The Most Dangerous Thing

she let him in one night. No one got hurt. No one ever gets hurt if people are quiet and discreet and mind their own business. It’s the talkers of the world who make trouble.

Tally Robison was a gossip, although she didn’t have any awareness of this, proclaimed to be the opposite. When Mickey sat in her kitchen, waiting for Gwen to return from school on the cute little half-bus that kids took to private school-even her bus is better, she remembers thinking-Tally talked on and on, and all her stories were about how wonderful she was and how awful everyone else was. The drab clothes worn by so-and-so, the awful casseroles the other mothers brought to the church potluck. The wonder of her taste, her style, her knowledge, her wit. She would flip through magazines, sighing. It’s criminal to have the taste without the pocketbook. McKey now thinks Tally overrated herself, but she was mesmerized at the time, nodding raptly over her miniature packets of Smarties and Twizzlers. Oh, the pain of being so beautiful, so bright, so stylish. How do you stand being you, Mrs. Robison?

She always thought it came down to the mothers. That’s why Sean chose Gwen. Because he bought into those fables, the special-ness of the Robisons. True, there was that dramatic rescue, the day he saved Gwen from the stream. But it was merely the climax to a story already written. He was going to choose Gwen no matter what. Mickey saw it coming a long way off, well before anyone else knew. Which was good. It gave her time to practice the art of not caring. An art that, three decades later, she has almost perfected. Being with Sean will obliterate everything else somehow.

Won’t it?

There’s the baseball field. There’s the little park. There are the lights of the runway. Why do people need to narrate their lives? What is the point of all this talk, talk, talk? Words don’t make things more real. Quite the opposite, McKey thinks. The more you talk about a thing, the less real it is. That’s what she was trying to get Go-Go to understand before he died. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP.

He finally did.

Chapter Thirty-eight

T im hangs up the phone, looks at Arlene, and lies to her face with an ease that breaks his heart.

“Work,” he says. “I need to go in to the office.”

She says: “On a Saturday? Poor you,” and rubs his shoulders. This is the payoff for being a relatively honest husband all these years. He can lie to his wife without her suspecting a thing. Interesting how scrupulously honest people and pathological liars end up sharing the same advantages. Those who never lie have so much credit stored up. Those who lie all the time get very good at it. It’s the poor schmucks in the middle, the sometime liars, who suck at it.

He always had Go-Go pegged as one of the poor schmucks in the middle. But if Gwen is right-he shakes his head. She can’t be right.

“I might as well go in now, get it over with,” he says, grabbing the car keys, ignoring his daughters’ wrathful looks.

“Is it the jewelry store murder?” Arlene asks.

“Sure,” he says. He almost wishes she would call him on his shit, ask what could possibly require him to go to the office on a Saturday, short of a cop killing. But she doesn’t pick up on it, only smiles and pats his shoulder again.

Behind the wheel of his car, he tries to concentrate on the roads even as he keeps reviewing the time line. If Gwen is right-if Father Andrew is telling the truth-

I f. There is another way of looking at this. The old priest is a liar. And with Go-Go dead, he can spin the story however he wants. But why spin a story at all? What does he have to gain? With Go-Go dead, he’s in the clear, assuming he’s the one who molested him. Only he says he’s not, that he’s never touched a kid, and that he was counting on Go-Go to tell people that.

He also says that Chicken George never touched a kid. At least-he didn’t touch Go-Go.

The priest was quite firm, Gwen told Tim. Go-Go said he was molested by two high school boys in 1980. The night of the hurricane-

Was in 1979, not 1980. People get those details wrong all the time. Trust me, Gwen.

But Go-Go said it was two high school boys, Tim. Not Chicken George. Why would he tell Father Andrew that?

Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the priest is using Go-Go’s death.

Father Andrew, it turns out, is essentially being blackmailed. A former student is threatening to go public with lurid tales of sex abuse in the parish. With the statute of limitations long past, he can’t bring a civil or criminal suit, but he can ruin Father Andrew’s life. The claim is baseless-Father Andrew says-but as an ex-priest and one who is now living openly as a gay man, he feels vulnerable. So many people don’t understand the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. Yet he refuses on principle to pay this amoral opportunist. His lawyer started assembling character witnesses, students who would testify as to his behavior. Go-Go was one of those students, and he had agreed to give a deposition.

Go-Go was making a clean breast of things. He wanted to know if he had to talk about other sexual experiences, in his deposition, and Father Andrew promised him that it wouldn’t come up. He was only going to be asked about his relationship with Father Andrew, if he ever saw anything untoward. Go-Go said he was happy to do it. But then he changed his mind, refused to talk to the private investigator or Father Andrew.

Did he tell him-

About Chicken George’s death? No. But he insisted he was molested by two boys, then blamed this older man.

Tim arrives at his mother’s house. She has a book in hand, holding her place with her finger, and she looks surprised-really, almost a little annoyed-at her son’s unannounced visit. It never occurred to Tim that his mother would prefer anything to seeing one of her sons.

“Sean’s meeting you there,” she says.

“Where?”

“The golf course. He said you were playing golf this afternoon, but he had some errands to run first.”

Interesting. Why has Sean created such an elaborate lie to get away from their mother? But Tim instinctively takes his brother’s back.

“Our tee time isn’t for another couple of hours. Mom, where did you say you keep the stepladder now?”

“Why do you need the stepladder?”

“I just do.”

She has to think-or pretend that she’s thinking. “In the garage. I so seldom use it.”

It is the stepladder from his childhood, the one that used to be kept in the upstairs hall closet, the one that he needed last month to put away things on the high shelf of the china cupboard. In the event of a fire, they were to drag the stepladder to Go-Go’s room, lift the rectangular board that led to the attic crawl space, then proceed to