Read The Most Dangerous Thing Online
Authors: Laura Lippman
He turns back, looks at the funny little cabin, comically small and lopsided from this distance. Funny, how they never connected it. The grown-ups drove past this cabin, saw something shameful, a man living like a sharecropper only a few miles from downtown Baltimore. The grown-ups saw the past, complicated and cruel. Their children saw a playhouse. The man who lived here saw a potential victim in Go-Go.
What if it were your child?
Tim had asked Clem that night. To this day, Clem thinks:
It wouldn’t be.
He knows that’s wrong. He understands intellectually that anything can happen to anyone at any moment. Even in his world of medicine and science, there are no absolutes. People smoke their entire lives at no seeming physical cost, while someone who has never so much as held a cigarette can get lung cancer. But he has to believe that his own daughter is immune to such danger, that she never would have allowed herself to let a stranger touch her as this man touched Go-Go.
He probably was dead when Tim got there. He slipped, he fell, and his lungs filled with water when the children ran to get help. Who can fault them for not staying with him on that dark rainy night? Who would ask them to administer first aid to that monster, lying in the creek? Yes, there was the strange arc of the flashlight going up and down, instead of side to side—
Stop,
he tells himself. Believe what’s easiest to believe. There’s no harm in it.
He is home now, or almost there, at the peak above his house.
Your
dream house, as Tally always says. It is. He built a house to his taste on a site that he loved, assuming his wife and children would love it, too, but only Gwen shared his affection for the place. Now even she wouldn’t object to moving, as long as she could continue to be the queen bee of her social set at Park School.
Someone—Clem has no idea who—called children and wives hostages to fortunes. He will never see it that way. His wife and his children are his real contributions to the world. He isn’t demeaning what he has accomplished professionally. He’s good at what he does and enjoys it, the best of all possible combinations. But there is always someone to take one’s place in any profession, no matter how singular or vital. There’s no shortage of men who want to be president or discover vaccines or explore the Amazon. Only Clem can be Tally’s husband, father to Miller, Fee, and Gwen. Only he can love them as he loves them.
As he descends the hill, he realizes that as much as he hates Tim Halloran, he envies him, too. Because Halloran proved he would do anything for his children, whereas Clem couldn’t even give up this jury-rigged, imperfect house. What Halloran did was savage. But it was also love, immutable, enormous love. He killed the man who touched his boy. If a police officer ever shows up on Clem’s doorstep, Clem will sell the others out in a heartbeat, cut a deal for himself. But their silence, their pact, was not simply about avoiding discovery. When they agreed that night to say nothing to anyone else about the man’s death, they condoned what Tim did. He avenged his son. He was a real man.
Something wraps around his ankle, and he starts. It felt like a bird. But it’s only a scrap of paper, a piece of trash blowing through his beloved woods, scampering down the hill toward his house.
G
wen lives in the future. All magazine editors do. Here it is, the last night of March, and she is already focusing on September, which brings the annual “best of” issue, exhaustive and exhausting. When that’s done by midsummer, Christmas will be bearing down on her. Her daughter is dreaming about the Easter bunny, whose arrival is less than a month away, and Gwen is trying to think about “hot gifts for cold nights!” She hopes her copy editors can do better than that.
So she has agreed to her publisher’s pressure to attend the opening reception for the big craft fair, the kind of work duty that she loathes and is usually spared. Her boss once adored attending all these things, but even he is burning out on the endless plastic cups of bad wine and prosciutto-wrapped bits of melon and mini crab cakes. Or perhaps his social interactions are less enjoyable since the magazine has started silting bits of real journalism among the themed guides (best doctors, best neighborhoods, best schools, best restaurants, maybe Tim was on-target with the best prostitutes issue) and shopping-friendly features. Gwen is particularly proud of a recent piece on one of Maryland’s most famous cold homicide cases, the 1980 murder of a nun. The article managed to upset everyone—the nun’s family, the diocese, the newspaper journalists who wrote about the case a decade earlier. Margery, her star reporter, took a measured approach toward the crime, and that seems to have inflamed everyone. The family is desperate to believe that a priest killed the young nun, but Margery’s dispassionate analysis makes a good case that the more likely suspect was a serial sex offender who later died in prison. Meanwhile, the diocese is displeased at the implicit criticism that its knee-jerk circle-the-wagon response to the initial police inquiries probably impeded the investigation in the first place. Gwen thinks it’s a good sign that everyone is unhappy. Her publisher does not see it the same way, but at least no major advertisers were offended.
