To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “That’s not fair,” Josie had protested, turning away from her mother’s computer, where she and Kat had been IM’ing about the tragedy. “It’s bad enough that I’m the last one to get my license because I have an August birthday. I have to get my driver’s license this summer. How else am I supposed to get anywhere? Do you want to drive me everywhere forever?”

  “Only until you’re fifty,” her father had said, coming over and ruffling her short curls.

  “If we had stayed in the city,” her mother said, “this wouldn’t be as much of an issue.”

  “Yeah, then all we’d have to worry about is whether Josie was going to be stabbed in the girls’ room.”

  Given all the attention demanded by the three deaths, it was perhaps understandable that few Glendale parents noticed, much less cared, that there had been an incident of vandalism on a local farm the same weekend. Vandalism was, unfortunately, all too common in this part of the county. The stock ponds on farmland were a longtime lure. But this had gone far beyond mere mischief. Three pigs had been poisoned at the home of Cyrus Snyder. Under different circumstances such a crime might have been the talk of the north county. But the Glendale families bristled at the idea that the death of three boys should be mentioned in the same breath as the slaughter of three pigs. It was disrespectful to two families who had suffered a real loss.

  Then an unthinkable rumor began, and the two stories merged in a way that no one could have predicted. Josie heard it first at a cheerleading practice that Kat had missed because she was being tutored for the AP tests. As soon as she got home, she IM’ed Kat, eager to be the first to tell her the latest gossip.

  J: have u heard?

  K: ?

  J: S, C and K = incident at Snyder farm. Blood on clothes not theirs. May be PIG blood.

  K: NO.

  J: Yes.

  K: That’s just stupid gossip. Don’t spread it. U know what

  Ms. Cunningham says.

  J: Perri calls her Ms. Cunnilingus. Cuz she’s all about the mouth.

  K: :O! Gross!

  J: Audrey sez her mom heard from someone at school.

  K: Audrey is an idiot. Gotta go—c u later.

  Later Josie remembered that Kat had dated Seth once or twice, back in sophomore year, her rebound relationship after Peter Lasko. Like most of the boys Kat dated since that summer with Peter, Seth had ended up being more of a friend, but a devoted one. Josie had pretended to like him, because life was easier that way. It didn’t pay to be too obviously at war with any of the jocks. But Seth had always creeped her out. Where other girls saw his silent style as cool—still waters running deep—Josie had sensed a real meanness in him. And everyone knew Chip was a thug.

  But Kenny—well, Kenny had always reminded her of herself, and not just because they were both short. His energy, his bounciness, his clownishness, were not unlike hers. He was the kind of boy who tried hard to please others. In the same situation, if Kat had been drinking—or Perri, although Perri was uninterested in alcohol, perhaps because her parents had given her permission to drink as long as she promised to call them should she ever need a ride—there was no doubt in Josie’s mind that she would take the wheel.

  The rumors about the accident continued to whip through Glendale with the same hit-or-miss velocity of the breezes that cut through the courtyard at the high school. Everyone’s information seemed to be fourth-or fifth-hand; each new piece of gossip had the life span of a soap bubble. People did not seem to care if the boys had really done what they were suspected of doing. Their primary concern was whether it was fair to pursue such an inquiry in the wake of their deaths. People were people and pigs were pigs; their lives should not be equated in any way.

  The gossip spun ’round and ’round like a child in a tantrum, reckless, indifferent to its own strength. The Snyders wanted an investigation. The Glendale families wanted the controversy buried with the boys. The matter was resolved in an unexpected way when an anonymous benefactor stepped in and made restitution to Cyrus Snyder. The police dropped the inquiry—after all, there was no one to charge, and the murder of a pig, unlike the murder of a person, was not a statistic that demanded a clearance. In the end no one in Glendale really knew if the boys’ clothes had been tested for the presence of nonhuman blood, as rumor had it. Or if a bag of poison had been recovered from the wreckage of the car. It probably wasn’t true either that Kenny Raskin, dying slowly behind the wheel of his overturned SUV, had attempted to make a full confession to the firefighters attempting to extract him. His injuries had been much too severe for him to speak.

  Once everything settled down, Alexa Cunningham tried to use the tragedy as a learning exercise, explaining to her students that spreading such rumors was irresponsible and cruel, that people could even be sued for making false allegations about private citizens.

  “In your history class,” she had told her girls, “you are taught the difference between primary and secondary sources. In the media there are distinctions among knowing something first-, second-, and thirdhand. Primary, or firsthand, refers to things you have observed. The moment you rely on someone else’s account of an event, no matter how authoritative, you open yourself up to errors. Even in retelling the details of an event that you have seen, you may make mistakes, large or small. Memory is imperfect.”

  She told them about the fallibility of eyewitnesses in criminal cases, reading from a piece in the New Yorker. She put them through an exercise, asking half of the students to leave the room while the others watched Ms. Cunningham and the history teacher, Mr. Nathanson, act out a skit. The other students were then summoned back to the room and paired with those who had seen the skit. Based on the retelling, they had to write short reports about what happened.

