The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [32]
“What about the chickens?” Gwen asked.
“What about them?” countered Tim.
“They’ll die out here. Animals will eat them.”
“So what? Chicken George was going to eat them, too. What’s the difference?”
“But Chicken George would have been more humane.”
Tim laughed. “You think so, Gwen? You think that snapping an animal’s neck is that much more humane than being snatched up in the jaws of a dog or a fox? Dead is dead.”
Go-Go liked that. “Dead is dead,” he raved. “Dead is dead!” He began throwing rocks at the chickens, then running among them, scattering them. But those chickens were tough. They spread out, giving Go-Go room, but they didn’t disperse.
Mickey and Sean had been quiet throughout, systematically looking through George’s things, trying to find clues. Mickey, although uninterested in school, had a talent for deduction. Gwen’s father, noticing how she examined facts and reached conclusions, had tried to interest her in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, but she had no patience for Sherlock Holmes. Or Nancy Drew, or Trixie Belden, or books in general. She was disdainful of people who read but not in a defensive, anti-intellectual way. She thought reading was a ruse, a completely wasteful activity. If Mickey were the kind of person who trafficked in similes or metaphors, she might have compared reading to rules such as not swimming an hour after a meal, or never going out of the house with wet hair. Instead, she just didn’t read and was baffled by those who did. She didn’t like television much, either. Mickey plain didn’t like sitting still. She wanted to make things happen. She wanted to see if she could jump from mossy stone to mossy stone without falling. She wanted to poke snapping turtles with sticks, and if one snapped, well, that was the point. She would have liked to live like Chicken George—in a cabin, accountable only to herself, although preferably with indoor plumbing.
“He’s gone,” she said and then it was real. Chicken George was gone. Sean picked up her words, repeated them. “He’s gone.”
We were sad. No one cried. Tim, Sean, and Mickey never cried, and Gwen and Go-Go had learned to follow their example. But we were all disappointed, and surprised at how disappointed we were. We had brought a bag of canned goods that day, plucked mainly from the Robisons’ kitchen, as Tally Robison was the least likely to notice anything missing, although once there was an amazing rage when she didn’t find the artichoke hearts she was sure she had in the pantry. Inventories were tighter, more closely monitored, in the other households. Sean, though, sometimes bought a few things out of his allowance, and he had added a can of deviled ham and ready-to-eat baked beans to the sack that Gwen carried. Now he took them out and placed them on Chicken George’s shelves.
“They’ll just get stolen,” Tim said.
But everyone understood what Sean was doing. He was acting as if Chicken George was okay, as if he would return. And soon, much sooner than we expected, he did. It was a raw February day, with plenty of winter left to go, when Mickey saw, or said she saw, a plume of smoke rising from his house. We trooped over there, our feet sticking in the muddy paths, which had been snow-covered only a week or so earlier.
When we arrived, Chicken George was inside his cabin. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but it was tolerable, a wispy heat emanating from the old woodstove. He wore multiple layers of clothes and fingerless gloves.
“Where you been?” he asked, as if we were the ones who disappeared. “What did you bring me?”
Chapter Eleven
When the man in 17F rings his call button and announces he is pretty sure he has thrown his dentures into one of the trash bags by accident, McKey need only to glance at her less-senior colleague.
“I don’t see why—” Wendy begins.
“Seniority has its privileges,” she says. McKey has no idea if seniority applies in this situation, but