To The Power Of Three

August
38

Every August in Maryland, there comes a moment when the wind shifts and, although the days remain hot and the nights humid, it is clear that something has changed. Summer is giving up, preparing to leave. It may linger for another few weeks, but its back has been broken, and everyone knows it. People suddenly have more energy, and only the youngest children mourn the passing of summer and the coming of school. Everyone else is eager for fall to arrive.

It was on such a day that Sergeant Harold Lenhardt asked Vik and Susie Patel if he could talk to their daughter, just one more time. They gave their permission reluctantly. They knew, intellectually, that the homicide sergeant had not caused them any harm; he was nothing more than a messenger, one who had no way of knowing what he was delivering. Still, they didn’t like him much and couldn’t help feeling he was somehow at fault for what they had been through.

Josie, however, didn’t mind Lenhardt at all. Her only grudge against him was that he had provoked her into ruining her best sandals, the very ones that she had been trying to save. She had given them to Binnie, who arranged for them to follow the cell phones-into the Muhlys’ compost pile.

“We’re releasing all the evidence, since the grand jury wrapped up,” he told Josie. They were in her room, at her insistence. Even when her parents were at work, she preferred the privacy of her room. “We don’t really have much of your stuff, but I thought you might want to see this.”

He handed her a piece of paper with just two lines: “I ask only that the truth be told. Love, Perri.” The word “only” had been crossed out. Josie studied the familiar handwriting, unsure what was expected of her.

“What does this have to do with me?”

“Well, nothing.” The sergeant perched on Josie’s bed almost gingerly, as if he feared mussing the spread. “We didn’t even present it to the grand jury, because it didn’t seem to have any bearing on anything. The thing is, Josie-why would Perri write something like this? It was addressed to Kat Hartigan, mailed that morning. But what was the point? She was already planning on confronting her at school. Why mail the letter?”

“Could there be more to it, another page?” Josie asked. “It seems kind of…truncated for Perri.”

“If there was another page, it never surfaced. Her parents looked, even checked her computer, but as you can see, she wrote it by hand, and there’s no evidence of an earlier draft. And, well, I can’t help wondering-what if this was a suicide note? What if Perri really did mean to kill herself and sent this just to torment Kat?”

“No.” Josie shook her head, resolute. “You’d have to know her. To have known her.” She was still having trouble with tenses.

“I’ll have to take your word for it. I’m just glad that Binnie Snyder’s testimony cleared up that locked stall door. That never did stop nagging at me.”

“Well, she was hiding, right? She was standing on the toilet and waiting for us to come in, because Perri had promised her she was going to get Kat to confess.”

“Right, but she unlocked the door to her stall. And I understand why the out-of-order stall was locked. It was the other one, the one that wasn’t in use-the one where I found-Anyway, I never did understand that. Binnie explained that Perri told her to lock all three and hide in one, so that if anyone came in, they would end up leaving.”

“See, that was Perri,” Josie said. “She had it all planned out.”

“Yeah, Binnie went into the first stall and…um, used it but realized she didn’t have a good sight line from there. So she crawled under the partitions to the one on the end. And when you and Kat came in, she text-messaged Perri. That’s why she had to take the phones. She didn’t know we could have gotten the transcripts, in time.”

Josie shook her head. Poor clumsy Binnie, forever so smart about big things, forever so dumb about small ones.

“Why did Binnie and I even have to go talk to those people, the grand jury?” Josie’s parents had tried to conceal their worry from her, but she knew they were upset about the legal fees that Ms. Bustamante had charged them.

“When someone is shot, no matter what the circumstances, it’s up to a jury to decide if he-she-should face any charges. Now it’s official-what happened was an accident.”

“Binnie’s father shot Peter on purpose, though. Right? He didn’t know it was Peter, but he aimed his gun right at him.”

“He’ll be no-billed, too.” Josie frowned, not sure what bills had to do with any of this, and the sergeant clarified: “It’s a way of saying no indictment will be handed up. It was unfortunate, what he did, and a young man died. But there’s a tradition in the law of letting people protect their property from intruders. And Mr. Snyder was a little jumpy, understandably. Given the events of a year ago.”

