The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Because they’re responsible for a man’s death,” Sean says.

  Mickey—and she is undeniably Mickey again to all of them, so young and vulnerable she reminds Gwen of Annabelle after being caught at something, miserable not at being caught but about being bad, which no one ever really wants to be—picks at the lush, embroidered flora of her gown, which is riotous with green tendrils and scarlet blossoms. Pretty, Gwen thinks again of the silk robe. Not the gown of a femme fatale, but of someone who wants love and romance. She is repelled by what Mickey did but can’t disavow her.

  Yet it is Tim, the father of three girls, who goes to sit next to her. “Talk to us, Mickey. Tell us everything that happened. We won’t turn our backs on you.”

  “But you did,” she says. “You all did. Except Go-Go. You left me.”

  “We’re here now.”

  She takes a sip of bourbon—from Gwen’s glass. “For all these years—for all these years—we felt responsible. Chicken George grabbed me, and I pushed him to get away. He fell. It was our fault, even if we didn’t mean to do it. Then this priest comes along and Go-Go wants to tell everything. Everything. For his own sake, not caring what will happen to me. I told him it was too risky to talk at all. We were responsible for Chicken George’s death and that’s something that never goes away.”

  “Not legally,” Tim says.

  “Not in any way,” Mickey says.

  “What about the high school boys?” asks Tim. “The ones that Go-Go told Father Andrew about?”

  “I met some guys when I went to the new school. Seniors. They wanted to mess around, and I was cool with it. Go-Go wanted to play, too. You know how he was. He always wanted to do what we were doing. So he wanted to do this, too.”

  “No,” Sean says. “That I don’t believe. You forced him.”

  “He didn’t know enough to know he shouldn’t like it,” Mickey says. “And, yeah, they gave him money sometimes. Gifts. Bribed him, I guess, so no one would tell. But they were more interested in watching Go-Go and me do things together than in doing things to him. They laughed at us.”

  “But they did do things.” Not a question on Tim’s part.

  “Nothing—nothing invasive. I mean, you can probably guess. Then they got bored. It was no more than three, four times. And, okay, it fucked Go-Go up a little. But he managed. He kept going, more or less—until your mom told him what your dad did. That’s when he went off the rails. Yes, I went to AA to watch him, make sure he didn’t break down and confess. Mr. Halloran was dead and had nothing to lose. If Go-Go started telling people about what happened—I wasn’t sure where it would lead. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Here,” Gwen says. “We ended up here.”

  Tim puts an arm around Mickey, tender and careful. Gwen sees in that moment something she will tell Tim later: She didn’t choose you because she looked up to you, because you were more of a father to her than any of the men who passed through Rita’s life. She needed someone she could control, and that was Go-Go. She was trying to hurt all of us through Go-Go. She did—herself included.

  Gwen will tell Sean things, too, when the time is right. That he shouldn’t confess to Vivian what happened here today because, in a way, it didn’t happen today. It happened a long time ago. Today was simply the resolution, a bill that came due. Her father might be right about this modern mania for honesty. It isn’t that we talk too much or talk too little, Gwen decides. It’s that most people choose an all-or-nothing approach. They speak of everything, or they speak of nothing. When we confess, it’s because we need to be absolved, and we don’t care how that affects others.

  Yet Gwen decides she will unburden herself to Karl. She will tell him what she’s done, the stupid affair—and forever forgo her role as the perfect, put-upon spouse. She has wronged him in a way that obliterates every slight, every moment of inattention and neglect. Because he’s Karl, he won’t hold it over her head. He will forgive her eventually. He will forgive her, but he won’t ever forget. Sadness will move into their house, an invisible sibling for Annabelle, a quiet, sneaky child who will on occasion misbehave outrageously, if only to remind Gwen that she’s there. It will be hard. It will be worth it. Allowing one’s self to be forgiven is just as hard as forgiving. Harder in some ways. Because to be forgiven, one first has to admit to being at fault.

