Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

Could it be a boy? Neither girl had anyone steady as of late. Perri, solo since her on-again, off-again boyfriend graduated the year before, had insisted on taking Dannon as her date to the senior prom, prompting much nasty talk. Kat had attended the dance with a soccer player, a handsome, loose-limbed boy named Bradley, but it appeared to be more a relationship of convenience, like two film stars walking the red carpet at a premiere. Kat and Bradley, both outstanding students, needed suitable partners to navigate the final rites of high school. There hadn’t been a trace of a real romance there.

Besides, Perri truly had no use for jocks like Bradley. While some of the drama-geek girls had chosen that path as a consolation prize, Perri’s indifference to Glendale ’s popular crowd had always seemed sincere. Her friendship with Kat and Josie guaranteed her acceptance by the jocks and the preps, but she had never pursued those kids. Her humor was a bit waspish, and Alexa had encouraged her to curb the more scathing comments, a concept that Perri had embraced this past year with her usual overkill. Once she stopped being so vicious about the high school’s unfortunates, she vented her spleen on those who were simply doing what she had once done-coining cruel nicknames, making devastating critiques of wardrobes and bodies. And where she had once been carefully neutral about the diva crowd, perhaps in deference to Kat’s friends within it, she had become openly disdainful the past year, which had only encouraged their enmity and gossip.

But beneath her lippy bravado, Perri yearned for adult approval. Her exhausting, articulate arguments on every topic under the sun were not meant to challenge the status quo, simply to persuade the grown-ups around her that she was an original thinker. Tightly wound, yes. Almost too empathic, with an easily aroused compassion for anything and everyone. Yet never violent, Alexa thought, although Perri had been increasingly conflicted about the ethical dilemmas posed by those who were. Events in the Middle East had been particularly hard for Perri to synthesize over the past year. Was war ever right? Did violence ever accomplish anything? Alexa had watched Perri struggle with these ideas-her heart yearning to say no, even as her head was insisting that pacifism had a spotty historical track record.

The phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, but no one picked up. Anita Whitehead had called in sick this morning, claiming she had a doctor’s note to stay home indefinitely. The events of the past few days had been much too traumatic for her. (As if Anita were the only one who had suffered, as if one needed Anita’s hypersensitive hypochondria to be affected by what had happened.) Where were the other secretaries? Where was Barbara? Probably in the seventy-fifth meeting of the morning. It would be wrong to say that Barbara was enjoying herself, but she had an unusually high color, as if flushed with usefulness in the wake of the tragedy.

There was a knock on the dressing room door, and the unexpected sound made Alexa jump. Everyone was on edge today, naturally. The door was pushed open before she could issue an invitation, and a round-faced man, stocky in a comfortable way, came into the dressing room.

“Ms. Cunningham? I’m Sergeant Lenhardt, Baltimore County Homicide. Mrs. Paulson said I could find you here.”

“You were here on Friday, right?” Alexa was proud of her memory for faces. “Don’t you have a partner?”

He had a slow, lazy smile. “Yeah, ladies always remember Kevin.”

“No, that’s not what I meant at all.” She resented the suggestion that she had been focused on something as trivial as a man’s looks in the midst of a crisis. Besides, the younger cop had been too handsome, the kind of cocky stud that Alexa avoided on principle. “It’s just that I thought you guys always worked in tandem.”

“We do tend to travel in pairs,” the sergeant conceded. “But it happens that the high school is more or less en route for me. I live up near the state line. Detective Infante has to come from the other direction, so he’s going to meet me here for the assembly.”

“You planned on attending?”

He eased himself into the chair one over from Alexa’s at the long counter beneath the makeup mirrors and rotated on its wheeled base, taking in the room. “We didn’t have anything like this at my high school. When we did shows, we had to get dressed in the wings or the boys’ lavatory.”

“Oh, it’s pretty standard stuff for schools these days,” Alexa said, wondering at her own reflexive defense of Glendale. Among her friends she was quick to mock how overdone the school was in the physical details, how lacking in basic amenities-such as space for its faculty. “But the auditorium is large, large enough to hold the entire student body. Feel free to sit in the back or to watch from the wings.”

“Actually, I was hoping I might speak. Me, or my partner, if you think the kids would be more responsive to him.”

“He’s not my type,” Alexa shot back, then blushed.

“I was just thinking, him being so handsome and all. And he’s younger, you know, closer to their age.” Again that slow easy smile. “But I’m happy to hear he’s not everyone’s type. We go to lunch, the waitresses swirl around him, offering seconds and specials and thises and thats. Me, I sit there pointing at my empty coffee cup until someone takes pity on me and pours me a refill. Even then it turns out to be decaf.”

Alexa doubted this. The sergeant clearly had his own kind of charm, and he wasn’t unaware of it. She could imagine him as a shopping-mall Santa, a good one, who never made children cry. Not that he was fat, although his middle was a little bulky. There was just something in his demeanor that made it seem possible, attractive even, to whisper in his ear.

“I don’t understand why either of you wants to address the students.”

“The usual stuff. Remind kids that they should come forward with anything they know. With the promise of confidentiality, of course.”

“Are you hoping to find out something about the motive?”

“Not really.”

“Excuse me?”

“Motives can be interesting. And when you don’t have anything, they’re a good place to start. But they’re not how you close cases, much less get convictions. I prefer eyewitnesses, hard physical evidence.”

“It’s pretty obvious what happened, right? Perri killed Kat, shot Josie, and then tried to kill herself.”

“That’s what everyone seems to think, yes.”

“But you don’t?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Then what do you think the students could tell you, if you already have an eyewitness and physical evidence?”

“I’m an open-minded guy. That’s my stock-in-trade.”

He rested one arm on the counter, his gaze unnervingly steady. Alexa’s eyes slid away, toward her own reflection. At twenty-eight she still looked twenty-two, although she worried about the way she might age. Time was unkind to blue-eyed blondes, judging by her mother. Were you always pretty? the girls asked, wistful and resentful at the same time, as if someone who was pretty in high school could never understand them. Not in my head, Alexa replied, and it was a good answer, true even. In high school she had not understood how blessed she was. No girl did.

“It’s a bad idea,” she said.

“Being open-minded?”

“Talking to the kids at the assembly.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. One is that the anti-snitch culture is alive and well in high school. Once you ask kids to talk to you, some will feel pressure to do anything but . The kids who do come forward will most likely be the drama queens and kings, desperate for attention. Or looking for a reason to get out of class for an hour.”