Yes, maybe it would be a good time to go to the craft fair and start scouting new artisans they could feature. She asks Margery to go with her.
“Am I being punished or rewarded?”
“A little of both. I’ll buy you dinner after.”
At least they don’t have to contend with the crowds that flock to this show once it is officially open to the public, and there are some beautiful things to see. Gwen’s real complaint is that it cuts into her evening with Annabelle, a situation made more problematic by the fact that Karl is out of town again, leaving Annabelle in the care of a babysitter. Annabelle cried on the phone when she called to tell her of the plan. Stoic Annabelle, who seldom cries, her girly-girly tomboy who combines tiaras with cowboy boots. “I ha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ate Kristen,” she gulped out in heart-wrenching sobs, and Kristen is her favorite babysitter. When Annabelle was a baby, she cried so seldom that when the tears did come, they were almost a source of marvel to Gwen and Karl. They would stand, transfixed—only for a moment—watching tears roll down their daughter’s face. She was cute when she cried.
But perhaps that was because they were sure they could end her tears easily, something of which Gwen is now less and less sure. She caused her daughter’s tears tonight. She may cause her more. How can she do this to her daughter?
“So you’re still staying at your dad’s and driving over there every morning and night?” Margery asks as they move through the endless aisles of handcrafted goods, their eyes quickly growing numb to all the stimulation. Their goal is to spot things that are local, original, and, if possible, eco-friendly, as their Christmas issue will be built around a green theme.
“It’s barely been a month,” Gwen says. “It’s not so bad.” Actually, it’s awful, just as her father and Karl predicted, but she can’t back down now. Besides, her father needs her, even if he won’t admit it. The daytime aide does the bare minimum. Gwen couldn’t sleep if she had to leave her father in another aide’s care at night.
“When did everyone become a purse designer?” Margery’s voice isn’t loud, but it’s clear and it carries. “Or jewelry designer? When did these become the default professions? You think that between Monica Lewinsky and all those reality-show types who run around with BeDazzlers and glue guns, people would have too much pride to make this crap.”
The woman at the nearest booth shoots Gwen a glance that is at once puzzled and wounded. Gwen shrugs, hoping the gesture serves as a blanket apology for her opinionated friend. To further make amends, she stops, examining this particular crop of purses. They are clutches woven from recycled materials, candy and gum wrappers and newspapers. Not original—she has seen bags like this in other stores and catalogs for the past several years—but well executed. Besides, being of-the-moment is not important in Baltimore.
“Are you from here? Do you have a card?” she asks the woman, who points to a little stand with embossed business cards:
LH DESIGNS
.
“I’ve only been at this for a few months, but I’ve managed to place my bags in some local stores,” she says. “Are you—”
“Just an editor, not a buyer. Gwen Robison of
Baltimore
magazine.”
“You looked familiar, but I guess that’s why. I’ve probably seen your picture in it.”
“Not mine.” That bit of vanity is reserved for her publisher, the moneyman. He pays the bills, which entitles him to a monthly column, rambling on about some safe, boosterish profundity that never angers anyone. Except, perhaps, people who dislike exclamation marks and chamber-of-commerce boosterish crap.
“Still, I feel I have seen you somewhere.”
“You look familiar, too.”
She holds out her hand: “Lori Halloran.”
“Oh my god—the funeral. I’m so sorry.”
