To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “Are you friends with my girl?”

  “N-n-not really.”

  “Why not?”

  Perri was speechless, something Josie had never seen, and Kat stepped in. “We’re not not friends with her. She’s in a different class from us. But she plays with Binnie Snyder sometimes.”

  “The Snyders are our neighbors, so I know them. What’s your name?”

  “Kat Hartigan.”

  “As in Thornton?” Kat nodded shyly. People were usually impressed when they learned that fact, but she almost never volunteered it. She was clearly surprised when the man added, “That old crook. He bought all that land on the sly to keep the prices low.”

  “What do you care?” the owner asked Mr. Muhly. “You didn’t sell, and now your land is worth three times what it was. Anytime you want to give up your acreage, you’ll have a buyer.”

  “And then what would I do with myself? Sit around here like the rest of you? That farm has been in my family for almost two hundred years.”

  “I’m just saying you’ve got no beef with him.”

  “Well, if he hadn’t started building houses out here, someone else would have, sure enough,” Mr. Muhly said. “But I don’t have to like it.”

  The commercial break ended, and the girls started to go, for that was the agreement. But the owner insisted on giving them free Cokes and french fries. He even seated them at the bar, although Perri said later she was pretty sure that was against the law. He seemed to find them amusing, Perri in particular. As the girls prepared to leave, strapping on their bike helmets, he suddenly grabbed Kat’s right arm by the wrist.

  “Hit it,” he said, indicating his left thigh.

  Kat looked to Josie and Perri, but Josie didn’t know what to tell her, and Perri again was at a loss for words. They were supposed to be on guard against strange people, of course, especially those who made unwelcome touches. But this man had let them take over his bar and fed them. Besides, what could he do to Kat with Josie, Perri, and a roomful of men watching?

  “Hit it,” he repeated. “Hard as you can.”

  Kat complied, but her punch was clearly too soft to please him. So he struck himself, producing a strange, hollow noise on contact.

  “Fake,” he said. “Fake! I lost it in an accident when I wasn’t much older than you, working on my father’s place. A tractor flipped over on me.”

  “Eleven-year-olds don’t drive tractors,” Perri said.

  “My daughter, Eve, drives a tractor and a truck, and she’s only ten,” Mr. Muhly put in. “And she doesn’t wear a helmet while doing it.”

  For the rest of the weekend, Josie lived in apprehension, sure that her parents would find out about the visit to Dubby’s. Then, just as she was beginning to believe they had escaped detection, the three were summoned to the principal’s office on Monday, with Mr. Treff in attendance. Josie assumed they were going to be suspended for going to a bar, and Perri cautioned them to volunteer nothing until they knew what was up.

  It turned out that one of the mothers had complained about their “morbid” assignment.

  “I know it seems unfair, after all the work you’ve done,” the principal said. “But we really need you to pick another topic. Mr. Treff will give you an extension, to make up for the week you’ve lost. But we just can’t condone such a, uh, ghoulish exercise.”

  Josie and Kat hung their heads, ashamed of being ghoulish. But Perri, although her face was quite pink with embarrassment, challenged the principal.

  “It’s a perfectly good survey,” she said. “I’m not going to redo it.”

  “Then you’ll receive a zero, and it will pull your grade down for the semester.”

  “My parents will understand. They’d rather that I get a zero than agree to something that I thought was unfair. There’s a principle involved here.”

  “And what would that principle be, Perri? The right to ask people gruesome, disturbing questions?”

  The principal clearly thought this point would end the discussion, but Perri shook her head. “That’s part of it. Freedom of speech and all. But the principle is that we were given an assignment and we did it according to the rules outlined, and now you’re changing the rules, saying we have to do it over, to get credit we’ve already earned. That’s not fair.”

  “There are limits, Perri. There are always limits.”

  “Then Mr. Treff should have made it clear when he gave us the assignment.”

  “If Mr. Treff failed to tell you that it was wrong to kill people in the name of an assignment, would you assume you could do that?”