The events of a year ago. What a lovely, say-nothing phrase, Josie thought. She could use some phrases like that. The events of a year ago.The accident with my foot. Just a little rumpus, as Perri herself might have said.

“Anyway, you can have it if you like. The Hartigans and the Kahns don’t want it, I can tell you that much.”

“I’m not sure what I would do with it,” Josie said, even as she refolded it into thirds and slid it beneath her keyboard.

“They were lucky, those girls,” the sergeant said, looking over her shoulder at Josie’s screen saver, a photograph of the three on the night of their junior prom. “To have you as a friend.”

“I always thought I was the lucky one.”

“You’re that, too, Josie. You’re alive, and you’ve got your whole future ahead of you.”

“Yeah, well, where else would your future be?”

The sergeant laughed and wished her well. His laughter pleased Josie, even though she had not been trying to make a joke. There had been so little laughter in her house this summer. Josie had found herself in the strange position of consoling her parents, repeatedly assuring them that nothing was their fault, and it wasn’t. The thing that seemed to bother them the most was her blurted revelation that she didn’t regret shooting herself. Did she not want to go to College Park? Did she subconsciously resent the fact that she needed an athletic scholarship?

Actually, Josie was quite keen to go away to school. College Park ’s hugeness, which had once frightened her a little, was now its chief asset. If anyone there remembered the shooting in Glendale, all Josie had to say was that it was tragic and she knew the girls.

Luckily, the latest doctor’s visit had been promising, with all signs pointing to a full recovery. Her right foot still cramped suddenly sometimes, as if it, too, had vivid memories from that day. Her foot had needed some coaxing to touch the ground again, once the wound was healed and she stopped using crutches. For a couple of days, it curled against her calf, shy and tentative. But eventually it found the floor.

Her computer trilled, probably her mother checking in from work. No one else IM’ed her much, although Binnie had touched base off and on until the grand jury was through with them, and Dannon Estes e-mailed from time to time, wanting to rehash memories of Perri. But Dannon’s Perri wasn’t really Josie’s Perri, and she didn’t know how to explain that to Dannon.

Kat was here, too, at least in name. She lived on in Josie’s IM box, although the icon showed that she was never signed on. Josie kept waiting for the Hartigans to realize that Kat’s screen name remained active, but so far no one had seemed to notice. Every day Josie clicked on Kat’s name, just to see the self-deprecating away message Kat had left there two months ago: “Trying to graduate. Be back in cap and gown.” Josie supposed she should tell Mrs. Hartigan about the lingering account. Her own parents would be horrified by such waste, paying for a service no one was using. But it was comforting, seeing Kat’s message, to think of her as merely being away, not gone. And now she had this little scrap of Perri, too, this last fragment.

It did not bother Josie that Perri hadn’t tried to write her. She was grateful, in fact. She understood now that Perri had been trying, in her own fashion, to keep the three of them intact. Kat would have been devastated if she thought the two of them had joined forces to confront her, or ganged up on her. In her own inimitable way, Perri was trying to put the three of them back together again.

There had to be more to that letter. How Josie wished she could read it.

Dear Kat:

When we were eight years old, we joined hands in a circle and promised to be true to each other and to do good in the world at large. Kid stuff, you might say, and maybe it was. But it was also a vow worth making and a pledge worth keeping. Tomorrow I will try to hold you to it.

Tonight I am putting a few things in writing because, for all my careful planning, I can’t be sure you won’t find a way around taking responsibility for your own actions, for continuing to deny the enormity of what you’ve done. You’ve always been very good, in your sweet way, at not doing what you don’t want to do. How do you do it, Kat? How do you stop talking to your oldest friend and persuade the school that I’m the one who turned my back on you? All these months, I could have gone to Josie, told her what was going on, but I didn’t want to put her in the middle. I didn’t want to be the one to break the news to her that even Kat Hartigan isn’t perfect. Is, in fact, a killer of sorts, responsible for the deaths of three of our classmates.

