To the Power of Three Read online

  Still, he believed that if Jessica were in a locked room with one dead girl and another who appeared to be well on her way to dead, she wouldn’t have lingered. She would have gotten to that door by any means possible, unlocked it, and gone down the hallway on her belly if she had to. His daughter was scrappy, more of a fighter than her older brother, truth be told. Jason was a dreamer, safe in a gauzy world of his own making. But even Jason would have the instinct to save himself.

  So why had the other girl stayed? Did she think the shooter might have the wherewithal to come after her? It was a foolish notion, but if you had grown up on a steady diet of horror movies in which the killer kept getting up again and again, you might think it possible. Had she been hiding in the stall and emerged only after it was all over?

  “Like I said, ninety percent of what I’m seeing and hearing matches up with the shooter being the girl in Shock Trauma,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t think anyone in this room is going to be happy with a ninety percent certainty if the case falls apart in court. The dead girl’s father is already busting our balls. Imagine what he’ll be like if we fuck this up.”

  “I thought it was a given in homicide that the obvious solution is the obvious solution.” The colonel smirked at what he thought was a brilliant ploy, throwing Lenhardt’s oft-repeated words back at him.

  “I never disdain the obvious,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t let myself get seduced by it either.”

  10

  “Is it too late for tulips?” Susannah Goode asked the funeral director.

  “Probably,” said Stan Jasper. “And they’re not a flower we work with, normally.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. Still, if they were in season…She loved tulips.”

  “Whatever you choose, I’d recommend a palette of white. White, or pale yellow, or pale pink. Very appropriate to one so young.”

  “Yellow,” Dale Hartigan said. “Roses.” Susannah squeezed his hand. More correctly, she squeezed his fist, because Dale’s hands had been pretty much balled into fists for the last twenty-four hours, except when occupied by tasks that insisted on uncurled fingers. Driving. Eating, except he hadn’t been able to eat, no matter how others urged him. Drinking, which he had done, well into the night, after the last phone call to his father, who wanted to know what the chief had said. He should be hungover today, yet he had never gotten drunk, much less achieved the total numbness he was going for. It was as if he had cried the liquor out before it could reach his blood.

  “We work with a florist whose roses are exquisite.”

  “Yellow roses are often quite bright,” Susannah pointed out. “Not pastel.”

  “Oh, no, the ones we use are very, very light in hue.”

  Dale had a weary moment of insight: He was being bilked. Well, not bilked, exactly, but the unctuous funeral director had sized him up nicely: Dale Hartigan, a well-fixed man who would spare no expense in burying his daughter, a businessman who would have no stomach for this negotiation. One man’s tragedy was another man’s workaday life, pure and simple. Stan might have been Dale, pricing out the electrical work on his latest project or girding for battle with the historic review board. Kat’s death was just a job to so many people—the police, the assistant state’s attorney, the medical examiner.

  Then again, it could be argued that someone such as Stan, who worked in an industry that few found desirable, was entitled to charge a premium. Dale had thought the funeral business might have changed, that it would be more like that television show, with lots of loquacious, quirky types whose own dramas could distract the bereaved from their problems. But it was still pretty much The Loved One—essential yet vaguely suspect, like aluminum siding.

  The interesting aspect about the funeral business, from a businessman’s standpoint, was that it didn’t have to chase its customers when they headed out to the suburbs. Other merchants needed to go where the customers were, but Baltimore’s mortuaries had stayed in place for generations, confident that their customers would come to them when the time was right. Who ya gonna call? Oh, shit, Dale was totally losing it, quoting Ghostbusters in his head, sitting like a bump in a funeral home while his girlfriend planned his daughter’s funeral. “Yellow roses” had been his only real input so far. Yellow roses and his credit card. But then, he needed all his energy to keep from breaking down every five minutes. Once, when he was seventeen, Dale had been rear-ended in a pretty bad pileup on I-83. A runaway semi had come tearing over a hill and confronted an unexpected backup. It had careered from one side to another, tearing open a Corolla, throwing a big boat of a Chevy into Dale’s father’s Pontiac. But he was young, his reflexes good, and he had braked before hitting the pickup in front of him. When he got out, he was astonished to see the damage to the cars, his and all those around him, more astonished that he hadn’t been injured. Yet, within a few hours, he was vaguely sore and achy.

