To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “Your fur-storage bill?”

  “Shut up, Dale. This is…this is…” She flapped it weakly, but all Dale saw was a plain white envelope, addressed in an elaborate handwriting, almost like calligraphy.

  “Maybe it’s a note of condolence,” he said.

  “It’s for Kat.”

  He took it from Chloe, turning it over in his hand. “I’m sure it’s some school thing. It’s postmarked Friday morning. It was mailed…before. Certainly before the sender knew.”

  When Dale opened it, a single page fell out: “I ask only that the truth be told.” The word “only” had been crossed out with a single pen stroke, and it was signed in the same blue ink: “Love, Perri.”

  19

  Alexa had neither office nor classroom in Glendale, a situation attributed to her lack of seniority, although she suspected Barbara Paulson’s resentment of her was the real reason. For all Glendale’s overcrowding issues, it should have been possible to carve out a space for her things—a desk, a cupboard, a filing cabinet—if not an actual classroom. Instead she was relegated to floater status, ferrying her papers and supplies on a wheeled cart, meeting with students wherever a quiet corner could be found. “My door is always open to you,” Alexa told her students with what she hoped came across as wry acceptance of a bad situation. “That is, my door is always open, assuming you can find it.”

  This morning she established a temporary beachhead in the dressing room behind the auditorium to begin gathering her thoughts about the assembly she had volunteered to organize. Had Barbara tricked her into taking on this extra chore? Alexa was no longer sure. All she knew was that she had found herself insisting that she had the necessary background, with her undergraduate work in rhetoric and her postgraduate degrees in psychology and education.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you,” Barbara had said. “Besides, I really don’t have the authority to assign you extra work—as you often remind me.”

  “It wouldn’t be an imposition,” Alexa had said. She was still remembering last year’s assembly in the wake of a car accident that had killed three popular athletes, how the outside grief counselors had mishandled it.

  “If you insist.”

  Barbara’s bland tone couldn’t quite conceal her smugness. Over the past two years, Alexa had been quick to remind Barbara that the Girl Talk! Empowerment Project had a specific purpose, and that Alexa had to account for her activities to both the state and the nonprofit that underwrote her grant. Yes, it made her sound a little petulant at times, but Barbara would have exploited her otherwise. If Barbara had her way, Alexa would have ended up pulling cafeteria duty and Lord knows what else.

  Alexa knew she looked privileged and protected to the rest of the staff, holding what were derisively known as her “hen sessions,” with blocks of time kept open for one-on-one counseling with students. Sometimes she dreamed of placing a sign on her desk—in her fantasies she had a desk—a sign that said IT ONLY LOOKS LIKE I’M NOT WORKING.

  She picked up the in-house phone and dialed the office, thinking, as she had frequently over the past three days, about the in-house call that had started everything on Friday. Well, not started, exactly. The shots had been the signal, the clarion call, but even the shots were a reaction to something, something as yet unknown. What had motivated Perri to do such a thing? The school today was rife with rumors, stories so wild that they seemed more like Internet fanfic inspired by one of those prime-time teenage soap operas. Jealousy was the common element in all the stories. Perri must have wanted something that Kat had, or resented her. Her blond good looks? Perri was pretty enough, in her angular way. Her future? But Perri’s admission to North-western’s theater school was as prestigious as Kat’s early acceptance to Stanford.

  Could it be a boy? Neither girl had anyone steady as of late. Perri, solo since her on-again, off-again boyfriend graduated the year before, had insisted on taking Dannon as her date to the senior prom, prompting much nasty talk. Kat had attended the dance with a soccer player, a handsome, loose-limbed boy named Bradley, but it appeared to be more a relationship of convenience, like two film stars walking the red carpet at a premiere. Kat and Bradley, both outstanding students, needed suitable partners to navigate the final rites of high school. There hadn’t been a trace of a real romance there.

