The Devil You Know: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

then done. When she went inside, the screen door smacked closed behind her. My father chewed his potato.

    T hese 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 fromnight 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, houseish 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 romancenovels 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!