  That was how he felt now, times a thousand. He felt as if he had been broken into pieces and glued back together, like a little pitcher or vase. He looked the same, but if you poured anything into him, it would all leak out. He couldn’t hold a thought, much less a conversation.

  “And the casket?” Stan Jasper prompted. Dale pointed blindly toward a photo in the glossy brochure before him, and Susannah nodded, signifying that his random choice was a suitable one.

  Dale had helped to plan one funeral before, his mother’s eight years ago, but he found he had no memory of it. Even if he did, he couldn’t see how it would help get him through this. The cliché held: Burying a parent was part of the natural order. Burying a child was not. His only child. Now he got it, the old saying about the monarchy, an heir and a spare. The parents of only children had forgone the spare, which mattered not as an issue of primogeniture but as one of emotional safe harbor. If you had only one, you could lose everything.

  Chloe had wanted a second child, but Dale could never see the point and had been secretly pleased when she couldn’t conceive again. Kat was so perfect that he worried he would favor her over any sibling who followed, even a son. Besides, Chloe’s interest in conceiving had been as flighty and temporary as all her plans—going back to school, becoming a certified yoga instructor, starting her own aromatherapy business. In the last instance, she had actually commissioned a sign, a hand-painted piece of wood proclaiming JUST GOOD SCENTS. The sign had cost four hundred dollars and was still, as far as Dale knew, tucked somewhere in the overstuffed garage, probably between Chloe’s kiln and Chloe’s skis.

  “We aren’t as familiar with the, uh, liturgy as we should be,” Susannah was telling Stan Jasper. “And we don’t have a pastor, not really. But we would like the service to be, well, original. That is, it should be specific to Kat. Would it be appropriate, say, to use one of her favorite poems?”

  “That would be utterly appropriate,” Stan said in his professionally assuring tones.

  “ ‘Dover Beach,’” Dale said.

  “Sweetie?” Susannah squeezed his fist again.

  “She was rehearsing a poem called ‘Dover Beach,’ or a piece of it, for the graduation ceremony. ‘We are alone as if…’ something, something. I remember something about ignorant armies. She picked it out herself.”

  “A poem would be nice,” Stan said carefully. “Although that one sounds a little—well, we don’t have to work out all the details right now.”

  “Still, we’d like to make as much headway as possible on the arrangements,” Susannah said. “And Mrs. Hartigan may have some thoughts.”

  “Will she be calling me?”

  “Perhaps,” Susannah said in the tight, careful voice she used whenever the subject of Chloe Hartigan came up in any context. “Dale went out to see her this morning, but she didn’t feel up to coming today.”

  That was one way to explain it, Dale thought. Upon hearing that he wanted an Episcopalian priest to officiate, Chloe had pitched a fit and then pitched a book at Dale’s head. A thin book, to be sure, The Prayer of Jabez, but it had
smarted a little. She had thrown a book at his head and called him a hypocrite and a stupid cunt, and he was still puzzling over both charges. The latter was a word Chloe had never used, even in her most Tourette-like rages. Had she been so upset that she had garbled her insult, saying “You stupid cunt” as opposed to “You and your stupid cunt”? He wondered if other families would tell Stan Jasper all of this, pour their hearts out. Or perhaps death, the ultimate bodily function, made people overly decorous and circumspect. Right now, for example, he knew he felt some odd need for the undertaker’s approval.

