The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [113]
That’s not exactly true. But she suddenly feels generous toward Mickey, wants to balance the scales of her own mind, where she’s been running her daughter down.
“You’ll have to introduce us when she comes to visit.”
That’ll be the day, Rita thinks, going back to her teakettle, the jar of Folgers, restarting her morning. What did I do, Mickey? I know I wasn’t perfect, not by a mile, but if Joey can forgive me, why can’t you? The difference, she thinks, is that Joey is a parent. He gets it, he knows how high one’s hopes and aspirations are—and how awful it is to confront the gap between the parent you want to be and the parent you are. Maybe she shouldn’t have had kids, but where would Mickey be then? Would she rather not exist at all? Rita, for all her aches and pains, for all her mistakes, thinks life is a hoot. She’d do it all over again, and the exact same way, knowing full well where she’s headed.
Coffee in one cramped, crabbed hand, she shuffles to the living room to watch the news, smoke another cigarette.
Chapter Thirty-three
Gwen has met many people who hate journalists—they announce it happily, proudly, often at cocktail parties where she has just been introduced—but none quite as vociferously as the private detective who tried to contact Go-Go in the weeks before his death. Tess Monaghan has refused to return Gwen’s calls and didn’t even acknowledge e-mails sent to the bare-bones Web site she maintains. After several days, she finally sent back a terse note:
I don’t talk to reporters.
Gwen wrote back, under her personal e-mail:
I’m not approaching you as a journalist, but as a friend of Gordon Halloran, who died in what may well be a suicide committed after you tried to contact him, wreaking not a little havoc in his life.
Another day went by before she received this e-mail:
My office, 2 p.m.
The office is in Butchers Hill, less than a mile from the magazine’s headquarters, yet worlds away in a sense. While Butchers Hill caught a whiff of the go-go real estate boom of the century’s first decade, it is nothing like the glass canyon where Gwen’s office is located. It has retained its human scale, tucking new restaurants and shops into old rowhouses. Tess Monaghan’s office, which was virtually unmarked, sits two blocks from Patterson Park.
“It’s open,” a woman’s voice calls out. Working behind an unlocked door seems a little casual for this neighborhood, even during the daytime. But as Gwen enters, she is immediately inspected by two large dogs, a greyhound and a Doberman, and a jumpier, miniature version of the greyhound. They circle and sniff her, apparently with satisfactory results, as they then return to the sofa, where they arrange themselves in an overlapping lump. Tess Monaghan, sitting behind her desk, doesn’t rise at all, but she has good reason: she is holding a baby, who is spitting up on her shoulder.
“Way to miss the burp cloth, Scout,” she says, clearly unperturbed by the fountain of curdy white liquid that trails down her sleeve.
“He’s adorable,” Gwen says, making conversation. She can’t really see much but the dark hair. She doesn’t have any real experience with infants. Annabelle was eight months when they met her in a Beijing hotel.
“She.”
“I thought you said scout?”
“That’s her name. Her middle name.” Tess Monaghan has a manner of speaking that makes questions seem not only unnecessary but also rude. The things that Gwen might normally ask—from To Kill a Mockingbird? Why do you use her middle name? How old?—die on her tongue.
“I don’t normally bring her to the office,” Tess says. “We had a child care crisis today and I didn’t want to cancel