The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  The office, never a loud place, is still today, with most of Gwen’s employees opting for the flex day. If she could drag her thoughts away from Annabelle, she could get a lot of work done. But what she really wants to do is go to the conference room and curl up with her, watch whatever Disney princess is enchanting her. Feminist that she believes herself to be, Gwen has no problem with little girls wanting to be princesses. Want to find the damaged women among you? Look to the ones who had their femininity thwarted at every turn, the poor hulking girls who were asked to play the boys’ parts at their all-girl summer camps or schools. Margery, her most aggressive, ruthless reporter, loves bags and shoes and wouldn’t step out of the house without makeup. It’s not an either-or world. It’s possible to be a feminine feminist.

  Becca, her assistant, pops her head around the door, and Gwen is instantly on alert. “Annabelle OK?”

  “Oh, yeah. She’s in heaven. She can’t wait until noon, when I’ve told her we can go to the vending machines and pick two items each, as long as one of them doesn’t have chocolate. No, you’ve got a call that came through the main switchboard. A woman, doesn’t want to give her full name, very cloak and dagger, but she says she’s been calling and calling your cell and you don’t answer and she does, in fact, know the number to your cell. Clearly, she thinks this is somewhat urgent.”

  Gwen glances down, realizes her phone has been on silent. When Annabelle is with her, there’s no reason to be vigilant about the cell. She touches the screen and sees a series of three calls over the morning, each from a number with the caller ID function blocked. But it’s a number she recognizes, kind of. Local. A number she has dialed recently. She touches it, the phone on speaker, and is amazed how quickly the call goes through, how a voice jumps out of the line like a coiled snake.

  “Jesus, about time,” says the voice, which she recognizes as Tess Monaghan’s. “You were on the verge of missing an opportunity.”

  Gwen turns off the speaker function and picks up the phone, which only piques Becca’s interest, but so it goes. “An opportunity?”

  A pause, a sigh. “My client is in town. And despite the fact that I have advised him strongly not to do this, he wants to meet with you. But the window is very small. He came here to meet with his lawyer. He has to go back home tomorrow, so the only window is early evening.”

  “He—so I’m allowed to know the gender now.”

  She is teasing, but Tess Monaghan doesn’t seem to enjoy being teased. No one does. “You’re going to know everything soon. Look, there’s a movie theater out on Nursery Road. Meet him in the lobby there.”

  “Why there?”

  “He can walk there from his hotel. He’s already turned in his rental car, so he’s kind of limited in his mobility.”

  “How will I know—”

  “He’ll find you. Frankly, I am hoping against hope that he stands you up or backs out at the last minute. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by him talking to you—and much to lose.”

  Gwen is quite familiar with the movie theater on Nursery Road, which is barely five miles from her house in Relay. It is never crowded for some reason, possibly because of the larger multiplex a few more miles down the highway, which is part of an enormous mall. She, Karl, and Annabelle have come here for virtually every talking animal movie and Pixar film made over the last two years. It is a ridiculous place to try to have a conversation, she thinks, especially as the ticket takers begin to eye her skeptically. Is it so unusual for a woman to wait in the lobby of a movie theater?

  An African American man comes through the door, sixty or so, and her stomach lurches. This is it. This is the moment she will be called into account, told that the man they left in the woods to die was someone’s father, grandfather, cousin. She will counter, of course, share the horrible truth about what he did to Go-Go, but it doesn’t balance out, not quite. Unless Go-Go’s death balances it out. Chicken George died in a night. Go-Go spent years dying.

  The man walks by, gets in the ticket line. She glances at her watch. The mystery client is going to stand her up after all. She feels relieved for some reason. He doesn’t want to see her. He has nothing to say to her. This has nothing to do with Chicken George.

  She checks her e-mail on her phone, checks her messages. Nothing. Now she’s angry. She could have had this hour with Annabelle at the house. They could be sitting in the kitchen, dyeing eggs, baking. She’s getting irritated at this phantom client whose on-again, off-again decisions have affected her. She begins playing a game of Angry Birds, feeling like a very angry bird herself.

  “Mrs. Robison?” a man’s voice inquires.

  She looks up into the face of a white-haired man, broad shouldered, quite handsome. He is wearing a turtleneck beneath a well-tailored camel’s hair coat.

  “Yes.” She doesn’t even bother to correct him, say it’s Ms.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. It’s farther than I realized, the walk here. It looked so close on a map. And I felt I was taking my life in my hands, walking along the shoulder. I thought there would be a sidewalk.”

  “There often aren’t,” she says, feeling stupid. “I mean—in the newer developments.” She cannot imagine what this immaculately groomed man has to do with Go-Go. Perhaps he senses her confusion, for he extends his hand. He is the kind of man who takes another person’s hand in both of his, holds it, making eye contact.

  “I am Andrew Burke,” he says. “Gordon Halloran knew me as Father Andrew, but I left the church several years ago. Last fall I asked Tess Monaghan to find him so he could do me a favor of sorts. He said he would. Then he changed his mind, and now he’s dead. A possible suicide. I feel horrible about that.”

