To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  She reached for him again, plunging her hand down into his open fly, hoping she was doing it right. Hadn’t Graham liked what she had done? It had seemed so at the time. And she hadn’t wanted to be with him, whereas she would give anything, absolutely anything, to get with Peter Lasko.

  He took her hand away, gently yet firmly, and zipped himself up. “Actually,” he said, “sex is a big deal. Kat and I never did it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I never told anyone that, but it’s true. I dated her all summer, and we never did it.”

  “Don’t you wish you did? Now that she’s dead?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it that way.”

  “Well, I bet she wishes she had. If I were your girlfriend, I wouldn’t be like that.” Adding hurriedly, “Not that I want to be your girlfriend. I’m just saying I’m not a cocktease.” Hadn’t Lila said that was the worst thing a girl could be?

  He finished off his beer, crumpling the aluminum can in his hand. “That’s what I told people that Kat was. I wish I hadn’t.”

  “It doesn’t really matter what you say or don’t say. People think what they want to think. You can tell them the truth, but it doesn’t make a difference. Everyone’s saying Perri shot Kat because she was jealous of her for some reason. That’s not the way it was, but that’s what people want to believe.”

  “How do you know?”

  She studied his face, as handsome as any movie star’s. But then, he was one, or about to be. She wanted to give him something, anything, to remember her by. She had thought sex would be the best way, but any girl could give him sex. All Eve had was a secret, but it seemed to be a secret he would value.

  “Because I know someone else who was there.”

  “Binnie Snyder,” Josie said. “Binnie Snyder was there, hiding in a stall. There was a struggle for a gun—no one meant for anything to happen—and we were so scared, and it was so stupid. I could have run—Binnie told me to run—but I couldn’t leave them.”

  “Start at the beginning,” Lenhardt coaxed the girl. “Start at the very beginning.”

  He had no way of knowing that the beginning, as Josie defined it, was her first day of third grade, ten years ago. He was used to more straightforward confessions—Tater shot Peanut over drugs, I cut my wife to shut her up. Sometimes, for variety, the wife cut the husband.

  He was a murder police, well into his third decade, and he thought there was nothing new under the sun, no motivation unknown to him, no scenario he had yet to document. And he was right. The story Josie told, haltingly yet determinedly, had the usual elements. Jealousy, covetousness, anger over slights so tiny that it was hard to believe they had resonated for even a moment, much less years.

  He let the girl go, allowed her all the extraneous details she thought so essential to her story. It seemed only fair, his having pressured her for the past week, to let her speak to her heart’s content.

  It was past midnight when Peter, at Eve’s instruction, stopped at the end of her father’s outlaw driveway, the one he had created at the edge of Sweetwater Estates.

  “I was going to stay out all night,” she said. “But there doesn’t seem to be any point.”

  Was she still leaving the door open for some kind of sexual encounter? Peter was tempted. But he also wanted to go home, call Mr. Hartigan, tell him what he had learned.

  “You know what? Nobody ever does. They say they’re going to, but even the seniors are home by two. It’s just so boring around here. Now, New York—New York is a city where you can do some damage, no matter what time it is.”

  “I’d like to go there,” she said. “Not to do tourist stuff. But, like, go to clubs.”

  “It’s a great city.”

  “Can I call you, if I go there?”

  No. “Sure.” He wasn’t going to be there anyway. He and his agent had mapped out the strategy. After Susquehanna Falls wrapped, he was going to go to L.A. for pilot season and meet a lot of people but not commit to anything until they had a sense of what the gathering buzz was on the movie.

  “Cool,” she said.

  “Is that where Binnie lives?” he asked, pointing to the dark house in the distance, a house where no lights burned, not even a porch light.

  “Yes, but you promised—” Her voice was shrill, almost hysterical.

  “I know. I promised I wouldn’t tell. And I won’t.” Actually, he had been very precise, promising Eve he wouldn’t tell the police. “But you should think about it, Eve. If she’s telling you the truth, she doesn’t have any reason not to come forward.”

