The Devil You Know E-Book

Elisabeth de Mariaffi

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 517

Beschreibung

Rookie crime beat reporter Evie Jones is haunted by the unsolved murder of her best friend in 1982. The suspected killer was never apprehended. Now twenty-two, Evie is obsessively drawn to finding the murderer. She leans on childhood friend David Patton for help - but why does every trail seem to lead back to David's father? As she gets closer to the truth, Evie becomes convinced that the killer is still at large - and that he's coming back for her.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

“Take wit of Gone Girl, the horror of Helter Skelter, the twists of In Cold Blood, and the wisdom of Joan Didion’s The White Album, and you feel the thrill of reading The Devil You Know. Elisabeth de Mariaffi has written a brilliant and thoughtful thriller that is tense, funny, scary, smart, and true. Her clear-eyed insight into the kind of fear that women carry through life resonated deeply with me.”

Claire Cameron, author of The Bear

“A first novel rich with menace and psychological depth, The Devil You Know transports in the dangerous way of a nightmare but remains grounded – even more dangerously – in the way of a documentary. Elisabeth de Mariaffi delivers a thriller that thrills in so many ways.”

Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist

“The Devil You Know manages simultaneously to be funny, sweet, hip, and utterly terrifying. Elisabeth de Mariaffi has written a smart, unique thriller.”

Alafair Burke, author of All Day and a Night

“[A] gripping literary thriller that will get under your skin and burrow into your every waking thought. You’ll see a little bit of yourself in Evie Jones, and you’ll find yourself looking over your shoulder even more after reading this creepy, chilling, and hauntingly beautiful book.”

Chevy Stevens, author of That Night and Still Missing

“Elisabeth de Mariaffi conjures an atmosphere that is both light and dark, familiar and off-kilter, nostalgic and hard-edged, and, ultimately, all the more chilling for being anchored in reality… You won’t sleep till you get to the end.”

Carrie Anne Snyder, author of Girl Runner

“[A]n exceptionally tense, thoughtful book, one which had me questioning my assumptions and checking my pulse. Elisabeth de Mariaffi writes in crisp, tight prose that pulls the reader through the story seamlessly, and it is a story that thrills, surprises, and above all else makes the reader rethink their assumptions about how women experience the world of violence. A magnificent debut novel.”

Steven Galloway, author of The Confabulist and The Cellist of Sarajevo

“I read The Devil You Know all at once, in gulps, on the weekend. I was home alone – mistake. Every little creak and bump – even a leaf that blew against the window – made me jump. I found myself turning off all the lights in the house, so nobody could see me. This story is creepy, dark, and addictive. It’s a really smart thriller – and it feels true, which makes it all the more frightening.”

Sarah Selecky, author of This Cake is for the Party

“Evie is a tough, wisecracking narrator worthy of the greatest private-eye pulp novels… [Her] vulnerable yet empowered voice, is refreshingly reverent.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[De Mariaffi] expertly builds suspense throughout this character-driven debut novel. As it nears its climax, readers will dread turning the pages for fear of what comes next…”

Library Journal

“[An] artful first novel… Hooked readers will silently implore Evie to refrain from entering a basement or a cabin in the woods in pursuit of a story—and a killer.”

Publishers Weekly

THE DEVIL YOU KNOWPrint edition ISBN: 9781783297627E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297634

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: February 201510 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Elisabeth de Mariaffi asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2015 Elisabeth de Mariaffi

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

What did you think of this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at: [email protected], or write to us at the above address.

To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website:WWW.TITANBOOKS.COM

FOR GEORGE

I USED TO BE PARANOID, THINKING SOMEONE WAS AFTER ME, BUT IT WAS YOU ALL ALONG.

Paulette Jiles, “Police Poems: I”

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.

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 line at the very back, against the wall, so nothing else could fit behind them, then I crawled out and shut the accordion doors tight.

When I got into bed I said a little prayer over and over again: Dear God, Thank you for everything you give me this day and every day. Please look after Lianne and keep her healthy and safe. If I started to wave off into sleep I’d sit up and start over. I had to say the thank-you part first, so that I wouldn’t seem spoiled and demanding. I needed God to do what I said. We knew enough, we knew she wasn’t lost, we knew someone had taken her. I had a hard-nosed faith in the world. I wanted her back, damaged and alive.

