The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [84]
And then he realizes that thought is as bigoted and snobbish as anything Tim Halloran ever dared to say out loud. Every time Clem wants to think he is different from Tim, something reminds him that he is not blameless. He will never be blameless.
He starts walking back, crossing the stream, a relative trickle today, then heading up the hill. This is the steepest part of the terrain. He imagines this spot as it was in the storm, what someone would have seen from where he’s standing now. Two men, hale and sure-footed, running down the slope, then kneeling in the rushing water, a slightly older one making his careful way toward them, flashlight strafing them with light. He sees the older man bending down—but he can’t stay outside the scene any longer. He is there again, realizing that the inert object at Tim’s and Rick’s feet is a man, dark as coal except for odd patches of unpigmented skin. And dead.
“He was dead when we got here,” Rick said.
“But Tim was ahead of you, going down the hill, he had at least twenty-five yards on you—”
“He was dead when we got here. Right, Tim?”
Tim Halloran nodded. He was shaking all over.
“The fall killed him,” Rick said. “See? That rock, that’s where he hit his head, and he’s been lying in this stream ever since, his lungs filling up with water. Between that and the head injury, he never could have survived. It doesn’t matter what the kids did. Leave him here.”
Clem bent down, tested at the neck for a pulse, knowing there would be none. He had no obligation to the dead, had taken no oath on their part. Still, it seemed wrong to leave the man here.
“He lived in these woods. He has no family, no one looking out for him,” Rick said. “It was an accident.”
“Was it?” Tim and Rick had crested the hill before him. Clem had heard shouting, though, seen an arc of light moving wildly through the night. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was flesh and blood clinging to Tim’s flashlight, even in this driving rain.
“An accident,” Rick repeated. “There’s nothing to be done. He slipped and fell. Talking about how he came to fall, or why we were here looking for him—there’s no point. We’ll have to talk about . . . everything. And that’s not going to be good for anyone.”
They left him there. Clem later made an anonymous call to the police from a pay phone downtown. A week later, when Clem hiked back into the woods, the man was gone. Clem wanted to believe that his anonymous call had yielded results, that EMTs had somehow found his body. But wanting to believe it didn’t make it true.
“Did you see his guitar?” Gwen asked one night, weeks later.
“Whose guitar?”
“The man in the woods. When you found him—did you see his guitar? It was steel, it was probably ruined in all that rain.”
“Honey, there was no guitar.”
To his amazement—and to his gratification, for Gwen had seemed cool and frivolous of late—she burst into tears. But it was the last time they ever spoke of the incident. Now, only a year later, she chatters away about dates and boys and, very occasionally, about school itself. The hurricane is forgotten. Her old friends appear to be forgotten. Mickey never comes to the house, although there’s still a drawer filled with the sugary junk she loved. The Halloran boys have abandoned the woods, although Clem sometimes sees little Go-Go walking along the top of the hill, where there’s a path.
It is the old who are supposed to have memory problems. Senility, Alzheimer’s, dementia. But in Clem’s experience, no one can forget the way a young person can. He specializes in the elderly, he is himself becoming elderly, but to be interested in old age also means thinking constantly about youth. That’s the paradox. His daughter is now almost the age her