  “Binnie always tells the truth—which is more than I can say for Kat and her friends.”

  “Okay, okay.” He was going for a big-brother vibe with her. Should he have fucked her? No, discretion really was the better part of valor sometimes. “Just think about it. Promise me? Think about it. Turn in those cell phones, the ones you said you hid in the compost pile. You can do it anonymously, I’m sure. It could be bad for you if it’s not as Binnie said. You could be an accessory.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He wasn’t fooled. She would think about it, but she wouldn’t do anything. That was okay. He didn’t need her to, and he wouldn’t tell anyone of her involvement. All Dale Hartigan needed to know was that a fourth girl was there, a girl who could explain, once and for all, what had happened.

  It was so dark here, with no streetlamps, yet Eve’s eyes were bright, wet, and hungry. She seemed to want a kiss, so he gave her one. He was surprised at how tentative she was, how reserved, as if she had never been kissed.

  He watched her run lightly up the drive, sandals in hand. She wasn’t going to talk to her friend, and even if she did, she would be tentative, unwilling to press for the right thing. The loyalties, whatever the reason, ran too deep. Maybe it was the legacy of being redneck girls, growing up among these pricey houses. Or maybe it was some kind of deeper girl shit, the kind he never got.

  What if he went to the Snyders’ house, just knocked on the door, told them what he knew? Okay, so it was after midnight and her parents would probably freak. But if he just walked over there, announced himself, and told them what he knew and that their daughter had to come forward, he could put the whole thing to bed tonight and no one, not even Dale Hartigan, would be able to deny his part in it.

  The road was rougher, far rougher than he realized, and he heard his mother’s car make an ominous noise. Shit, something beneath the car had popped a bolt and was now dragging, making a huge amount of noise. He hadn’t felt drunk, but now he realized that the beer was catching up with him. He was definitely buzzed. This was stupid. This was way stupid.

  He pulled up to the gated driveway, intent on backing out and turning around, but it was dark and he heard a hard thunk. Shit, he had hit the fence or something, but when he tried to turn the car on again, nothing happened. His mom’s distributor cap might have come loose on that road. He was going to have to call in all his charm points when his mother saw what he had done to her Mazda.

  He got out, trying to walk around the car to inspect the damage, but the car was angled weirdly, so he had to climb out the passenger side. Maybe he should raise the hood, check the distributor cap, then assess the damage to the rear end. He stumbled forward, falling to his knees. He hadn’t eaten enough today. That’s why the beer was making him light-headed. He had been drinking on an empty stomach.

  “Who’s there?” The question came from a shape, a huge, dark shape, almost like a bear, although Peter knew that bears cannot speak. He froze, trying to think what he should say. In his mind he was invisible as long as he didn’t speak. He would just wait for the shape to go away and—

  The pain seemed to come before the sound. Was that possible? Did sound travel slowly enough that the shotgun blast that tore through him really had a chance to announce itself? His middle seemed to be on fire, and Peter clutched himself as if he had a stomachache. His arms came away slick and red, his knees buckled be
neath him. Was he fainting, or was he dying?

  Now he was on the ground, and he suddenly felt cold, as cold as he ever had.

  Not good, he thought. Definitely not good.

  How far do sounds travel on a summer night? A shotgun, for example. Does the damp air slow it down, hold it close? Does it matter if those within its range recognize the sound for what it is or if they assume it’s something more familiar—a firecracker, a car backfiring? Those in the Sweetwater Estates certainly heard Cyrus Snyder’s shotgun, but it was only the sirens, then the whirring of another Shock Trauma helicopter over the valley, the second in a week, that alerted them to the fact that something had happened. In their pen, Claude and Billy nattered, and Eve’s mother poked Eve’s slumbering father. But Dale Hartigan, eight acres away, slept on.

