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

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 thewhole 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.
    Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing at school, Evie?
    He had a weird, repetitive way of using my name. Six or seven times per car ride.
    Hi there, Evie. You look like you’re ready to go home, Evie. Well, Evie, was Santa good to you? Did you get just what you asked for?
    Maybe he was trying to show that he knew who I was. In the small space of the moving car, it felt intimate, like a hand against the back of my neck. A hard thing to articulate.
    David said his father was a teacher at a high school in the east end. He taught industrial arts but he was really a photographer. He offered to take my picture more than once, which was appealing enough for a girl my age, but then one time I overheard my mother make a snide and raucous joke about Graham Patton getting the ninth-grade girls to sit pretty for the photographer. He and David’s mother split up a long time ago now.
    If I ever have kids, I’ll tell my husband just to shut the fuck up in the car with the babysitter: she’s probably afraid of him.

    I wasn’t afraid of my own father. My dad is a pretty decent guy. He cooks and does the laundry and stuff. He’s a dentist but he works for the public health clinic, fixing teeth for little kids or old people with no money. You could say he didn’t get into it for the money. Most of his patients don’t speak any English. He doesn’t golf: he’s more of a canoeing-type dentist, if you know what I mean. He’s spry. He has a wiry look, and most but not all of his hair. In the fall he still climbs up the side of the house to put on the storm windows and he can hold himself there pretty