Free The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi Page B

and they were making cakes and pies, using tiny icicles for the candles. It was a careful endeavor and they whispered instructions back and forth. I gave the tops of my legs a rub and my brain a little dead-girl pep talk. The other reason I was stalling about going in to work. The baby and her nanny had left the park a few minutes earlier. The girls’ mother was asleep on her bench. A pocket full of candy says I could have walked off with the two of them, Jenny and her sister, in a heartbeat. Because that’s how it happens. You just need one adult to look away, and another one to look too closely.

CHAPTER 6
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    S omeone had left a bag of equipment sitting all over my desk. I unzipped the bag and found a Pentax 35mm with a strap and a few other technical items I wasn’t sure of. A light meter, maybe. A battery charger. I cracked a black plastic oval open and found it full of tiny canisters of film. Next to the bag there was a yellow sticky note with Angie’s writing on it: Where the hell are you?
    I walked into her office.
    I’ve been doing some thinking, I said.
    Think in the newsroom, Angie said. At nine in the morning like they pay you for. She had her head down in the previous day’s A-section. I waved the camera bag.
    What’s all this?
    It’s for your dead girls, she said. On your way home, swing up and take a few shots of gravestones. See if you can find someone relevant.
    I do everything around here.
    We could use a stock photo, she said. But my impression is you like fresh air. Plus you may as well learn to operate the thing. Sometimes you got no choice. It’s a bugger if you can’t take a basic photo without fucking it up.
    I can take a photo, I said. Are you sure that’s what you want? You want a close-up of some little kid’s grave from back when shewas murdered? I weighed my hands back and forth like they were scales. Maybe a big establishing shot of a bunch of graves, I said.
    Angie looked up from her postmortem. Nah, she said. I want something specific. Your job isn’t establishing shots. Go break someone’s heart. Go break my heart with gravestones. Little murdered kid gravestones. Capisce?
    Sheesh, I said. Ca-peesh. I slung the strap of the camera bag over one shoulder like a pro. See what I did there? I said. The magic of rhyme, right to your doorstep. I’m like a treasure, Angie. I’m pure rhyming diamonds.
    She had her head down in the paper again and didn’t offer any opinions pro or contra my rhyme value. I called David from my desk.
    How would you like to spend an affable afternoon at the cemetery? I said.

    M ount Pleasant Cemetery is really close to the house where I grew up. It’s a place kids go to fool around. Lianne and I had used the trails as bike paths, which is odd to think of, given everything that happened later. When you’re in high school, kids jump the fence and go in there to make out, or smoke pot, or just to feel cool being in the cemetery at midnight, and I did those things, too. In a studied way.
    I walked down from Davisville Station and stopped in front of the gates to wait for David to show up. There was a No Loitering sign on the fence and I tried to strike the best loitering-type pose I could think of, leaning up against an electrical pole. Like the cemetery was a fancy house and I was casing the joint. The camera bag was cutting hard into my shoulder and I put it down at my feet. I had a handful of lily of the valley that I’d picked up from the subway florist for no reason. Except that walking into a graveyard with a camera and an assignment, looking only to take something away, was mercenary.
    Whatever trick I’d pulled on my own mind in high school had worked. I realized that I hadn’t thought of Mount Pleasant as a place for dead people for a long time. It was part of the neighborhood, like the Dominion store or Maurice Cody school or the Barmaid’s Arms. Lianne may as well have been buried in a different city. I didn’t remember any trees or grass