To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  The Patels’ home was in one of the older sections of Glendale, built almost thirty years ago, and it looked a little tired to Peter. The stairwell was scuffed in places, the carpet dingy from foot traffic, and there were lots of boy toys scattered about, trucks and cars. He knew instinctively that Josie’s room would be to the right of the staircase, at the opposite end of the hall from the master bedroom. The door was ajar, but he knocked anyway, waiting for Josie to look up from her computer. Her crutches were leaning against the desk, and her right foot, the injured one, was propped up on a pillow on another chair.

  “Hey,” he said. “You online?”

  She turned quickly, her right arm knocking her crutches to the floor, then poked a key, losing what was on her screen. But that was instinctive. Peter always closed whatever was on his computer when someone walked into the room, even Colin, even if it was innocuous as the Television Without Pity boards or ESPN.com. Being caught at your computer was like hearing someone rattle the stall door in a public bathroom. Even if the door was latched, even if you were dressed, it spooked you a little.

  “It’s you,” she said, not particularly surprised to see him. Not surprised and not happy either.

  Peter took a seat on the bed, which was covered with a pink plaid spread. Girls’ bedrooms always struck him as odd and a little overdone, with so much emphasis on self-expression. It was as if every object, every decorating touch, had to convey some deeper meaning. Sure, guys stuck up posters, too, but it wasn’t like the announcement of a personal philosophy.

  “I wanted to see you,” Peter said, offering the explanation that seemed expected of him, “because you’re probably one of the few people around here who feels worse than I do these days.”

  “Why do you feel bad? Because you never apologized to Kat for the way you dumped her that summer and now you never can?”

  “I didn’t—” It was automatic to defend oneself, but not productive, not in this situation. He was supposed to be winning Josie over, gaining her trust. He sighed so his shoulders sagged. “I never meant to be a jerk.”

  “Well, you were. You broke her heart.”

  “Really?” He had never known that. Kat had never reproached him in any way after he stopped calling.

  “The way you did it. No call, no explanation.”

  “I went back to college. I really shouldn’t have been messing around with her at all, if you think about it.”

  “She never really got over you just dropping her. She was in love with you.”

  No she wasn’t, he wanted to protest. No one at fifteen was ever in love, outside Romeo and Juliet, and maybe not even them. Old Giff used to argue that the star-crossed lovers simply were buzzed on the fumes of forbidden lust. Give them thirty years of togetherness, Old Giff always said, and Juliet would be plunging the dagger into Romeo.

  “I was in love with her, too. That was the problem.” The lie, once offered, felt true. After all, why had he let Kat torture him so long when there were so many willing girls? He must have cared about her.

  “How is that a problem, loving someone who loves you?”

  “She was fifteen. I was nineteen. What were we going to do, get married? Start a long-distance relationship that would have had to last a minimum of three years before we could live in the same city? And that’s assuming her dad would let her go to school in New York, when we all know he was pretty much pushing Stanford from the day she was born.”

  “She never dated in high school, not seriously. She had friends, guys she would go to dances with, but no true boyfriends.”

  “Friends with benefits?” His voice was casual, joking even, his use of the now passé term deliberately arch. Yet he cared more about the answer than he wished to let on.

  “No, not like that. Kat wasn’t into hooking up. If anyone got, like, serious, she shut them down. She said it was because of her parents’ divorce, but I think it was you. Once burned, twice shy.”

  Peter, who had not thought about Kat Hartigan outside of occasional jerking-off sessions, when she usually morphed into someone riper and far more willing, couldn’t help being flattered.

  Josie’s computer trilled.

  “Someone’s trying to IM you.”

  She shrugged, turning quickly and clicking her “away” message. “Just my mom. She messages me from the kitchen so I don’t have to hop up and down the stairs. Probably wants to know what I want for dinner. Kat was the only person I really talked to on the computer. Kat and Perri.”

  “Yeah, you three used to be tight. What happened? How could Perri do what she did?”

