The Devil You Know: A Novel Read Free

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
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    O n 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 forsomeone (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