To The Power Of Three

PART SIX. Commencement
34

Graduation day started with a yellow-red haze on the horizon, the kind of sky that promised a long, sticky day and thunderstorms late in the afternoon. Eve, walking with Claude and Billy, thought about what she should wear-not to school but tonight, when she planned to meet Val and Lila for the Senior Ramble. Because she would have to slide quietly along the porch roof beneath her bedroom window, she definitely had to wear pants, dark ones. But perhaps a halter beneath her flannel shirt, and her new sandals, which were adorable. She would have to carry them in her hand, given their height, but she could change into them once she was in Val’s car.

The Ramble was supposed to be for seniors only, of course. The other students at Glendale were expected to be in class tomorrow, fresh and rested. The perquisites of graduation-the curfew-free night, the specials at the restaurants and ice cream shops that stayed open late, the chain of supervised parties across the valley-were not theirs to sample But every official celebration eventually ends up with an unofficial partner, and while the seniors of north Baltimore County had been granted this night of controlled, alcohol-free partying, the other classes felt free to hold their own shadow party, one with fewer rules and controls. “Which means we get to have more fun,” Val said, “because we didn’t have to sign any stupid pledges.”

Eve’s mother remembered the Ramble in its earliest incarnation, when it began as a spontaneous car rally, the newly minted seniors driving around and around because there was no place to go, other than the Dairy Queen, and even that closed at ten back then. Over the years, as proms had migrated to downtown hotels, the Ramble had become the all-night prowl of choice, with parents volunteering to hold open houses and students agreeing to accept designated-driver status. Last year, after Seth, Chip, and Kenny had died in the car accident on Old Town Road, the Ramble had almost been canceled. But then it was decided that the student drivers would register and agree to wear red wristbands, so if one appeared under the influence in any way-which they shouldn’t, being eighteen, but alcohol had a way of sneaking into such things-he or she would be sent home, along with those who had signed up to ride in that particular car. Student drivers may risk many things, but their parents believed that the wrath of their peers would achieve what nothing else could.

Last year Eve had not been sufficiently bold to try to sneak out for the entire night. She had made excuses to Val and Lila, who accepted them with their usual nonjudgmental nonchalance. But she felt it was important to join them tonight, to prove herself worthy of their friendship.

Dannon was going to run the lighting board for the graduation ceremony, costuming not being much of an issue. He had helped distribute the caps and gowns earlier in the week, and he would have the unenviable job of collecting them at the end of the evening, tracking down the crying girls and the high-fiving boys, who threw their caps in the air despite repeated admonitions.

The lighting scheme was relatively simple, at least-no split-second blackouts, no spots, no special filters-but Old Giff was a perfectionist about anything produced on his stage, and he had insisted on this tech run-through.

“At this point the senior members of the chorale society will come center and sing the ‘Desiderata,’ so we’ll need to bring the lights up on the apron, but I don’t want the rest of the stage completely dark,” he told Dannon, looking at his typed rundown. “Then they return to their seats, and we have the presentation of the Hartigan scholarship, boom, diplomas, boom, recessional, and out.”

“Three hundred seventy-five names,” Dannon said. “It’s going to take forever. Especially if people clap for individual students, and they always do, no matter how many times they’re told not to.”

Not that he had anywhere to go or anyone to go there with. He just couldn’t imagine anything more boring than listening to a list of names.

“Three hundred seventy-seven.”

“So if each student takes five seconds, which makes twelve students per minute, a hundred twenty students per ten minutes…” Dannon’s voice trailed off, math not being his strong suit. “Well, more than half an hour.”

“I’m counting on Principal Paulson to make it brisker than that. Even she gets bored around the J’s, starts speeding up without realizing it.”

The phone in the lighting booth rang, the short, staccato rings of an in-house call. “Gifford, speak!” Old Giff commanded in his usual tone of bored impatience. But his imperiousness instantly faded.

“Yes? Yes. He’s right here. No. Of course, right away.”

The face that Giff turned toward Dannon was pitying. No, not pitying, and maybe not pitiful either, as pity was a cheap emotion, distant and uninvolved. Giff was as affected by whatever he had heard as he expected Dannon to be. That could mean only one thing.

“She’s dead. Perri’s dead.”

“She will be. Her parents have decided to turn off all the life-support machines, but they will wait for you to get there. Once everything is off-they don’t know, Dannon. It’s not like turning off a light switch, and there’s always a chance-although not much of a chance-that a person might surprise doctors, start breathing on her own. But I’ll take you down, and I’ll wait there with you.”

“Will we be back in time for graduation?”

“Who gives a shit? They can just turn on the stage lights and let it go, for all I care. I don’t get paid extra for supervising this crap.”

“No chance of a dying declaration, I suppose?” Infante asked Lenhardt after they were informed by the police officer posted in the Kahn girl’s room that she was to be taken off life support.

“Doesn’t seem likely.”

“It could end here,” Infante said, but his statement was a question, the kind of question asked when someone knows the answer but wishes it could be otherwise. “If we say it was her, just her, we’re done. The extra fingerprints could be from anyone, anytime. The tampon could be from some girl who ducked in there earlier and got out, never knowing what a close call she had.”