Margery has kept moving all this time and is far, far down the aisle. She turns around, makes an impatient hurry-up gesture. But there’s no way to walk away now. Lori Halloran is young, early thirties at most. She was Go-Go’s second wife, Gwen recalls. Estranged at the time of the accident, although she and her daughters were down front in the church, sitting with Tim Junior’s wife and girls, while the brothers flanked their mother. They were the little girls who wouldn’t go up to the casket.
“I’m really sorry,” Gwen repeats. “I’ve known him since he was a little boy, although we had fallen out of touch—”
“He talked about you a lot.”
“Me?”
A lot?
“All of you. His brothers, you, a girl named Mickey, although it was a while before I even realized Mickey was a girl. He said that was the best time in his life, playing in the woods.”
“Really?” Before, perhaps. Before Chicken George did whatever he did. Why does Gwen still feel that twinge of guilt she always feels when that memory returns, unbidden?
We shouldn’t have left him there. He was hurt. Whatever he did, it wasn’t right to leave him there to die alone.
“I admit, that’s not saying a lot. He wasn’t a very happy guy.”
How much do you know? What did Go-Go tell you?
Gwen chooses her words with care. “We had a lot of freedom. Sometimes I think we were the last generation to live that way. These days, we live near a state park, very pretty and bucolic, and I would never dream of letting my daughter play there, unsupervised.”
The “we” is a lie, used for convenience’s sake but it gives her a pang.
“Gordon was real paranoid about our girls, too. He didn’t even like them to be in our fenced backyard by themselves.”
“I saw them at the funeral. They’re beautiful little girls.” Gwen is not being polite. The girls are beautiful, as is their mother—blue eyes, blond hair, fair skin. Go-Go, for all his rough-and-tumble ways, always liked beauty, respected it. He had high standards, too. He clearly thought Tally Robison exquisite, he loved to look at her, grab her. Gwen, even after her transformation, did not impress him.
“My mother-in-law blames me for his death,” Lori says. Her tone is matter-of-fact, as if commenting on the weather, but she has to know this is a shocking thing to say. Neither Tim nor Sean mentioned it to Gwen. But then—Tim and Sean are a long way past the time when they felt obligated to tell Gwen things.
“Oh, people say all sorts of things when grieving—”
“She’s not entirely wrong.”
An older woman jostles Gwen to get to Lori’s bags, but that is the point of the craft fair, after all. She paws the little bags, snaps them open, runs the zippers up and down, fingers the lining. The bags deserve kinder hands, but if the woman is a buyer, Gwen doesn’t want to come between Lori and a sale. Lord knows if Go-Go had a life insurance policy, or if it paid off, given the uncertain circumstances of his death. Gwen digs through her own shoulder bag and finds her card, adds her cell and the landline for her father’s house.
“If you want to talk,” she says. “About anything.”
She assumes, hopes, Lori won’t follow up. Go-Go’s secrets are, in part, Gwen’s, although she likes to think she is the least guilty of the five, the sole bystander. All Gwen did was agree to go along, to let Sean be the spokesman and not insist on including the troubling details that might complicate their story when they told their parents. No, Lori will think better of it, decide she doesn’t want to talk, not to a virtual stranger. But if Lori does confide in Gwen, is Gwen obligated to tell her there are all sorts of reasons why Go-Go might have driven into that concrete barrier, none of which have anything to do with his second wife kicking him out? No need to worry. Lori won’t call. Even if she does, Gwen owes her nothing.
Yet several hours later, when Gwen places her cell phone by her girlhood bed, there is a text from Lori staring up at her.
I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO YOU. SOON?
It’s the question mark—unsure, pleading—that makes the request impossible to ignore.
I
t has taken several days, many promises, and a few threats, but Tim has finally corralled all three daughters and taken them to his mother’s house for Sunday lunch. “What about Mass?” his mother asked when told of the plan. He couldn’t bear to let her know her oldest two granddaughters are basically heathens, so he made up a story about the SATs and a sleepover and sent Arlene to Mass with his mother as the family’s sacrificial lamb. In old age, which seems to have fallen on Doris suddenly and even a little precociously—she’s barely in her sixties—she is as distractible as a baby.
