The Devil You Know

by Trish Doller

  “I thought being alone might help me forget.” Noah’s voice goes husky for a moment, but after he clears his throat, he’s back to normal. “But there’s such a thing as too much solitude. Too much time to think.”

  “Do you still have the Cougar?”

  “No,” he says. “Keeping it didn’t feel right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugs a little. “It was just a car.”

  We walk a bit farther.

  “I wrestled a long time over whether I should come,” Noah says. “I wasn’t sure if you’d even want to see me again, considering … but I regretted not saying goodbye and I figured it was probably time I said thank you.”

  I stop him right there in the middle of the sidewalk and kiss him. It is a kiss made of absolution and hope, sorrow and promise. And as he kisses me back, he grants me the same. His hands bury themselves in my hair, and when it ends, the back of his T-shirt is clenched tight in my fists.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Jesus,” Noah whispers into my hair, raising goose bumps on my arms and making my toes feel as if they’ve melted inside my boots. “Now I wish I’d come here sooner.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I was wondering,” he says, as we start walking again. “Do you think we can have a do-over? Maybe slow it down. Go on an actual date and figure out if this”—Noah gestures from himself to me and back again—“is really something.”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “How does August look for you?”

  “Too far from now.”

  “We’re leaving tonight to spend the summer camping,” I say. “We, um—my family was kind of broken when I met you. All I had was a head full of unfocused dreams and a desperate desire to escape my life. We both know how that turned out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have an online shop now.” It feels strange to have a fond memory of Matt MacNeal, but if I have to have one, I’m glad it’s this. I’m nowhere near my first million, but this fall, after Danny starts kindergarten, I will have enough money to plan my first solo trip. Maybe nothing as grand as Machu Picchu or Fiji, maybe somewhere a little closer to home.

  “I’ve seen your website,” Noah says. “It looks good.”

  “It feels good to be doing instead of dreaming,” I say. “And this vacation—it’s the first we’ve taken together as a family since my mom died, so I need to be with them. I want to be with them.”

  Noah looks disappointed, but there is an understanding in the way he nods and in the brown warmth of his eyes. “So, okay. August. I guess that will have to do.”

  It takes all my self-control not to tell him how—when I pulled the pins from the map on my bedroom wall—I found the pin he’d moved from New York to Montana. How I phoned several dozen state parks, trying to track him down, before I reached the one where Noah works. The guy who answered told me Noah was leading a hike and offered to take a message. Instead, I made a reservation.

  Noah’s fingers twine through mine, and my brain and mouth go on a rogue mission, breaking free from my resolve to keep it a surprise. “Or maybe I’ll see you in three weeks at Thompson Falls.”

  The light comes up in his eyes as he figures it out, and when he smiles, huge and wide like a little kid on Christmas morning, I have to smile back in order to release some of the too-big-for-my-body feelings I’ve been carrying around. And as we walk up Main Street, wearing our hearts on our faces, I can’t help thinking that maybe, finally, this is the pearl.

  Maybe it’s not.

  Time will tell, I guess.

  But, either way, it’s good to have a plan.

  Acknowledgments

  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that books don’t just spring fully formed from a writer’s head. Hemingway (who shared an editor with Fitzgerald, by the way) is credited with saying that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he was probably right about that. Which is why I am so grateful for Brett Wright, who pulled on the tall boots and waded in with me on this one.

  My it-takes-a-village village includes the whole Bloomsbury team, Victoria Wells Arms, Kate Schafer Testerman, Suzanne Young, Cristin Bishara, Miranda Kenneally, Tara Kelly, Veronica Rossi, Kelly Jensen, Carla Black, Ginger Phillips, Anna Hutchinson, Gail Yates, the staff of Barnes & Noble #2711 in Fort Myers, and the whole B&N family, including Tracy Vidakovich, Billy McKay, and Brian Monahan. I couldn’t have done it without any of you. Thank you.

  Special thanks to Lee County sheriff deputy Todd Olmer and Florida Wildlife officer Guy Carpenter for the nuts and bolts of murder, jurisdiction, and the eating habits of alligators and crocodiles. Thanks for grossing me out, Todd. And I hope my portrayal of Naked Ed Watts will be seen in the light of respect and good nature that was intended.

  Mom, Jack, Caroline, and Scott, I love you all.

  And Phil … I love you best.

  Author’s Note

  During a freshman literature course I did in college, we were tasked with reading short stories by American authors, including giants like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I loved reading the stories but was notoriously awful at interpreting the meaning behind them. (The Internet was just a baby back then, so there weren’t whole websites devoted to doing that job for me.) After reading we would discuss the text in class, and I was usually surprised (and sometimes confused) by what I’d missed that the other students had caught.

  One of my favorites—and one that has stuck with me all these years—was Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace,” which was originally published in 1920 in The Saturday Evening Post. I was charmed by how the story bookends itself (a device I’ve used more than once in my own professional writing life), but, more importantly, I loved that Sally Carrol Happer’s struggle to find her place as a young woman in a changing world was as relevant in 1986 as it was in 1920. It’s still relevant today.

  The Devil You Know was heavily inspired by “The Ice Palace.” Cadie and Sally Carrol have nearly a hundred years separating them, but their lives are pretty similar. Both girls want something more for themselves, get a little lost on their quests to find it, and ultimately make their way back home. Fitzgerald knew in 1920 what we know today: that it’s hard to be a woman in a world filled with real and imaginary monsters.

  And that there’s usually more to a story than meets the eye.

  Also by Trish Doller

  Something Like Normal

  Where the Stars Still Shine

  Copyright © 2015 by Trish Doller

  All rights reserved.

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.

  First published in the United States of America in June 2015

  by Bloomsbury Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published in June 2015

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Doller, Trish.

  The devil you know / by Trish Doller. pages cm

  Summary: Exhausted and rebellious after three years of working for her father and mothering her brother, eighteen-year-old Arcadia “Cadie” Wells joins two cousins who are camping their way through Florida.

  [1. Psychopaths—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Camping—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Single-parent families�
�Fiction. 6. Florida—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D7055Dev 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014023032

  eISBN: 978-1-61963-417-6

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