  Yet here was a guy who was going to touch Dale’s dead daughter, who was going to oversee her final choice of dress, arrange her hair, supervise her makeup, pump her full of formaldehyde, or whatever it was these guys did. He’s going to see my daughter naked, Dale thought, and no man ever had. At least he was pretty sure that Kat was still a virgin, despite dating that college boy, Peter Lasko, a few summers back. Dale had disliked that guy from the moment he met him. There had been something predatory about him, swooping in to pluck Kat, then newly hatched from her baby fat. A nineteen-year-old college boy going after a girl who had just finished her first year of high school. He was slick, an opportunist. He had wanted to be an actor, for God’s sake, although Dale was pretty sure his greatest role was the nice-boy act he put on for Chloe, who ate it up sideways with a spoon. She had no judgment about people.

  Then again, she always swore she liked Susannah.

  “She’s so accomplished,” was what Chloe said. “She’s a great role model for Kat.” Dale kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, the insult that he was sure Chloe was holding back for the perfect moment. But she remained sweet as pie to Susannah. It was her way of underscoring the fact that Dale was her only enemy. Dale was the person she blamed for everything that had gone wrong in her life, even things that happened long before he showed up. Why? Their marriage counselor had spoken of the concept of shame, of the way that certain experiences left holes in people. Chloe had never gotten over her haphazard family, or the fact that her dreams were squashed so young. (Yet Dale’s father was as big a piece of work as anyone, and Chloe always mocked him for bringing that up.) Her ob/gyn had cited postpartum depression, but did postpartum last for fourteen years?

  After the tumultuous years with Chloe, it had been hard at first to trust Susannah’s sweet, steady competence. “She has the best disposition,” Dale told his father when they started dating. “I hate to tell you this,” his father said, clearly not hating it, “but you said the same thing about the other one once upon a time.” Now, four years in, Dale had been proven right about Susannah. Always calm, always capable, never letting her emotions get the better of her. These were the things he loved about her.

  Until right now, when he kind of hated her for these very qualities. How could she be so collected, so efficient? Maybe Susannah had never really cared for Kat. Maybe she was secretly glad Kat was dead. Now she would want a baby, and Dale had been very clear on that score—no more children. He was done.

  “We expect a lot of people,” she was telling Stan Jasper in her lovely low voice, a voice that Dale had never heard raised except in joy or excitement. “Kat was a very popular girl, and…the nature of what happened makes this something of a public event. Yet we still want the service to be intimate, to reflect her.”

  “I’d recommend a private service,” Jasper said, “followed by a more, ah, inclusive burial service. Or even a memorial service at the school, which would allow her little friends to grieve, without putting too much of a burden on you.”

  Oh, he was such a shit. Susannah had loved Kat, too. There had been tensions, of course. It wasn’t easy for Kat to have a de facto stepmother who was only fourteen years older, even if Susannah was far more mature than Chloe would ever be. But Susannah’s cool competence, so comforting in other aspects of their life together, was also present in her relationship with Kat, and that had worried Dale a little. She admired Kat, complimented her, had even been instrumental in helping Kat get into Stanford, but she was unusually insistent, in Dale’s opinion, about not wanting to replace Chloe in Kat’s heart. One could argue that Susannah was being sensitive and responsible in not pressing for too intimate a connection to Kat. Yet Susannah’s reserve had always bothered Dale.

  Then he remembered Susannah yesterday afternoon, crying wholeheartedly upon hearing the news, holding him as tightly as anyone had ever held him—outside Chloe, who used to grab on to Dale so hard when she was angry or sad that it had frightened him a little. Susannah felt this as deeply as she could—but she could never feel what he did. The irony of Kat’s death, if such a thing could ever be termed ironic in any aspect, was that the only person on earth who understood what Dale was going through was a person who was determined to hate him. That was Chloe’s religion, the Gospel According to Hating Dale. What did it matter if an Episcopal priest or Chloe’s Buddhist-monk friend officiated at the service? The only person who could please Chloe was someone who got up and reminded the mourners that everything was Dale Hartigan’s fault, forever and ever, amen.