  The question was too direct, and Josie’s face clouded over. Peter had always thought of her as monkeyish, but maybe she had changed, or was changing. Her skin was the color of pale tea, her features strong and compelling.

  “I mean, that’s something people did talk about. The Big Three, busted up. It’s all I heard about when I came home last Christmas.”

  Another lie, but a plausible one. Hadn’t Old Giff mentioned some sort of fallout over the school musical?

  “What can I say? Perri got weird.”

  “Well, yeah. I always thought she was jealous of Kat.” But he was being too obvious. He needed to be at once more provocative and subtle to get Josie talking. “Jealous of Kat’s preference for you, actually.”

  “They were friends longer….” Josie spoke in the wistful way of someone who wants to seize a compliment but can’t quite believe she deserves it.

  “They were friends first. But you and Kat were the ones who lasted. You were probably going to be friends for life. Be each other’s bridesmaids, you know.” He tried to think of other things that girls did for one another. “Be, like, godparents to each other’s kids.”

  “I don’t want to have kids.” Said fiercely, as if he had insulted her. “Not everyone wants to be a mom.”

  “Kat did.” He was bullshitting like crazy now. What did he really know about Kat Hartigan? That she was beautiful in a way that made him ache all over. That she had the tenderest heart, so soft and vulnerable that she wept at movies like Meatballs because she couldn’t bear the early scenes where the kid was a misfit. He would tell her that it was part of the essential arc, that the kid had to be an outsider in order to make his triumph all the sweeter, but Kat still found it heartbreaking.

  “It was really all she wanted,” he insisted. “She said she’d go to Stanford because her dad cared so much, maybe even study architecture and take a job with his company, just to make him happy. But all she wanted to do was get married and have kids. Lots and lots of kids. Like, three or four.”

  “Yeah.” Josie was starting to tear up. Peter worked up a few tears himself, using a sense-memory exercise, remembering how his dog had been killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was eight. Soon, however, his tears were as sincere as Josie’s. How does someone like Kat disappear? A week ago, five days ago, she had existed, and now she didn’t.

  “I wish I could have saved her,” Josie said. “If—But it happened so fast.”

  “I can imagine. Someone comes into the bathroom firing a gun. Who would have time to react?”

  “It’s, like, you’re frozen. My legs wouldn’t move.”

  “She just comes in, and bam, Kat’s dead, and bam, you’re hit.”

  “It was like a movie. I mean, it was like something happening outside me. All I could do was watch.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive. Perri always seemed wound a little tight to me.”

  “Not always. Just lately. I mean, going back to when we were kids, she wanted to have her way, but not like this.”

  This struck Peter as a hint, but he didn’t want to pursue it too directly. “You have to be a nut to do what she did. Doesn’t seem to be any point in looking for reasons, does there?”

  “Exactly. What’s the point? She’s probably going to die anyway, so what does it matter what happened? She’s dead and Kat’s dead—and I wish I were dead.”

  It occurred to Peter that he
could kiss Josie just now. People did things like that in the face of loss—made connections to show they were still alive. And if he kissed her, she might come to trust him and tell him more. How to do it? He should just swoop in fast, get down on his knees in front of her, do a real Hollywood kiss. But what about her foot, propped up on the footstool? How could he maneuver around the foot? It probably hurt her a lot if she had to have it elevated like that. Too bad, because suddenly he wanted to kiss her, and not just to win her confidence. He wanted to kiss her for the very reasons he had outlined to himself as reasonable pretexts for kissing. He was alive and she was alive, and that was worth remembering.

  Instead he said, “I don’t think Kat’s dad is ever going to get over this.”

  “Why?” Josie’s voice seemed shrill and fearful.

  “Because parents don’t. That’s what my mom said. It goes against the natural order of things.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I mean, it’s like Mr. Hartigan needs to understand what happened to get past it. The why of it, you know? It’s not enough for him to say Perri was crazy and just walk away. He needs to know the reason.”

