To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  Perhaps, Alexa thought, Dannon had last-minute instructions for Josie, whose participation in that night’s ceremony had been carefully scripted so she could accept her scholarship, then wait in the wings for her diploma, instead of going up and down the stage stairs.

  The last line of the “Desiderata” echoed in Josie’s mind, more crystalline in Toni Singleton’s soprano than it would have been in Perri’s. Peace in silence. Perri had never been as good a singer as she yearned to be, so she had worked extra hard at chorus, winning solos through sheer determination. It had been difficult for her, when Kat’s golden voice had emerged, although she had never admitted it.

  How could she be dead? Until the moment that Dannon had grabbed Josie—hissing at her, as if it were her fault—Josie had believed that Perri would recover. Perri had to recover. Perri was the talker. Perri was the one who needed to explain what happened.

  The speaker droned on and on, but Josie heard none of it, although her mind registered the relieved applause signaling that the speech was over. Only two more items on the program, the Hartigan Scholarship and the diplomas. She barely heard her own name when Mr. Hartigan called her forward, although each mention of Kat’s name was like a low-level electrical shock. Kat! Hartigan! Kat! Hartigan! Kat! Hartigan!

  Then there was a huge silence, and Rose Padgett nudged Josie, reminding her to rise and go up the stairs to the stage. It was hard to maneuver, even though they had arranged for Josie to be on the aisle, and she lurched a bit, rolling from side to side as if drunk. She hopped up the steps—they had offered to put in a ramp, but Josie had said she could manage the short flight of stairs, and made her way toward Mr. Hartigan. He had a handheld mike, and he tilted it toward her so she would not have to let go of her crutches while making her brief remarks.

  Peace in silence. Josie would know peace, if only she could keep her silence. No, that was wrong. She would be miserable if she kept on this way. It was everyone else who would be happy. Her parents, Mr. Hartigan, the Kahns. The scholarship was a bribe, even if they didn’t realize it. Take the money, go to college, and stick to the version that made everyone comfortable. With Perri dead it would be easy. Even if they found her sandals, even when they retrieved the text messages from Perri’s and Kat’s phones, they couldn’t prove anything. If Josie had learned anything from her mathematically inclined father, it was how hard it was to create a proof from a few scanty facts.

  “Mr. Hartigan, parents, my fellow students,” she said, stalling as she gathered her thoughts, trying to figure out if she really wanted to say the words forming in her head. All she had to say was thank you, according to her mother. A simple thank-you and she would be free. Or not.

  “You are very kind, but I can’t accept this scholarship. Kat would have wanted it to go to someone who truly needed it—and someone who deserved it.”

  It had been planned that the diplomas would be awarded next on the program and that Josie could wait in the wings for her name to be called, rather than make her laborious way back to her seat. The band played, covering the confused silence, and parents applauded as if the scholarship presentation had gone as planned. Josie stayed, making it through the G’s, but she simply could not take it anymore, and escaped through the stage door, following the curving paths around the school to her parents’ car.

  When they showed up twenty minutes later, they did not berate her for what she had done or pester her with questions, although Josie could see a thousand questions in their faces.

  “Perri died,” she told them. “This afternoon. Dannon Estes told me while I was in the processional. The police kept it from me.”

  “Oh, Josie,” her mother said. “No wonder you’re so upset.”

  “I want to talk to the police.”

  She was scaring them, she knew she was scaring them, but she couldn’t help it. She had been protecting them for a week, and she was exhausted.

  “Why don’t you sleep on it?” her father suggested. “Go home, get a good night’s sleep, and we’ll call Ms. Bustamante.”

  “I’m not going to be able to sleep until this is settled.”

  Just as Josie had gone reeling, in her own fashion, from the auditorium, Dale had slipped away, too, leaving as soon as the principal began handing out diplomas. What was the girl thinking? Why had she embarrassed him that way? True, he may have had ulterior motives when he offered Josie the scholarship, but it was, above all else, a sincere memorial to Kat, and she had been Kat’s best friend. Angry, distracted, he drove blindly through the streets of Glendale, unsure of where he was going until he ended up at his old house.

  “Dale,” Chloe said. It wasn’t even nine-thirty, but she was wearing a silk robe, which she had thrown over a decidedly odd outfit, even for Chloe—yoga pants and a tailored shirt. It was as if she couldn’t decide what part of the day she was inhabiting. She held a glass of wine in her hand, and Chloe had never much cared for wine. “What in…?”

  “Can I have a drink?”

  “Sure.” She closed the door on him, returning to the porch with a second glass and the bottle of Vigonier in which she had already made a considerable dent. “Let’s sit out here. It’s a nice night.”

  She doesn’t want me in the house, Dale thought. She’ll never let me in this house again if she can help it.

  “It will be loud,” he said. “All those kids driving around, the night of the Senior Ramble and all. The traffic on Old Town Road will be bumper to bumper.”

  “I don’t mind noise these days,” Chloe said. “In fact, I find I need a constant wall of sound. I’ve started sleeping with the television set on.”

  “I don’t sleep at all.” They were being competitive. Lord help them, they were competing to see who was suffering more.