  How far does a girl’s voice travel? Josie Patel was barely audible to the five adults gathered around her in the Patels’ family room. The detectives kept glancing worriedly at the microcassette recorder, making sure that the voice-activated microphone was picking up her words. If Dale Hartigan had been in the next room, he might not have heard the girl’s voice. But he was in his old bed, asleep in his ex-wife’s arms.

  Later, when he pieced together the events of that night, he would remember that dreamless sleep as a blessing of sorts. For while it could not be said that this June evening was the last happy night that Dale Hartigan would ever know, it was the last innocent sleep of his life. When he had passed out next to Chloe, he was a victim of circumstance, undeserving of his fate. He was still a man who believed he could afford to know the why of things, and that those explanations would then lead to solutions he could effect. He had gone to sleep feeling that his life was still open, that he was not as thoroughly destroyed as he feared.

  By morning he would wake to a world where five young people’s deaths, including his daughter’s, had been traced back to him. Six, if one counted Peter Lasko, and Dale did. He had not meant any of this to happen. All he had wanted was the very best for his daughter. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?

  But in the end it was Josie’s story, and Dale Hartigan never challenged her right to tell it, much less tried to contradict a word of it, unflattering and damaging as it was to him. Josie told it in her own ragged, discursive way, for there was no one else to shape her words. Not Perri, with her heightened sense of drama and narrative. Not Kat, with her tendency to edit out the problematic details, to gloss over anything unpleasant and unflattering. Not Eve, who had only Binnie’s version and one page of a letter. In the end it was Josie’s story, and she believed that every detail mattered—the cupcakes and the Ka-pe-jos, the jokes and the plays and the crushes.

  There were three girls. For ten years they were best friends who did everything together. Then they weren’t, and then they didn’t. It was only in how their friendship ended that there was anything singular about them.

  37

  In April of junior year, Kat checked her SAT scores on the Internet and found that they were still stubbornly short of the 1400 mark. “Short” was a euphemism: At 1340 she was closer to 1300 than 1400, and even 1400 was a far cry from the 1500 that her father said would make her a “lead-pipe cinch” for Stanford.

  “Lead-pipe cinch,” Perri said when Kat repeated her father’s phrase. “What does that mean? I mean, why does it denote a sure thing?”

  They were all a bit obsessed with words and meanings and analogies at this point, having spent the past three years preparing for their college boards. They had taken practice tests freshman year, taken the PSATs twice, studied vocabulary lists in English this year, then taken the SATs twice. But of the three, no one had spent more time preparing than Kat.

  “Some building term, I suppose,” Kat said. “Anyway, I’m not too worried. I think being ranked number one in the class balances my SATs.”

  Her confidence didn’t seem a put-on. With help from her father’s girlfriend—an accomplished Stanford alum in her own right—Kat did appear to have everything else she needed for a spot at the school: straight-A grades, a sheaf of recommendations, a list of extracurricular activities that signaled her breadth and diversity. Even the news that Binnie Snyder planned to apply there was of little concern, because Kat was going early decision and Binnie was spreading her applications out, targeting all the big math-and-science schools—Caltech, MIT, Berkeley. Besides, Binnie was a math nerd. She didn’t have the all-around profile that Kat had cultivated.

  But Kat’s calm assurance shattered when she learned that Binnie had signed up to take an advanced calculus course at community college that summer—and that she would be given high-school credit. Under the byzantine system that Glendale used to calculate class ranking, this would make Binnie number one and drop Kat to number two. Again Kat insisted she was not worried, but she was far less convincing this time. Whenever the girls got together the spring of their junior year, the topic was sure to surface, with Kat seeking her friends’ reassurances, then saying she didn’t need them.

  Her usually mild-mannered father was apoplectic, complaining that Kat was being cheated out of an honor for which she had been preparing since middle school. “We’ve been outscheduled,” he told his daughter. Her father even met with the principal and tried to persuade her that no credit should be given for outside coursework. He offered to underwrite a scholarship at the school, in his family’s name, and back it with a large donation. But while Barbara Paulson took Mr. Hartigan’s money, the only thing he accomplished was getting the school to scuttle its traditional vale-dictorian/salutatorian roles. There would still be a number-one ranking as far as colleges were concerned; it just wouldn’t be announced at graduation.

