“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 who don’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 b
een 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.
35
Dale Hartigan remembered exactly one thing about his own graduation from Hereford High School: The speaker had predicted that the students wouldn’t be able to recall his name, much less what he said. The guy had pretty much nailed it. The only thing Dale remembered from graduation night was that Cathleen Selden, a rather plain girl who had gone through high school in flannel shirts and work boots, had shown up in a black-print halter dress. Cathleen Selden’s reinvention had fired Dale’s imagination, in ways large and small, reminding him that there really was a reason the ceremony was known as commencement. He might not be going to his college of choice, he might still be yoked to his brother, but College Park was big enough to allow a fresh start. After the ceremony he had tracked Cathleen through the looser, less organized gatherings that made up the Senior Ramble in his day, and while they never got further than sharing a Miller Lite on the hood of his car, it had been a most satisfying night.
Yet Dale was certain that every detail of his daughter’s graduation ceremony would have remained vivid. Not because she was first in her class—Glendale, following the cowardly example of other schools, had dropped valedictorian and salutatorian from its ceremony, denying Kat that recognition. Nor did he care that she was slated to recite that strange poem, “Dover Beach.” His daughter could have been just one of the crowd, an ordinary student with no special role in the ceremonies, and every moment would have been etched in his memory as long as he lived. When it came to his own achievements, Dale felt vaguely shameful. But he had been able to glory in everything Kat did.
Of course, it hadn’t quite worked that way in Dale’s family, where his parents had been keen not to emphasize the differences between the brothers. Everything must be equal for twins, his father insisted. Dale remembered his parents’ consternation when they finally left the house on Frederick Road and moved into the old Meeker farm, whose odd-shaped rooms made it impossible to give their sons identical bedrooms. So, rather than let one boy have what was clearly a superior room—even by random drawing of straws or flipping a coin—they had made them continue to double up. Dale had not minded, not until the issue of college came up and his father said each boy would get the same amount of money, no more. So if Dale wanted to go to Stanford, which was offering no financial aid, it was up to him to pay the difference in tuition. And not just the college costs but the difference in expenses, including the travel back and forth to California. It was probably a bluff, but Dale hadn’t called it.
Wait—he did have another memory from his own graduation night: His father had arrived late. Dale had been third in his class, winning prizes for math and history, but his father had managed to miss that part of the ceremony. Yet he was there when the diplomas were awarded, clapping first for Dale Hartigan, then Glen. He knew that his father hadn’t meant to teach him to be ambivalent about his achievements, and yet Dale always felt a little desperate whenever he received any public recognition.
So Dale had tried to do things differently with Kat, and he hadn’t lacked opportunities to celebrate her. Number one in her class, a cheerleader yet, and popular too, the kind of girl who was elected prom queen not just because she was beautiful but because she was beloved. Early admission to Stanford. All that, and then the bonus of her lovely soprano voice, to which Kat seemed utterly indifferent. He remembered feeling a little startled when she said Perri had been given a solo while Kat was to recite.
“It’s what I want,” she insisted. “I specifically asked for a speaking part. Dad—don’t interfere again.”
“I never interfere.”
“Dad.” Kat could say a thousand things with that one word. In this instance she was saying he was full of shit. She knew him, his daughter. Her love for him was not blind, but it was constant, unwavering. Married people never knew this kind of love. A lasting marriage was full of rough spots and angry times; the only real victory was hanging on. But it was possible, with a child, to have a pure relationship.
“That was different, what happened last spring. You deserved the number one ranking in the class. It was silly of them to try to deny it, sillier still to just drop the valedictorian rather than sort out their own contradictory policy—”
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“Dad.” This time her tone signaled: End of topic. If Dale had been frustrated by his own father’s refusal to brag about him loud and long, Kat squirmed a little at her father’s obvious pride, which just made her more adorable. What would Kat have been like as a mother? What lessons would she have absorbed, what models would she have rebelled against? Her even temper, her dislike of arguments—were those inborn or the result of the fractious years in the Hartigan marriage?
Kat was Kat, her own person. He had looked forward to celebrating every milestone in her life, had cherished the idea of seeing her graduate, high school and college, find her way into the professional world, marry—but not too soon. Have children. Again, not too soon. He had envisioned her winning prizes first—he wasn’t sure for what, just that there would be prizes, endless prizes, and he would always be there.
Alexa was one of the teachers assigned to keep the seniors in the cafeteria, where they were corralled like wild horses. After all, there were almost four hundred of them, and, understandably, their spirits were high verging on insane. Alexa tried not to find them annoying, but her own mood was gloomy. Perri was dead, so all her efforts on the girl’s behalf were meaningless. And Perri had been her primary focus, she assured herself now. She had not used her concern over the girl as a pretext to spend time with the sergeant. He was much too old for her, and stocky.
Even Josie Patel, allowed to perch on a bench while the others stood, seemed happy, if not as gleeful as her fellow students. When the signal finally came, via walkie-talkie—Barbara Paulson had no intention of any unplanned contingencies in the graduation—Josie’s fellow P’s helped her stand and accommodated her off-kilter gait as they began to march out to the recorded strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Yes, Josie was smiling—wanly, to be sure, but smiling.
As the procession reached the door of the cafeteria, Alexa saw that strange little gay boy, Dannon something, appear at the threshold and fall into step alongside Josie, whispering urgently. Josie shook her head, trying to pick up her pace, but there was no place to go, and Dannon continued to dog her down the long corridor. Finally another teacher put a hand on his shoulder, told him to step back and stop slowing down the processional, which had to cover a lot of ground through the cavernous school.
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