  Perhaps because he’s a man who seems skilled at giving comfort, Gwen also wants to comfort him. “No one knows, for sure. If it was a suicide.”

  “But you think it is.”

  She wants to tell the truth. “Sometimes you can’t know.”

  He shakes his head. “True enough. But I feel that I inadvertently pressured him. You see—we spoke, after Tess found him. I wasn’t supposed to call, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m afraid I frustrate her, with my inability to follow her instructions. But I wanted to hear from him—what I needed to hear. He ended up telling me things, things I think I should tell someone close to him. I considered his mother, but I don’t think Doris could bear it. When I heard about you from Tess, I realized that’s who I needed. A friend, someone who cared enough about Go-Go to ask questions after he died. Besides, you’re a part of the story, aren’t you?”

  Gwen wants to run, dash out to her car in the parking lot and drive back home. Drive back in time. But how far back will she have to go? How far must she go to escape what has happened? You’re a part of the story—well, she is. But so is Sean, so is Tim, and McKey. Why is she being singled out?

  Because she wouldn’t leave it alone. Because she had to go to the private detective, had to pry. Tim warned her not to do this. But how could she know that Tim would grow up to be not only smart but wise? When did that happen?

  “Is there somewhere we can go? Somewhere private?”

  “There’s actually an airport bar outside security in terminal A,” says Gwen, who has always wondered who drinks outside the security gates in an airport. Now she has one answer. People who can afford to sit while others rush by, people who want to be as anonymous as possible. “Let’s go there.”

  “A drink would be nice,” says Father Andrew—no, just Andrew Burke, not a priest, not anymore, which Gwen finds bizarrely comforting. He puts a gentle hand between her shoulders. It’s as if he has had some experience with people who need help moving toward something unpleasant and inevitable.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  As McKey’s flight begins to make its descent into Baltimore, she hears the passengers start the usual patter about what they can identify on the ground below. “There’s Big Lots. Is that Ritchie Highway?” “I see the Applebee’s. The one on Route 175.”
The Chesapeake Bay should make it easy for people to orient themselves, yet much of what she overhears is off-kilter, people mixing up east and west. McKey finds the whole ritual strange. Who needs to orient themselves from the sky? By the time you identify where you are, you’re no longer there.

  She makes the final pass through the cabin. There’s always at least one person who doesn’t put electronic equipment away after the announcement. This time, it’s a Kindle user, who maintains that the prohibition doesn’t apply to e-readers. Yes, it does, sir. She’s firm but not bossy.

  It is almost eleven. The airport will be a ghost town, with all the newsstands and food places closed for the evening. She won’t even be able to grab McDonald’s on the way out. She’ll end up eating canned tuna and whatever she can scrounge from her own fridge. She should shop tomorrow, make it special. No. That will spook him. She’ll have beer and wine—shit, she told him she was in AA. Fuck it, she’ll tell him she realized she didn’t really have a problem. But isn’t that what everyone says? Maybe she’ll tell him the truth, that she was there to watch over Go-Go. But then he’ll ask why. As always, the less said the better.

  She picked up Sean’s message in the shuttle on the way to Detroit Metro. “What are you smiling about?” one of her coworkers asked. McKey hadn’t realized she was smiling. She knew he would call her. It has taken more than thirty years, but Sean finally wants to be bad, and he has chosen her. Not Gwen, her. There are some women who would say that’s because Gwen is a nice girl while McKey is not, but McKey doesn’t see it that way. For one thing, she doesn’t think Gwen is all that nice. She cultivates the appearance, as many women do, but Gwen has lots of bad in her. Everyone does. Goodness isn’t natural. All other living creatures put themselves first. Only people try to pretend they’re different, that they have any goals beyond survival.

  Sean probably wants a one-off, no complications. That’s what she wants, too. She thinks. She’s pretty sure. God, if he fell in love with her, imagine the headaches. He might get a divorce, which he probably can’t afford, and then there would be his kid and all that shit. McKey is not angling for that. Although it would be cool if he fell in love with her short-term, if he got a little crazy for a while, then sobered up and went home. A prolonged fling would be perfect.

  It’s funny to McKey how men think they’re in charge, making these decisions. They never are. If a man leaves his wife, it’s because another woman has finagled him into asking for a divorce. Or he gets kicked out, which wasn’t what he wanted, even if he was having affairs and the like. Rita always engineered the end of her relationships. Shed Rick for Larry, shrugged Larry off to follow that big-talking loser down to Florida. She may not have made the best choices, but they were hers.

  McKey could end it here. It’s enough that Sean has called, that he wants to see her. To talk, he said in his message. Right, sure, uh-huh. I bet your wife doesn’t understand you. I bet you’ve grown apart. She’s very cold. She never pays you any attention, never has a kind word for you. McKey has heard all those things over the years. Not long ago she heard them from her ex, who came sniffing around her door, and OK, she let him in one night. No one got hurt. No one ever gets hurt if people are quiet and discreet and mind their own business. It’s the talkers of the world who make trouble.