* * *

On June 4, a lady named Alice May was walking her dog through the trails in Taylor Creek Park and found Lianne lying facedown in the mud. The dog found her. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her body was all wrapped up in an Anheuser-Busch duffel bag and there was a leg sticking out of the bag. I read all of this in the newspaper. Where she was, who found her. There were other interviews: a Tamil family that lived in the same rooming house as Robert Nelson Cameron said they heard her screaming, but they were illegal and too afraid to call the police. Besides, who knows why a kid screams?

The way her body looked told the police a lot about what had happened. Last year I asked my mother how she could possibly have thought that was a good idea, letting me read the news.

* * *

There was a funeral that we all went to. I went along with Cecilia Chan, in the back of her mother’s Pontiac, and we spent the whole ride there turned around in our seats, making faces at Alex Hsu in the car behind us. Alex sat next to me in class and we were going out in the way that fifth graders go out: so, barely talking but making each other miserable all the same. When you think about the shock of grief, the way a funeral is just a shit show for others to look in on, how you’re not even in mourning yet, you can’t be, but there’s that immense pressure to look the part? That goes about a hundred times for kids, but with a hundred times less awareness. I’d never known a dead person. I’d been to two Jewish weddings where the brides wore hot pink and one regular wedding where my uncle married a Mexican girl and my father got drunk and did a hat dance. That was the closest I’d come to ritual. Cecilia’s mother had to go to the funeral because she taught at the school and Lianne’s little brother was in her class. It felt very similar to a field trip: we were there all together, with parent volunteers, and teachers telling us to please be serious.

In the course of the ceremony, the minister asked Lianne’s friends to come and pay their last respects at the coffin and I got up and walked to the front of the church. The only other kids who came up were Alex Hsu and this Australian kid, Lachlan Armstrong. Neither of them had been particular friends of Lianne, so I was surprised. Later Mrs. Chan told me that the school principal had chosen just those two to represent Lianne’s friends, because they were less likely to be traumatized. Once I was up there, I wished I hadn’t gone. We were on stage. Lianne was dead and everyone thought I was trying to show off. I remember I was holding a red candle and the boys were standing next to me moving their feet around and making a noise against the thin carpet. I looked down and Lianne was lying there in her Christmas dress, polished white and still.

That last part is another confabulation. She screamed and screamed, and he stuffed an old shirt in her mouth and then he strangled her until her neck broke. The casket must have been closed.

* * *

Where were my own parents in all this? They got up with me on the funeral morning and my father ironed my navy-blue dress and then he went to work. My mother had a fierce self-protective instinct. A firm believer in auto-determination. That means she thought I’d better learn to deal with this on my own. She’d seen a lot of harsh things growing up in northern Ontario and then as a teenager alone in Toronto that she’d never gotten over. When I asked her, last year, why they had allowed me to spend months reading the details of my friend’s rape and murder in the daily newspaper, she said: We couldn’t stop you.

It’s likely that she really does think this. I was a precocious reader and following the story would have given me a sense of control over what had happened. Knowledge is power, right? There’s a basic neglect inherent to this style of parenting. I was a small adult from an early age. The same therapist who explained what confabulation means also advised me to never read the news when it’s about little girls getting abducted, or older girls like me getting raped or killed. She told me this while I was in j-school.

I write those newspaper stories, I said.

She shrugged. That’s all about control, too.

All through high school I could barely cope with riding the bus, even during the day, because out in Scarborough that’s where girls were getting raped. At bus stops.

I walked everywhere. It’s like when you go to a movie: they talk about suspension of disbelief. I don’t have any disbelief, it’s in permanent suspension. The good thing about working in the newsroom is at least now I’m the first to know. Any kind of awful thing humans do to one another seems plausible to me.

It must have been a tremendous relief for my parents when Cecilia’s family offered to take me to Lianne’s funeral along with them. There’s not a lot of reality wiggle room at an event like that. Kids’ funerals tread a funny line: people bring flowers and teddy bears and balloons and everybody eats cake afterward. It’s a lot like a baby shower, except for the horror. It was a well-publicized case, so the church was packed with strangers.