The house on Sekots Lane was a desired destination when the girls were younger, a place they clamored to visit. It had a doll’s house feel to them—smaller in scale than the houses in their Stoneleigh neighborhood, and full of wonders. The carpet sweeper, a waist-high freezer in the basement stocked with Good Humor bars, Grandma’s “goodie jar,” the dogs. But the house and its inhabitants long ago ceased to entertain the girls. Lunch finished, the three sisters slump on the sofa in the downstairs rec room, watching the flat-screen television, a gift from Tim and Sean, connected to cable, a bill that Tim pays monthly, dismissing Doris’s protestations that she doesn’t need it. If not for cable television, the girls would never come here, but he doesn’t want to spell that out for his mother.
Yet even the television barely holds their interest. The older two are bent over their phones, texting, texting, texting, while the baby, as he still thinks of eight-year-old Karen, twirls her hair and watches them covetously. She has been told she can have a phone at age twelve, a decision she challenges daily, sometimes with fresh arguments, more often with mere petulance. Yesterday she told Tim she should have a phone because it would keep her safe from child molesters.
Only if you see them coming from a long way off, sweetheart.
What could the older girls be texting about on a Sunday afternoon? And to whom? Only last week, Lisa left her phone unattended and Tim seized the chance to read every text still in it, rationalizing that he was right to violate her privacy because of the Dani/joint incident. Yet the conversation, such as it was, revealed almost nothing. The only topics were location (at mall/at McDonald’s/at skate park) and mood. Everything is lame. Everyone is lame. Parents, friends, school, any activity. The jokes of the other texter are lame. Lord, is it any wonder that zombies are enjoying a resurgence in pop culture? This generation is the new walking dead, except they lumber
away
from brains, disdainful of anything that requires thought, passion, participation. He imagines his daughters vacant-eyed, arms stretched in front of them, tottering down the street moaning:
“No brains, no brains.”
But still texting, all the while.
“Some help with the dishes?” He tries to make it sound like a suggestion, yet one that cannot be ignored.
“Sure,” Michelle says.
“In a minute,” Lisa says.
Nothing moves except their thumbs. He thinks of the heroine of Tom Robbins’s
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
imagines a generation of girls with giant thumbs, hypertrophied from overuse. What he can’t imagine is his daughters hitchhiking. Not because it’s forbidden, but because that’s way too much effort.
“Leave the girls alone,” his mother calls down the stairs. “There’s not that much to do. And it’s easier to clean up when there aren’t so many bodies in the kitchen. Do the girls want some more cookies or chocolates?”
They look up, dazed. Certain words, such as
cookie,
can penetrate the force field around them. “OK,” Michelle says, as if conferring a favor. All three continue to sit.
“Well, you can at least go upstairs and get them yourselves,” Tim says.
A pause. “That’s all right,” Michelle says. “I’m not really that hungry.” But Doris is already bustling downstairs with her “goodie” jar, a huge Tupperware container that holds opened bags of cookies and a selection of miniature candy bars. The goodie jar is a long-standing tradition in her household, but Tim has noticed on recent visits that sometimes the items are quite stale. This was true even before Go-Go died, but it troubles him. He asked the girls not to mention it. They said they hadn’t noticed.
Doris spoils all her grandchildren this way. To be fair, she spoiled her sons almost as much. They had few responsibilities in the house and only marginal ones in the yard because their father loved his lawn mower and did not want to entrust it to them. They were savages. Or so Arlene said in the early years of their marriage, when she discovered that Tim did not know how to do anything domestic—wash his clothes, sew a button, scour a pan, run the vacuum.
He did not think Arlene should have been surprised. She had seen his apartment, after all, even pretended affection for his bachelor ways. But Arlene, like a lot of women, had one set of standards for her boyfriend, another for her husband. The difference was that Arlene really did manage to change him. Everyone said that people couldn’t be changed and perhaps it was all semantics, perhaps Tim had chosen to change. Still, he believed that Arlene transformed him by the simple act of loving him. Despite being raised in a household where nothing was expected of the males and everything was given, he learned to shoulder household tasks and, when the time came, child care. If anything, he did more than Arlene around the house because she left all traditional masculine chores to him. He was, after all, the only man in the house.
