Alder asked, “What time did Omar leave campus?”
“11:18,” Britt said. “Which lines up perfectly with her time of death, so that wasn’t good for him. He was speeding.”
“It was on Dateline,” Alyssa said.
I’d forgotten that. Something in me sank, settled. I said, “Right. And his only alibi is that he was alone in the same building where she died, at the time she died. Which is not an alibi. That’s the opposite of an alibi.”
41
Now they all wanted to watch Dateline—which sounded like a better way to fill the time than sitting around watching Britt sulk—and so Alyssa set up her laptop and we found it streaming.
We skipped the intro and started a few minutes in. Here were Myron and Caroline Keith at their kitchen table, glass cabinets full of tasteful dinnerware behind them.
Alder said, “Wait, go back, we missed Camelot!”
He was vetoed.
Myron Keith said, “She was our tomboy.” There was Thalia, no front teeth, kneeling in a soccer uniform. “But before we knew it, she was a young woman.”
“She wasn’t happy at home, sophomore year,” her mother said. Caroline was lovely, thin, hair a silver pixie cut. “She’d had a bad breakup, and she’d fallen out with friends. We thought boarding school would be a good change. And the school assured us they kept the kids close, watched over them.” Here, a crack in her voice.
The camera cut to Thalia’s younger sister, then in her early twenties. I remembered Vanessa as a confident eleven-year-old, speaking in a fake French accent as she helped the Keiths pack up Thalia’s side of the room at the end of junior year. And I remembered her, somber but fidgety, sitting beside her parents in New Chapel the next spring for Thalia’s memorial. On-screen she looked tired, her foundation applied too thickly by the makeup crew.
“She was happy there,” Vanessa said. “At least she seemed happy.”
Thalia’s older half brother, a soap-star-handsome guy I’d never met, nodded gravely. He talked about visiting her on campus, being so impressed with the place.
And here came the stock footage of Granby: Founders’ Day, students with backpacks crossing Middle Bridge, a boys’ eight rowing down the Connecticut. Full stands at a football game, fans singing You can’t beat the Granby Dragons! Your offense is awful and your defense is laggin’！
“Oh,” I said at the next shot. “That’s Mr. Hoffnung! That’s Ms. Hoffbart’s dad!” He scribbled on the chalkboard as students took notes.
Dr. Calahan appeared in her office, prematurely white hair tucked impeccably behind her ears. “Thalia was an excellent student and athlete, well-liked, social,” she said, careful warmth suffusing her voice. “She embodied the spirit of Granby.”
After her interview, the part we’d come for: Lester Holt somberly laying out the timeline of March 3, 1995. “By nine p.m., Camelot was over.”
“Questionable!” Alder interjected.
They showed curtain call—Thalia bowing on the arm of Max Krammen’s Merlin. “Students headed back across the crisp snow to their dormitories, where their books awaited them.”
“Wrong,” I said. “It was slush and mud.”
A shot down the hallway of Singer-Baird, all the doors closed. “By the eleven p.m. curfew, however, Thalia Keith was elsewhere.” No mention of Jenny Osaka, the microwave incident, the reasons Miss Vogel overlooked Thalia’s absence.
“The next day was Saturday,” Lester Holt continued, “a day with no scheduled activities. Even at the rigorous Granby School, students are free to enjoy their weekends. But come Saturday afternoon, Thalia Keith . . . was nowhere to be found.”
“I hate the way he says ‘Granby,’？” Jamila said. I agreed. It was somehow both mocking and precious. “These shows, they make everything sound like someone going alone into a haunted house.”
That was exactly it. As if anyone with street smarts would have stayed away from a boarding school in the woods, a place where kids were so privileged that karma was surely out to get them.
Lester Holt explained how suspicion soon settled on the twenty-five-year-old athletic trainer, the only other person known to be in the athletic complex that night.
Omar had returned at 8:15 from traveling with the girls’ hockey team to an away game at St. Paul’s, we were told. He unlocked the gym, caught up on paperwork in the training office, and from 8:53 to 10:02 p.m. was on the phone. As Britt had said, he sped off campus at 11:18—giving him just enough time, the State Police believed, to kill Thalia, clean up, and get out of there.
“An independent medical expert brought in by the defense,” Lester Holt said, “attempted to argue that Thalia died before ten, thus giving Omar Evans a solid alibi.”
“Who was he even calling?” Jamila asked. “He could’ve been on hold at some company and put the phone down.”
Britt shook her head. “It was a parent and a doctor, talking about an injured kid, and then right afterward it was the athletic director. They gave affidavits.”
Now here was Omar’s lawyer, explaining that New Hampshire is not one of the states that requires recording of custodial interrogation—meaning there was no record of what happened when Omar was questioned for over fifteen hours without a lawyer present. There was no record of what was said and done before he signed a statement that he’d been sleeping with Thalia Keith, bribing her with not just pot but hard drugs, that he’d been angry when she tried to end things, that they fought in his office and he hit her head on a poster on his wall, that he choked her and threw her in the water and left her for dead.
He recanted his confession less than twenty-four hours later, saying it was coerced.
Omar appeared on-screen in a forest green jumpsuit, head shaved, his last name written on a piece of medical tape on his chest. His face had thickened along with the rest of his body, but he had the same broad chin and sharp eyes. He said, “They came up with a story, they wrote the story in their own words, and they made it sound like if I just said this stuff, they’d put it down to an accident, like that was my best shot.”
When I first saw this, I’d firmly believed he was lying here. I’d stared hard at my TV, trying to see his tells. This time, all I saw was resignation, exhaustion, a lingering bewilderment.
“Jesus,” Alder said. “This is why you always wait for a lawyer. You think it’ll make you look guilty, but dude. You have to.”
The kids’ talking drowned out the rest of the show: Omar’s conviction and appeal, Thalia’s family fighting to keep him in prison, Lester Holt straining hard at the end for Camelot parallels, something about “no happy-ever-afters.”
42
The slow, slow wheel of my brain finally turned.
There was alcohol in Thalia’s stomach, but it wasn’t in her bloodstream yet.
If I was right that she’d drunk from that flask backstage, she died very soon after Camelot ended.
If she died soon after the show ended, she died while Omar was on the phone.
Oh.
I did the math again.
Jesus.
But who would remember, after all this time, if she sipped something backstage that particular night? Who could ever testify to that?