  “You haven’t been in an Episcopal church since we got married,” Chloe complained. “And that was only for your parents.” So hypocrite, okay. But why a cunt? Wait—now he got it. She had been going for his soft spot, mocking his masculinity. A real man would be able to take care of his daughter, Chloe was saying. Never mind that she was the custodial parent, that if anyone could have seen this storm gathering on the horizon, it should have been Chloe, who was part of Kat’s life on a daily basis. She knew about this strange feud with Perri, as it turned out, but had written it off as a rite of passage. “All girls fight,” she had said. No, this, too, had to be Dale’s fault somehow.

  She hadn’t thrown The Prayer of Jabez at him because of the Episcopalian minister. That was a lie, the only thing he could think of to explain the red mark on his forehead to Susannah. Chloe had tossed the book at him because Dale had agreed that Kat’s death was all his fault—but not for reasons that Chloe wanted to hear.

  “If I hadn’t let you pack my bags and put me out that first time,” he had told her. “If I hadn’t made the mistake of telling the truth, in hopes of making a truly fresh start with you. If I hadn’t accepted your edict that our marriage was over, if I had parked myself on our front porch and refused to move until you heard me out—”

  “You stupid cunt,” she had said. “You think everything is about you.”

  And the book had landed before Dale could finish his thought, which was simply, If I hadn’t left, I would have been here to protect her.

  11

  Josie was alone with her mother when the two strange men appeared in her hospital room. She could not have told you who they were, but she quickly understood who they were not. Not doctors, because they wore suits and ties and hovered in the doorway waiting to be invited in, while the hospital staff always sailed right in. Not from school. Not friends’ fathers, because she didn’t recognize them, and one looked a little too young to be anyone’s dad. Not her parents’ friends, because—But she had no words for this knowledge, just an awareness that these were not men from her parents’ jobs. Something about their suits, their ties, even their hair, told her they were not part of her family’s world.

  “Mrs. Patel?” the older one asked. Josie, who had endured a lifetime of such puzzled looks, knew he was trying to connect the blond woman in the chair to the dark girl in the bed. He also didn’t say their name quite right. It was more “Pattle” than “Pa-tel” in this stranger’s mouth. If her father were here, there would be no confusion. But Josie’s father was in the parking lot, arguing with his insurance company on his cell phone. Josie was to be discharged today, but with television trucks cruising the cul-de-sac in front of their house, her parents felt it would be easier to safeguard her privacy at the hospital. Her father had assured Josie it was just a matter of getting the right person on the phone, but there were apparently many, many wrong people en route to that righ
t one, bored men and women in windowless cubicles in distant states who did not understand the magnitude of what had happened at Glendale, or Josie’s singular role in it.

  “Mrs. Patel?” The older man had to repeat himself, for Josie’s mother was just looking at him over her magazine, fatigue making her punchy. She had gone home last night to take care of Matt and Tim, but she told Josie she hadn’t slept.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Sergeant Harold Lenhardt from Baltimore County Police, and this is my partner, Detective Kevin Infante. We’d like to ask your daughter, Josephine, some questions if she’s up to it.”

  “Josie,” said Josie, shocked to hear the old-fashioned name that her family had never used. Then she wished she had not responded so quickly and forcefully. She should have pretended to be tired, or spacey from the painkillers. Then these men would have to go away. Why did she have to talk to police? Wasn’t it obvious what had happened?

  “I suppose—” her mother began.

  “It’s important,” the older man said, the one who had identified himself as a sergeant. “It’s best to talk to witnesses when their memories are freshest. Every day that goes by, things will be harder to recall. Especially in a trauma like this, where a healthy brain will be working to suppress memories.”

  “Josie’s brain is very healthy,” her mother said, clearly not hearing all the words.

  “Of course she is. It’s just, from our point of view, it’s never too early to start preparing for a trial.”

  “There’s going to be a trial?” Josie asked.

  “Maybe,” Lenhardt said. “If…well, for now, we have to assume that someone will be charged. That could change.”