He often wonders now if his mother felt similarly isolated as the sole female in a house of men. In the years since his father’s death, Tim has put in a lot of time helping his mother create the pretty, well-maintained house she never really had. The basement rec room was one such project—white paint brightened the inevitable knotty pine paneling, his father’s beloved bar was replaced with a craft table, the crappy old sofa was tossed. He also helped her wallpaper the dining room and do some modest updates in the kitchen. Mother and son paid lip service to the idea that these renovations were geared toward an eventual sale. Yet Tim knew his mother would never move. Because if Doris moved, where would Go-Go go when he boomeranged, as he did every few years or so? That was one room they never touched, Go-Go’s little bedroom at the head of the stairs. Through high school, college, and two marriages, Go-Go’s room remained the same, waiting for him to fail again.
Yet although Go-Go’s intermittent homecomings should have been disappointing to their mother, she never quite saw it that way. Doris was thrilled to have him back, and Go-Go, whatever his faults, was good company for their mother after their father died. So Tim did the work, standing in for the father who had died too young, and Go-Go made their mother laugh, the perpetual baby of the family. Yet it is Sean, far away, who still gets to be the good son, the perfect son, the pride and joy. How does that figure? Maybe being perfect can be achieved only at a distance.
Tim wipes down the counters, letting Arlene carry the conversation with his mother. It’s mindless, maddening chatter—analyzing various mutual acquaintances, discussing that morning’s Mass. Tim may not have standing as the best son, but there’s no doubt that Arlene’s the best daughter-in-law, steady and reliable. Doris likes Lori, too, or did before she threw Go-Go out. Doris can’t take the side of anyone who has hurt one of her sons, no matter how justified it might have been. Sean’s wife, Vivian, is on Doris’s permanent shit list because Doris thinks it was her idea to move to Florida. Funny, because Sean was for it. So why does Doris blame Vivian? Probably because Sean told her as much. A lot of lying goes into being perfect.
As a prosecutor, Tim feels he has a particular insight into lying. People lie to him all the time. Perps, of course, but also cops who don’t want him to know about corners cut, rights violated. Even colleagues lie. Tim lies, too. Everyone lies. It’s a cardinal rule of homicide investigation, but he feels this maxim has broader applications. He lies to Arlene—harmless things, not for advantage, just to keep the peace. He lied to her, for example, about “loaning” Go-Go money a year or so ago. They do OK, with her back to teaching school, but they don’t have money to throw around. Loaning—OK, giving—money to Go-Go was, by definition, throwing money around, out, away. But Go-Go was never more sincere than when he promised to pay back a loan, and Tim couldn’t bear not to reward Go-Go’s belief in himself, wan and flickering as it was. Had Go-Go ever been truly confident? He was loud and brash, yes, but that’s not confidence. When Tim tries to talk to his daughters about the dangers of the world, they roll their eyes, wholly convinced that they know everything. Go-Go was never like that. He was bold, but not fearless. He knew the world could hurt him. He just didn’t know how.
Doris and Tim Senior made it clear that Tim and Sean were never to speak of what happened the night of the hurricane. They led by example. If someone mentioned Hurricane David, his parents would pretend to need to be prompted on the date. Eventually it didn’t even seem a pretense. “Oh, that storm,” Doris might say. “That was the night that we went to the Robisons’ house and stayed because the power was out and the street in front of their house filled with water.” Tim and Sean were more than happy to leave it at that. If Go-Go was never molested, then Chicken George never died. It was almost as if Chicken George never existed at all.
In law school and later, preparing for the bar, Tim sometimes laid out the facts of that night as if it were a case he might one day prosecute. A man who had been sexually assaulting a child chased him and another child through the woods. He slipped and fell, injuring himself fatally. The children dutifully reported this to their fathers, who trekked back into the woods and found his body. There was no crime in this. Well, Mickey pushed Chicken George. She admitted as much. But she was acting in self-defense. She was not even fourteen, a child by the standard of the law at the time. No, they committed no crime that night. Still, as an adult, as a father, Tim has often longed to speak of it. Not to Go-Go, never to Go-Go. That would have been unfair to him.
