The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [106]
“That’s her story.”
“Well—yes.”
Tim has enough information now to stake out his territory. Some would say he’s being the devil’s advocate, but as he sees it, he’s standing up for his brother, who isn’t here to defend himself. “Did it ever occur to you that Lori wants to revise their history? She threw him out, he started drinking again, he ended up dead. She doesn’t want to be responsible.”
“Yes, but why confide in me?”
“Because here you are, sharing it with his brother. She saw you at the funeral, she knows there’s some connection. She’s trying to get back on my mother’s good side.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why does she need to be on your mother’s good side?”
“For one thing, my mother essentially owns the house she lives in. She loaned Go-Go the money to buy it. She could call in the note.”
“Grandmothers don’t do that to their grandchildren, no matter how they feel about their daughters-in-law. Lori is the one who has the power in this situation. She could sell the house and move away. She can keep your mom from seeing the girls. Anyway, I assume you know your sister-in-law better than I do, but that strikes me as way too devious for her. She’s pretty direct.”
Tim is ready to counter—to say he does, in fact, know Lori better than Gwen, to ask who she is to presume to tell him about his family, his sister-in-law—but he starts to laugh instead.
“What?”
“It’s like we’re kids again. This is how we argued then.”
Gwen laughs, too. “So maybe we are still friends.”
“Maybe.” He can’t go that far. As Gwen said, it’s like entering a time machine. They went into the past there for a moment. But they can’t stay there. He doesn’t want to stay there.
“Look, Tim, the reason I called you is because—this private detective. What if she was hired by his family?”
He is confused by the pronoun. “Go-Go’s? My mom, you mean?”
“No.” She lowers her voice and leans toward him. He wishes she wouldn’t. Her posture is a secret personified. He leans back, crosses his arms. “His. Him. From the woods.”
It takes another second to process. “He didn’t have any family.”
“That we know of. But he would disappear, remember? Why did he disappear? I never really thought about it, but chances are that a family member would intervene from time to time, if his health was jeopardized. They’d get a judge to put him in a hospital for his own good, but then he would sign himself out. I know it was easier to institutionalize people then, but if he was considered sane, he couldn’t be kept anywhere against his will.”
“OK, so maybe he had family. So what? He fell down in the woods, he hit his head, and bled out or drowned. It was an accident. Mickey didn’t mean to—well, you know. It was just easier not to explain that part, or to tell our parents how well we knew him, how we created the circumstances that ended up with Go-Go being assaulted. Those omissions don’t change the basic facts.”
“I know. I was there. And if we had told the full story at the time, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But if it were your relative, if he was found in the woods without his guitar, his single most precious object, a day or so after a horrible hurricane, based on an anonymous call—would you think it was an accident?”
“He had the guitar.”
“When we saw him. My father told me he hiked back to make sure if the EMTs had found him and there was no body—and no guitar.”
“Paramedics probably stole it. Besides, why wait thirty years to pursue it? Why now?”
“I don’t know. But who else from Go-Go’s childhood would think he could do him a favor?”
“You said ‘need,’ not a favor.”
“Yeah, well, a smart private investigator isn’t going to say, ‘Hey, I’m looking into a suspicious death of which you might have knowledge.’ She’s going to set you up to think it’s something good, then lower the boom.”
Their food arrives, but the gyro, which Tim had been looking forward to with almost pathetic anticipation, is tasteless. If the guy does have family, if there are suspicions