  “No, but murder is illegal. We didn’t do anything against the law.”

  “Perri, you’re a bright girl, but sometimes you have to accept the rules without arguing. Redo the assignment or get a zero. Those are the choices.”

  Kat and Josie redid the poll, asking people in the neighborhood to pick their favorite desserts. They had no intention of going back to Dubby’s, however, so the sample was a little smaller although the answers ultimately more diverse, people having more emphatic ideas about dessert than death, as it turned out. Perri handed in the charts and graphs based on the death survey, refusing Mr. Treff’s attempts to give her extra-credit projects that might have made up the damage done by the zero he was forced to give her. Perri got a C in math that semester. On the Friday after grades came out, her parents took Perri, Kat, and Josie to Perri’s favorite restaurant, Peerce’s Plantation. She liked it because it seemed so grown-up and grand, with its striped awnings and views of the reservoir.

  “Is this because you got all A’s except for math?” Josie asked Perri. But it was Dr. Kahn who answered her question.

  “This is because she got a C in math—because she stood up for what was right.”

  “Were Kat and I wrong to redo it, then?” Josie had gotten a B in math, barely. She hated to think what would happen if she had taken the zero. Kat had gotten her usual A. Only Binnie Snyder did better in math than Kat, and Kat was the best in all the other subjects.

  “Not wrong,” Dr. Kahn said. “Practical, under the circumstances. The principal was a bully, and it’s hard to stand up to a bully. And you couldn’t know, sitting in his office that day, how your parents might react if you argued with him.”

  Josie did know, however. Her parents would have told her that sometimes you have to do things you don’t think are fair, because that’s the way the world works. And Kat’s father would have said that she had to get A’s now so she would keep getting A’s later. Getting good grades was like anything else, Mr. Hartigan always said. You practiced until it became second nature.

  “I didn’t mind doing it over,” Kat said.

  “Oh, Kat,” Dr. Kahn said, tugging a lock of her hair. “You never mind anything.”

  “I didn’t like hitting that guy’s leg. That was gross.”

  “What?”

  Josie felt Perri’s leg brush past hers beneath the table, landing a quick and careful kick on Kat’s shin. So Perri’s parents didn’t know about the trip to Dubby’s. Would they have supported that principle? Would they admire Perri for figuring out a way to get around their rules?

  “Nothing,” Kat said. “Just something that happened in gym.”

  “What were the final results anyway?” Mrs. Kahn asked. “I know I picked a plane crash, but what did others say?”

  “Forty-two percent picked drowning. Twenty-eight percent chose plane crash. Then there was twenty-five percent for suffocation and only five percent for fire.”

  “Which is funny,” said Dwight Kahn, whose eyes Josie could barely meet, given that he was a high-schooler, six whole years older than they were. “Because most fire victims die from smoke inhalation, not burning.”

  “We knew that. We specified being set on fire,” Perri told her brother. “And everyone who picked that was male, between the ages of ten and eighteen.”

  They were eleven. They were in sixth grade, a much more innocent version of sixth grade. Septembe
r 11 was literally unimaginable, except for those who were planning it. When 9/11 came in the fall of sophomore year, it turned out that one of those killed in the World Trade Towers was Dwight’s friend, the older boy who had thought their survey was so funny. He was a trainee at an investment firm, high in the second tower.

  “I remember him,” Josie told Perri. “From the survey. He wanted to die in a plane crash. Remember, Dwight’s friend?”

  (Actually, they knew by then that Dwight’s friend had been his supplier, that Dwight had run a thriving dope-dealing ring in Glendale all through high school, but it was not a topic that the candid Kahn family liked to discuss, now that Dwight had straightened out.)