  Her computer beeped again, but Josie didn’t even turn her head toward the screen. She was staring at Peter, her eyes cold and hard again. He had lost her. The moment he had mentioned Mr. Hartigan, she had shut down.

  Still, he persisted.

  “So there wasn’t, right?”

  “What?”

  “A reason. I mean, there’s nothing more to say, right? Perri just came in and started shooting, and that’s all there is to know.”

  “No reason.”

  “And it was just the three of you, the way it always was?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just that there are these rumors. About maybe someone else being there.”

  It is a cliché that acting is reacting, that the best actors know how to listen, but Peter had been well trained over the past four years, his parents had gotten their money’s worth from NYU, and he did know how to listen, pay attention. Josie was in turmoil, eaten up by whatever she knew, so close to wanting the relief of sharing it.

  “People are saying that?” she asked at last. “Lots of people?”

  “Some.” One.

  “But you don’t even know people at Glendale anymore.”

  “I knew their older brothers and sisters.”

  “Like who? Who did you talk to, exactly?”

  “Kevin—Shawn Weaver’s little brother.” He had talked to him at the funeral. But one name seemed a bit thin, so he pulled out the name that Kevin had whispered when he pointed out the girl in the low-cut top, the blow-job queen. “And Eve Muhly.”

  “She’s, like, a pathological liar. She loves to say she knows stuff when she doesn’t.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not the only one, in this case.” He was almost indignant, totally caught up in his stories as he spun them. Okay, so neither Kevin nor Eve had spoken about a fourth girl to him. Okay, so he had never actually spoken to this girl, Eve. But Mr. Hartigan said the police thought there might be a fourth girl or that Josie and Perri had conspired in some way. That’s why Josie got nervous when Mr. Hartigan’s name came up.

  Josie’s chin trembled, and she looked as if she might cry again. But her voice was measured when she spoke, exceedingly calm.

  “I did lie.”

  “Yes?” Now she was going to tell him, now he was going to find out what she was hiding from the police and everyone else. Mr. Hartigan would be so pleased to learn that Peter Lasko had done so quickly and easily what no one else could do.

  “You didn’t really break Kat’s heart,” she said. “I mean, she dated Seth Raskin after you, and he was much handsomer. And then he died in that car crash last spring. He’s the one that Kat can’t get over.”

  He understood that this, too, was a lie, a punishment for his trying to get her to open up. The surprising part was how effective it was.

  “Well, I guess I should go. You’ve got a lot going on this week, with graduation and everything. Is Senior Ramble still a big deal?”

  “Yes, but…” She indicated her bandaged foot. “Not for me. I’ll be going to the ceremony, then coming straight home.”

  He left on that and she didn’t even say good-bye.

  From the hall, with its scarred walls and framed art posters, he could hear Josie typing furiously, pounding away at her computer without pausing, in a cadence that marked the rhythm of an IM conversation, or maybe e-mail. Whatever it was, Peter was pretty sure it wasn’t a girl telling her mother what she wanted for dinner.

  Dale Hartigan was in a meeting when his cell phone vibrated—he never had it on ring, a point of pride with him—and the caller ID showed it was Peter Lasko. Given how dreary the meeting was—the usual cranky homeowners, convinced that a mixed-retail space would be the death of their neighborhood, especially if the restaurant had a liquor license—he would have taken any call, even one from Chloe or his father. This interruption not only saved him, it filled him with hope. Certainly the boy wouldn’t call unless he had something vital to report.

  “Right back,” he mouthed to Susannah, who was running the show, trying to make everyone happy. The great smoother-over, as Dale thought of her.

  “Yes?” he snapped into the cell phone as soon as he cleared the room.

  “Josie didn’t have much to say.”

  “And I needed to know that right now because…?”

  “Because the way she didn’t say it was kind of striking. Like she’s hiding something.”

  If Peter had been his employee, Dale would have been sharp with him. Not unkind or abusive, for Dale did not ape his father in that way. But he disliked people who talked just to talk, the eager young ones—and they were almost always young—who manufactured excuses for face time with the boss, not realizing they were wasting the boss’s time.