But even if you never speak to me again, you still have the option of admitting what happened. Not to your parents and the world at large, but TO YOURSELF! I’m not saying it’s all your fault-you didn’t tell them to speed or to let Kenny drive-just that you can’t ignore the part you played in it. I know I’m asking you to do something hard, but I also believe it will liberate you in a way you never imagined. Stand up, Kat. For once do something that doesn’t come easy. Earn your place in heaven. Earn all that love the world heaps on you.

Eve sat at the end of her family’s driveway-the real one, off Old Town Road, not the fake one her father had cut into Sweet-water Estates-keeping company with two bushels of tomatoes, several ears of white corn, and endless zucchini. But it was a slow afternoon, with few people stopping to buy. She had only sixteen dollars to show for her two hours out here, and she was expected to split that with her father.

Bored, she had taken the creased letter from the back pocket of her cutoffs, a letter she had read many times over the past two months. It changed, according to Eve’s mood, just as some movies changed when you watched them over and over again. But it never failed to fascinate her, this glimpse into another girl’s life on the day before she died. So that’s what they had been doing in the woods, all those years ago. Of course Eve knew the story about what had happened in the bathroom-Binnie had finally confessed all when she came to get the cell phones she had asked Eve to stash someplace safe. But the shooting was far less interesting to Eve than the emotion in the letter, as close to a love letter as anything she had ever read.

From time to time, Eve thought about destroying the letter or telling someone she had it. But, as with most of her secrets, Eve didn’t think it was information that anyone wanted.

She admired her sandals, the green-and-yellow ones that Binnie had brought her a few days after the shooting and asked her to hide. They were really too nice to be wearing out here, at the end of the dusty driveway, but she loved them so much that she put them on at every opportunity. That’s why she couldn’t bear to put them in the compost pile with the cell phones, which Binnie had given her in those first frantic moments, when she found Eve waiting in the trees for Val and Lila. It seemed such a waste and the fact that they fit-well, that was a sign, wasn’t it? It had never occurred to her that Josie might want them back. Eve wouldn’t, in Josie’s place.

A Volvo station wagon stopped, and Eve put on her friendly, helpful face, but it was Val and Lila, who were not likely to be in the market for vegetables. She faced them defiantly, not sure how they would react to seeing her behind the stand.

“You sell, like, vegetables?” Lila asked.

“My dad splits the take with me fifty-fifty,” Eve said. “It’s good money on weekends.”

“Cool,” Val said. “Want to go to the pool?”

“I’m not a member,” Eve said.

“We can take you as a guest,” Lila said.

“I have to ask my parents.”

“You ask now?” But Val grinned, so Eve knew she was being teased.

“Yeah.” Peter Lasko’s death had shaken Eve’s parents hard-not because he was killed by the Muhlys’ neighbor and friend but because it quickly came to light that Peter had brought Eve home just a few minutes before he was shot. They had promised Eve they would be more lenient if she would be more honest with them. So far they were keeping their side of the bargain.

Val and Lila helped her load the produce, the sign, and the table into Val’s Volvo, then drove her up the long, dusty driveway to the barn, where she stored the items in a freestanding shed and received her father’s permission to take the rest of the afternoon off.

“It’s so slow,” Eve said. “I don’t think you’ll lose a single sale.”

“It must be slow,” he said, looking at the five dollars in the cigar box Eve handed him.

“Weekdays,” Eve said with a shrug.

Lenhardt ended up spending the rest of the day babysitting a jury in Towson, curious to see if he was going to get the first-degree conviction he deserved on the last of the suspects in the Woodlawn case. The jury was trying to claim it was deadlocked, which was a bad sign, but the judge decided to press them, make them spend the night in a motel and return for another day of deliberations. It would be a bitch trying this guy all over again.

Marcia was in the side vegetable garden clipping basil. Lenhardt happened to hate basil, but he wouldn’t mention that, not tonight. He and Marcia were in a good place lately, one of those serene lulls that long-married couples learn not to take for granted.

He watched his wife bending over, scissors in hand. The black-and-white checked pants did her ass no favors, but the extra pounds she carried suited the rest of her, especially her face. With her full cheeks and blond ponytail, Marcia looked as young as she had when he married her, and no one would say the same of Lenhardt. He should take pains not to fall asleep in front of the television tonight and not to let her have the extra glass of wine that caused her to nod off over whatever she was reading for her book club.