“Such a girl would call a press conference in this day and age, sell her story to the networks. ‘A timely bathroom break saved my life.’ I’m surprised we don’t have forty girls claiming to have been in that bathroom just before it happened.”

“Yeah, I know. I just hate being in a lose-lose, where whatever we do is gonna end up pissing people off. So why not say, ‘Dead girl did it, go on with your lives.’”

“You mean, other than the fact that we know that’s not the whole story?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time we made a square case fit into a round hole.”

“It would be the first time we did it consciously.”

Lenhardt looked at the notes and files and photographs spread across his desk. Sometimes police work reminded him of algebra, not that he could do algebra for shit anymore, as he had discovered when Jason asked for help with his homework this past school year. Back in the day, however, he had been good at math, had even enjoyed it. The facts in front of him were like one of those long problems-x + y + z = 2 (x + y) -z. You simply had to isolate the variable. Well, they had isolated her again and again, and Josie Patel had proved to be all too consistent.

And once Perri Kahn was dead, Josie Patel would be untouchable. No one could contradict her, except the phantom fourth girl, and even Lenhardt was beginning to doubt she existed.

Infante was right: It would all go away if they decided things had happened as Josie said, and everyone would be happier for it. Hang it all on the dead girl, get their clearance, move on. The Kahns might squawk a little, but Mrs. Delacorte’s photographs put the gun in the girl’s hand just a few weeks out. He didn’t doubt that Perri was the one who had brought the weapon to school. The only question was who else had known about it. Someone had taken that photo, and Lenhardt was reasonably sure it wasn’t Mr. Delacorte. Was that you, Josie, on the other side of the camera? Is that what you’re not telling us? Why?

Perhaps even Dale Hartigan would be satisfied with this outcome. It was an answer, neat and contained. The girl who had killed his daughter would be dead, and he wouldn’t even have to go through a trial, much less risk seeing the girl acquitted on an insanity defense. All of Glendale would be happy to see this end, so it could go back to being known for its high-achieving graduates and its intermittently successful soccer team.

Yes, everyone would be happy-except Lenhardt and Infante, and their bosses if the day ever came that the fourth girl surfaced for some other reason. Putting down a bad case was much worse than keeping one open.

“We’ve got to talk to Josie Patel one more time,” he said. “Right now, before she knows that Perri Kahn is dying. It may be our last chance to get the truth out of her.”

“But how do we nudge her forward? We can bluff the girl about the physical evidence, but we can’t get anything past her lawyer.”

“We get a search warrant.”

“For…?”

“For a pair of missing shoes.”

“We’ve been over that. If we ask her for the shoes and she doesn’t have them, she’ll just say they got thrown away by accident or something.”

“I don’t care about the shoes. I just want another excuse to talk to her, let her think that we know more than we do.”

Peter slept late, slept in the heavy, dreamless way that he hadn’t known since he was in his teens and his body was perpetually exhausted by the demands of his late growth spurt. Still in his pajama bottoms, he padded barefoot around his mother’s kitchen, looking for something healthy to eat, preferably lowcarb. The refrigerator had plenty of nutritious options, but they were so much effort. Egg-white omelets required separating eggs, a process that Peter understood only theoretically. Salads meant washing and endless chopping.

He nuked one of his mom’s Lean Cuisines, daydreaming while it turned lazy circles inside the microwave. On set, the food-you called it “craft services,” according to Simone, based on her experience as a day player in Good Will Hunting-was constant, a cornucopia. There was always one sit-down hot meal and then, if the day went late enough, a second meal brought in. He would be able to save a lot of his paycheck.

Absentmindedly, he braced himself against the counter and did a few push-ups. He didn’t feel quite as fervent about going out for the Senior Ramble tonight. Chasing gossip seemed less important today than yesterday. But it was something to do, and he was so restless.

Dannon was terrified of being in the room while Perri’s life ebbed out of her, but he did not see how he could refuse the Kahns’ offer. They clearly considered the invitation a great honor, proof that he was like family to them. One of us, one of us, he chanted in his head, then realized it was the litany from Tod Browning’s Freaks. He was no longer so sure that he wanted to be one of the Kahns.

He told himself that the person in the bed was a stranger, someone he didn’t know. But there was no comfort in that.

“Do you want to hold her hand?” Eloise Kahn asked. “Or have a private moment?”

“No.” It was all he could do to keep the panic out of his voice. In The Three Faces of Eve, another one of the old movies that he and Perri had gobbled up during their long afternoons at Dannon’s house, an encounter with a dead grandmother was enough to explain multiple personality disorder. Kiss a corpse, go bonkers. People knew better now. Dannon knew better, but he still did not want to be left alone with Perri, for fear that she would suddenly snap into consciousness, fix those fierce blue eyes on him, and announce, I know what you did, Dannon. I know how you tried to betray me.

“I mean, no, please don’t leave,” he said. “I couldn’t bear it if…”

Everyone in the room knew what could not be borne, or thought they did. Dannon took Perri’s hand. It felt loose and floppy, boneless.