  “It’s like Telephone,” Ms. Cunningham had concluded after sharing some of the funnier errors with the students. “Only it’s not a harmless game. Misinformation can ruin a person’s life.”

  A girl’s voice called from the back of the room, “But what if a story is true? Can someone sue you for telling the truth?”

  A few girls gasped, but it was a fake shock, a form of mockery. The girl who had asked the question was Eve Muhly, and everyone knew that the stories about her were true. Who was she going to sue, when sixty other sophomores had seen exactly what she did?

  “The point of this exercise is just how hard it is to know the truth of anything. If you don’t have firsthand information from primary sources, you shouldn’t gossip about it.”

  “What if you talked to the victim?” Eve persisted. “Because I did.”

  “I didn’t know,” Ms. Cunningham said, “that you were a pig whisperer, Eve.”

  Everyone laughed, and Ms. Cunningham looked uncomfortable at the success of her joke, clearly aware that she had been less than teacherlike in her demeanor. But Eve didn’t seem to be the least bit perturbed.

  “I mean the Snyder family. We live next to them. My dad went over there after he heard what happened. Would my dad count as a firsthand source?”

  “No, he would be secondhand, unless he told you about something he observed directly, not what Mr. Snyder told him. But really, Eve, the point is not to talk anymore about this horrible incident, the point is—”

  “My dad saw it. So it’s firsthand. He saw the letter with his own eyes.”

  “Eve—”

  “They used blood to write a note. It said, ‘We’re coming for your pig daughter this summer.’”

  This gasp was real. This information was new, and quite provocative. Binnie Snyder was not as pink and red-eyed as she had been in grade school, but she was still an odd girl with carroty hair, a girl so advanced in mathematics that she took extra classes at Johns Hopkins. When she spoke in class—and she spoke often—her voice was too loud and strangely inflected. And she still had a way of squinching up her face when thinking hard. “Pig” would have been unkind, but not altogether untrue.

  “I think,” Ms. Cunningham said, “that we’re getting of
f topic.”

  Josie, who was there for the session, could not wait to tell Kat and Perri about this development. She raced to find them as soon as class was over, risking a tardy slip for English. She reasoned that it was okay to tell Kat about Eve’s information because she wasn’t saying it was Seth, Chip, and Kenny, whose guilt could not be established. The point was that the perpetrators, whoever they were, were so much more evil than anyone had realized.

  But Kat had shook her head, refusing to believe the story even in its generalities.

  “Eve Muhly is a slut,” she said, shocking Josie, who had never heard Kat speak so cruelly of anyone. “And a liar. Everyone knows that. She’s just making stuff up to get back at the people who talked about her.”

  “Don’t use ‘slut’ just to criticize some girl you don’t like,” Perri said, her voice a dead-on imitation of Ms. Cunningham’s. She switched to her real voice. “Seriously, if anyone is a slut in this scenario, it’s Chip. He went after girls the same way he scored goals in soccer. But everyone thought he was cool, whereas Eve gets in trouble for giving one blow job.”

  “He’s dead,” Kat protested.

  “And when he was alive, he wasn’t very nice. People don’t become something other than what they were just because they had the misfortune to die.”

  “Okay, Chip wasn’t the greatest guy. But Seth was our friend,” Kat said. “And everyone loved Kenny. We’ve known them both since we were five years old, Perri.”

  That gap, seldom alluded to, always made Josie feel a twinge of jealousy and insignificance. She hated being reminded of Kat and Perri’s longer history, the three-year difference she could never make up. The three could be friends for eighty years, and yet Kat and Perri would then be friends for eighty-three.

  “But what if they really did it?” Perri persisted. “How would you feel about them then?”

  “I’m not going to speculate about someone who’s dead.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s mean, it’s harmful.”

  “To whom? They’re dead and it’s not like their parents are standing here.”

  Josie had watched them, anxious, filled with regret that she had brought them what she considered nothing more than a juicy story, only to start this near fight. Ms. Cunningham was right about the destructive power of gossip.

  Kat and Perri glared at each other. It all seemed so much angrier, so much more personal, than it had any right to be. But Kat had no talent for anger, and she broke first.

  “I can’t be sure of anything. I don’t know, and you don’t know, and Eve Muhly definitely doesn’t know. She was, like, borderline retarded when we were kids, remember? I can’t believe you’re taking her side.”

  “I’m not. I’m just being open-minded. There are infinite possibilities here.”

  “If someone said anything horrible about you or Josie, accused you of doing something disgusting, wouldn’t you want me to defend you?”

  Josie waited, as curious about this answer as Kat.

  “It depends,” Perri said. “What if I really did it?”

  PART FIVE

  there

  won’t

  be

  trumpets

  wednesday

  26

  Infante liked to say he could smell crazy on a woman—the better to run right toward it. But even Infante seemed skittish around the gorgeous redhead who had shown up at headquarters this morning offering her full cooperation in the Hartigan case. Yet thirty minutes into the conversation, she had managed not to answer a single direct question. This horse has led herself to water, Lenhardt thought in exasperation, but she still doesn’t want to drink.