  Mickey needs them. They need Mickey. They will never be five again. They won’t even be four. But there’s no doubt in Gwen’s mind that Go-Go would want them to take care of Mickey, that he wishes her no harm. Go-Go was the most generous of all of them.

  Gwen goes to Mickey’s kitchen, pokes around, knowing she will find a stash somewhere. Yes, here are circus peanuts, candy Boston baked beans, and in honor of Easter, Peeps. She puts them on a plate and sets them in front of Mickey, urges her to eat, joins her. Tim and Sean also join in, although without much enthusiasm. It all goes down surprisingly well with bourbon.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Gwen went home.

  We all went home. Gwen to Karl. Sean to Vivian. Tim to Arlene, although there was never any suspense about that. It’s not clear who told what to whom. We no longer share everything. But then—we haven’t shared everything for a long time. It’s possible we never shared everything.

  Doris stays in the house on Sekots Lane, where she continues to entertain—or not entertain, depending on one’s perspective—all her grandchildren, including Go-Go’s daughters. There are even visits from Duncan, at Sean’s insistence, three-day weekends carved out of his crammed schedule. That is Sean’s newfound talent, being insistent with Vivian. Duncan has yet to reveal his college preference or his sexual preference, but Sean is trying to find a way to convey that he is comfortable with anything Duncan wants, or is.

  Clem left his dream house and has taken up residence at an assisted-living facility in the D.C. suburbs, a mere thirty-five-minute drive from Gwen’s home, as close as many of the retirement communities Clem might have chosen on Baltimore’s north side. He has made a full recovery, although his hip aches on cold, sharp days. The Robison house has not yet sold, and Gwen agrees with Karl that it is wildly impractical for them. It is a unique property, to use the real estate parlance, waiting for a special buyer, someone who values trees, if not light, and a sense of isolation. A new Clem Robison.

  We try to stay in touch. Of course Tim and Sean were always in touch, but now Gwen checks in with them from time to time, which is more than she used to do. They talk about their kids and their parents. These are dutiful conversations, full of pauses. If the subject of Go-Go comes up, it’s only in the safest of memories. Remember how he chased the ball into the street that time? Remember how he danced? It’s hard to say how much longer this will go on.

  McKey has made it clear that she does not care for speaking on the phone. But a few months after we saw one another last—and that night, in her apartment, was the last time we were together, probably the last time we will ever be together—she sent everyone a note, announcing her marriage to a man she met on one of her flights. A botanist, she wrote, underlining the word three times. The other three talked among themselves about the meaning of that underline. Sean thinks she is excited to have met someone who has made a profession out of the thing she loved most. Tim thinks she just likes to underline things.

  Gwen believes that McKey wants us to know that she has been rewarded, which is proof that she never did anything wrong. And who knows, maybe she didn’t. Maybe they were just two children, playing a game, as children always have and always will. Maybe she was as much a victim as Go-Go of the high school boys. Maybe. It is hard not to judge things from where we stand now, by the standards of the present, but we try not to. A girl and a boy played at being grown-ups. Another girl and a boy imitated them. Was anyone right? Was anyone wrong?

  We take a step further back, consider our parents. Clem Robison marrying Tally when she was barely out of high school. Imagine how Tim would feel if a thirty-two-year-old man dated his high scho
ol daughter. Rita, flitting from one man to another as if they were cheap furniture, things you acquired with no intent of keeping. Was she liberated or merely pathetic? Doris and Tim Senior, left on the sidelines by a quirk of timing, too old to join the fun, too young not to miss it. At least Tim got to march in one parade.