  “You’re still applying early decision,” Perri told Kat after she confided in her friends, embarrassed by her father’s interference, but also visibly disappointed that he hadn’t been able to change the principal’s mind. “They won’t know Binnie is number one until long after they’ve accepted you.”

  “I know, but number one makes much more of an impression,” Kat said. “Being number two just leads people to wonder how much better number one might be. It’s the damn reading comprehension. I’m too nervous to concentrate. I can zip through the vocabulary, and I was fine in the timed trials I did with my tutor. But my brain locks up on test day.”

  Josie, whose board scores were a mediocre 1260, said nothing, but she understood Kat’s dilemma. Her old choke mentality had resurfaced in these tests, although her parents insisted they didn’t care. Perri, meanwhile, had scored an enviable 1550 but had the good taste not to mention it. If anyone was a lead-pipe cinch, it was Perri for Northwestern’s theater program.

  “It’s not going to matter,” Perri said staunchly. “You’ve got a stellar application. You’ll be okay.”

  “I know.” Kat sighed, stabbing her Frappuccino with her straw. “I just always thought I’d be number one.”

  They were in a new Starbucks several miles south of Glendale. Now that they had licenses and cars—well, Kat and Perri had cars, Josie had only a license—they no longer met at each other’s homes or in the woods behind Kat’s house. They drove to the mall, the good one with the upscale department stores, or to restaurants that treated the high-school crowd hospitably.

  Driving had opened up the whole world to them in the past year, although they seldom traveled more than five or ten miles from Glendale. Once, just once, Josie had borrowed her father’s car and taken the girls down to South Baltimore, the neighborhood of her pre-Glendale life. But the streets were narrow and all the parking was parallel, and the girls were a little stunned at the sight of homeless men slumped in doorways along Light Street. Josie could sense the energy and eccentricity that would have beguiled her parents when they were young, but she was thankful her family had left for Glendale. She would not have wanted to grow up here, with its no-name stores and littered streets.

  “I’m telling you it doesn’t matter,” Perri said. “Besides, it’s not a done deal. You could take
summer classes, too.”

  “No, I can’t. I’ve already signed up to work at a summer camp for disabled kids.”

  “She still hasn’t taken the class,” Perri said. “Anything can happen. She could drop out, or not get an A.”

  “Ever since middle school, Binnie’s been a straight-A student,” Kat said. “I only stayed ahead of her by taking so many AP courses. I liked her better when she was a math genius.”

  “We never actually liked her,” Josie pointed out.

  “Well, you know what I mean. Why couldn’t Binnie be satisfied being this huge math brain and a National Merit Scholar? Why did she have to turn it into a competition?”

  The girls sucked on their drinks. Josie’s mom liked to joke that Starbucks was the malt shop of Josie’s generation, but coffee drinks were so much more sophisticated.

  “Well, it hasn’t happened yet,” Perri reiterated. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Nothing?” Kat, like Josie, believed that Perri had a plan for everything. In fact, Josie realized, Kat had been fishing, trying to get Perri to solve her problems, as Perri usually did.

  “Not that I can see. Like I said, she might change her mind about taking the summer course if something better comes along, like a hot job. She might not get A’s. She could fall in love with some guy or have a nervous breakdown. But it’s out of your hands.”

  The conversation had not seemed important at the time. Even a month later, after the pigs were killed at the Snyders’ farm, it didn’t seem notable to Josie. Summer came, and they went off in various directions—the camp job for Kat, a mother’s-helper gig for Perri, a mall job for Josie, who was trying desperately to earn money now that she knew the story of her compromised college fund. Things seemed normal enough when school resumed, but then this strange iciness set in Perri. She stopped speaking to Kat altogether, and when Josie begged her to tell her what was wrong, she referred her back to Kat, who said she had no idea what Perri’s problem was.