  Besides, Perri truly had no use for jocks like Bradley. While some of the drama-geek girls had chosen that path as a consolation prize, Perri’s indifference to Glendale’s popular crowd had always seemed sincere. Her friendship with Kat and Josie guaranteed her acceptance by the jocks and the preps, but she had never pursued those kids. Her humor was a bit waspish, and Alexa had encouraged her to curb the more scathing comments, a concept that Perri had embraced this past year with her usual overkill. Once she stopped being so vicious about the high school’s unfortunates, she vented her spleen on those who were simply doing what she had once done—coining cruel nicknames, making devastating critiques of wardrobes and bodies. And where she had once been carefully neutral about the diva crowd, perhaps in deference to Kat’s friends within it, she had become openly disdainful the past year, which had only encouraged their enmity and gossip.

  But beneath her lippy bravado, Perri yearned for adult approval. Her exhausting, articulate arguments on every topic under the sun were not meant to challenge the status quo, simply to persuade the grown-ups around her that she was an original thinker. Tightly wound, yes. Almost too empathic, with an easily aroused compassion for anything and everyone. Yet never violent, Alexa thought, although Perri had been increasingly conflicted about the ethical dilemmas posed by those who were. Events in the Middle East had been particularly hard for Perri to synthesize over the past year. Was war ever right? Did violence ever accomplish anything? Alexa had watched Perri struggle with these ideas—her heart yearning to say no, even as her head was insisting that pacifism had a spotty historical track record.

  The phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, but no one picked up. Anita Whitehead had called in sick this morning, claiming she had a doctor’s note to stay home indefinitely. The events of the past few days had been much too traumatic for her. (As if Anita were the only one who had suffered, as if one needed Anita’s hypersensitive hypochondria to be affected by what had happened.) Where were the other secretaries? Where was Barbara? Probably in the seventy-fifth meeting of the morning. It would be wrong to say that Barbara was enjoying herself, but she had an unusually high color, as if flushed with usefulness in the wake of the tragedy.

  There was a knock on the dressing room door, and the unexpected sound made Alexa jump. Everyone was on edge today, naturally. The door was pushed open before she could issue an invitation, and a round-faced man, stocky in a comfortable way, came into the dressing room.

  “Ms. Cunningham? I’m Sergeant Lenhardt, Baltimore County Homicide. Mrs. Paulson said I could find you here.”

  “You were here on Friday, right?” Alexa was proud of her memory for faces. “Don’t you have a partner?”

  He had a slow, lazy smile. “Yeah, ladies always remember Kevin.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant at all.” She resented the suggestion that she had been focused on something as trivial as a man’s looks in the midst of a crisis. Besides, the younger cop had been too handsome, the kind of cocky stud that Alexa avoided on principle. “It’s just that I thought you guys always worked in tandem.”

  “We do tend to travel in pairs,” the sergeant conceded. “But it happens that the high school is more or less en route for me. I live up near the state line. Detective Infante has to come from the other direction, so he’s going to meet me here for the assembly.”

  “You planned on attending?”

  He eased himself into the chair one over from Alexa’s at the long counter beneath the makeup mirrors and rotated on its wheeled base, taking in the room. “We didn’t have anything like this at my high school. When we did shows, we had to get dressed in the wings or the boys’ lavatory.”

>   “Oh, it’s pretty standard stuff for schools these days,” Alexa said, wondering at her own reflexive defense of Glendale. Among her friends she was quick to mock how overdone the school was in the physical details, how lacking in basic amenities—such as space for its faculty. “But the auditorium is large, large enough to hold the entire student body. Feel free to sit in the back or to watch from the wings.”

  “Actually, I was hoping I might speak. Me, or my partner, if you think the kids would be more responsive to him.”

  “He’s not my type,” Alexa shot back, then blushed.

  “I was just thinking, him being so handsome and all. And he’s younger, you know, closer to their age.” Again that slow easy smile. “But I’m happy to hear he’s not everyone’s type. We go to lunch, the waitresses swirl around him, offering seconds and specials and thises and thats. Me, I sit there pointing at my empty coffee cup until someone takes pity on me and pours me a refill. Even then it turns out to be decaf.”

