The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [108]
“I’m going to go talk to her.”
“Her?”
“The PI.”
Tim shakes his head. “Don’t. This is about my family, not yours, Gwen.”
“It’s about all of us. There’s no hierarchy.”
“Really? Were you sexually molested in the woods? I mean, nonconsensually?”
She blushes. “That’s a little crude, Tim. Even for you.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to take the bloom off your first love, the tender memories of dry-humping and second base.”
He has been too specific. She shoots him a look. “I always thought you watched us.”
“Only once,” he admits. “And not out there. In the basement.”
She looks down at her plate. “That summer, when Chicken—when he—disappeared that last time, Sean and I started using the cabin. Only a few times. It smelled so bad. I felt dirty there.”
“And not in the good way.”
“Tim.”
God, they are their young selves again, him teasing Gwen because he’s so insanely jealous of his brother, having a willing girlfriend when Tim can’t find one. It’s not that he wants her, or ever really wanted her. It’s that his brother leapfrogged ahead of him. Later, Go-Go got more pussy than the two of them combined. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure that one out.
“Did you ever go back?” she asks. “After?”
She doesn’t have to specify back to where. “No.”
“My dad did. He went back again and again. He doesn’t know I know this. He would set out for these long walks on weekends and he wouldn’t invite me, the way he used to. I’m sure that’s where he went.”
“He probably thought you had no interest. You were a teenager by then. Trust me, teenage girls have very little use for their fathers. Their fathers’ wallets, but not their fathers.”
“My dad and I got along well. Then and now. Yet we can’t talk about this.”
“Gwen, let it go. This isn’t about you.”
Gwen glances around the table, in search of something. She grabs a napkin, rummages in her purse, finds a pen. A much-chewed pen, Tim observes, the one thing about Gwen that is not put together, polished. She draws a star in the way that grade-schoolers are taught, with five slashing lines.
“This was us. The five points of a star,” she says. “Remember? Mickey said we were like a starfish.”
“A starfish regenerates its limbs. My brother isn’t coming back. My brother, Gwen.” He is trying to underline to her that he gets to decide this. He and Sean, if it comes to that, but not Gwen.
“Now look at the center. When you draw a star this way, it forms a pentagon at the center. That was Chicken George. Not just him, but the woods, and our adventures there. When he molested Go-Go, when he died—we were all cut off from each other. I suddenly couldn’t stand to be around Sean. I didn’t know why, I just know it was so. And I think he was relieved that I didn’t want to go with him anymore. Mickey went to a new school, and we didn’t see her anymore, but we had always gone to different schools, so that wasn’t it. You think it’s dangerous to look closer at this. I think it’s dangerous to look away.”
Their appointment had been for twelve forty-five, late for lunch in this part of town, and the diner has emptied, entered the afternoon lull. He sees the homicide detectives up at the cashier, paying their separate checks, shaking toothpicks free from the dispenser. A lawyer he knows, a formidable defense attorney, is finishing her coffee at the counter, reading the paper. She catches his gaze, arches an eyebrow at him. That old bag doesn’t miss a trick.
“I’ve got to get back to work.” In his mind, he is running through the chain of events if this were ever to become public. What if Gwen decides to write about this, for God’s sake? Writers have so few boundaries. Didn’t she publish an article about her own daughter’s adoption a few years back, complete with details no one needed to know about her fertility problems? Maybe he should tell his boss, confidentially and preemptively. Hell, forget his boss, how does he tell Arlene, someone from whom he