To the Power of Three Read online

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  to the power of three

  FOR NANCY GOLDMAN GREENBERG

  My Life had stood—a Loaded gun

  —In Corners—till a Day

  The Owner passed—identified—

  And carried Me away—

  …

  Though I than He—may longer live

  He longer must—than I—

  For I have but the power to kill,

  Without—the power to die

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Three can keep a secret, if two are dead.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Thursday

  1 People would want to know what she was thinking, the…

  Part One: The Lost Tribe of the Ka-pe-jos

  Friday

  2 When the shooting started, Alexa Cunningham was looking at Anita…

  3 When Baltimore County began training its police officers in the…

  4 The things we can do without thinking, Dale Hartigan decided…

  5 “Saving Private Ryan,” Colin said…

  6 When Josie woke at 2:00 A.M., she had no confusion about…

  Third Grade

  7 Josie Patel, assigned to the front row because she was…

  Part Two: Death, Near and Certain

  Saturday

  8 It was still early, not even 7:00 A.M., when Eve Muhly…

  9 Harold Lenhardt had made sergeant twice in his life, first…

  10 “Is it too late for tulips?” Susannah Goode asked the…

  11 Josie was alone with her mother when the two strange…

  12 “Do you want anything from downstairs? Zip’s going to the…

  Sixth Grade

  13 The summer before the girls were to enter sixth grade…

  Part Three: Falling In Love With Jesus

  Sunday

  14 Lenhardt lay in bed, listening to his family get ready…

  15 Alexa had her Sunday routine down pat—the gym, then…

  16 Out-of-towners have been known to compare the train’s eye…

  Ninth Grade

  17 Thirty years ago, back when Thornton Hartigan was still wondering…

  Part Four: Last Year’s Funeral

  Monday

  18 “What do you want?” Chloe said by way of greeting…

  19 Alexa had neither office nor classroom in Glendale, a situation…

  20 Peter knew it was a bad idea to go to…

  21 The Kahns were adamant that they did not want to…

  22 “That was soooooooo queer,” Lila said…

  Tuesday

  23 Back when Lenhardt was coming up, he had a sergeant…

  24 The lot in Loudon Cemetery was desirable, assuming such a term…

  Eleventh Grade

  25 In the spring of the girls’ junior year, three soccer…

  Part Five: There won’t be trumpets

  Wednesday

  26 Infante liked to say he could smell crazy on a…

  27 In the thirty-five years since Thornton Hartigan had first fixed…

  28 A floater couldn’t help losing things, Alexa told herself, pawing…

  29 Josie was lying on the sofa in the family room…

  30 Dannon Estes could tell he made the detectives uncomfortable. Some…

  31 It was his mom’s idea to cut flowers from her…

  32 Alexa liked the bar—“No, really,” she found herself saying…

  Twelfth Grade

  33 Old Giff, as theater teacher Ted Gifford was known throughout…

  Part Six: Commencement

  34 Graduation day started with a yellow-red haze on the horizon…

  35 Dale Hartigan remembered exactly one thing about his own graduation…

  36 Senior Ramble sucked sober, Peter Lasko was realizing. Or maybe…

  37 In April of junior year, Kat checked her SAT scores…

  August

  38 Every August in Maryland, there comes a moment when the…

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by laura lippman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  thursday

  1

  People would want to know what she was thinking, the night before. They always do, or think they do—but in her case they would have been disappointed. Because by the night before, the thinking was long over and she was preoccupied mainly with logistics. Planning, preparing, packing. Finding her old knapsack, an orange-and-black JanSport she hadn’t used for months, not since Christmastime.

  Knapsacks had gone out of fashion that spring at Glendale High School, at least among the stylish girls. The divas, as they were known—they had bestowed the name on themselves and considered it laudatory—had taken to carrying plastic totes in bright primary colors, see-through and flimsy. Even the name-brand versions, the ones that cost upwards of a hundred dollars, buckled under the weight the divas expected them to carry. But then it’s a myth that more expensive things are better made—or so her father always said, whenever she expressed a desire for something trendy. At the mall she had seen diva mothers storm into Nordstrom or Hecht Co., proclaiming the totes defective. “What was she using it for?” skeptical salesladies inquired, examining the torn and stretched-out handles beneath the fluorescent lights. “The usual,” lied the mothers. “Girl stuff.”

  In the end the salesladies didn’t care if the mothers stretched the truth as far as those rubbery handles, because they always left with even more merchandise—not only a replacement tote or two but those hideous Louis Vuitton billfolds that were so unfathomably popular that spring, maybe a small cosmetic bag in the same distinctive-tacky pattern. They needed cosmetic bags because the totes had another design flaw. The not-quite-opaque plastic allowed the world to see whatever one carried. Forget trying to bring Tampax to school, or even a hairbrush. (She had always considered hairbrushes one of the more horrible secrets that regular purses kept—oily, matted with hair, shedding those strange little scales.) Yet perhaps that was the very source of the totes’ cachet: To use one, you had to pretend you had no secrets, that your life was an open book—or, more correctly, a see-through purse. You couldn’t put anything in those totes that you didn’t want other people to glimpse.

