According to Dateline, all they found around the pool was a confusing mess. Luminol gives a bright, flashing reaction to bleach—different from its dim, glowing reaction to the iron in blood—and areas of the pool deck had recently been bleached. Or was that just chlorine from the pool? I never fully understood. There was evidence of blood, too, on the cement, but whether it came before or after the bleach, whether it came from moving Thalia’s body, was unclear.
It wasn’t long, though, before the police were out of the building. Spring sports needed to start up, the alumni were descending, and I’m sure Dr. Calahan was under a world of pressure to get all yellow tape and swarming investigators off campus, to get the garbage bags off the windows, lest the volleyball games look like they were happening in a fallout shelter. I remember the police spending time in Thalia’s room in Singer-Baird; we were told to steer clear.
“The police have kept so much to themselves,” Dane Rubra says. “This makes sense when an investigation is ongoing. They hold something back so when the murderer slips up and gives a detail the public doesn’t know, BAM!”—he pounds his fist into his hand—“they got him. Right? But they’ve allegedly already got their guy. So okay, why no photos from the pool scene? Why no video surveillance from the campus entrance? Why no photos of the back door?” It’s hard to tell if his eyes are watering from the wind howling around him or if they’re always like this. “This school has the New Hampshire DA around their little finger. You know how many lawsuits they get dropped? You know how many sexual abuse cases they’ve covered up?”
Dane believes the door wasn’t alarmed in 1995, that there was an exterior handle and lock, and anyone with the right key could have gotten in. “Someone like Robbie Serenho,” he says. “Someone like Puja Sharma.”
He says, “Campus Security opened that door for the EMTs. No one, in their police interviews about that day, recollects a door alarm sounding. Did they disarm it before opening the door? That would be a poor use of their time. Or was it never alarmed to begin with?”
He looks straight at the camera. “We’ve scoured every yearbook, but we aren’t done trying. If you have photos of the back of Mardis Gymnasium on the Granby campus from any year in the 1990s, contact me. Don’t comment below, contact me directly.” His email crosses the screen. “We can arrange for compensation, we can arrange for anonymity.” His nostrils flare.
He seems exhilarated being this close to everything. He’s blinking too fast. He keeps wetting his thin lips.
36
Fran and I talked my housemate, Oliver, into coming to the party that night, where he was instantly surrounded by young female faculty desperate for fresh meat.
The party, to my delight, was in the Singer-Baird apartment where Fran had grown up—the floor plan the same, but the kitchen new and the vibe so much cleaner than the colorful Hoffnung chaos. I couldn’t even make out whose place it was now; everyone navigated the kitchen like they owned it, and Fran casually adjusted the thermostat herself. Several small children ran through in dress-up-box splendor, but there was no telling who belonged to what adult or what children belonged to the apartment.
I grabbed a single beer, which I planned to nurse all night. I didn’t want to drink too much two nights in a row—plus I was seeing Yahav the next day, assuming he didn’t chicken out, and I wanted not to look like death.
（In Concord, as we began the party, Omar was starting to feel a little better, and the external bleeding had mostly stopped—although he was still cold, dizzy. He couldn’t eat and his abdomen felt swollen. The nurse who’d checked his wound that afternoon had slipped him two extra ibuprofen, told him to save them for when it was important. He swallowed them that evening, and they suppressed what would still have been a low-grade fever.）
Around the kitchen island, people discussed the news story. （“It’s a second violation, what they’re putting her through.” “I literally wanted to barf. No really, I went to the bathroom and tried to barf.”）
There was a staggering amount of drinking, by any measure. No one had to drive home, no one had work in the morning, and anyone whose kids were home had a student babysitter who could stay late. A room is never drunker than when you’re the sober person.
A woman who’d dropped a wine bottle earlier kept checking that we were wearing shoes.
Mr. Levin was there, and I told him the story of the time I won trivia for my team by knowing Pythagoras was a vegetarian, thanks to him. I said, “I’d buy you a drink, but I wouldn’t know who to pay.”
A sweet and flamboyant young English teacher named Ian convinced me to read more Shirley Jackson, but even after I was thoroughly convinced, he kept right on convincing me, splashing gin and tonic on my sweater. I typed my email into his phone so he could check in a month that I’d done my homework.
A basketball game was ending—some purple blurs versus some yellow blurs—and the party crowd seemed split in their fandom. More people gathered, more drunkenly, around the TV as the clock ticked down.
Two women whose names I’d missed—one was a lawyer, so I assumed they were faculty spouses—were onto the news story again. Mr. Levin joined them, and so did a man with a baby in his arms. The man said, “Did you see they have him on suicide watch?”
Mr. Levin said, “Well, sure. They’d better make sure no one murders him, either. Before they can get his testimony.”
The lawyer said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing him murdered. Sorry, but we’re talking about decades of—did you see how he controlled her credit cards?”
The second woman said, “You know when they cover the body like that it’s personal; they’re showing shame.”
Priscilla Mancio sidled into the conversation. She said, “It’s a miracle she survived.”
Ian, the English teacher, said, “That thing with the sign language? On the security camera? Like, she’s sitting there spelling out the letters of the dude’s name. That’s—she knows she’s gonna die, and she has the wits to do that?”
The lawyer said, “It’s always the husband.”
“DC is like that,” Mr. Levin said. “They go through interns like tissues.”
“And the children! I wonder what will happen to the children.”
“I just can’t stop thinking about the mother. She locks the daughter out of the house, and how on earth would she know there was a predator? The world is usually safe. We can’t forget that.”
“Those VHS tapes were in the floorboards for what, twenty years?”
Priscilla Mancio said, “I just don’t understand how the girlfriend went along with it. She’s as bad as him, if you ask me.”
“The thing about Hollywood,” Mr. Levin said, “is they’ll cover up anything in the name of money. Well, Bodie, you would know. Have you been following the case?”
I didn’t manage an answer. The basketball fans were getting loud; and here came someone with, improbably, a tray of pudding shots, and we needed to help clear the counter.
The second woman turned out not to be a faculty spouse but an art history teacher. On impulse, I asked, “Did you see that thing about Jerome Wager?”