In the house, shut up from the beautiful summer day in the bubble of central air-conditioning, Jason was at the computer in the family room.

“Mom fed us burgers already,” Jason said, “but she’s making a second dinner for the two of you. Something more grown-up, she said.”

“That’s nice.” So he and Marcia were on the same wavelength, other than the basil.

“What are you reading on the Internet, Jase?”

“Porn.”

“That’s my boy. No, seriously, Jase.”

“Seriously, I’m downloading a few songs. Legally.”

“I appreciate that. Would be kind of embarrassing for me, having the feds raid the house because my son was a music pirate.”

“Aaaaaaargh,” Jason said in his old-salt croak, a voice picked up from some cartoon. “I sail the seas of the Internet, looking for musical booty to plunder.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“In her room.”

“Doing what?”

“Who cares?”

“Jason.”

Jessica was lying on her bed, plugged in to her digital mini-not an iPod but a lesser MP3 player, a faux pas for which her parents had not quite been forgiven even now, eight months after Christmas.

“Dad.” She gave the word almost eight syllables. “You’re supposed to knock.”

“I did, but you didn’t hear me. What are you doing?”

“Listening to music.” Melodramatic eye roll and a huge, heaving sigh, but for whose benefit? He already knew that his daughter thought he was an idiot, and no one else was in the room.

“You blue because summer’s almost over?”

“What?”

“Jesus, turn it down for a second.” She dialed down the volume but wouldn’t pull the little clips from her ears. Lenhardt remembered when the Walkman had been the big thing, the modern wonder. What was next? What technology, ten or twenty years in the future, would make his jaded daughter feel nostalgic for this little box on her belt while her kid sighed and heaved and rolled her eyes? God, he hoped he lived long enough to see Jessica being driven crazy by her children.

“How you doing?”

“Fine.”

“Your mom mentioned that you might want to quit swim team.”

Another eloquent shrug.

“I mean, the whole world is in love with an Olympic swimmer from Baltimore County, and you want to quit. That strikes me as kind of funny timing.”

“Well, I’m not going to make the Olympics, so what’s the point?”

“If you enjoy it, you should do it. If you don’t, you shouldn’t. It’s that simple.”

Jessica looked at the ceiling, as if amazed that someone could be ignorant enough to proclaim her problems simple.

“Honey, do you even know what makes you happy?”

“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.”

“Because I want to know, okay? Your mom and I both do.”

“I’m happy.” Her voice was stormy, as if she had been falsely accused of some infraction.

“Okay. But you’d tell me if you weren’t, right? You’d tell us if something was bothering you, no matter how hard it was? It’s important that you know you can talk to us about anything. About parties and boys”-he choked a little on the last word-“and…well, pressure. Anything that’s upsetting you. You’ll tell us, right?”

“O-kay.” This was exhaled from a clenched jaw as if a huge concession had been made, and perhaps it had. Lenhardt patted his daughter’s hand and stood to leave, but he was stopped at the door by her voice-her real voice, as he thought of it, the voice of the little girl who just a year ago had let him take her in his lap, a voice without those drawn-out vowels and curlicues of sarcasm.

“Dad…what if I have a problem that you and Mom can’t fix?”

From the mouth of babes-but while he would concede this point to himself, almost, there was no way he would admit it to his daughter. Lenhardt liked to tell himself that was the difference between him and a guy like Hartigan. He knew he couldn’t do everything for his kids, that he couldn’t keep them from disappointment and heartache. Lenhardt liked to tell himself that, but he also knew he was full of shit. His first daughter, Tally, was as lost to him as Kat Hartigan was to her father, and for less fathomable reasons. He couldn’t stand in judgment of anyone.

“You just come and talk to us, Jessie, and we’ll take it from there.”

Dale Hartigan could see the red-and-white Long & Foster sign outside the Snyders’ property even in the encroaching dusk. That made sense, with Binnie going away to school and feelings still running high over Peter Lasko’s death. It was so odd. Because the grand jury met in secret, the circumstances of Kat’s death-and life-were still largely unknown in the community at large. Yet everyone was aware that Cyrus Snyder had killed Peter Lasko. Now Snyder felt that he had to leave, while Dale Hartigan continued to receive sympathetic looks and warm handshakes on the rare days he ventured into Glendale. Even Chloe was kind to him. Too kind. Earning Chloe’s ready forgiveness only convinced Dale that he was beyond hope.

