The Accidental Detective and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  “I’ll be there.” She considers placing a hand on Sean’s forearm, but worries it will seem flirtatious. Instead, she strokes the dogs, who are old, with grizzled jowls and labored breathing, so ancient and tired that they don’t object to this long interlude in the middle of their walk. Yet old as they obviously are, they can’t be more than, what? Fifteen? Sixteen? Which is still older than her marriage to Karl.

  “Mom will appreciate that,” Sean says and heads back up the hill. She knows the route, knows the house at which he will arrive after going up Wetheredsville, then turning left on “New” Pickwick, a street of what once seemed like modern houses, small and symmetrical relative to the shambling antiquities for which Dickeyville was known, following it to the shortest street in the neighborhood, Sekots, just four houses. The Halloran house always smelled of strong foods—onions, cabbage, hamburger—and it was always a mess. Sometimes the chaos could be comforting; no child need worry about disturbing or breaking anything in such a household. It could be terrifying, too, though, a place where the adults yelled horrible things at one another and Mrs. Halloran was often heard sobbing, off in the distance. The boys never seemed to notice, and even Mickey was nonchalant about it. But the Halloran house scared Gwen, and she made sure their activities centered on her house or the woods beyond.

  Go-Go, dead. The only surprise was that she was surprised at all.

  Most thought he was called Go-Go because it was a bastardization of Gordon, but it really derived from his manic nature, evident from toddlerhood, his insistence on following his brothers wherever they went. “I go-go,” he would say, as if the second syllable, the repetition, would clinch the argument. “I go-go.” And he did. He ran into walls, splashed into the polluted waters of the stream, jumped from branches and balconies. Once Go-Go spent much of an afternoon running head-on into an old mattress they had found in the woods, laughing all the while.

  Now he has run head-on into the barrier at the end of the highway. Gwen can’t help wondering if he was drunk. Although she hasn’t seen the Halloran boys for years, she knows, the way that everyone knows things in Dickeyville, that Go-Go has a problem. It is implied, if never stated outright, in the lost jobs, the broken first marriage, the rocky second one, the fact that he returns to the roost for open-ended stays.

  Then again, who is she to judge Go-Go? Isn’t she pulling the same trick, running home, a two-time loser in matrimony, taking comfort in a parent’s unconditional love? Mr. Halloran may have been hard as nails, but Mrs. Halloran, when she wasn’t screaming at her sons and wondering why they had been born, spoiled them to the best of her ability, especially Go-Go. And while most people will assume Gwen is nothing more than a devoted daughter, some will see through her. Her brother and sister, certainly. And Karl.

  That is, Karl would see through her if it ever occurred to him to look, really look at her. But if Karl looked at her that way, they wouldn’t be in this fix. At least that’s how she likes to see it.

  Summer 1976

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I hate it here,” Fee said. “It’s boring.”

  “There’s no place to go,” Miller said. “There’s nothing to do.”

  “Only boring people are bored,” their father said.

  “Or maybe only boring people don’t realize how bored they are,” Fee said. “They are so boring that it never occurs to them to do anything.”

  “Gwen likes it here,” their father said.

  “Well, Gwen.” Fee sniffed. “She’s a child.”

  “Of course I’m a child,” Gwen said mildly. “I’m ten.”

  “The thing is,” Miller pressed on, intent on making his case, “there are plenty of kids for Gwen to play with—that Mickey girl, those brothers—”

  “We do NOT play with the Halloran boys. They’re too wild,” Gwen put in.

  Gwen spoke the truth, at the time. In the summer of our nation’s bicentennial, the five of us were not friends yet and the Hallorans were considered wild. We were two and three—the two girls, Gwen and Mickey, the three brothers, Tim, Sean, and Go-Go. We would not come together as a group until the following spring. But we were all aware of each other. Mickey was a familiar little figure in Dickeyville, a terrifying tomboy assumed to be a loner by choice, a child who wanted to be outdoors no matter how fierce the weather. The Halloran boys were known as hellions, primarily because of Go-Go. Besides, in the summer, they went down to the ocean, then to camp.

  And Gwen’s family, the Robisons, were famous in Dickeyville because they had been trying to build their new house for almost seven years, stopped twice by injunction because of the neighborhood’s historic status. Strangely, Dr. Robison did not resent the neighborhood’s resistance to his house. This was his dream house and he would suffer anything to get it. He had bought the lot a decade earlier, around the time Gwen was born, after stumbling across Dickeyville while trying to get to the Forest Park golf course. First he had been told that the lot wasn’t suitable for building, that its pitch would make it impossible. He refused to accept this and finally found an architect who said it could be done, although at great expense. Then the neighborhood had decided to fight it, although Dickeyville had its share of postwar nondescript houses. The Hallorans lived in one, in fact, but did not feel themselves hypocrites for joining the opposition. The Robison house—new, modern—signified something, even if no one was quite sure what. Change, hypocrisy, a challenge to traditional values. Yet nine years after the lot was purchased, five years after ground was broken, the house had asserted itself into being, through the sheer force of Dr. Robison’s will.

  This apparently came as something of a surprise to Mrs. Robison and the two older children, twenty-year-old Miller and seventeen-year-old Fee. And although Miller had to endure only summers there, and although Fee had only a year of high school left and she was continuing at Park, the same private school Gwennie attended, they were bitter. Mrs. Robison was not bitter, not exactly, but we all sensed something in her attitude. How to put it? There was a quality of withholding. In her beautiful, hippieish clothes, she moved through the world with her head down and arms crossed, as if to say to Dickeyville: I will not love you, I will not. Inevitably, all the fathers and even some of their sons were a little bit in love with Tally Robison, mistaking her coolness to her surroundings as a coolness toward them, which never fails to provoke a man. Gwen never doubted her mother’s love, however, which was mildly infuriating to the rest of us, who sometimes wondered if our mothers were altogether pleased by our existence. Mickey’s mom, the boys’ mom—they tended toward moments of frustration. Doris Halloran, in particular, had a way of asking “Why were you born?” as if she didn’t really know, or as if she was debating the church’s doctrine on abortion. Not that abortion was legal even when the youngest of the Halloran boys, Go-Go, was conceived. But we still had the impression that Mrs. Halloran would have appreciated having a choice.

  But we didn’t care what the grown-ups thought, or even Gwennie’s older brother and sister, impressive as they were, with their driver’s licenses and studied indifference to us. In our imaginations, we lived in a world without grown-ups most of the day. We all had the same rules, more or less. Don’t ride your bikes on Forest Park Avenue (busy, blind curves), be on time for dinner, and stay out of the creek. We found a way around the first rule, had no problem with the second, and figured the third didn’t matter if our tetanus shots were current. We never went into the creek on purpose, but we ended up in it a lot by accident.

  Gwen and Mickey met by the creek that bicentennial summer. Mickey was lying belly-down on the bank, near a culvert where crawfish were sometimes found, poking the murky water with a long stick.

  “I’m Gwen,” Gwen said shyly to the wiry little back and frowsy black hair.

  “You live in that big house, at the end of the road. Are your parents rich?” Mickey replied, eyes fixed on the brown water.

  “I don’t think so.” Gwen considered the evidence. Their house was grand, a
t least on the lower floors. The bedrooms felt a little stingy. Fee and Miller had a car, but they had to share it, and it was an old Volvo. Her parents went to New York once a year to go to the theater and shop for Christmas gifts. Did this make them rich?

  “What does your father do?”

  “He’s a doctor.”

  “So you’re rich,” Mickey said, eyes never leaving the water. Did crawfish really live there? Gwen could not imagine it. But Mickey insisted they were there and that, furthermore, she was going to take them home and eat them. If she caught any. She had a net at the ready, but it didn’t look up to the job. It was tiny, the kind of thing used in tropical aquariums. Even one small crawfish would test its capacity.

  “He’s the kind of doctor who teaches.”

  “My dad owns the service station, up the hill. Well, he’s not really my dad, but my stepdad. He’s good-looking. He looks like Tom Selleck.”

  “That’s cool. Him owning the service station.”

  “No, it’s not. Because when I want a soda or a snowball or something from the pharmacy next door, I can’t go there because someone from the station will rat me out. And there’s nowhere else to go. There used to be a store here in the neighborhood, where they sold penny candy, but they stopped. Do you have treats at your house?”

  “What?”

  “Treats. Ice cream and cookies and candy and soda? I suppose not, your father being a doctor.”

  “Oh, no, we have—treats. My mother goes grocery shopping once a week, and each one can choose whatever snacks we want. But that’s it, for the week. If you eat it all up right away, you have to wait until the next week.” Gwen did not add that she had learned all sorts of ways of making treats last. She nibbled 5th Avenue candy bars, plucking off the solitary almond, then slowly removing the chocolate with teeth and tongue, leaving behind an unsheathed bar of peanut butter. She ate peanut M&M’s by cracking the chocolate shell, removing the peanuts, then placing the peanuts in a bowl, to be gobbled in a handful. She was proud of these maneuvers but aware that others considered them gross. Besides, she was pudgy and desperate to pretend candy was not particularly interesting to her, that her condition was glandular.

  Mickey sat up. “Would you get circus peanuts sometimes?”

  “Peanuts?”

  “Circus peanuts. The big fluffy ones. Kind of like Peeps, only not so sticky.”

  “Sure.”

  The next Friday, on her mother’s weekly shopping trip, Gwen put a bag of the orange peanuts into the cart. “Really?” her mother asked. “You hate marshmallow.” Gwen nodded. The next day, she took the treats to Mickey. Over the course of the summer, she brought Mickey Smarties, candy buttons, Pixy Stixs. Necco Wafers. Now and Laters. Gwen’s mother figured it out within a week or so, but she didn’t care. In fact, she complimented Gwen on her selflessness. But it didn’t feel selfless to Gwen, more like a necessary tribute. Mickey was valuable. Mickey knew things. You couldn’t have access to all she knew without making some sort of contribution.

  Mickey had been roaming the wooded hills around Dickeyville since the age of eight, when she persuaded her mother to let her walk home from the public elementary school on the other side of the hill. She acted as if she owned every inch of it, and we didn’t contradict her. We never got lost when we let Mickey lead the way, while the rest of us could get turned around quite easily.

  Yet Mickey was the only one of us who didn’t live in Dickeyville. Her family lived above it, in the town houses called Purnell Village, on the other side of Forest Park Avenue. Most children would not have been allowed to cross that street, much less walk to school alone, but Mickey had permission. Or said she did. Mickey was not always the most reliable person when it came to herself. Her stepfather, for example, was not her stepfather and did not own the gas station. He managed it. He did, however, look a little like Tom Selleck.

  Caught in a lie or a contradiction by the rest of us, Mickey would shrug, as if the misstatements that flowed from her were incidental, a slip of the tongue, like mixing up facts you knew perfectly well. And because Mickey was beautiful, despite her wild bush of hair and grubby clothes, we came to believe that was one of the perks of beauty, the freedom to lie and not be called on it. Who wanted to fight with someone as pretty as Mickey? She was prettier still for not being able to do much about her appearance. She wore jeans and T-shirts, often the same ones two days running, and her hair was never quite brushed. Sometimes, Gwen’s mother would say, “Let’s play beauty parlor,” and Gwen understood it was an excuse to pull a brush through Mickey’s matted hair, which would shine and gleam under her mother’s care. Later, when we became a group, a unit, the boys wished they could have Mrs. Robison pull a brush through their hair, short as it was. Not that they ever said anything. Well, maybe Go-Go did. Go-Go never understood that there were things he shouldn’t want, desires he shouldn’t express. He would watch Tally Robison work on Mickey’s hair, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as it often did, as if he thought something tasty might fall from the sky at any moment and he didn’t want to miss it. Sometimes Go-Go would try to climb Tally Robison, would literally start to shimmy up her body, trying to force her to unfold those thin arms and hold him.

  But that was yet to come. That first summer, 1976, there was only Gwen and Mickey, Mickey and Gwen, best friends along with everything that being best friends entailed, all the wonder and closeness, all the pain and resentment. We didn’t have the term BFFs back then, and even if we had, it wouldn’t have been accurate. Mickey and Gwen fell well short of forever. But that summer, it felt like forever.

  Tally Robison died in Gwen’s senior year of college. She had been too ill to see her daughter accept a prize for her college journalism, too ill to tell her daughter that the gorgeous college sweetheart to whom she would soon become engaged was too gorgeous. Gwen kept assuming Mickey would get in touch. Whatever had happened, all those years ago, did not change the fact that her mother had been good to Mickey, kind and generous. Certainly, Mickey must know of Tally’s death, must have heard from someone, even if her family had long ago left the town houses of Purnell Village, which had become exceedingly rough, even as Dickeyville continued to be its placid, sui generis self. Gwen was just shy of her twenty-second birthday, much too young to lose a parent, especially a parent as lovely as her mother had been. But we were all young then, unaccustomed to death and its rituals, how important the smallest gestures were. Only Sean—forever Sean-the-Perfect—wrote a note, and it was a little stiff, almost grudging, as if he felt that Gwen’s mother had died in order to force him to contact her daughter.

  Five years later, the two former best friends met face-to-face on a plane. Gwen was in first class, upgraded on her husband’s miles. Mickey was the flight attendant. Still beautiful, but there was a hardness to her now, a sense that the real person was layers and layers down.

  “Mickey,” Gwen said brightly when offered a beverage before takeoff. A blank stare. “Mickey. It’s Gwen. Gwen Robison.”

  Mickey continued to stare blankly. No, she stared through her, which is quite different. “It’s McKey now.”

  “Mick Kay?”

  “Think of it this way—I dropped the i, capitalized the K. McKey.”

  “Legally?” A bizarre response, but Gwen couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You always were a stickler for rules,” Mickey—McKey—said. “Can I get you anything?”

  The other passengers, businessmen accustomed to life in first class, were growing impatient with this trip down memory lane. They wanted their drinks, their hot nuts, whatever small treats their status entailed. But Gwen couldn’t let her old friend go.

  “It’s been so long. I hate that we lost touch. In fact, I thought I might hear from you when my mom died. She died, did you know that? Five years ago, from bladder cancer.”

  “I heard, but not right away. I’m sorry.” The words had all the intimacy of champagne or orange juice?

  “You heard from�
��” Foolish to extend the conversation, and what did it matter how McKey had learned?

  “From Sean.”

  “You’re in touch?” She couldn’t decide if what she felt was jealousy or—stickler for the rules she was—a sense of betrayal. They weren’t supposed to be friends anymore. That was the price they paid for the horrible thing that had happened.

  “Sometimes. He sends Christmas cards.”

  “He told you about my mom in a Christmas card?” Not challenging Mickey—McKey—but honestly astonished, confused.

  “Look, I’ll come back and chat later in the flight, okay?”

  She didn’t.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Gwen was spared funerals as a child and accepted this practice, as she accepted so many of her parents’ practices, as the inarguably right thing to do. Certainly, it has not occurred to her to bring Annabelle to Go-Go’s visitation, and she is shocked to see how many young children are here. More disturbing, they are gathered around the open casket, inspecting Go-Go with a respectful but palpable excitement. A dead person! This is what a dead person looks like! In the face of their bravery, how can Gwen not come forward and look as well?

  A dead person this may well be, but it is not the boy she remembers and not only because he is thirty years older than the Go-Go who lives in her memory. This person is too still, his features too composed. Go-Go was never still.

  “Gwen.” Doris Halloran holds her hands tightly, peers into her face, as if nearsighted. “Pretty little Gwen. You look wonderful.”

  She does? She doesn’t feel as if she looks wonderful. True, she is thin. She has no appetite as of late. But she is pretty sure that the lack of food has made her face gaunt, her hair dull and dry. Then again, maybe it’s all relative. She looks better than Go-Go, for example. And better than Mrs. Halloran, whose face is white and puffy in a way that cannot be explained by mere grieving. Her eyes are like little raisins deep in an uncooked loaf, her mouth ringed by wrinkles.