  Especially a gun, no matter how small. Even a gun wrapped in a scarf, as hers would be.

  The problem was that she, too, had abandoned her knapsack earlier that school year, although she was not one to follow the trends, quite the opposite. She had different reasons for retiring her trusty JanSport. I am putting away childish things, she told herself in November, having been reminded of that Bible verse while rereading a favorite childhood novel. Her mother had gotten a canvas bag at Barnes & Noble, one with Emily Dickinson’s face, and she had co-opted it for a joke, just to test how ignorant everyone was. (“Is that someone you know?” “Is that you?” “A relative?”) She hadn’t planned to use it every day, but then her parents began to nag, said she was going to throw her spine out of alignment or damage the nerves in her shoulder. Then she had to keep using it, if only to prove to them that it was her spine, her nerves, her life.

  Except the Emily Dickinson bag was forever falling over, scattering its contents. She couldn’t afford such accidents or missteps, not on the day she took her gun to school.

  She finally found her knapsack at the back of her closet, and it was a kind of relief to be reunited with her old, practical friend. She dampened a paper towel and ran it over the bag’s insides, removing debris from last fall—cookie crumbs, specks of chocolate, a lone Brazil nut, which would have been there since September, when she tried to go vegan and lasted all of a
week. She had carried this knapsack for four years, from fall of eighth grade to the fall of twelfth grade, and its surface—the names and former loyalties inked onto its orange nylon, the rips and tears—was a vivid reminder of how much she had changed. You probably shouldn’t get tattooed, her mother always said. You don’t know who you’re going to be when you’re thirty. But a tattoo can be concealed, or even removed with lasers. Piercings close up if you give them enough time. A knapsack covered with embarrassing sentiments in permanent ink could only be discarded or replaced. Her parents would have purchased her a new one if she had only explained her reasons, but that was one thing she hadn’t dared to do. She was tired of explaining herself.

  Once the bag was clean inside, she surveyed the things laid out on her bed. There was her notebook, the take-home test for Mrs. Downey, her independent study project for Ms. Cunningham. And there was the gun, wrapped in a silk scarf from the old dressup chest.

  The gun had been in her possession for almost a month, but the mere sight of it still shocked her. It was so like the toy six-shooter she had begged for when she was little, not even four. Why had she yearned for a gun, a holster, and a cowboy hat at such an age? She had wanted to be Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley, marching around the house singing “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.” Yes, it was queer, but then everyone was queer when little. And maybe she had wanted to shock her parents, who weren’t hippies but were antiwar, even this current one, which a lot of Glendale parents had said was okay when it started.

  Standing in her bedroom, a real gun in her hand, she finally understood how toddlers could pick up a weapon and fire, with no instruction or training. The gun she had taken was just like her old toy—six chambers for six bullets, each one dislodged by pressing the trigger. Or so she assumed, because she hadn’t dared to fire it, not even once. There was no place she wouldn’t be overheard. Once Glendale had had large tracts of woods, areas where a kid could hide, escape the world for a little while. But those spots had been mowed down, leveled, replaced with strip malls and parking lots, just like the song said. She had really liked that song before her parents told her it was a cover, that the Counting Crows hadn’t done it first, that they had listened to it, too, when they were even younger than she was now. Her parents meant well, but sometimes she wanted something that was all for her. Was that so much to ask?

  The gun had come with four bullets, which seemed an odd number to her, not that she could ask how that came to be. How many bullets are in the gun, Chino? That was a line from West Side Story, Maria’s big moment at the end. She was never the kind of girl who got to play Maria, nor did she want to be. Namby-pamby “I Feel Pretty” Maria, totally reactive. It had been stealing, of course, to take the gun, but then the people who owned it had broken laws, too. It should have been in a safe and equipped with a childproof lock. She had written a paper on state gun laws for history last year, arguing strenuously for a true ban on all firearms. The rednecks had been outraged, of course. Not that there were many rednecks in AP American history.

  Before she’d wrapped the gun up in the scarf, she’d picked it up and held it next to her cheek, stroking herself, the way villains were always caressing women in spy movies. It didn’t look the same. Maybe it was because she didn’t have the right kind of face. Her mother always told her that her face was heart-shaped, but all she saw was that it was sharp in an almost witchy way—pointy chin, hollow cheeks. When an actor traced a line down an actress’s face, the gesture was sexual and violent at the same time, or so Ms. Cunningham had said in her “Rhetoric of Images” class. She told the girls they had to learn to recognize such images and decode them, so they wouldn’t be infected by them. It made no sense, though. She couldn’t get why the gesture was sexual if it denoted rape, which everyone kept insisting wasn’t about sex but violence. Because the gun is a phallic symbol, Ms. Cunningham explained. Rape is an act of violence that happens to be expressed through sex. “But you also said rape isn’t about sex, that if boys force us to do anything we don’t want to do, it’s the same as assault.” Yes, and films confuse the message, suggesting that rape can be sexual, when it clearly isn’t, setting you up to make poor choices. Don’t you see?