  Perri looked disgruntled at the mention of Dwight’s friend, perhaps because Josie was getting too close to the forbidden subject of Dwight’s pothead phase, or just because Josie was claiming a first-person connection that Perri considered her private property. It was a time of much weeping in Glendale High School, with girls erupting like geysers, and there was almost a competition of sorts, as unseemly as that might sound, to form connections to these events, at once so close and far. To speak of funerals attended and friends of friends of friends who had perished, to repeat stories of close calls—the local family that had almost flown out of Dulles that day, the cousins who lived mere miles from where the one jet crash-landed in Pennsylvania.

  “Well,” Perri said. “He got his wish.”

  PART THREE

  falling

  in love

  with

  jesus

  sunday

  14

  Lenhardt lay in bed, listening to his family get ready for church. Week in, week out, it was one of his best moments—alone yet not alone, the sounds of his wife and children drifting up to him from the downstairs rooms. The chatter was sharp at times; getting two children to church was seldom a smooth process and even required taking the Lord’s name in vain a time or two.

  But, overall, it was a comforting, lulling murmur. On winter Sundays, Lenhardt exulted in the warmth that Marcia left behind, rolling into her spot, picking up her scent, very clean and soapy. On a warm June morning such as this one, he kicked off the lightweight blanket and stuck a leg outside the sheet, a thermal balancing act he had learned from his first wife. That had been a young marriage, a starter marriage, the kind of mistake that only two twenty-two-year-olds can make. The divorce had been more like a breakup, with record albums to be divided—and not much more. Except, sadly, an infant daughter. Lenhardt had paid his support dutifully for eighteen years, but his wife moved to Oregon and remarried before the girl, Tally, was two. She thought of her stepfather as her daddy, and maybe he was. To this day Lenhardt sent checks on Christmases and birthdays, but nothing ever came back, not so much as a postcard.

  The hallway floorboards creaked, a sound signaling a child’s excessive, overdone caution, and Lenhardt cracked an eye as the bedroom door whined open. Jessica’s pillow was just about to land on his head when he snaked his arm to the left, grabbed Marcia’s abandoned pillow, and thwacked his daughter softly on the back.

  “Got you first!” Jessica crowed, doing an up-and-down victory dance.

  “But you can’t get me now,” he said, taking her wrists in his and pulling her onto the bed. He began tickling her, and although Jessica managed to free a hand, she was helpless to defend herself. She writhed and giggled, quite out of breath.

  “Jessica—” Marcia’s tone was even, but Lenhardt recognized she was near her breaking point. “You just brushed your hair. Now it has to be brushed all over again.”

  “No.” The girl took refuge behind her father. “I’ll do it myself.”

  “Okay, but quickly. We need to leave in five minutes. Besides, you’re supposed to let your father sleep on Sundays. It’s his only day to sleep in.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Jessica said, tucking her legs beneath her and making no move to reach for the hairbrush that Marcia was now extending toward her. “Why can’t Daddy sleep in on Saturdays the way the rest of us do when there’s no swim meet?”

  “Daddy worked yesterday,” her father pointed out. “In fact, Daddy’s going to work today.”

  “I mean, when you don’t have to work. Why don’t you go to church with us?”

  “Well, I have chores, and things to fix.”

  “Why can’t you do your chores later?” she persisted.

  “Jessica, get out of that bed and brush your hair, or I’ll use this on your bottom instead.”

  The girl rolled her eyes, knowing that neither parent would ever raise a hand to her. But she did as her mother said, although she managed to do it in a way that indicated it was a mere courtesy to two inferior beings. Lenhardt slid out of the bed after her and headed into the shower, marveling again at his daughter’s bullshit detector. Jason was two years older, but he had never questioned Lenhardt’s absence from church. Jessica had an instinct for stories that didn’t quite hang together. Maybe it was a genetic thing.

  Lenhardt had given his wife’s Methodist church a try, but he had never felt comfortable in the generous, light-filled space that Marcia called a church. Old habits died hard. He said “trespasses” instead of “debts” during the Lord’s Prayer, started to cross himself, and while his knees didn’t miss the literal ups and downs of the Catholic mass, his heart did, a little. “Church” should be one of those tall, gloomy piles that made you feel guilty as soon as you were over the threshold. No, he was just too old a dog to learn new tricks. So Marcia allowed him to abstain, as long as he promised to show up for the big things and didn’t expose the kids to his own doubts about the whole enterprise.