  “I don’t really sleep. I lie in bed, and I listen to CNN. There’s so much death in the world. Every day people die. Soldiers and civilians. Ex-presidents. A busful of people on their way to a riverboat casino in Mississippi.”

  “But none of them matter. Not like Kat.”

  “You only say that because she was your daughter, Dale. Our daughter. But everyone who dies is someone’s child. Or a parent, or a sibling. This is our grief. But we’re not alone. Every day someone in the world is grieving.”

  “No, Kat matters more. She was extraordinary. She would have done important things.”

  “Like you? Like me? What have we done with our lives that makes us so vital, so much more important than others?”

  “Chloe—”

  “We lost our daughter, Dale. You don’t need to make it bigger than it is. It’s big enough.”

  Oh, Lord, the world really was upside down. Chloe was wise and calm, while Dale was the hysterical one, scattered and out of control.

  From Old Town Road, they heard the first slow rumble of cars, the honking horns, the blasts of hip-hop music, and, over it all, the loud, exuberant voices of eighteen-year-olds flush with the success of surviving their education. The Senior Ramble was under way.

  36

  Senior Ramble sucked sober, Peter Lasko was realizing. Or maybe it sucked because he was so much older than these kids. All he knew was that he was bored out of his mind, going from party to party, restaurant to restaurant, all in the hopes of finding some fresh gossip on Josie, Kat, and Perri. Someone had to know something, but the only news was that Perri had been taken off life support this afternoon and Josie Patel had shocked everyone by refusing the Hartigan Scholarship and then ditching graduation altogether.

  “I can’t imagine doing what she did.” The girl was Lauren something, a bright-eyed brunette who was going to Beloit, a fact she felt the need to interject in the conversation about every sixty seconds. Peter had semi-tuned her out early on and had no idea what the girl was referencing, but he thought it had something to do with Josie.

  “Turning down a scholarship?”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, Perri. Killing someone. Josie just had some sort of breakdown. Oh, Janie just came in—she’s going
to Beloit, too.” The girl eeled away from him, as if he were less desirable than some high-school senior bound for a second-tier school in Wisconsin.

  It was time to move on anyway. This party was dead, a chaperoned event in one of the newer houses. Peter decided to head out to the fringes, the places where the sophomores and juniors gathered for their unofficial parties. There was an old parking lot near the Prettyboy Reservoir, a somewhat risky spot, as the county police would know to check it throughout the night, but it was irresistible—hidden, with a dramatic view and lots of dark places that afforded privacy, or the illusion of privacy.

  Yes, a small circle of kids was here, skeezers and skateboarders, drinking beer. It was a mellow scene, in some ways more tolerable than the giddy senior gatherings, where everyone was acting as if they’d just split the atom. Boy, Peter would like to see those self-important seniors in a few months, when they’d been broken down, reduced to freshmen again. He’d been cocky, too, heading into NYU, but he had never been as cocky as those kids. Beloit! Imagine being full of yourself because you had gotten into Beloit.

  A boy offered him a beer—a PBR, which was pretty much ten minutes ago as a trend, but cheap as ever—and Peter tried to ease into the conversation as nonchalantly as he pulled the tab on the can.

  “I hear Perri Kahn was taken off life support today. So I guess that’s it.”

  The boy shrugged. “Saves the county the cost of a trial.”

  “Unless there’s another person who was involved. You hear anything about that?”

  No one picked up the cue. That was the problem with the skeezer crowd—they were almost too mellow. It was one thing to be nonjudgmental, another to have no opinions, no initiative, no ambition whatever.

  A short, dark-haired girl emerged from the shadows, standing just a little too close to Peter, especially given how humid the evening was.

  “I’ve heard that, too,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “In fact—” She stopped.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Eve.”

  The girl that Kevin Weaver had pointed out at the funeral, the girl whose very name had made Josie so heated. A slut and a liar, Josie had said.

  “You want to take a walk or something?”

  “I came with my friends, in their car.”

  “I’ve got a car.”

  She hesitated, but he knew she wanted to go with him. He just needed to give her an excuse to ditch her friends.

  “I’m…I’m so sad tonight, Eve. You know? Kat and I dated, way back. She was my girlfriend, and I knew Perri from doing theater stuff, and I’m just so sad and lonely. I need someone to talk to.”

  “Let me find my friends.”

  It had been a long time since Dale had unhooked anyone’s bra one-handed and apparently just as long since anyone had tried this maneuver on Chloe, who was laughing hysterically. That is, she was laughing when she wasn’t letting him kiss her, sloppy and uncoordinated as he was.

  He was not sure just when they had ended up on the sofa in the alcove off the kitchen, although he thought it was somewhere between killing the first bottle of wine and starting the second. Yes, that was it. He had followed Chloe into the house when she went to get more wine, and although she had ordered him back to the porch, he realized it was because she knew how susceptible she was to him. But she had started it, being so nice and tender, reminding him of the woman he had fallen in love with so many years ago. It had not been a mistake, after all, loving Chloe, marrying her. Lord, she had given him Kat. The only mistake was in not realizing that the woman he loved had always been here, buried beneath her disappointments and confusion and shame. He didn’t need to award a scholarship to honor his daughter’s memory. All he had to do was love her mother again. They would reconcile, make a new baby. Nothing would have made Kat happier.