Look at her now, he thought as she opened the door to him. It was almost unbearable, the way she gazed at him, the gentle voice she employed, as if Dale were a wounded animal.

“The deed was in my safe-deposit box,” he said, handing her a manila envelope. “An oversight. You know how papers flew back and forth in the divorce.”

“I never would have sold if Kat-Well, you know how much she loved our little patch of woods. But there’s a buyer for the Snyder farm, and he offered so much for my acres. Enough for me to move wherever I like, maybe even go back to school. It seems like fate.”

“Sort of the opposite, if you think about it.” Inviting her to castigate him, to connect the dots, to articulate how he had brought them here. But Chloe had completely lost interest in punishing Dale now that he was doing such a good job.

“Let’s just say it’s meant to be. How’s Susannah?”

“Fine. I told her, you know. Made a clean breast.”

“About what?”

“Us. That night.”

“Oh, Dale.” Just hearing the pity in her voice was like fingering a bruise, for it reminded him that Chloe had never entertained the same rosy hopes of reconciliation, not even while making love to him. He was the only one who had imagined starting over.

“I’m simply trying to be honest.”

“It’s possible to be too honest, Dale. Just because you need to say it doesn’t mean anyone else needs to hear it.”

“Well, she forgave me. She took me back. Susannah says that everyone deserves a second chance.”

Yes, he was reproaching Chloe in his own way, reminding her that some women were capable of forgiveness. He didn’t mention his sneaking suspicion that Susannah was delighted to have something so dire to hold over him, a card he could never trump. For Susannah Goode to be good, Dale was realizing, she needed the contrast of someone else’s badness. For years that person had been tempestuous, unpredictable Chloe. Now it would be Dale.

“I have plans tonight, so if there’s nothing else…”

“Plans? Like a date?”

“Dale.”

“Okay. None of my business. Just make sure he’s not after your money.” It was a pathetic attempt at a joke, and it fell flat, as it deserved to. “Chloe…when you’re getting ready to move, I’d like first crack at anything you get rid of. Especially Kat’s things, of course.”

“Even the painting?” She raised an eyebrow, capable now of making jokes at her own expense.

“Actually, I would love to have that painting. More than anything.”

“It was always yours, Dale. Remember? I gave it to you for Christmas, the year Kat was eleven.”

“Ten.” But they smiled at the old disagreement. Their fractiousness was a memory now, a reminder of a time when they could afford such petty irritations.

Heading down the drive a few minutes later, Dale saw three small figures cutting across his land. Chloe’s land, he corrected himself, and soon to pass out of the Hartigan name altogether. Enjoy it now, he wanted to yell out. If Snyder’s property was already in escrow, bulldozers would probably be here by Labor Day, grading the land for the forty or so houses the site would accommodate. Would Muhly sell as well? No, he was too stubborn, too proud of being able to say he worked a farm that had been in his family for five generations. The old Meeker farmstead had stayed in Dale’s family for three-which, as it turned out, was the end of the Hartigan line.

From this distance the children were dim shadows in the twilight, and it was difficult to tell if they were boys or girls, especially as they moved single file through the grass, which was waist-high to their small frames. They had to raise their knees to right angles to find their footing. How had it gotten so overgrown? Chloe must have forgotten that she was responsible for maintaining this part of the property, or thought it no longer mattered with a sale imminent. Didn’t she know that high grass like that attracted rats and other vermin? It almost made him happy, this evidence of Chloe’s characteristic carelessness, his reflexive self-righteousness. Seemed like old times.

As the three children reached the tree line, they re-formed so they were walking abreast and reached for one another’s hands. Swinging their arms between them, they ran toward the elms and maples and ailanthus. Girls, Dale thought, only girls hold hands. Boys, no matter how young and unself-conscious, would never be caught doing such a thing.

Then, just like that, the girls were gone, disappearing so suddenly in the gray-green dusk that Dale was forced to wonder if they had ever really been there at all.