Laura Lippman - The Most Dangerous Thing

He enters the market. Noisy and chaotic on this Thursday before Memorial Day, it comes at him in a wave of aromas. Fried food, deli meats, fish, flowers. The sweet, buttery smells of Konstant Candies’ peanut brittle trumps everything else. He will buy some for Gwen only-she doesn’t eat candy anymore. His mood flags, thinking of his daughter, the obsession with her weight. Worse, her intense interest in boys. She used to have a lively, curious mind and now all she cares about are clothes and how many boys call her each week. It wasn’t that long ago that she walked with him through the woods on weekend days, raptly absorbing his knowledge of plants and wildlife. Only two years ago, they read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn together, which provided a lot of opportunities for valuable discussion. Poverty, the lives of immigrants, even sex crimes. When he speaks to her now, she is very patient and kind, as if he were mildly retarded.

He decides to have a crab cake at Faidley’s. And a beer. It’s practically the holiday weekend.

Someone has left a copy of yesterday’s Star, the afternoon paper, on the counter. Clem flips through it reflexively, pushing it away when he chances on an item from Chicago, something about a possible appeal in John Wayne Gacy’s case. Every year, there seems to be a new unthinkable horror. Jim Jones in 1978, John Wayne Gacy last year. What will 1980 bring before it’s over? And will his first name begin with a J ?

His food arrives and he focuses on enjoying the platter, a cholesterol horror show-French fries and macaroni and cheese, the fried crab cake. He would chide a patient for eating such a lunch. But his own cholesterol is excellent, as is his blood pressure. He knows his good health is a lottery ticket, but he’s proud to show patients what is possible as one ages. Yet no matter what he does, statistics show his wife is destined to be a widow at a relatively young age. That’s a bum thing to do to the person you love most in the world.

Tally was adamant that she understood the actuarial odds. That she would rather have a foreshortened time with him than a longer marriage to anyone else. Still, he wonders if she will decide that it was a poor bargain, giving away her youth, only to find herself alone with much of her own life ahead of her. Say she’s sixty-three when he dies, which would make him seventy-seven. That’s too late for a true second chance. She’ll almost definitely be a grandmother. She might be on her way to being a great-grandmother, if either Miller or Fee decides to start a family early. His money’s on Miller, a bit of a throwback, short-haired and stalwart and dutiful. Miller, born in 1956, almost seemed disappointed that he had to sign up for the draft but not actually serve. Miller lives to serve. He always wants to do the right thing. In other words, he’s just like his father. He has made a good marriage to a terrific girl. And that girl, like her mother-in-law before her, has persuaded Miller to abandon his hometown, only in her case she wants to be close to her family. He calls every Sunday, recounting his week. In some ways, Clem feels he knows more about Miller’s life than he does about Gwen’s.

Now Fee is quiet, withdrawn. She has a secret, even if she doesn’t know it. Tally believes it’s her sexuality, which makes Clem sad, only because he believes Fee’s life will be harder for it, that she will not be comfortable in her own skin. She’s in San Francisco, but she might as well be in… Dubuque, based on what Clem has gleaned of her life. She goes to school-she’s working toward a master’s in psychology-and spends her weekends biking obsessively, almost as if she’s trying to get away from herself. Clem hopes she eventually finds a way to be still.

As for Gwen-sweet, pretty, eager-to-please Gwen. Whatever she does, she’ll do well. So much younger than her siblings, Gwen had the best of both worlds: she was essentially raised as an only child, but by parents with 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 canapés 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.