  Tally Robison was a gossip, although she didn’t have any awareness of this, proclaimed to be the opposite. When Mickey sat in her kitchen, waiting for Gwen to return from school on the cute little half-bus that kids took to private school—even her bus is better, she remembers thinking—Tally talked on and on, and all her stories were about how wonderful she was and how awful everyone else was. The drab clothes worn by so-and-so, the awful casseroles the other mothers brought to the church potluck. The wonder of her taste, her style, her knowledge, her wit. She would flip through magazines, sighing. It’s criminal to have the taste without the pocketbook. McKey now thinks Tally overrated herself, but she was mesmerized at the time, nodding raptly over her miniature packets of Smarties and Twizzlers. Oh, the pain of being so beautiful, so bright, so stylish. How do you stand being you, Mrs. Robison?

  She always thought it came down to the mothers. That’s why Sean chose Gwen. Because he bought into those fables, the special-ness of the Robisons. True, there was that dramatic rescue, the day he saved Gwen from the stream. But it was merely the climax to a story already written. He was going to choose Gwen no matter what. Mickey saw it coming a long way off, well before anyone else knew. Which was good. It gave her time to practice the art of not caring. An art that, three decades later, she has almost perfected. Being with Sean will obliterate everything else somehow.

  Won’t it?

  There’s the baseball field. There’s the little park. There are the lights of the runway. Why do people need to narrate their lives? What is the point of all this talk, talk, talk? Words don’t make things more real. Quite the opposite, McKey thinks. The more you talk about a thing, the less real it is. That’s what she was trying to get Go-Go to understand before he died. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP.

  He finally did.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Tim hangs up the phone, looks at Arlene, and lies to her face with an ease that breaks his heart.

  “Work,” he says. “I need to go in to the office.”

  She says: “On a Saturday? Poor you,” and rubs his shoulders. This is the payoff for being a relatively honest husband all these years. He can lie to his wife without her suspecting a thing. Interesting how scrupulously honest people and pathological liars end up sharing the same advantages. Those who never lie have so much credit stored up. Those who lie all the time get very good at it. It’s the poor schmucks in the middle, the sometime liars, who suck at it.

  He always had Go-Go pegged as one of the poor schmucks in the middle. But if Gwen is right—he shakes his head. She can’t be right.

  “I might as well go in now, get it over with,” he says, grabbing the car keys, ignoring his daughters’ wrathful looks.

  “Is it the jewelry store murder?” Arlene asks.

  “Sure,” he says. He almost wishes she would call him on his shit, ask what could possibly require him to go to the office on a Saturday, short of a cop killing. But she doesn’t pick up on it, only smiles and pats his shoulder again.

  Behind the wheel of his car, he tries to concentrate on the roads even as he keeps reviewing the time line. If Gwen is right—if Father Andrew is telling the truth—

  If. There is another way of looking at this. The old priest is a liar. And with Go-Go dead, he can spin the story however he wants. But why spin a story at all? What does he have to gain? With Go-Go dead, he’s in the clear, assuming he’s the one who molested him. Only he says he’s not, that he’s never touched a kid, and that he was counting on Go-Go to tell people that.

  He also says that Chicken George never touched a kid. At least—he didn’t touch Go-Go.

  The priest was quite firm, Gwen told Tim. Go-Go said he was molested by two high school boys in 1980. The night of the hurricane—

  Was in 1979, not 1980. People get those details wrong all the time. Trust me, Gwen.

  But Go-Go said it was two high school boys, Tim. Not Chicken George. Why would he tell Father Andrew that?

  Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the priest is using Go-Go’s death.

  Father Andrew, it turns out, is essentially being blackmailed. A former student is threatening to go public with lurid tales of sex abuse in the parish. With the statute of limitations long past, he can’t bring a civil or criminal suit, but he can ruin Father Andrew’s life. The claim is baseless—Father Andrew says—but as an ex-priest and one who is now living openly as a gay man, he feels vulnerable. So many people don’t understand the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. Yet he refuses on principle to pay this amoral opportunist. His lawyer started assembling character witnesses, students who would testify as to his behavior. Go-Go was one of those students, and he had agreed to give a deposit
ion.

  Go-Go was making a clean breast of things. He wanted to know if he had to talk about other sexual experiences, in his deposition, and Father Andrew promised him that it wouldn’t come up. He was only going to be asked about his relationship with Father Andrew, if he ever saw anything untoward. Go-Go said he was happy to do it. But then he changed his mind, refused to talk to the private investigator or Father Andrew.

  Did he tell him—

  About Chicken George’s death? No. But he insisted he was molested by two boys, then blamed this older man.

  Tim arrives at his mother’s house. She has a book in hand, holding her place with her finger, and she looks surprised—really, almost a little annoyed—at her son’s unannounced visit. It never occurred to Tim that his mother would prefer anything to seeing one of her sons.

  “Sean’s meeting you there,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “The golf course. He said you were playing golf this afternoon, but he had some errands to run first.”

  Interesting. Why has Sean created such an elaborate lie to get away from their mother? But Tim instinctively takes his brother’s back.

  “Our tee time isn’t for another couple of hours. Mom, where did you say you keep the stepladder now?”

  “Why do you need the stepladder?”