After the memorial we drove to Mount Pleasant Cemetery and watched them lower the coffin into the ground. The funeral director gave all the kids white flowers. You were supposed to toss the flowers onto the coffin as it was going down. There was a ring of children standing around the grave. Some of them were Lianne’s real friends from school and some of them were her cousins from Quebec, and some of them were just kids who’d read the story in the newspaper but didn’t know her at all, and we were all standing there holding the same pretty white carnations. I was counting the faces in each row and how many rows there were and doing multiplication. In my own hand, the flower stems pressed tight against the insides of my knuckles so I couldn’t lose them and then it was too late: the coffin was already down and a couple of men with spades were throwing great shovelfuls of dirt onto it. We’d spent all morning waiting. The dirt knocked the other kids’ carnations off. The flowers looked like dirty Kleenexes, like someone had kicked over a garbage can.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I wanted my flowers to be there, too, I guess, and then a second later Cecilia’s mother was yanking me out of the hole by one arm. They thought I’d done it on purpose. This was the story that went home to my mother, that I’d thrown myself into the grave with Lianne. You can see that’s the way adults would tell it, too.

After they pulled me out, people left a respectful distance between me and them. When I noticed that, I walked a little slower. No one even tried to brush the dirt off me.

2

After Lianne’s funeral my parents sold our house and we moved to a different, bigger house where my mother could feel like I was safe. Except what she didn’t count on is that bigger spaces make you feel more vulnerable, not less. The safest place you can be is inside a shoebox, a tiny space that’s just for you. If you can reach one hand out and touch a wall, and reach the other hand out and touch a different wall, then you know for certain no one else is in that small place with you and you are just fine.

The house on Inglewood had three stories for the three of us, three bathrooms, a laundry chute that used to be a dumbwaiter and fell in a straight path from my own bathroom on the third floor right down to the stone-floor basement. Two televisions. Sliding doors to the backyard, a big square of land with an engineered waterfall in one corner as a landscape feature. My parents still live in that house, but they pulled out the waterfall a few years ago. In the summer you could hear it trickling all day through the kitchen window. My mother said it made her crazy. It made her think she had to pee.

There’s a big front porch with a couple of chairs on it, and my mother sat outside most of that first summer rocking in her seat like a sentry. That was the year everybody’s mother changed. Every kid I knew suddenly had more rules to follow, an earlier bedtime. We didn’t play hide-and-seek after dinner because if you were hiding and it suddenly got dark, something bad could happen to you. Every kid was under surveillance. My mother had never seemed to me like other parents, but now that difference multiplied: she’d go missing for a few hours at a time, without telling us where she was off to or even that she was leaving. I can’t say for sure what triggered this. She was different from the get-go, so maybe it was what happened to Lianne, or maybe it was just a mid-life thing. Those little escapes were consistent with her personality in general. She’s not always predictable. The day before Lianne disappeared, I’d run home to ask if we could help find a lost dog, but I found the front door locked. My mother was in the living room, arguing with someone I couldn’t see. She saw me out on the steps and sent me to my room. As a kid, you don’t really question things like that. Odd to imagine your parents as their own entities, moving through the world.

The alley from the next street over opens up right across the street from our house. One night I was sitting on the steps with my father, eating baked potatoes off plates on our knees. We’d been waiting for her to come home and make dinner but once it got dark I guess my father gave up and turned on the oven himself.

Your mother’s okay, he said. He’d scrubbed the potatoes over the sink, then wrapped them up in foil with butter and chives already inside them. I hadn’t asked where my mother was, and it made me happy that he’d supplied the answer. We didn’t need to have a discussion about it.

It was the end of August and maybe nine o’clock at night. My father’s hair was very blond and cut close to his head, short, the way you expect a dad to look, with just a tiny lick of a curl behind his ear. I was focused on the task of cutting into my potato without tipping the plate on my lap. I imagined the plate tipping and my potato rolling off and then bonking down the steps, bonk bonk, and down the path into the gutter. My father scooped some sour cream off his own potato and put it onto mine.

There was no streetlight over the entrance to the alleyway. It was the first night where you really needed a sweater, and I pulled the hood on my sweatshirt up over my ponytail. There was a scuffling sound like a kid falling off a fence or someone kicking at stones. I looked up and my mother came walking out of the alley, alone. Her jean jacket was open like it wasn’t cold at all. She saw us and walked straight up the steps anyway.

No rapists in there? my father said, as though we bumped into my mother, casually like this, practically every day. He didn’t say: Why were you in the alley at night? Or, Where have you been? Or even, Have you had dinner?

