I always wondered if her marrying him was a survival tactic. Or if she’d coldly seduced him into staying, imagining good uses for his money.
Alyssa confirmed that the version they tell now at matriculation is more comprehensive, acknowledging both the displaced Abenaki and Arsareth’s onetime slaver status. Even on the school website, under the History tab, they now own the fact that although the first Black student graduated in 1860, the second wasn’t admitted till 1923. Right below this is the detail that the school held a quota on Jewish students from 1930 to 1950.
Arriving in ’91, I’d considered Granby tremendously diverse if only because Broad Run, Indiana, was even less so. At home I’d known two Asian kids, both adopted by white families. I knew one family from Mexico. I watched The Cosby Show. And that was it. Suddenly at Granby I had classmates from India, Pakistan, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Singapore. I was rooming with Diamond Bailey, from Kingston, Jamaica. But in retrospect, this was a small percentage of the student body. The two dozen or so Black students tended to sit together in the dining hall, at those long tables by the cereal station. I saw it only as cliquish; I failed to consider to what extent it might have been an act of self-preservation.
By 2018, there were far more students of color, and the kids mixed together on campus as if they’d been posed that way for the catalogue.
Which isn’t to say things were perfect. Jamila had statistics for her project on the ways financial aid applications were prohibitive for the students most in need of assistance. The retention rate for non-Asian students of color was still lower than for white kids. She had sharp things to say about the difference between equity and equality.
But I was talking about Arsareth Gage Granby, and what I was going to say was that I made the mistake in class that Friday of mentioning the séances we used to have for her—and then everyone, particularly Alder, wanted Alyssa to hold one for her podcast, and I agreed that if they could get permission to use Gage House some night, I’d supervise and we could record. I told them this would be an exercise in making content out of nothing—a useful skill.
“So it never worked?” Jamila asked.
“We made stuff happen, like someone would get their friend to throw a pebble at the window. I don’t think that counts.”
What I didn’t say was that we held these séances without permission. We’d sneak out of the dorms, confident that the building housing Alumni and External Relations would be empty in the middle of the night. It was not the tiny cottage Arsareth had first lived in, but the nice stone edifice Samuel Granby had built her, parlors and bedrooms now converted to offices.
How alarming, in retrospect, that the various keys Fran was able to filch from her parents’ key chains opened nearly every door on campus. One of those keys opened every dorm room. Fran would never take the dorm door one, except a couple of times to let me back into my room when I’d locked myself out—but she’d often borrow the one that opened the academic buildings, and eventually she managed to get it copied at the Aubuchon Hardware in Kern, despite the key saying do not duplicate right across the top.
I’d always assumed that various students, in their interviews with investigators in the spring of ’95, must have mentioned the master keys floating around, the ones passed from graduates to younger friends, sibling to sibling. I didn’t mention it myself, because they didn’t ask and because what was I going to do, point a finger at Fran, of all people? Now I wondered: What if no one said anything? But surely the police understood that kids had ways of getting around locked doors.
The students of 2018 were ready to go through more legitimate channels: Alyssa used our midmorning break to email the dean’s office, and by the end of class we had permission and a plan. I’d be at the faculty Midi-Mini party that evening, so we’d do this all late Saturday night. Either Yahav would be gone by then, or he’d have agreed to stay over, would wait for me in my bed. The kids and I arranged to meet outside Gage House, and I gave them my number to text if anything came up.
（I knew I’d regret that, but not how quickly: I was still on my way out of Quincy when Alder sent a GIF of a woman passing her hand over a crystal ball, and the message It’s Alder P! Okay if I bring my tarot?）
33
Walking to the dining hall for lunch, I googled Serenho + Portuguese. It was indeed a Portuguese name. Most of my knowledge of Portuguese New Englanders came from the working-class kids in Mystic Pizza—but surely some New England Portuguese families were well-off. Still, Priscilla had sounded so certain. Working class, she’d said. Every article about Thalia’s death had fixated on how Thalia and Robbie were the perfect prep school couple, moneyed and talented and privileged, and Omar Evans—no mention of his mother working at Dartmouth—was this outsider. That made the best narrative.
It was unlikely that there was a middle ground, that Robbie was neither rich nor poor. Even in 2018, families either paid full tuition or were on nearly complete financial aid. The only middle-class kids were still faculty brats like Fran.
In the salad bar line, I googled Serenho + electrician + Vermont and found an obituary for a Roberto Ademar Serenho who’d died in 2009, survived by a son of the same name who was clearly Robbie. Roberto Sr. had worked enough places—a motor rewind shop, whatever that was, an electric supply store, a farm machinery company—that he couldn’t have risen far in the ranks anywhere. He was a member of the Lions and the Elks, a volunteer firefighter. He was beloved for his pancakes and for plowing neighbors’ driveways with his tractor.
I sat at an empty table and kept googling, now on my laptop, telling myself I’d stop when someone joined me. But no one showed up.
According to Facebook, Robbie Serenho was a financial planner in Connecticut. A profile picture last updated three years back showed him with his wife, two young sons, a toddler daughter—the whole family dressed in light blue, posed on a beach. It looked like he’d done well for himself. A bit of a paunch, balding, gray at the temples. His wife wasn’t beautiful, at least not compared to Thalia, but she had the superficial markers of attractiveness: toned arms, long, bleached hair, unrealistic eyelashes.
Robbie didn’t have many public posts. Old fundraising pages for a condition a friend’s child died of, some YouTube links. A wedding picture posted on his anniversary. There was his daughter, older than in the profile photo, running toward the Christmas tree, pure joy, her nightgown blurring. There he was doing yoga with his wife. On the anniversary of Thalia’s death last year, a link to Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah”—but that could have been coincidence. There he was sitting by a river; he wore an I’m With Her T-shirt and so did his son. Here was an article about Universal Basic Income. Three years ago, he’d attended a fundraiser for a literacy center in Hartford. I was taken aback by how much like my kind of person he seemed.
I’d already seen most of this in that first long Google dive. I’d started by looking up Camelot cast members, then found only a few adjacent folks before Jerome stopped me. Robin Facer, who played Lady Catherine, and who’d rowed five seat, was competing in Ironman races. Mrs. Ross, who lived in Wyoming now, was active on Facebook and friends with a lot of Granby alumni. Max Krammen, who’d played both Merlin and King Pellinore and was always stoned, was now an employment attorney in LA with a respectable haircut and everything. Beth Docherty seemed wealthy and bored, a stay-at-home mom using social media to sell essential oils for money that, from the look of her house, she didn’t need.