The Devil You Know: A Novel Read Free Page B

to slit its wrists a little.

    L ianne 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 makeme 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