The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [8]
Now he has run head-on into the barrier at the end of the highway. Gwen can’t help wondering if he was drunk. Although she hasn’t seen the Halloran boys for years, she knows, the way that everyone knows things in Dickeyville, that Go-Go has a problem. It is implied, if never stated outright, in the lost jobs, the broken first marriage, the rocky second one, the fact that he returns to the roost for open-ended stays.
Then again, who is she to judge Go-Go? Isn’t she pulling the same trick, running home, a two-time loser in matrimony, taking comfort in a parent’s unconditional love? Mr. Halloran may have been hard as nails, but Mrs. Halloran, when she wasn’t screaming at her sons and wondering why they had been born, spoiled them to the best of her ability, especially Go-Go. And while most people will assume Gwen is nothing more than a devoted daughter, some will see through her. Her brother and sister, certainly. And Karl.
That is, Karl would see through her if it ever occurred to him to look, really look at her. But if Karl looked at her that way, they wouldn’t be in this fix. At least that’s how she likes to see it.
Chapter Two
Summer 1976
“I hate it here,” Fee said. “It’s boring.”
“There’s no place to go,” Miller said. “There’s nothing to do.”
“Only boring people are bored,” their father said.
“Or maybe only boring people don’t realize how bored they are,” Fee said. “They are so boring that it never occurs to them to do anything.”
“Gwen likes it here,” their father said.
“Well, Gwen.” Fee sniffed. “She’s a child.”
“Of course I’m a child,” Gwen said mildly. “I’m ten.”
“The thing is,” Miller pressed on, intent on making his case, “there are plenty of kids for Gwen to play with—that Mickey girl, those brothers—”
“We do NOT play with the Halloran boys. They’re too wild,” Gwen put in.
Gwen spoke the truth, at the time. In the summer of our nation’s bicentennial, the five of us were not friends yet and the Hallorans were considered wild. We were two and three—the two girls, Gwen and Mickey, the three brothers, Tim, Sean, and Go-Go. We would not come together as a group until the following spring. But we were all aware of each other. Mickey was a familiar little figure in Dickeyville, a terrifying tomboy assumed to be a loner by choice, a child who wanted to be outdoors no matter how fierce the weather. The Halloran boys were known as hellions, primarily because of Go-Go. Besides, in the summer, they went down to the ocean, then to camp.
And Gwen’s family, the Robisons, were famous in Dickeyville because they had been trying to build their new house for almost seven years, stopped twice by injunction because of the neighborhood’s historic status. Strangely, Dr. Robison did not resent the neighborhood’s resistance to his house. This was his dream house and he would suffer anything to get it. He had bought the lot a decade earlier, around the time Gwen was born, after stumbling across Dickeyville while trying to get to the Forest Park golf course. First he had been told that the lot wasn’t suitable for building, that its pitch would make it impossible. He refused to accept this and finally found an architect who said it could be done, although at great expense. Then the neighborhood had decided to fight it, although Dickeyville had its share of postwar nondescript houses. The Hallorans lived in one, in fact, but did not feel themselves hypocrites for joining the opposition. The Robison house—new, modern—signified something, even if no one was quite sure what. Change, hypocrisy, a challenge to traditional values. Yet nine years after the lot was purchased, five years after ground was broken, the house had asserted itself into being, through the sheer force of Dr. Robison’s will.
This apparently came as something of a surprise to Mrs. Robison and the two older children, twenty-year-old Miller and seventeen-year-old Fee. And although Miller had to endure only summers there, and although Fee had