He can’t tell Arlene either because they have been together too long now, the time for such secrets is past. There’s Sean, but Sean is even more adamant than their parents that they must not speak about the night of the hurricane. Tim thinks it’s because it doesn’t jibe with Sean’s version of Sean. Gwen, Mickey-now-McKey?
Gwen
. Despite his habit of teasing her, he likes and respects her. As a kid, he was even a little into her, and not just out of envy for whatever sexual favors his brother was being granted. Tim liked Gwen before, when she was a plump little girl. She was smart beneath all her girly mannerisms. He doesn’t have any present-day yearnings for her. Arlene is the love of his life, and he is grateful for the clarity with which he sees that, accepts the compromises required by monogamy. He’s a man. He thinks frequently about other women, wonders what it would be like to fuck this one or that one. There are things, extreme things to be sure, that he has never done, and it now seems unlikely that he will. It’s okay. He has a good imagination, which serves him well when he’s alone. Still, he would like to talk to Gwen, just talk.
Tim carries the clean platter, one of his mother’s “good pieces,” to the built-in corner cupboard. It goes on the highest shelf, which is not quite within his reach. “Ma, where’s the stepladder?”
“Oh, I put that out in the garage, years ago. Just stand on a chair.”
He does, although he’s nervous about his weight, and he doesn’t like the idea that his mother gets up and down from a chair when she needs something from the upper reaches of the breakfront. He really should get that stepladder out of the garage, have it closer to hand.
His father always complained that the house wasn’t well built, but it appears more solid to Tim than the overpriced town house Go-Go bought for his family last year. Tim couldn’t begin to help with that purchase. One thing to hide a thousand or so from Arlene, quite another to come up with fifty thousand. His mother mortgaged this house without consulting him or Sean. He probably should be grateful that the housing market had already imploded, even if the stock market crash did ding the hell out of his girls’ college funds. Otherwise, his mother would have taken out even more and ended up underwater in her mortgage in a house that had been hers in full before his father died.
Both Tim and Sean were outraged when they heard about the loan, but it was too late to do anything. Doris claimed she didn’t understand why they were angry with her. “I bought a house for my grandbabies, and that’s who all my money is for anyway, the grandchildren.” Tim didn’t want to explain to her that she had taken her primary asset and given it in full to two of her six grandchildren. The whole subject made him feel small and mercenary. But Sean had no problem expressing his fury. He told Doris she should rewrite her will to make up for this inequity, reflect the fact that the $50,000 loan was an advance against what the girls might have inherited and they would be entitled to nothing else. A disproportionate advance, he added, with surprising bitterness. Of the three boys, Sean is the best fixed. Only one kid, the kind of kid sure to score a financial aid package to college because of his cross-country stuff. Plus, Sean’s father-in-law is loaded. “It’s not about the money,” Sean said heatedly when Tim called him on this.
In Tim’s experience,
everything
is about the money, especially whenever people say it’s not about the money. Granted, the money stood for something in Sean’s eyes, but what? Attention, love? Sean never lacked for either. And he still gets to be the good son, even though it’s Tim standing in their mother’s kitchen, drying the things that are too precious or too large to go in the dishwasher.
Arlene catches his eye and gives him a smile, one in which there is a world, a history of understanding. She is both insider and outsider in the Halloran family and her perspective, more dispassionate, yet also more forgiving, keeps him on an even keel. Go-Go got the beauties. Sean’s Vivian has a wealthy, privileged family. But there’s no doubt in Tim’s mind that he, of all the Halloran boys, made the best match. How did he do this? How did he find the right woman when he was a sophomore in college, only a few years older than Michelle is right now? Let Sean be the favorite. Tim’s the lucky one, and he’ll take lucky every time.