None, my mother said. No rapists at all. She smiled sharply. The smile was there and then done. When she went inside, the screen door smacked closed behind her. My father chewed his potato.

* * *

These days she’s more settled. She fits inside her own skin. There’s a theory that women in their thirties are naturally inclined to recklessness. A woman that age has more in common with a teenaged boy than anyone else: she’s reeling on hormone-drive. The sound of her biology isn’t a ticking clock, it’s a motor, revving up. I don’t know if this explains it, or if it’s a simple equation involving distance from a traumatic event. I can tell you my mother turns forty this year.

She’s a bookkeeper by trade and works freelance out of a tiny, gold-painted office on the second floor of the house. There’s a business card with her name, Annie Jones, also in gold. This is fixed to the door with painter’s tape, instead of a sign. Her window faces the back garden. One day she’s up there wearing a pantsuit and a pair of killer heels and the next day she’s all ripped jeans and a T-shirt. This has less to do with client meetings than it does with just putting whatever she wants on her body at any given time. She’s math-minded, in the same way that she would always prefer a yes-or-no answer to any question. The details of the situation take a backseat to definitiveness. I guess she started chasing down deadbeat patients for my father’s dental practice when I was a kid and took a shine to solving money problems. Her certification all came from night school. I can’t imagine her working in an office or for any kind of boss.

Sunday mornings we’ll bike over to the St. Lawrence Flea together, down the long sweeping spin of the Mount Pleasant Extension. She dyes her hair so it’s brighter somehow and it comes flying out of her blue bike helmet, coppery in the sunlight. We jump off close to the lakeshore and lock up and get busy touching all the merchandise. Since I moved out she’s keen to buy me things, house-ish things, or else sensible clothing such as cashmere turtlenecks or warm winter boots.

Burberry! Who got rid of this?

The vendors see my mother coming and get sad eyes. I like to leave her to it. She has a lot of stamina for arguing. This time she handed me an entire ensemble folded in on itself inside a white plastic grocery bag.

Ten bucks, she said. It was early February, but one of those days that warms up so much you almost believe it’s going to be spring. Kids throw down their winter jackets and commit themselves to hopscotch.

I opened the bag: black turtleneck, classic belted trench coat.

No one will know I’m a reporter now! I said. Wait. Did you get me a deerstalker? I don’t know if I can solve mysteries without my deerstalker.

Har.

I slipped my arms into the trench and opened up just one side suggestively, then sidled closer to my mother:

Would you like to buy an O?

There’s a few antique dealers but in other respects it’s just your standard flea market.

Audio cassettes and vintage Snoopy piggy banks, embroidered tablecloths, plates with pictures on them. Who wouldn’t want a gravy boat with a picture of the Bluenose on it? Paper stalls with racks of old Life magazine covers wrapped up in their plastic sleeves: Marilyn and Jackie Kennedy and the moon landing. Stacks of romance novels and Agatha Christies. Royal Wedding memorabilia. Vintage porn and true crime.

Here’s a stat for you. I held up a paperback and waved it at my mother: Women are voracious true crime readers. No word of a lie. Much more so than men.

She came over and took the book from me, then laid it back on the pile.

So, the men are doing all the serial killing, but the women are reading about it?

Not what you expect, is it? I said.

My mother had her fingers on the black spine of a copy of Helter Skelter. She flipped it up and flashed the cover at me.

I knew a guy once, she said. Who used to say he’d met him.

The True Story of the Manson Murders, I read. Number One True Crime Bestseller of All Time! I reached out for the book. Friend of a friend?

Of a friend of a friend, my mother said. I imagine it was all lies. She went back to browsing.

Think we live vicariously? I said. Reading it, I mean.

Sometimes I just throw this shit out there because it feels good. Because, hey, look at us, out for a Sunday stroll and chatting it up about gruesome murders and whatnot. I dug into my purse for fifty cents and reached the coins over to the book vendor, a tall guy with a comb-over and baby-fine gray stubble. He clicked open his cash can and threw the money in. There was a hundred-dollar bill Scotch-taped to the inside of the lid and I asked him what for.

Counterfeit, he said. So I remember what they look like. He leaned across the table and straightened the little rows of books. He had long, elegant fingers.

Your serial killer name is The Librarian, I told him.

I slid Helter Skelter into my purse and we moved on to the next booth, old paintings and ponchos hanging from a wire.

