Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

He let the girl go, allowed her all the extraneous details she thought so essential to her story. It seemed only fair, his having pressured her for the past week, to let her speak to her heart’s content.

It was past midnightwhen Peter, at Eve’s instruction, stopped at the end of her father’s outlaw driveway, the one he had created at the edge of Sweetwater Estates.

“I was going to stay out all night,” she said. “But there doesn’t seem to be any point.”

Was she still leaving the door open for some kind of sexual encounter? Peter was tempted. But he also wanted to go home, call Mr. Hartigan, tell him what he had learned.

“You know what? Nobody ever does. They say they’re going to, but even the seniors are home by two. It’s just so boring around here. Now, New York – New York is a city where you can do some damage, no matter what time it is.”

“I’d like to go there,” she said. “Not to do tourist stuff. But, like, go to clubs.”

“It’s a great city.”

“Can I call you, if I go there?”

No . “Sure.” He wasn’t going to be there anyway. He and his agent had mapped out the strategy. After Susquehanna Falls wrapped, he was going to go to L.A. for pilot season and meet a lot of people but not commit to anything until they had a sense of what the gathering buzz was on the movie.

“Cool,” she said.

“Is that where Binnie lives?” he asked, pointing to the dark house in the distance, a house where no lights burned, not even a porch light.

“Yes, but you promised -” Her voice was shrill, almost hysterical.

“I know. I promised I wouldn’t tell. And I won’t.” Actually, he had been very precise, promising Eve he wouldn’t tell the police . “But you should think about it, Eve. If she’s telling you the truth, she doesn’t have any reason not to come forward.”

“Binnie always tells the truth-which is more than I can say for Kat and her friends.”

“Okay, okay.” He was going for a big-brother vibe with her. Should he have fucked her? No, discretion really was the better part of valor sometimes. “Just think about it. Promise me? Think about it. Turn in those cell phones, the ones you said you hid in the compost pile. You can do it anonymously, I’m sure. It could be bad for you if it’s not as Binnie said. You could be an accessory.”

“I’ll think about it.”

He wasn’t fooled. She would think about it, but she wouldn’t do anything. That was okay. He didn’t need her to, and he wouldn’t tell anyone of her involvement. All Dale Hartigan needed to know was that a fourth girl was there, a girl who could explain, once and for all, what had happened.

It was so dark here, with no streetlamps, yet Eve’s eyes were bright, wet, and hungry. She seemed to want a kiss, so he gave her one. He was surprised at how tentative she was, how reserved, as if she had never been kissed.

He watched her run lightly up the drive, sandals in hand. She wasn’t going to talk to her friend, and even if she did, she would be tentative, unwilling to press for the right thing. The loyalties, whatever the reason, ran too deep. Maybe it was the legacy of being redneck girls, growing up among these pricey houses. Or maybe it was some kind of deeper girl shit, the kind he never got.

What if he went to the Snyders’ house, just knocked on the door, told them what he knew? Okay, so it was after midnight and her parents would probably freak. But if he just walked over there, announced himself, and told them what he knew and that their daughter had to come forward, he could put the whole thing to bed tonight and no one, not even Dale Hartigan, would be able to deny his part in it.

The road was rougher, far rougher than he realized, and he heard his mother’s car make an ominous noise. Shit, something beneath the car had popped a bolt and was now dragging, making a huge amount of noise. He hadn’t felt drunk, but now he realized that the beer was catching up with him. He was definitely buzzed. This was stupid. This was way stupid.

He pulled up to the gated driveway, intent on backing out and turning around, but it was dark and he heard a hard thunk. Shit, he had hit the fence or something, but when he tried to turn the car on again, nothing happened. His mom’s distributor cap might have come loose on that road. He was going to have to call in all his charm points when his mother saw what he had done to her Mazda.

He got out, trying to walk around the car to inspect the damage, but the car was angled weirdly, so he had to climb out the passenger side. Maybe he should raise the hood, check the distributor cap, then assess the damage to the rear end. He stumbled forward, falling to his knees. He hadn’t eaten enough today. That’s why the beer was making him light-headed. He had been drinking on an empty stomach.

“Who’s there?” The question came from a shape, a huge, dark shape, almost like a bear, although Peter knew that bears cannot speak. He froze, trying to think what he should say. In his mind he was invisible as long as he didn’t speak. He would just wait for the shape to go away and-

The pain seemed to come before the sound. Was that possible? Did sound travel slowly enough that the shotgun blast that tore through him really had a chance to announce itself? His middle seemed to be on fire, and Peter clutched himself as if he had a stomachache. His arms came away slick and red, his knees buckled beneath him. Was he fainting, or was he dying?

Now he was on the ground, and he suddenly felt cold, as cold as he ever had.

Not good, he thought. Definitely not good .

How far do sounds travelon a summer night? A shotgun, for example. Does the damp air slow it down, hold it close? Does it matter if those within its range recognize the sound for what it is or if they assume it’s something more familiar-a firecracker, a car backfiring? Those in the Sweetwater Estates certainly heard Cyrus Snyder’s shotgun, but it was only the sirens, then the whirring of another Shock Trauma helicopter over the valley, the second in a week, that alerted them to the fact that something had happened. In their pen, Claude and Billy nattered, and Eve’s mother poked Eve’s slumbering father. But Dale Hartigan, eight acres away, slept on.

How far does a girl’s voice travel? Josie Patel was barely audible to the five adults gathered around her in the Patels’ family room. The detectives kept glancing worriedly at the microcassette recorder, making sure that the voice-activated microphone was picking up her words. If Dale Hartigan had been in the next room, he might not have heard the girl’s voice. But he was in his old bed, asleep in his ex-wife’s arms.

Later, when he pieced together the events of that night, he would remember that dreamless sleep as a blessing of sorts. For while it could not be said that this June evening was the last happy night that Dale Hartigan would ever know, it was the last innocent sleep of his life. When he had passed out next to Chloe, he was a victim of circumstance, undeserving of his fate. He was still a man who believed he could afford to know the why of things, and that those explanations would then lead to solutions he could effect. He had gone to sleep feeling that his life was still open, that he was not as thoroughly destroyed as he feared.

By morning he would wake to a world where five young people’s deaths, including his daughter’s, had been traced back to him. Six, if one counted Peter Lasko, and Dale did. He had not meant any of this to happen. All he had wanted was the very best for his daughter. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?

But in the end it was Josie’s story, and Dale Hartigan never challenged her right to tell it, much less tried to contradict a word of it, unflattering and damaging as it was to him. Josie told it in her own ragged, discursive way, for there was no one else to shape her words. Not Perri, with her heightened sense of drama and narrative. Not Kat, with her tendency to edit out the problematic details, to gloss over anything unpleasant and unflattering. Not Eve, who had only Binnie’s version and one page of a letter. In the end it was Josie’s story, and she believed that every detail mattered-the cupcakes and the Ka-pe-jos, the jokes and the plays and the crushes.