  She was beginning to. She now saw how ideas that might appear to be at the opposite ends of a spectrum were really matched sets, yin and yang, eternally connected rings. No love without hate. No peace without war. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Mr. Blum, the history teacher, was always offering this as an example of the idiotic things said during the Vietnam War, that war being his big reference point, the proof that he had once cared about something larger than himself and his precious little sports car, which he buffed with a chamois cloth in good weather, out in the teachers’ parking lot. It seemed silly to be so proud of a car, when half the kids at Glendale drove nicer ones. You have to destroy the village in order to save it. She no longer saw the paradox. Sometimes you do have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them.

  Yet these thoughts, while appropriately deep, did not figure into her last words. She had only so much time, so much space, and she was undeniably self-conscious, perhaps a bit too fixated on the effect of what she was doing. The letter she composed was factual, yet somehow false. Even her handwriting was false—florid, overdone, so she couldn’t fit it all onto one sheet of paper as she had planned. She had lost the habit of expressing herself honestly, without irony and grandiose turns of phrase. She wrote about heaven and love, and called on old loyalties. She asked only that the truth be told. She wrote it just that way, in just those words: “I ask only that the truth be told.”

  After much chewing on the end of her pen, a bad habit she had never outgrown even though it often left her with blue lips, she crossed out the word “only.” She knew that it was a lot to ask, perhaps the most a person can ask, under certain circumstances.

  PART ONE

  the

  lost tribe

  of the

  ka-pe-jos

  friday

  2

  When the shooting started, Alexa Cunningham was looking at Anita Whitehead’s arms—her arms, then her underarms, because Anita threw her hands over her head and began to shriek. Later Alexa Cunningham would try to rewrite that memory in her head, replace it with something more portentous, but the image was stubborn: Anita’s tremulous upper arms bursting into hives, then the tiny white mothballs of roll-on deodorant visible in the stubble of her underarms just before she threw the telephone down. Alexa even caught a whiff of something floral, antiperspirant or perfume, and found time to wonder why someone who claimed to suffer from multiple chemical sensitivities would use anything scented.

  That troubled her, too—how one track of her mind detached, finding room for trivial observations in the midst of a crisis. Later she told herself that it was simply a citizen’s duty to be prepared for the role of eyewitness, absorbing every detail of an unfolding tragedy, and one could not pick and choose what one noticed. Still, there was no getting around it—what Alexa saw, at the moment that everything changed, was Anita’s arms, swaying like poorly staked hammocks; Anita’s lips, puckered around the straw in her omnipresent Diet Vanilla Coke, then rounding into a scream; and Anita’s eyebrows, too overplucked to register surprise. And what Alexa heard was a voice in her head, coolly narrating events. Why was that? Where did such a voice come from? But Alexa knew. If you lived to tell the story, then you lived. She had instinctively thought like a survivor, and there could be no shame in that.

  When the shots came, I was picking up my mail in the office and listening to Anita complain about her imaginary symptoms.

  “TGIF,” Anita had said a few minutes earlier by way of greeting. “Tee-Gee-Eye-Eff.”

  “Hmmm,” Alexa murmured, eyes on her mail so she would not stare at Anita’s arms, left bare by a sleeveless knit top. Alexa’s older brother, Evan, had once dressed as a woman for Halloween, donning a flesh-colored turtleneck beneath a muumuu, then stuffing the
arms with tennis balls so they wobbled back and forth just the way Anita’s arms shook whenever she moved them. Alexa, eight at the time, had laughed until she almost wet herself. Evan was imitating their own mother, who was a good sport about such things.

  “You got big plans for the weekend, Lexy?”

  Alexa had never been known by this nickname, which sounded a little soap-operaish to her ear.

  “Uh-uh. You know how the work floods in, the last week for seniors. Have to make sure all my kids are ready to walk next Thursday.”

  “Supposed to be beautiful this weekend. I wish I could go somewhere. But even if we could get down the ocean”—she gave it the local pronunciation, downy eauchin—“my doctor says I really shouldn’t.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Because of the sun.”

  Alexa made no reply, pretending absorption in Barbara Paulson’s memo on senior pranks. Faculty and staff were to be reminded—that was her wording, were to be reminded—that any student participating in a stunt involving damage to property, no matter how small, would be banned from the graduation ceremony. As a relatively new school, Glendale did not have many entrenched traditions, but outgoing seniors did have a curious habit of setting off firecrackers in the woods just beyond the athletic fields. We also take a strict view of injury, Barbara had added, making bodily injury seem an afterthought to the more serious problem of vandalism. The memo was pure Barbara—bureaucratic, poorly written, unintentionally funny. But then Barbara was never funny on purpose.

  “And the air.” Aaaaaah-er in Anita’s accent. “The very air makes my skin sting. My doctor says it’s because of the salt in the breeze.”