The Most Dangerous Thing

plenty of field experience. Some might call her spoiled, but Clem thinks she’s the opposite. Gwen is a delight. Or was.

“What if it were your child? What if it was Gwen or Mickey?” Tim Halloran asked Clem and Rick that night. To this day, Clem has to fight down the impulse to blurt out: It wouldn’t be. Gwen isn’t stupid that way . He isn’t blaming the victim, Go-Go. He’s castigating the Hallorans for not preparing their son for the world at large. Was it because he was a boy that his safety in the world was presumed, or because he had two older brothers who were supposed to show him the ropes? Yet Clem and Tally hadn’t abdicated their responsibility to Gwen because of Miller and Fee.

“Hey, he tried to hit Mickey,” Rick said. “He could have killed her. The kids say he kept an old shotgun in that cabin. What if he had grabbed that instead of his guitar?”

“It’s not the same,” Halloran shrilled, his voice high-pitched as a woman’s. “It’s not the same.”

Halloran was right, but not in the way he believed. Clem could not bear to tell Tim that a violent physical assault on a girl would, according to the law, be judged much more harshly than the touches that the old man had bestowed on Go-Go. What would the courts have done to him? He would have gotten a year or two at the most. And what if he had denied it? How could it be proved? According to Sean, Mickey couldn’t describe what she had seen in the darkness of the cabin, only that the old man had become violent when she found him alone with Go-Go. Yes, the man was old and black and indigent. The justice system would not be predisposed in his favor. But whatever sentence was meted out would never have satisfied Tim. Hell, a smart defense attorney might summon Dr. Money as an expert witness, ask him to tell the court what he had told Time magazine: “A childhood experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.” But what was a child? What was a relative? Clem remembers, as he often does, the image of eighteen-year-old Tally, passing canapes in her parents’ house, offering her tray to her bachelor uncle’s best friend, pregnant by him not even a year later. Utterly different, of course-and yet some people wouldn’t consider it so. Both situations would be covered by Dr. Money’s rubric.

The discussion was moot. The man was dead at their feet. Events and possibilities swirled around them, fast as the water rushing around the man, unstoppable, implacable. Any number of things could have killed him. The fall, the blow to his head, a heart attack, drowning. What good would it do to tell anyone about the children, how the man had chased them through the woods, much less why. They agreed that Clem would place an anonymous call to 911 from a pay phone downtown, reporting a body in the woods, then check the morgue to find out when a John Doe was brought in. An autopsy would determine if it had been a heart attack, or even a stroke, brought on by exertion. No one was to blame for what happened.

But when Clem finally called the morgue on an elaborate pretext, claiming he needed to collect data on all over-fifty deaths in September for a research project, there wasn’t a single John Doe who matched the description of the man in the woods. Had his body not been found? Could he have been wrong about the man’s death? If so-

He pushes his plate away, incapable of finishing. He should buy something for the girls, as he thinks of Tally and Gwen. But what can he take them? Tally is proprietary about her menus and resents any unsolicited contributions. Gwen no longer eats sweets. The market’s flowers are not the best, a little bedraggled and mealy- looking. He has nothing to bring them but himself, old and tired at the end of another day.

Chapter Twenty

“I found my thrill,” Larry sings, “up on Strawberry Hill.”

“Strawberry Hill Apartments… for-e-ver,” Rita sings back, unwrapping glasses. Lord, Mickey did a shit job packing them, and a few are chipped. Inevitably, it’s her nice ones, the matched set of heavy Mexican amber from Pier One. Why couldn’t the freebies from the filling station giveaways end up cracked?

But even the broken glasses can’t dim Rita’s mood, although she makes a mental note to find Mickey later and give her what-for.

Moving, which is supposed to be one of the most stressful events in a person’s life, has brought Rita nothing but a constant, giggling joy since she signed the lease on the Strawberry Hill apartment last month. She floats through her days, her temper soft, and she rockets through her nights, shooting up, up, up on waves of sex, then falling into the best sleep she has ever known. She can’t believe Larry volunteered to move in with her, without even being asked. Being legit-sharing a bed and an apartment with Larry, if not the actual lease-is the best high she has ever known. Everything is better. Each cigarette, each drink, punching out at work. Even Joey, something of a wild child, is suddenly an angel. It’s almost as if he knows who his real father is, although Rick-of course!-continues to be the superdutiful dad, coming by every other weekend and Wednesday nights. God, Rita would love to tell him the truth, just to wipe that superior look off his face, but she doesn’t want to say good-bye to his checks.

Besides, Rick’s visits seem to be the only thing that rouses Mickey out of her permanent sulk. Suddenly, nothing makes that girl happy. Take the school thing. She hates her current school, Rock Glen. She was excited about the transfer to a new district when Rita first told her. Then Rita told Rock Glen that Mickey has a medical condition and wouldn’t be able to attend the last three weeks. She now lives too far away to walk to the bus stop, and who’s going to drive her there at 7:30 A.M. every day? Not Rita. Besides, no one learns anything the last three weeks of school. You think a girl would be happy, getting a head start on summer vacation. Plus, Rita’s paying Mickey to babysit during the mornings, when it would be entirely reasonable to expect her to do that for free. A dollar twenty-five an hour, five hours a day, five days a week. Heck, that’s better than Rita does some nights. The girl should be delirious.

But Mickey hates the new apartment. She has to share a bedroom with Joey, at least until Rita can justify buying a sofa bed, but it’s not like either kid can be in Rita’s room, now that Larry is sleeping over. The new place may be smaller, but it’s nicer. Clean, freshly painted. Besides, her car insurance dropped almost by half just for moving out of the city, and they are a mile closer to the shopping centers up on Route 40 and out Security Boulevard. Mickey could take the bus to any of those places, go shopping, go to the movies. But when Rita points this out, Mickey sighs and says: “I miss my woods.” Her woods? Foolish girl.

Rita can’t waste time worrying about Mickey. Her immediate goal is to make Larry a man, a real man. Someone who provides. Someone who doesn’t deal drugs, maybe uses them from time to time, but doesn’t sell.

“What is this?” Larry asks, pulling a long, lidded metal pan from a box. She needs a beat to identify it.

“A fish poacher.”

“Have you ever used it?”

“No. I brought it home from work one night because I heard that was a good way to make fish, but my kids hate fish.” Actually, it was Rick who hated fish, but she tries to mention him as little as possible. She wants to erase Rick from the record, pretend he never happened.

“ ‘Brought it home’-you mean you nicked it.” Larry smiles. He likes her wicked side.

“Maybe.” She gives him a sideways bump with her hip as she passes him in the small galley kitchen, then turns and bumps her rear against his crotch, moving lazily back and forth until she sees Mickey standing in the living room, watching them through the pass-through. No expression on her face, no comment, just watching. The girl sees too much. Rita wonders if Mickey has noticed her brother’s marked resemblance to Larry. Thank God both Rick and Larry had dark hair and eyes. There’s nothing obvious to link Larry to Joey unless one looks for the resemblance, as Rita does, repeatedly. There’s a thinness at the bridge of the nose, camouflaged by Joey’s chubbiness, a sameness to the ears. Yes, the ears. She knows Larry that well, inside and out.

Which means she understands it won’t be easy, domesticating a man who loves her wild side. Rick was the big attraction, the thing that brought Larry back to her. Now that they aren’t cheating, his interest could fall off. If she leans on him to give up dabbling in drugs, move in officially-no, he has to make those decisions on his own. Or think he’s making them. So be it. She knows how to keep him happy and interested. Last week, they went to the drive-in