  “That was always my supposition, Peter. And while it’s nice to know you agree, it doesn’t really seem to advance things.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. But it did give me an idea. You know the Senior Ramble?”

  Dale did. He had one of his rare quarrels with Kat over this very subject not two weeks ago, saying he didn’t care what other Glendale parents did, he was not going to suspend Kat’s curfew on graduation night just so she could increase her chances of dying in a traffic accident. When Kat had protested that the Ramble was zero tolerance, with students signing pledges to serve as designated drivers, parents agreeing to chaperone official parties in their homes, and public places staying open late so the graduates could congregate safely, Dale had not been moved. “Exhaustion alone is enough to get kids in trouble,” he had said. “Your curfew stands, and I’m going to tell the Patels as much, so don’t think you can get around it by spending the night with Josie, playing by their more lax rules.”

  How innocent Dale had been then, just two weeks ago, when he thought the worst thing that could happen to his daughter was a car accident caused by fatigue or youthful driving errors. Two weeks ago the Patels had been his allies in parenthood, and now they were on the other side, protecting their child, not caring about justice for his.

  “What could the Ramble have to do with any of this?” he asked Peter.

  “Kids are out, they’re loose. I thought I would work it, you know. Assuming you think it’s a good idea.”

  Dale was beginning to see how stupid this entire idea was, how worthless Peter Lasko was to him. But he had solicited the boy, sought him out. There was no reason to make him feel like the ineffectual failure he was.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not? Knock yourself out.”

  Peter Lasko had called Dale from the Dairy Queen, and he was so undone by the man’s obvious lack of faith in him that he ordered a Snickers Blizzard. After all, he wasn’t trying to lose weight—he just had to make sure he didn’t gain any. He’d do an extra-long workout tonight to make up for it.

  Of course, Mr. Hartigan had always made him feel sma
ll and stupid. They had sat here, not even three years ago, at this very same Dairy Queen, as Mr. Hartigan had flattered Peter, asked about his aspirations, wondered if there was anything he could do to help him.

  “Given the business my family is in,” he had said, “we go way back with the Rouses.”

  Peter had bobbed his head politely. Back then he hadn’t worried about what he ate, and he had let Mr. Hartigan buy him the works—two chili dogs, a shake, onion rings, a Peanut Buster Parfait.

  “We know the Rouses quite well.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In fact, I hear Jim Rouse’s grandson may make a movie in Baltimore next year.”

  “Is he, like, a director?”

  “He has directed, I think. But he’s primarily an actor. He’s done quite well for himself.”

  “Never heard of anyone famous named Rouse, except that DJ on the local oldies station.”

  Mr. Hartigan had smiled. “The actor I’m speaking of is Ed Norton. His mother was a Rouse.”

  Even now Peter could remember how he had blushed at his ignorance. Of course, he had been more of a theater snob then, not easily impressed by movie types, but still—Ed Norton. Oscar nominee, serious guy, total cred.

  “You know him?”

  “Well, my father knew his grandfather. After all, they were in the same business, more or less, although my father’s vision was far less utopian. In fact, he started buying the land out here because he thought he could imitate Rouse’s success in Columbia. I could introduce you. I think he’s coming home in August for a visit—his uncle told me the Maryland Film Commission got use of the governor’s box and was going to have a little thing for him. He’s a big Orioles fan, but aren’t we all?”

  Mr. Hartigan was not so crass as to make it an offer or a case of quid pro quo. And Peter was not so stupid that he didn’t recognize it as such. At first he told himself he wasn’t interested. But even as he congratulated himself for not falling for Dale Hartigan’s un-spoken bribe, one summer day slipped into another, and before he knew it, a week had gone by, then another, and finally all of August was gone, and he had simply stopped calling Kat Hartigan. The shock was that she didn’t call him or e-mail him. She was fifteen years old, and she had more innate dignity than the college girls he would later know. You didn’t want Kat Hartigan in your life? Then she didn’t want you.