The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [119]
Pity Us All
Chapter Thirty-five
When Sean’s plane touches down at Baltimore/Washington International on Good Friday morning, he is thinking about the first time he landed at this airport, which happened to come at the end of his first plane trip. He was in college, heading home for a surprise Thanksgiving visit after signing up to courier a package, a not uncommon arrangement then. Twenty years old! Duncan has been on a plane at least twenty times, possibly more. He’s on yet another one right now, en route to New Orleans, a place where Sean has never been. “It’s just not on my list,” Vivian had said when he proposed it as a romantic getaway for the two of them a few years ago. “The food is so heavy.”
The airport where Sean landed in the mid-1980s had already switched its name to Baltimore/Washington International from Friendship, an unlikely moniker for any airport in these hostile days. Sean travels enough for work that he is a low-maintenance passenger—shoes off, laptop unsheathed, liquids in the right volume, stowed in a plastic bag of the dictated size. He has little patience for the petulant fliers who treat everything as an affront, who have decided that the security line is the place to throw down for their dignity, to argue for the five-ounce bottle of hand cream, which is apparently made from ground diamonds if it’s really a hundred dollars an ounce, as the woman at the Tampa airport kept insisting. For Christ’s sake, even if you seldom fly, is it so darn hard to get on the Internet and do a little homework? The only people who don’t annoy him are the very old travelers, often infirm, who seem genuinely overwhelmed by the experience. He does the math—people in their late eighties were born before the Depression, knew a childhood in which cars were far from the norm. He thinks people have a right to be spooked by anything invented after they were twenty-one. Commercial air travel is a relatively recent phenomenon. His own mother can’t manage the trip to Florida on her own. Or so she says.
Twenty-seven years ago, when Sean made his first flight, he tried to play it cool. But between the novelty of the plane—a little disappointing, except on landing, not at all what he thought flying would be like—and the responsibility of being a courier and the coiled surprise of showing up unexpectedly for Thanksgiving—oh, how happy he was going to make his mother—it was hard not to be giddy. He checked his bag, a boxy suitcase without wheels, and held the package on his lap throughout the flight, although it was only a stack of legal files that needed to be in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving.
He handed these papers to a local courier who met him at the airport, then realized he had no idea how to get into Baltimore without ponying up for a cab, which probably cost twelve, fifteen bucks at the time. He was Timothy Halloran’s son and couldn’t bear to pay that much for something so simple. He wandered the terminal, found a free hotel shuttle to a place over on Security Boulevard, then caught the bus from there to Dickeyville. Two buses because he couldn’t walk the final mile with that heavy suitcase. In the end, it took almost three hours to get from the airport to the house, while the flight itself had been barely ninety minutes. That was okay. It just heightened the pleasure of the surprise, of the anticipation of walking through the door and saying jauntily, “I’m home!”
But the house on Sekots Lane was empty that day. Empty, yet with a sense of things having been interrupted very suddenly—his mother had clearly been in the early stages of preparing the Thanksgiving sauerkraut, one of those Baltimore customs that Sean didn’t think to question until he ventured out in the world.