* * *

My friend David Patton moved me into my bachelor. He borrowed his mom’s minivan and we packed it with all my stuff: books and papers and Goodwill buy-the-pound vintage. My mother had given me a plastic laundry basket filled with packaged food: spaghetti, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, applesauce. In the housewares department I owned three coffee mugs, a teapot that I thought was an antique but later turned out to be from Ikea, and a cast-iron fry pan. This paucity of assets must have seemed strong evidence that I didn’t need help moving, and my parents didn’t offer any. I think they were instead offering subconscious discouragement regarding my plan to live all by my lonesome. I could have moved all my worldly belongings in two cab rides—maybe even just one. But David had his mom’s Caravan. So.

The original plan had not been for me to live out in Parkdale on my own. My friend Melissa and I were meant to share an apartment up in the Annex. She had a line on a nice one at College and Borden. Her father owns a bunch of cosmetic surgery clinics, so she comes from money. Only then Melissa quit her summer job to go see a few Grateful Dead shows and never came back. Her dad found her in a parking lot outside of Nashville, painstakingly carving I Need A Miracle signs into some shim wood she’d found. This is a thing she was doing for money, and I guess it’s better than some of the alternatives. She had some kind of breakdown on the way home and ended up in the hospital on lithium. When I told David that, he said the same thing happened to his cousin Helen when she was twenty. Just the lithium part, unrelated to Jerry Garcia and his timeless music.

It’s really common, he said. Girls go crazy all the time.

As it turned out, I loved bachelor life. You walk into your own tiny space at the end of the day and everything you see here is yours. There’s no joint decision making and no explaining anything. On Saturday mornings I turned off the answering machine until 2:00 p.m., to feel independent of social connections. Sometimes it kills you. It’s excellent to force your own hand. Then you know for sure you don’t need anyone.

You think David’s my boyfriend, but he’s not. He’s been my friend since forever. He’s been my friend since we were kids. David Patton was just this kid I used to babysit. He’s still got the same mess of dirty blond hair over his eyes all the time—back then because he was a kid, and now because he’s trying to look hard-edged and a little broken. He wants his hair to make a girl think of Kurt Cobain, and maybe get the two of them, Kurt and David, confused for a moment. He’s also still got the same five freckles across the bridge of his nose, plus a few extra in the sun. These detract from the grunge persona and a girl (me) is careful not to mention them too much. The year David turned thirteen he grew about seven inches in two months and did nothing but eat sandwiches. So today he stands six-foot-two, which is a solid five inches taller than me, but I still have the power because once upon a time I was the boss and somewhere inside we both remember that.

I was David’s babysitter for a little over a year, starting about a year or so after Lianne disappeared. I was in seventh grade and David was in the fifth. That’s not much of an age difference, but his mother didn’t think he was old enough to be home alone yet. David was an only child and I was an only child and it’s my understanding that those kinds of parents either worry about you too much or too little.

In those days David really did whatever I said. If I said, You know what’s cool? We should make shoes out of cardboard and walk downtown. We should draw a game of hopscotch onto the bathroom floor with the paint from your paint-by-numbers. We should make Chef Boyardee ravioli on apple-juice can stoves in the backyard. We should make potato-chip-peanut-butter sandwiches with sweet pickles on the side. Then David would totally want to do those things. We didn’t go to the same school and neither of us had any brothers or sisters. How was he to know I wasn’t on the cutting edge of pop culture?

David’s mother had blond hair and a chunky body, but she wore a lot of headbands and did aerobics in the basement. Sometimes she called me over just to take David to McDonald’s so she could be alone in the house. She had a husband, Graham, who’d set the whole thing up. I guess he got to chatting my mom up in line at the grocery store one day and when he found out she had a daughter, voilà, I got the job. My mother didn’t normally allow me to babysit for strangers. I looked on it as a reprieve from the post-Lianne lockdown. Graham Patton was never there when I arrived, but he came back with David’s mother late at night and offered to drive me home, even though I only lived a few blocks away. He said he didn’t want me walking home in the dark.

The fathers always drove you home and they were the ones you knew the least. The whole world tells you to never get into a stranger’s car—unless you’re babysitting his ten-year-old. I climbed into Graham Patton’s station wagon with my fuzzy white winter coat wrapped around my chest and zipped, and he gave me five or ten dollars in my hand. He had a brown beard. He drove along making small talk, trying to get me chatting.