  Chicken George remains in the pauper’s grave where he was buried more than thirty years ago, the usual arrangement for a man who dies as a John Doe, with no family to identify him. We are his family. We would come forward to claim him if we knew his real name, but we never even thought to ask his real name. That’s how incurious we were. Our parents allowed us to roam the thickly wooded hillside of Leakin Park, while warning us about its dangers, large and small—hair-matting burrs, the polluted stream, the poisonous red berries on those spiky shrubs, rusty nails, broken glass, the possibility of rabid animals and, after the fact, the alleged pervert in the ramshackle house. They tried, they really tried, to anticipate everything that could bring us harm. But it was us, in our naïveté and heedlessness, who were to be feared. We were the most dangerous thing in the woods.

  Acknowledgments

  This is the most autobiographical novel I have written in strict geographical terms. For many years now, I have been circling the unusual neighborhood in which I grew up, determined to write about it, but wanting to wait for the right time and story. Very careful readers—one might even say obsessive—will realize that several of my previous books have gotten close to this territory. The cabin in the woods, the crafts store near High’s Dairy, Monaghan’s Tavern, the dead-end highway, Leakin Park, the cops and the attorney sitting in Towson Diner—they’ve all shown up before.

  But because Dickeyville and Leakin Park are real, it’s important to say what’s not true in the preceding pages. There is not and never has been a house such as Clem Robison’s in what would be the 4700 block of Wetheredsville Road. The Hallorans’ house on Sekots is also wholly an invention of mine. St. Lawrence, the Catholic parish school near Dickeyville, has indeed closed, but I know of no allegations against any priest who worked there in the 1980s. All the families in this book are drawn from my imagination.

  Perhaps because this book was intensely personal, I asked for less help than I usually do. Still, I am grateful for the daily support of: Carrie Feron (and everyone at William Morrow/HarperCollins); Vicky Bijur; David Simon; Ethan Simon; Theo and Madeline Lippman; Susan Seegar (my favorite bookseller); Dorothy Simon. I have stolen jokes from my brother-in-law, Gary Simon, often enough to give him credit here. And while Dana Rashidi technically doesn’t work for me, she’s awfully good-natured about the way my life bleeds into hers. Alison Chaplin has become a vital part of my writing process. Alison has called my attention to factual errors in the text; to the extent that any remain, it is because I do think novelists have some leeway. I also am grateful to my two “offices”—Spoons in Baltimore, Starbucks in New Orleans—and the people who work there. A special shout-out to Niki Hannan.

  But nothing would have gotten done this past year without the help of several wonderful young women, especially Sara Kiehne. A woman is only as good as the people taking care of her children. A man, too, probably. Like Tally Robison, I am keenly aware that I have only a limited amount of time to work every day now, that I must put my work away before the sun goes down. Unlike Tally, I am happier for it.

  About the Author

  LAURA LIPPMAN grew up in Baltimore and returned to her hometown in 1989 to work as a journalist. After writing seven books while still a full-time reporter, she left the Baltimore Sun to focus on fiction. She is the author of eleven Tess Monaghan books, including Baltimore Blues, Another Thing to Fall, and The Girl in the Green Raincoat; five stand-alone novels, including Every Secret Thing, To the Power of Three, What the Dead Know, and Life Sentences; and one short story collection, Hardly Knew Her. She is also the editor of another story collection, Baltimore Noir. Lippman has won numerous awards for her work, including the Edgar, Quill, Anthony, Nero Wolfe, Agatha, Gumshoe, Barry, and Macavity.

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  Also by Laura Lippman

  I’d Know You Anywhere

  The Girl in the Green Raincoat

  Life Sentences

  Hardly Knew Her

  Another Thing to Fall

  What the Dead Know

  No Good Deeds

  To the Power of Three

  By a Spider’s Thread

  Every Secret Thing

  The Last Place

  In a Strange City

  The Sugar House

  In Big Trouble

  Butchers Hill

  Charm City

  Baltimore Blues

  Credits

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover photograph © by Scott G. Johnston / Alamy

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE MOST DANGEROUS THING. Copyright © 2011 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ISBN 978-0-06-170651-6

  EPub Edition © September 2011 ISBN: 9780062092588

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