  Alexa doubted this. The sergeant clearly had his own kind of charm, and he wasn’t unaware of it. She could imagine him as a shopping-mall Santa, a good one, who never made children cry. Not that he was fat, although his middle was a little bulky. There was just something in his demeanor that made it seem possible, attractive even, to whisper in his ear.

  “I don’t understand why either of you wants to address the students.”

  “The usual stuff. Remind kids that they should come forward with anything they know. With the promise of confidentiality, of course.”

  “Are you hoping to find out something about the motive?”

  “Not really.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Motives can be interesting. And when you don’t have anything, they’re a good place to start. But they’re not how you close cases, much less get convictions. I prefer eyewitnesses, hard physical evidence.”

  “It’s pretty obvious what happened, right? Perri killed Kat, shot Josie, and then tried to kill herself.”

  “That’s what everyone seems to think, yes.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “Then what do you think the students could tell you, if you already have an eyewitness and physical evidence?”

  “I’m an open-minded guy. That’s my stock-in-trade.”

  He rested one arm on the counter, his gaze unnervingly steady. Alexa’s eyes slid away, toward her own reflection. At twenty-eight she still looked twenty-two, although she worried about the way she might age. Time was unkind to blue-eyed blondes, judging by her mother. Were you always pretty? the girls asked, wistful and resentful at the same time, as if someone who was pretty in high school could never understand them. Not in my head, Alexa replied, and it was a good answer, true even. In high school she had not understood how blessed she was. No girl did.

  “It’s a bad idea,” she said.

  “Being open-minded?”

  “Talking to the kids at the assembly.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. One is that the anti-snitch culture is alive and well in high school. Once you ask kids to talk to you, some will feel pressure to do anything but. The kids who do come forward will most likely be the drama queens and kings, desperate for attention. Or looking for a reason to get out of class for an hour.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about that. So should I go about it a different way? Are there any individuals I should seek out?”

  She thought of Eve but hurriedly pushed the girl out of her thoughts, as if fearful that this policeman could read her mind. Eve was hers.

  “Well, Josie Patel, obviously. She’s the only eyewitness, right?”

  “Right,” the sergeant said in his agreeable tone, so why did Alexa have the feeling he wasn’t really agreeing with her? “Still, I’d like to speak at this confab. Just for two minutes, maybe at the very beginning. Then you can get down to the serious business at hand.”

  “You sound a little…sarcastic.” Like her brother, the day before. She was tired of people making fun of what she did.

  “Do I? I don’t mean to. I think grief counseling is a good thing. Posttraumatic stress, all that stuff. They talk a lot about it in my shop.”

  “Have you…?”

  “Oh, it’s not for me.”

  “No, I wasn’t asking if you’ve had it, just if—Well, you must have seen a lot. As a detective.”

  “I’m in homicide. My whole life is posttrauma. But it’s not what I’ve seen that’s likely to bother me. It’s what I’ve heard. The confessions. The rationalizations. The lack of rationalizations. You can’t believe how thoughtlessly some lives are ended, how little goes into the decision. Makes me sad.”

  Me, too, she wanted to say, yet she knew it was inane, a guidance counselor claiming kinship with a homicide detective. Still, it was amazing, the stories that teenage girls confided, once they felt safe. Their confused notions of sex, the things they were willing to do for the tiniest scrap of male attention, the viciousness of other girls.

  “Look, you really shouldn’t go before the assembly. You’re just going to end up trying to sort a lot of chaff from the wheat, the attention hogs and liars.”

  “Everybody lies. It’s the cardinal rule of homicide investigations.”

  Alexa blushed, feeling that he had seen through her own omissions, her refusal to mention Eve. But there was no way she could turn Eve over to police. The girl would never trust her again.