  “This is crazy,” Chloe kept saying, but if she wasn’t exactly helping him, she wasn’t fighting him either. It was like a test, a quest. He was a knight, and he just had to get past all these barriers—the bra, the yoga pants, which had an unusual side fastening, something with laces. Their history, which was more complicated still. He should have done this four years ago, just planted himself here when Chloe ordered him out of the house and refused to leave.

  But it was never too late. Nothing was truly over, as long as you were alive.

  “We’ll start when my partner gets here,” Lenhardt said.

  “Okay,” Josie said.

  “We’re going to record it, on a little microcassette recorder that he’s bringing.”

  “Okay.” Her voice was low, but even and sure.

  “And you’ll need to read this statement, indicating this is voluntary—”

  “It’s not a confession,” her lawyer put in. “I want to be very clear on this. My client is not confessing and is not going to be held liable for any charges.”

  “Gloria, if you want to make a deal, make a deal. Tell me what you want up front, and I’ll call an ADA, and we’ll see what we can do. But until then, if your client cops to a felony, I’m not going to promise what charges she’s going to face. She called us, remember?”

  “Is it a felony to shoot yourself?” Josie asked.

  “Josie!” her lawyer all but yelped.

  “Depends,” Lenhardt said.

  Her parents, sitting side by side on the sofa, were wide-eyed.

  “Because I did, you know. I shot myself in the foot. But you knew that, from the very beginning. How did you know that? Was it because of the angle or because it was my right foot? If I had shot my left foot, would you have been fooled? Or because you couldn’t find my sandals. I took them off, right before, because I didn’t want to ruin them. That was stupid, wasn’t it? But they were brand new.”

  “Josie,” her lawyer repeated in that same yelping-warning tone.

  “Josie,” her father said sorrowfully. “What have you done?’

  “Please,” Lenhardt said. “Let’s wait until my partner gets here with the recorder.”

  Several old paths wound through the underbrush along the reservoir, and Peter led Eve by the hand down one of these until they found a small clearing with a felled tree where they could sit and drink their beers. At least, he was drinking. Eve, gulping nervously, had finished hers in a matter of seconds, but she continued to bring the can to her lips. It gave her something to do with her hands. She wished she had a cigarette with her, but they were back in Val’s car. Along with her regular shoes. It was going to be a bitch shimmying barefoot up the drainpipe and back into her room. And she couldn’t throw the shoes up on the roof, because they would make an enormous clatter. She really hadn’t thought this through. But what did you do when Peter Lasko asked you to go for a walk? Even Val, who took a dim view of ditching girls when a boy crooked his little finger—that was Val’s expression, “crooked his little finger”—could not object to such a monumental opportunity.

  “So did you know Kat and her friends?”

  “I was a grade behind them. But my father’s farm—it’s between the Hartigans’ property and that new development, Sweet-water. So I used to see her sometimes. Around.”

  “She was great.”

  Eve lifted a shoulder, wanting to be agreeable but not wanting to lie out and out. “Great” was not the word she would use to describe Kat Hartigan.

  “I mean, she was such a sweetheart. She never hurt anyone.”

  “Not directly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Just…well, you don’t have to hurt people if other people will do it for you, right?”

  “You mean Perri? The way she used to talk shit? You can’t blame Kat for Perri.”

  “Look, it’s not important. She’s dead, and that’s sad, and I don’t want to say anything bad about someone who’s dead.”

  “They’re both dead now. So I guess we’ll never know what happened.”

  She pr
essed the can against her mouth again, pretending to drink. It was no longer truly cold, but the metal felt good on her mouth. Above them cars were pulling out of the gravel lot, trying to stay ahead of the patrols. Evading the police was the only real excitement of the night. Eve wondered if the Ramble was always so anticlimactic. So far the best part had been sliding down the roof, running silently down the drive to where Val and Lila waited.

  You’re here with Peter Lasko, she reminded herself. An almost movie star. But he didn’t seem particularly interested in her. Abruptly, she dropped her empty can, letting it roll down the hill, and knelt between Peter’s legs, reaching for the fly of his jeans.

  “What—?”

  “Don’t you want to?” It was amazing, how he moved beneath her hand—not hard yet but already twitching a little. She thought of those gliding airplanes sold from the mall kiosks, the ones that seemed to fly by magic. It was almost as if she had that kind of control over him, as if her lightest touch could make him respond. She could be with him now, and years later, when he was a famous movie star, she would have that memory. Or if she was good enough, if she did it well, maybe he would want to see her again. Maybe he would want her for his girlfriend. That would be worth anything.

  But before she could get started, he pulled her up by the armpits, so they were face-to-face.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Eighteen,” she lied reflexively.

  “No you’re not. You said you were a year behind Kat in school.”

  “I’m old enough. I’ve done it lots of times. Come on, it’s just sex. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”