  The woman was Michael Delacorte—estranged wife, registered owner of a murder weapon, Perri Kahn’s former employer. So far she had explained how she came to marry Stewart Delacorte (much too quickly), and the travails of their two-year-old son (rare genetic disorder), which had helped her focus, after much searching (yoga, Buddhism, ceramics) for meaning in her life. The epiphany that she needed to leave her husband arrived, coincidentally, the same week as the news of the SEC investigation into his business affairs.

  “I realize now that I was put here to care for my son, that my purpose in life was right there in front of me,” she said, smacking the table so forcefully that her tennis bracelet slid up and down her skinny forearm each time her palm landed. Lenhardt had never understood the origin of that name, tennis bracelet, but he knew that his wife would like one. “Oh, you have no idea how wonderful it is to realize that one’s life has true meaning.”

  Mrs. Delacorte smacked her hands a few more times, and Infante twitched, just a little, as each blow landed. She had a cat’s face, a dancer’s body, and, by all appearances, a plastic surgeon’s breasts, high and molded. Lenhardt prided himself on being able to tell. His wife had explained it to him one day, how the artificial ones always pointed straight ahead.

  “About Perri Kahn,” he began, and it was far from the first time that he had tried to introduce the girl’s name into the conversation. But Mrs. Delacorte was not interested in approaching anything that might be called a point.

  “Yes, exactly. Exactly.”

  “Exactly?” Infante seemed to be echoing a word here and there, just to keep himself alert.

  “You see, before I really understood my situation, before I accepted the fact that this was part of a higher plan, what my real calling was, Perri used to baby-sit for me every Thursday. I was in denial. I felt I just couldn’t survive if I didn’t have a day, once a week, where I knew I was going to get out of the house. I mean, I had a nanny, of course, but the nanny had Thursdays off, and I just needed a day that was all for me.”

  Lenhardt tried to digest this concept, a woman with full-time help who needed part-time help so she wouldn’t feel trapped. Well, rich people had different expectations, he told himself, although he would bet anything that Mrs. Delacorte hadn’t been rich before she met her husband.

  “In May I finally saw that I had to leave. I was very aboveboard about it. I told Stewart that I wanted out, that I wouldn’t seek anything more than was fair, under the law. Although, of course, support would have to be calculated differently with a special-needs child. I’m going to need help as long as he—” Her breath caught. “As long as he lives.”

  Lenhardt’s heart softened toward the woman, silly and ditzy and spoiled as she was. She had a child with a fatal condition. She had earned her craziness.

  “About the gun?” he asked, reasoning it was a kindness to distract her from what had to be a painful subject. “Did you know it was missing?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you—I left earlier than I planned because I noticed it was missing, and I assumed Stewart had taken it. I was terrified. I thought he was going to kill me as I slept. That’s why I had to get out so quickly.”

  “But you never asked him directly if he had taken the gun?”

  “No. I just plotted my escape.” She gave a strange little laugh, like one that an actress in an old-fashioned radio play might have used. “I mean, I had been thinking about leaving for a while, but when my gun disappeared, I knew I had to get out sooner rather than later. I found a new place for the baby and me, then hired a moving crew that could get me packed and out in twelve hours.” She laughed in the same fashion. “I guess there were some advantages to the hours he worked after all.”

  “Back to the gun—you noticed it missing in May, but you never asked your husband about it.”

  “No.”

  “Did you mention it to anyone?”

  “No.”

  “And was Perri Kahn still working for you when the gun disappeared?”

  “I don’t know when the gun disappeared. I only know I noticed that it was gone in mid-May, when I started packing and I couldn’t find it.”

  Great, now she was suddenly Ms. Precise. Lenhardt pictured her in front of a grand jury, dithering for two hours and then taking pains to make clear how hard it wa
s to know exactly when the gun had gone missing.

  “You said you realized the gun was gone and started packing to leave. Then you said you were packing to leave, and it was only then that you realized it was gone.”

  “Same difference.”

  Actually, the two things weren’t the same at all, but Lenhardt decided to drop the subject, for now.

  “How long did Perri Kahn work for you?”

  “She started last fall and continued through mid-May, when I moved out. But until then she came every week. She was reliable for a high-school girl.”

  This was a promising detail. Juries did not necessarily reject coincidence. In fact, they were quite happy to draw inferences from mere opportunity. Perri Kahn had worked in a home where a gun went missing, and that gun was later used in the commission of a crime where Perri Kahn was present, so it was logical to assume that Perri Kahn had taken the gun and used it. But a good defense attorney could make a person doubt that logic.

  “You see, Mrs. Delacorte—”

  “Michael, please! I hate that name. I can’t wait to be rid of it. I hate anything that reminds me of him. Except for Malcolm, of course. But Malcolm doesn’t remind me of his father.”

  “Michael, sure.” Lenhardt wondered again at the parents who gave a newborn girl that name. It was okay, since she had turned out gorgeous. But what if she had been broad-shouldered and hulking? Then the name would have been a death sentence. “What you’ve told us is a help. But it’s better if we can prove that Perri at least was aware of your gun. Did you ever mention it to her? Show it to her?”