Read Online The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi - Free Book Online

they, he said. Just there?
    Don’t you think it’s weird? I came over to the window but didn’t lean as closely in. Looking at the fire escape made me want to keep my distance. Whoever found my mittens must have been watching us fool around in the park, I said. Then he watched to see what house I went into.
    He didn’t catch much action then, David said. Aside from my near-death. He pressed his hands against the glass and pushed backward. Maybe someone likes you, Evie. I mean, who wouldn’t, right?
    He had a way of holding his head down but looking up at me that sometimes made me want to jump up and down a little bit and sometimes just made me want to punch him.
    That’s the last thing I want to hear right now, I said.
    I went over to the kitchen counter and opened up the cabinet. There were a few things sitting in the dish rack in the sink and I started stacking them up, pulling the plates and cups out of the rack and setting them in the cupboard. I turned back to David.
    Then this guy waits a whole day to climb up onto my fire escape and leave them there in the creepiest way possible? Why not put them in the mailbox? Or leave them in the doorway with the hat? Or—now get this—how about ring the doorbell?
    David turned around and put a hand on my shoulder.
    Look, he said. It’s definitely one of the guys upstairs. Why don’t you ask them?
    I pulled the mittens onto my hands and looked down at them. They’d been lost on a wet day. I opened my mouth to tell David what I thought, that they looked so clean when I found them, laid out like a gift. Like someone had washed them for me. I splayed the thumbs in and out. My hands looked like Pac-Man’s hungry mouth.
    I don’t want to encourage anybody, I said.

CHAPTER 5
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    Y our standard workday as low-man at a daily newspaper is engineered to start early and end late. This inspires loyalty. It’s like Stockholm syndrome. Get ready to be there for fourteen hours, even if you’re only scheduled for half a shift. Even if at first glance it looks like the world’s easiest day, and actually you’re just dropping by to pick up your paycheck before you go to your friend’s cottage for the weekend. There are too many variables. Who can say what will happen next?
    I controlled this aspect by showing up later than I should. I got up the next day and put on my weird, clean mittens and then took them off again and shoved them into my bag. In case sometime later the cold made me really desperate. Most days, Angie was too busy with her own stuff to come looking for me until around ten, so it was safe enough if I rolled in by that time; anyway, part of the reporter beat is to know the city. She’d told me that herself: Walk everywhere, learn the neighborhoods, pay attention. Get to know the local zoo—hookers, junkies, everybody. Hookers and junkies, especially.
    It was a nice enough day and I zigzagged to work, walking up along Dundas and then through Kensington Market. I bought a sugary cappuccino in a Styrofoam cup from the corner shop, figuring I could drink it out in the bracing freshness of February and wander back down Spadina. It was cold but not impossible. I wonderedif it would be worse to sit out on a park bench or on the frozen sidewalk. When I was a kid my mother was convinced that sitting on a cold sidewalk would give you a kidney infection. I was the only child standing up through the whole Santa Claus parade. Everyone else sat on the curb.
    The sidewalk in Kensington is filthy in any season. On Baldwin Street a few stragglers emptied out of a second-floor booze can, a dark-haired woman in jeans and army boots wearing a full-length fur coat and dragging her boyfriend along behind her. The boyfriend was heavy-eyed. He had a cadet’s cap on his head and a professional coat of pink lipstick across his mouth. Short, light blond hair stuck out straight from under the hat and at the back of his neck. He had a Russian look that suited him and the woman grabbed his