To The Power Of Three

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 pressed 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.”

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 SusquehannaFalls 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 beneath 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.