The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [137]
McKey has made it clear that she does not care for speaking on the phone. But a few months after we saw one another last—and that night, in her apartment, was the last time we were together, probably the last time we will ever be together—she sent everyone a note, announcing her marriage to a man she met on one of her flights. A botanist, she wrote, underlining the word three times. The other three talked among themselves about the meaning of that underline. Sean thinks she is excited to have met someone who has made a profession out of the thing she loved most. Tim thinks she just likes to underline things.
Gwen believes that McKey wants us to know that she has been rewarded, which is proof that she never did anything wrong. And who knows, maybe she didn’t. Maybe they were just two children, playing a game, as children always have and always will. Maybe she was as much a victim as Go-Go of the high school boys. Maybe. It is hard not to judge things from where we stand now, by the standards of the present, but we try not to. A girl and a boy played at being grown-ups. Another girl and a boy imitated them. Was anyone right? Was anyone wrong?
We take a step further back, consider our parents. Clem Robison marrying Tally when she was barely out of high school. Imagine how Tim would feel if a thirty-two-year-old man dated his high school daughter. Rita, flitting from one man to another as if they were cheap furniture, things you acquired with no intent of keeping. Was she liberated or merely pathetic? Doris and Tim Senior, left on the sidelines by a quirk of timing, too old to join the fun, too young not to miss it. At least Tim got to march in one parade.
Chicken George remains in the pauper’s grave where he was buried more than thirty years ago, the usual arrangement for a man who dies as a John Doe, with no family to identify him. We are his family. We would come forward to claim him if we knew his real name, but we never even thought to ask his real name. That’s how incurious we were. Our parents allowed us to roam the thickly wooded hillside of Leakin Park, while warning us about its dangers, large and small—hair-matting burrs, the polluted stream, the poisonous red berries on those spiky shrubs, rusty nails, broken glass, the possibility of rabid animals and, after the fact, the alleged pervert in the ramshackle house. They tried, they really tried, to anticipate everything that could bring us harm. But it was us, in our naïveté and heedlessness, who were to be feared. We were the most dangerous thing in the woods.
Acknowledgments
This is the most autobiographical novel I have written in strict geographical terms. For many years now, I have been circling the unusual neighborhood in which I grew up, determined to write about it, but wanting to wait for the right time and story. Very careful readers—one might even say obsessive—will realize that several of my previous books have gotten close to this territory. The cabin in the woods, the crafts store near High’s Dairy, Monaghan’s Tavern, the dead-end highway, Leakin Park, the cops and the attorney sitting in Towson Diner—they’ve all shown up before.
But because Dickeyville and Leakin Park are real, it’s important to say what’s not true in the preceding pages. There is not and never has been a house such as Clem Robison’s in what would be the 4700 block of Wetheredsville Road. The Hallorans’ house on Sekots is also wholly an invention of mine. St. Lawrence, the Catholic parish school near Dickeyville, has indeed closed, but I know of no allegations against any priest who worked there in the 1980s. All the families in this book are drawn from my imagination.
Perhaps because this book was intensely personal, I asked for less help than I usually do. Still, I am grateful for the daily support of: Carrie Feron (and everyone at William Morrow/HarperCollins); Vicky Bijur; David Simon; Ethan Simon; Theo and Madeline