Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

Josie, however, didn’t mind Lenhardt at all. Her only grudge against him was that he had provoked her into ruining her best sandals, the very ones that she had been trying to save. She had given them to Binnie, who arranged for them to follow the cell phones-into the Muhlys’ compost pile.

“We’re releasing all the evidence, since the grand jury wrapped up,” he told Josie. They were in her room, at her insistence. Even when her parents were at work, she preferred the privacy of her room. “We don’t really have much of your stuff, but I thought you might want to see this.”

He handed her a piece of paper with just two lines: “I ask only that the truth be told. Love, Perri.” The word “only” had been crossed out. Josie studied the familiar handwriting, unsure what was expected of her.

“What does this have to do with me?”

“Well, nothing.” The sergeant perched on Josie’s bed almost gingerly, as if he feared mussing the spread. “We didn’t even present it to the grand jury, because it didn’t seem to have any bearing on anything. The thing is, Josie-why would Perri write something like this? It was addressed to Kat Hartigan, mailed that morning. But what was the point? She was already planning on confronting her at school. Why mail the letter?”

“Could there be more to it, another page?” Josie asked. “It seems kind of…truncated for Perri.”

“If there was another page, it never surfaced. Her parents looked, even checked her computer, but as you can see, she wrote it by hand, and there’s no evidence of an earlier draft. And, well, I can’t help wondering-what if this was a suicide note? What if Perri really did mean to kill herself and sent this just to torment Kat?”

“No.” Josie shook her head, resolute. “You’d have to know her. To have known her.” She was still having trouble with tenses.

“I’ll have to take your word for it. I’m just glad that Binnie Snyder’s testimony cleared up that locked stall door. That never did stop nagging at me.”

“Well, she was hiding, right? She was standing on the toilet and waiting for us to come in, because Perri had promised her she was going to get Kat to confess.”

“Right, but she unlocked the door to her stall. And I understand why the out-of-order stall was locked. It was the other one, the one that wasn’t in use-the one where I found-Anyway, I never did understand that. Binnie explained that Perri told her to lock all three and hide in one, so that if anyone came in, they would end up leaving.”

“See, that was Perri,” Josie said. “She had it all planned out.”

“Yeah, Binnie went into the first stall and…um, used it but realized she didn’t have a good sight line from there. So she crawled under the partitions to the one on the end. And when you and Kat came in, she text-messaged Perri. That’s why she had to take the phones. She didn’t know we could have gotten the transcripts, in time.”

Josie shook her head. Poor clumsy Binnie, forever so smart about big things, forever so dumb about small ones.

“Why did Binnie and I even have to go talk to those people, the grand jury?” Josie’s parents had tried to conceal their worry from her, but she knew they were upset about the legal fees that Ms. Bustamante had charged them.

“When someone is shot, no matter what the circumstances, it’s up to a jury to decide if he-she-should face any charges. Now it’s official-what happened was an accident.”

“Binnie’s father shot Peter on purpose, though. Right? He didn’t know it was Peter, but he aimed his gun right at him.”

“He’ll be no-billed, too.” Josie frowned, not sure what bills had to do with any of this, and the sergeant clarified: “It’s a way of saying no indictment will be handed up. It was unfortunate, what he did, and a young man died. But there’s a tradition in the law of letting people protect their property from intruders. And Mr. Snyder was a little jumpy, understandably. Given the events of a year ago.”

The events of a year ago . What a lovely, say-nothing phrase, Josie thought. She could use some phrases like that. The events of a year ago. The accident with my foot. Just a little rumpus, as Perri herself might have said.

“Anyway, you can have it if you like. The Hartigans and the Kahns don’t want it, I can tell you that much.”

“I’m not sure what I would do with it,” Josie said, even as she refolded it into thirds and slid it beneath her keyboard.

“They were lucky, those girls,” the sergeant said, looking over her shoulder at Josie’s screen saver, a photograph of the three on the night of their junior prom. “To have you as a friend.”

“I always thought I was the lucky one.”

“You’re that, too, Josie. You’re alive, and you’ve got your whole future ahead of you.”

“Yeah, well, where else would your future be?”

The sergeant laughed and wished her well. His laughter pleased Josie, even though she had not been trying to make a joke. There had been so little laughter in her house this summer. Josie had found herself in the strange position of consoling her parents, repeatedly assuring them that nothing was their fault, and it wasn’t. The thing that seemed to bother them the most was her blurted revelation that she didn’t regret shooting herself. Did she not want to go to College Park? Did she subconsciously resent the fact that she needed an athletic scholarship?

Actually, Josie was quite keen to go away to school. College Park ’s hugeness, which had once frightened her a little, was now its chief asset. If anyone there remembered the shooting in Glendale, all Josie had to say was that it was tragic and she knew the girls.

Luckily, the latest doctor’s visit had been promising, with all signs pointing to a full recovery. Her right foot still cramped suddenly sometimes, as if it, too, had vivid memories from that day. Her foot had needed some coaxing to touch the ground again, once the wound was healed and she stopped using crutches. For a couple of days, it curled against her calf, shy and tentative. But eventually it found the floor.

Her computer trilled, probably her mother checking in from work. No one else IM’ed her much, although Binnie had touched base off and on until the grand jury was through with them, and Dannon Estes e-mailed from time to time, wanting to rehash memories of Perri. But Dannon’s Perri wasn’t really Josie’s Perri, and she didn’t know how to explain that to Dannon.

Kat was here, too, at least in name. She lived on in Josie’s IM box, although the icon showed that she was never signed on. Josie kept waiting for the Hartigans to realize that Kat’s screen name remained active, but so far no one had seemed to notice. Every day Josie clicked on Kat’s name, just to see the self-deprecating away message Kat had left there two months ago: “Trying to graduate. Be back in cap and gown.” Josie supposed she should tell Mrs. Hartigan about the lingering account. Her own parents would be horrified by such waste, paying for a service no one was using. But it was comforting, seeing Kat’s message, to think of her as merely being away, not gone. And now she had this little scrap of Perri, too, this last fragment.

It did not bother Josie that Perri hadn’t tried to write her. She was grateful, in fact. She understood now that Perri had been trying, in her own fashion, to keep the three of them intact. Kat would have been devastated if she thought the two of them had joined forces to confront her, or ganged up on her. In her own inimitable way, Perri was trying to put the three of them back together again.

There had to be more to that letter. How Josie wished she could read it.

Dear Kat: