The Accidental Detective

drive on that patch of dead-end highway. Drunk or asleep or dead, he couldn’t have forgotten that there were barricades, that it ended.”
    “Let it go, Tim.”
    “Speaking of drinking—anyone want to?”
    They end up at the Point, once a reliably sleazy dive on Franklintown Road. To their horror, it has been yuppified. Live music on the weekends, a decent wine list. The bar food is traditional but prepared with care. It isn’t the kind of experience Gwen—or most Baltimoreans with money, or even the city’s pseudohipsters—are inclined to seek out on Franklintown Road, although Gwen realizes she might find it a handy retreat as long as she’s staying in her father’s house.
    The boys drink Rolling Rock on tap, while she has a micro-brew.
    “Raison D’Être.” Tim pronounces the name of her beer with great disdain. Ray-zohn Det-ruh. “Faggot beer.”
    Sean winces at his un-PC brother, but Tim isn’t shamed: “Any beer with a French name has to suck.”
    “It’s very good,” Gwen says. “And it’s made in Delaware. Taste it.”
    Tim refuses, but Sean is polite enough to try it and say nice things, although he clearly doesn’t care for it.
    “You are such a fucking yuppie,” Tim says. A new insult, but in the same vein of all the insults heaped on her when they were children. Gwennie the Whale. Gwen the Goody Two-shoes. Yet Gwen was never as proper as Sean. She wonders if Tim knows that.
    She responds, because Tim wants her to and his brother is dead, so she owes him a little good-humored argument. “That term is incredibly dated to the point of being meaningless. When did it come into vogue? The eighties? And who isn’t an urban professional among the three of us? Young we’re clearly not.”
    “But you work at that stupid magazine—”
    “I
edit
it, yes.”
    “And it’s all about what to buy and what to eat and what to wear.”
    “We do a lot of substantive journalism. More than ever, given how the
Beacon-Light
has been gutted. I’d love to commission an article on the trial you’ve got going, Mr. State’s Attorney. We also still make money. You know why? Because we are business friendly, which kept our advertising stable when the economy bottomed out. And we don’t give all our content away.”
    “Best doctors. Best restaurants. Best neighborhoods. Best of the best. Why not—best places to pick up hookers? Hey—why not best hookers? That’s news I could use.”
    “I didn’t know you had to pay for it, Tim.”
    “I don’t. I
prefer
to pay for it.”
    “He’s kidding,” Sean puts in, ever the PR man, worried that Gwen is going to run off and write a headline: ASSISTANT STATE’S ATTORNEY PREFERS HOOKERS . “Tim’s so straight he doesn’t even drive over the speed limit. And he’s still stupid-in-love with Arlene.”
    It’s funny, how quickly they revert to their roles—their roles as they first were, when they functioned as a group with no relationships within the relationships. The only thing different about their interaction is the alcohol. And that they are three, instead of five. They can never be five—the starfish, as Mickey called it—again. Gwen realizes she always hoped they might be, if only for a night, that they would come together once more and confront all the little ragged pieces of their shared story. Other than her father and her siblings, no one in her life knew her as a child. No one has any sense of the totality of who she is. Not even Karl, and certainly not Annabelle. Not her current staff and not her former colleagues from her newspaper days, scattered throughout the city. The Gwen that most people know is the adult Gwen. She wants to be among people who know her. She yearns for her mother, who made her feel special even when she clearly was not, who trusted her to morph into a swan. She even misses Mickey.
    That is, she misses Mickey until the next morning when
McKey,
swathed in black from head to foot, enters the church moments before the funeral service begins and takes a seat in the Hallorans’ pew, as if she’s a part of the family. McKey even reaches around Sean to pat Doris Halloran’s shoulder, then leaves her arm around Sean for several seconds.
    It’s easy to miss some people,
Gwen thinks,
until they actually show up.

About the Author
    Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years, including twelve years at the Baltimore
Sun
. She is the author of eleven Tess Monaghan books including
Baltimore Blues
,
Another Thing to Fall
,