the soft part of her stomach. We were getting ready for lunch when she told me this, so she stood there with her fist in her stomach for ten or twenty seconds, and then went back to setting the table.

The police called our house at two in the morning. My parents didn’t want to wake me up, but the cop on the other end of the line wouldn’t hang up until he’d asked me some questions. They had a class list and they were going through it alphabetically. I wasn’t special: they were calling everyone. Lianne was my best friend and I wanted to be the first one they called. If anyone knew where Lianne was, it would be me, right? How could they not know that I should be first?

What they wanted to know was if Lianne was hiding in my closet. Did I know she was going downtown to practice for the track meet? Did I say I would meet her, and then forget?

This seemed possible, even though I wouldn’t be eleven until November and I wasn’t allowed to take the subway alone. I also wasn’t allowed to take gymnastics, or throw myself out of trees the way Lianne did, hoping to break a bone so that she could have a cast and get everyone to sign it, like Sarah Harper did in the fifth grade. I know that the day before she disappeared, we wanted to help find a lost dog in the park and we’d both run home to ask. I wasn’t allowed to do that, either.

The cop knew everything about me. He knew I ran relay with Lianne, and hurdles. He knew which corner store we stopped at on the way home from school when it was sunny out and we wanted to buy frozen cherry Lolas. It was like he’d been watching me and Lianne for months.

Questions the police asked me in the middle of the night:

Did I say I’d go to Varsity and run track with her, and then leave her there alone?

Or did she come home with me? Maybe we wanted to have a sleepover and didn’t tell anyone. Were we afraid our parents would say no?

Was Lianne in my house right now?

I was standing in my parents’ bedroom in the dark, with the curly phone cord wrapped around my wrist. No one put a light on. There were the red numbers shining out of my father’s digital alarm clock next to the phone and a couple of skinny stripes of moonlight where the vertical blinds didn’t match up. I imagined Lianne sitting in my closet, safe in the back shadows like the plate of bread mold, with her knees drawn up high against her chest and her red sneakers still on.

No, I told the cop.

You didn’t see her today?

No.

You didn’t play with her?

No.

Did you see her at the park?

I don’t think so.

Did you go to the park today? Did you see her in your backyard?

No. I don’t. I don’t know.

If she’s at your house, you’re not in trouble. We’re trying to find Lianne, we need to know where she is.

I didn’t see her.

The way I can picture Lianne sitting in the closet, or standing around on the corner at the track entrance, those things are called confabulations. False memories, probably induced by a combination of guilt and suggestion. If you want to answer a question badly enough, your brain will supply the solution.

It’s a strange thing to have to think about every spring.

Outside it’s bright and cheerful and there’ll be fat yellow dandelions in all the yards across the street, turning into white wishing puffs. I like to buy three or four bunches of cut hyacinths at a time from the Portuguese lady on the corner and rollerblade down the block with my hands full of them. Purple and pink and white: the whole room smells sweet and clean and I’m windburned from rushing around on wheels all afternoon. I mean, I have fun. I’m a fun girl, I’m good at it. Still, there’s this piece of you, every May, that kind of wants to slit its wrists a little.

Lianne 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