The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [126]
He also says that Chicken George never touched a kid. At least—he didn’t touch Go-Go.
The priest was quite firm, Gwen told Tim. Go-Go said he was molested by two high school boys in 1980. The night of the hurricane—
Was in 1979, not 1980. People get those details wrong all the time. Trust me, Gwen.
But Go-Go said it was two high school boys, Tim. Not Chicken George. Why would he tell Father Andrew that?
Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the priest is using Go-Go’s death.
Father Andrew, it turns out, is essentially being blackmailed. A former student is threatening to go public with lurid tales of sex abuse in the parish. With the statute of limitations long past, he can’t bring a civil or criminal suit, but he can ruin Father Andrew’s life. The claim is baseless—Father Andrew says—but as an ex-priest and one who is now living openly as a gay man, he feels vulnerable. So many people don’t understand the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. Yet he refuses on principle to pay this amoral opportunist. His lawyer started assembling character witnesses, students who would testify as to his behavior. Go-Go was one of those students, and he had agreed to give a deposition.
Go-Go was making a clean breast of things. He wanted to know if he had to talk about other sexual experiences, in his deposition, and Father Andrew promised him that it wouldn’t come up. He was only going to be asked about his relationship with Father Andrew, if he ever saw anything untoward. Go-Go said he was happy to do it. But then he changed his mind, refused to talk to the private investigator or Father Andrew.
Did he tell him—
About Chicken George’s death? No. But he insisted he was molested by two boys, then blamed this older man.
Tim arrives at his mother’s house. She has a book in hand, holding her place with her finger, and she looks surprised—really, almost a little annoyed—at her son’s unannounced visit. It never occurred to Tim that his mother would prefer anything to seeing one of her sons.
“Sean’s meeting you there,” she says.
“Where?”
“The golf course. He said you were playing golf this afternoon, but he had some errands to run first.”
Interesting. Why has Sean created such an elaborate lie to get away from their mother? But Tim instinctively takes his brother’s back.
“Our tee time isn’t for another couple of hours. Mom, where did you say you keep the stepladder now?”
“Why do you need the stepladder?”
“I just do.”
She has to think—or pretend that she’s thinking. “In the garage. I so seldom use it.”
It is the stepladder from his childhood, the one that used to be kept in the upstairs hall closet, the one that he needed last month to put away things on the high shelf of the china cupboard. In the event of a fire, they were to drag the stepladder to Go-Go’s room, lift the rectangular board that led to the attic crawl space, then proceed to throw a rope ladder out the attic window and clamber to the ground. The only problem was that their father never anchored the rope ladder to the sill, which meant it was useless. If the house ever caught fire, they would have been safer jumping out the second-story windows than clambering down an unsecured rope from the third. Still, the stepladder belonged in that upstairs closet. It’s the only way to get to the attic. He was surprised that his mother had moved it to the garage. Now he has a hunch why.
It clearly has been years since anyone has pushed open the door, leading to the storage space under the eaves. Someone—Go-Go, his father, his mother?—has tried to nail it shut, but it’s a piss-poor job. Tim pushes it with his shoulder and the nails slide from the thin, splintery wood.
Tim isn’t particularly tall, but once in the attic he has to stay hunched to keep his head from grazing the ceiling. He pulls the chain on the single-watt bulb only to watch it die with a pop. There’s enough light from the window for him to