“Talk to her, Dannon,” Eloise encouraged him. “She might hear you.”

“Hey, Perri.” God, that was lame. “So…remember Fatty Arbuckle and Kevin Bacon? I finally figured out how to do it. You go Fatty Arbuckle to Buster Keaton-they made a lot of shorts together. Then Buster Keaton to Zero Mostel, in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Zero Mostel to Woody Allen, The Front. Woody Allen to Elizabeth Shue, Deconstructing Harry. Shue to Bacon, The Hollow Man. Done!”

There was no response. If Perri could talk, she would probably tell Dannon that she didn’t want to spend her last minutes on the planet thinking about a stupid movie game.

“The thing is…” He lowered his voice, leaning closer to her. “The thing is, I cheated, Perri. Just a little. I used the Internet Movie Database to find out if Keaton and Arbuckle were in anything together. I mean, I thought they might be, but I’m not strong on the early stuff, but I knew if I could get the two of them together, I could complete on my own. I wasn’t thinking of Forum, but I knew that Keaton was in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, which meant I could do Annette Funicello or Frankie Avalon, and he’s in Grease, so I could have done Buster Keaton-Frankie Avalon-John Travolta. And Travolta was in Phenomenon with Kyra Sedgwick, and she’s been in a ton of stuff with Bacon since she’s his wife. But I knew you’d like it better if I went through Forum, it being Stephen Sondheim and all. Still, it was cheating. You were always adamant that we shouldn’t use IMDb to figure out Fatty Arbuckle.”

And you wouldn’t approve if you knew I didn’t erase that photo, the one with you in Mrs. Delacorte’s underwear, holding the gun. But I didn’t know what else to do. I had promised you I wouldn’t tell, and I saw what you could do to people whodon’t take your side. You had cut off Kat and Josie because they had displeased you in some way, and they were your forever friends, whereas we had just been hanging out the past year. So I left the one photo in there, thinking someone might find it and call the police or tell your parents. It was so half-assed, so typically me. I should have told or not told. If I had been willing to risk losing your friendship, you might be alive. Jesus, Perri, what were you thinking?

But Perri’s thoughts were long gone, shut off to him, lost to everyone, forever.

Josie knew the car by now. Not by sound, not like her mother’s chugging Accord, but she knew it by sight, the generic Ford Taurus that the detectives drove. She had seen them leaving Kat’s funeral in this car, the older one staring her down from the passenger seat. And just as the detectives had been out of place in her hospital room, their car did not look right in a Glendale driveway. Too boxy, too plain.

Now the detectives were on her doorstep, ringing the bell, and she was balanced on her crutches three inches, four inches away-she really wasn’t good with distances, as she had told the detectives that very first day-wondering if they could tell she was on the other side of her door, holding her breath.

“Josie?” the older one said. “Josie, are you there? Is someone there?”

Marta had left to run an errand and then pick up her brothers at school, which meant she wouldn’t be home for an hour. Her parents were still at work. If Josie stood very still, if she didn’t breathe or make any noise, the detectives couldn’t know she was here. And even if they knew, they couldn’t force her to open the door. Could they?

“We have a search warrant, Josie.”

Search warrant? The shoes, the damn shoes. Well, she had taken care of that. They wouldn’t find the sandals here. It had broken her heart, but they were gone now, gone as the cell phones. She had taken care to get rid of them right after the funeral. Another piece of improvisation.

“Josie, just let us in. We won’t try to talk to you until your lawyer shows up. Unless you want to talk, of course. But we’re entitled to execute this search without your lawyer being here.”

It was getting hard balancing on one foot. She gave a little hop, and a crutch bumped against the door.

“Josie-we hear you.”

She opened the door but said nothing, absolutely nothing. Her parents and her lawyer had been adamant in their instructions: Do not talk to anyone without us present. She had been happy to follow their advice to the letter and had taken it even further, refusing to speak to her parents and her lawyer as well. She let the the police in, pretended to read the paper that they thrust at her, then tilted her head toward the stairs, knowing it was her room they wished to search. She hopped back to the sofa in the family room and continued watching Judge Joe Brown. Her parents would be home early for the graduation ceremonies. In less than an hour, her father would come through the door and take care of these detectives. Until then all she had to do was stay quiet.

Quiet was something at which she excelled, Josie was finding out, a skill that she had acquired from Kat without even realizing what she was learning. For while she had often envied Perri and her endless, inventive rush of words, there were advantages to keeping still, saying no more than strictly necessary. In gymnastics the ability to hold a pose, to defy momentum or at least manipulate it, had been as essential as the movements themselves. It didn’t matter how beautifully you tumbled and flipped if you couldn’t nail the landing. Perhaps Josie had more of a game-day mentality than anyone had ever known, herself included.

She just hoped the detectives finished before she had to start getting ready for the evening. Her dress was laid out on the bed, a yellow-and-green sundress. Oh, her sandals would have been perfect with that dress, not that she could wear anything with a heel just now, even kitten heels. She was going to have to wear her clashing pink Pumas.

Puma, she corrected herself. Just the one.