  His cell phone rang, a strangely straightforward ring to Alexa’s ears, inured to the elaborate tones that the kids downloaded. ABBA was big, for some reason. “Dancing Queen” and “Waterloo” always seemed to be coming out of someone’s purse or backpack these days. There also was a lot of hip-hop, at least among the boys, a hilarious affectation at Glendale, where only 5 percent of the student body was African-American and almost everyone was well-to-do.

  The sergeant took the call, his monosyllabic responses revealing little about the information conveyed. Really? Do we need a lab tech? Okay. Okay. Okay.

  “I guess it’s all moot for now,” he said, snapping the phone shut and placing it back on his belt. “Something—well, maybe nothing, really, but it takes priority. You could ask for us, though, couldn’t you? Ask the kids to call me or my partner, give out our numbers. In whatever way you think would elicit the best responses.”

  He hit the word “elicit” hard, as if he expected her to be surprised by the usage. As if she thought he was stupid, when she was now quite sure he was anything but.

  “I’ll do my best,” she promised.

  “Good girl.”

  She disliked him for that—in part because it was so patronizing, as if he were old enough to be her father, and maybe he was, but he should treat her as the professional she was, his equal.

  And in part because, having heard it, she wanted to hear it again, wanted this man’s approval.

  Wanted, in fact, an excuse to talk to him again. Because while his partner was not her type, Lenhardt definitely could be. Was he married? She hadn’t noticed a ring. Not that all men wore rings. Her father certainly hadn’t. Besides, she just wanted to talk to this man, get to know him better. There was nothing illicit about that.

  20

  Peter knew it was a bad idea to go to the high school Monday morning, but he just couldn’t help himself. He was bored out of his mind. Television was all girly stuff, even on pay cable—clearly no self-respecting man was supposed to be watching television before noon. The Glendale pool didn’t have weekday hours until later in the summer, and the early-June days were too cool for swimming anyway. Besides, he wasn’t sure how the producers would feel about him tanning. Guy Pearce was a pretty pale guy, although there was a hint of olive in his complexion. With all those self-tanners on the market, Peter could always go darker fast if need be, whereas if he overtanned, there was no makeup in the world that could take it down. Too bad, because Peter tanned beautifully.

  A year a
go, even as recently as Christmas, Peter might have found some of his old compadres hanging around Glendale, but college graduation had changed that dynamic. People had jobs or internships, or else they were doing big trips before they plunged into grad school. There were no students at the high school who knew him, although the real drama geeks might remember him from his community-theater work.

  But his drama teacher was still on the faculty, and Peter couldn’t resist going up there, sharing his big news. Old Giff would be so happy for him. Really, it would be a favor to him, letting him be the first to know that one of his former students was succeeding at such a high level.

  Vans from the local television stations were parked on the shoulder along Glendale Circle, and Peter had a hunch some security guy would be posted at the front door, making sure that all visitors reported to the office. But these were his old stomping grounds. He knew tricks that no reporter, no stranger, ever could. Instead of heading to the front doors, he ambled to one of the breezeways, losing himself in the crowd of students during a class change. The kids glanced his way—they weren’t fooled by the twenty-two-year-old impostor among them—but didn’t challenge him, just kept up their own manic chatter. It took him a second to tune in to their frequency, and when he did, he realized that all the buzzing was about the shooting. Of course.

  Old Giff was sitting in a chair on the stage, and in the split second before he realized he was being observed, he reminded Peter of a particularly poignant Malvolio from a Lincoln Center production of Twelfth Night, and it wasn’t just because he wore bright yellow trousers. Giff had a rubbery, comic countenance, the kind made for Neil Simon’s earlier plays, but left to its own devices, Old Giff’s face sagged into melancholic lines and folds. He looked lonely and unloved, and in full knowledge of the fact that he was lonely and unloved. In high school Peter had refused to think about Giff’s sexuality, not that he had a problem with people being gay or whatever. Peter had even threatened to beat up an oafish freshman who threw the word “faggot” around a little too carelessly. It was just that if he conceded Giff was gay, then he would have to wonder if the older man’s devotion to him was based on Peter’s talent or some latent attraction.