The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [88]
“Oh, people say all sorts of things when grieving—”
“She’s not entirely wrong.”
An older woman jostles Gwen to get to Lori’s bags, but that is the point of the craft fair, after all. She paws the little bags, snaps them open, runs the zippers up and down, fingers the lining. The bags deserve kinder hands, but if the woman is a buyer, Gwen doesn’t want to come between Lori and a sale. Lord knows if Go-Go had a life insurance policy, or if it paid off, given the uncertain circumstances of his death. Gwen digs through her own shoulder bag and finds her card, adds her cell and the landline for her father’s house.
“If you want to talk,” she says. “About anything.”
She assumes, hopes, Lori won’t follow up. Go-Go’s secrets are, in part, Gwen’s, although she likes to think she is the least guilty of the five, the sole bystander. All Gwen did was agree to go along, to let Sean be the spokesman and not insist on including the troubling details that might complicate their story when they told their parents. No, Lori will think better of it, decide she doesn’t want to talk, not to a virtual stranger. But if Lori does confide in Gwen, is Gwen obligated to tell her there are all sorts of reasons why Go-Go might have driven into that concrete barrier, none of which have anything to do with his second wife kicking him out? No need to worry. Lori won’t call. Even if she does, Gwen owes her nothing.
Yet several hours later, when Gwen places her cell phone by her girlhood bed, there is a text from Lori staring up at her.
I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO YOU. SOON?
It’s the question mark—unsure, pleading—that makes the request impossible to ignore.
Chapter Twenty-six
It has taken several days, many promises, and a few threats, but Tim has finally corralled all three daughters and taken them to his mother’s house for Sunday lunch. “What about Mass?” his mother asked when told of the plan. He couldn’t bear to let her know her oldest two granddaughters are basically heathens, so he made up a story about the SATs and a sleepover and sent Arlene to Mass with his mother as the family’s sacrificial lamb. In old age, which seems to have fallen on Doris suddenly and even a little precociously—she’s barely in her sixties—she is as distractible as a baby.
The house on Sekots Lane was a desired destination when the girls were younger, a place they clamored to visit. It had a doll’s house feel to them—smaller in scale than the houses in their Stoneleigh neighborhood, and full of wonders. The carpet sweeper, a waist-high freezer in the basement stocked with Good Humor bars, Grandma’s “goodie jar,” the dogs. But the house and its inhabitants long ago ceased to entertain the girls. Lunch finished, the three sisters slump on the sofa in the downstairs rec room, watching the flat-screen television, a gift from Tim and Sean, connected to cable, a bill that Tim pays monthly, dismissing Doris’s protestations that she doesn’t need it. If not for cable television, the girls would never come here, but he doesn’t want to spell that out for his mother.
Yet even the television barely holds their interest. The older two are bent over their phones, texting, texting, texting, while the baby, as he still thinks of eight-year-old Karen, twirls her hair and watches them covetously. She has been told she can have a phone at age twelve, a decision she challenges daily, sometimes with fresh arguments, more often with mere petulance. Yesterday she told Tim she should have a phone because it would keep her safe from child molesters.
Only if you see them coming from a long way off, sweetheart.
What could the older girls be texting about on a Sunday afternoon? And to whom? Only last week, Lisa left her phone unattended and Tim seized the chance to read every text still in it, rationalizing that he was right to violate her privacy because