  Well, he was working today, that wasn’t a lie. Less than fifteen minutes after his family headed out to church, he was en route to the Glendale address that the gun registration had kicked back for Michael Delacorte. Somewhat to his surprise, Glendale wasn’t that far from his own house, a quick detour off I-83. He had always thought of that rich suburb as a world away. But then, there were no true neighborhoods out here in north county, not like in the city, just one development running into another, sort of like what happened when Jessica tried to make cookies. Lenhardt had grown up in Remington, a lower-middle-class enclave best known for its rat problem. Word had it that Remington was getting semidesirable these days. And why not? It was good housing stock, brick and stone, ten minutes to downtown. People were tired of driving so much, in Lenhardt’s opinion. He wouldn’t have moved out here if he hadn’t landed the job in the county. There was a guy down at the University of Maryland who released a study, year after year, showing that commuting was the single biggest waste of Americans’ time.

  “What about books on tape?” Infante had asked whenever Lenhardt cited this study, trying to play devil’s advocate. “You could learn, like, lots of stuff.”

  “Such as?”

  “Civil War battles. Or art history, like they have in that one book everyone’s reading now. Or you could read the classics you didn’t read in school.”

  “I read The Great Gatsby when Marcia was doing it for book club,” Lenhardt said. “Green light, big thrill.”

  Once in Glendale it took him a few wrong turns to find the place he wanted, Windsor Park. Like most of the developments out here, it was set on a series of loops, with loops coming off the loops, so it was easy to get lost. The planners probably thought this layout discouraged burglars and thieves, and they would have been right, if communities such as this were targeted by the usual schmo amateurs, the addicts and teenagers interested in a quick buck or a joyride. But a pro wouldn’t be deterred by Windsor Park’s layout. A real thief would study it, driving the streets in the bland white van of a contractor, figuring out when people came and went, who had dogs, what drew attention. Such a guy might even take a job as a workman, given the endless renovations and remodelings, which would afford him the chance to find out who had alarms—and who set them. You’d be surprised how many people didn’t use their expensive alar
m systems because they didn’t want to turn the bypass code over to the maid, or some nonsense like that. The smarter thieves cut phone wires, waited to see if anything happened—some homes had cellular backup, but not many—and then went in with a pillowcase.

  Lenhardt had a dog, a sweet mutt who barked her head off if someone outside the family so much as touched the front door.

  The Delacorte residence, however, had walled itself off behind a fence, with an electronic gate across the driveway. Lenhardt pressed the button on the intercom system, checking his watch. Ten was a little early for a Sunday visit, but that’s why he had chosen this time. More likely to find people at home, assuming they skipped church as he did.

  The voice that came back to him was alert, harried even. “Maurice? What are you doing at the front gate? You know you’re supposed to come to the side.”

  “Mr. Delacorte? I’m Sergeant Harold Lenhardt from the Baltimore County Police Department, and I need to speak to you.”

  “Now? What about?”

  A fair question. The man had no way of knowing that his gun had been used in the Glendale shooting, may not even know it had been stolen, given that there was no report on it. The only information released to the media so far was that the shooter had used a licensed handgun.

  “It’s not something I can talk about over an intercom.”

  “I’ll open the gates.”

  The gates rolled open, and Lenhardt found himself thinking of Graceland, a trip to Memphis when he and Marcia were about six months into their relationship, that time when it’s still all roses and valentines—no voices raised, no disappointments. You couldn’t go fifteen years without a few shouts and recriminations, of course, especially when raising kids. There was no doubt in Lenhardt’s mind that the long haul was better, overall, than the superficial pleasures of those early months, when nothing was at stake. Still, there was something to be said for beginnings, especially when they were behind you.