I paused on the porch, looking back out to the town square. There was the courthouse, with two separate clusters of colorful coats mounting the broad steps. Just one news van, plus the giant Court TV truck, nothing happening around them. I feigned interest in the plaque by the door （apparently the inn was founded in 1762 and rebuilt after a fire） so I could scan the lobby. Aside from one elderly couple, it was empty. I stepped in onto carpet that might once have been red. It covered dramatically uneven flooring; if I’d taken my hand off my suitcase handle as I waited at the desk, it might have rolled away.
On my phone, a zillion texts.
Fran had written Welcome, followed it with an upside-down smile emoji. I sent back a photo of my own face: airplane hair, glasses instead of contacts, a cloth face mask with little ferns—voluntary here as of a couple weeks back, but providing me some nice anonymity in addition to protecting my health. I wrote, My cunning disguise. As much as I’d planned to stay behind the scenes of the podcast, it hadn’t necessarily worked out that way.
Leo, now eleven, had texted to ask if I remembered to get batteries for his drone, and if so where they were.
Alder wrote: Your plane land? Welcome to Kern Vegas! （I wrote back: Yup, but remember we’re not really supposed to text!） Alder was technically a member of the press, and it didn’t look good if I talked to him. Britt, meanwhile, was also a witness for the defense and couldn’t talk to either of us about the case.
Geoff Richler, who hadn’t been subpoenaed, was thinking of flying in: Are you there? Are other people there? Is it more like THE BIG CHILL, or the second half of IT? I sent back a clown emoji and a balloon emoji. He wrote, I’m gonna do it. I can swing an extra-long weekend. I didn’t fully understand his impulse, but I was eager for the company of someone I was allowed to talk to. He wrote, I can be your personal court reporter. I wrote, Nope, but it’ll be fun to see you!
I had calls to make, but not till I was alone in my room. I had to tell the defense team I was here, to report myself landed and officially sequestered.
The pockmarked teenager at the desk asked my name, and when I told him, he grinned. “I’m a fan,” he whispered. Then he spent too long squinting at the computer. I angled myself so I could see the whole expanse of lobby.
The elevator dinged behind me, an icicle to my neck, and I turned to see a woman too young to be anyone I knew from Granby. She stepped off, adjusted a baby in a sling.
“The fitness room is back there behind the elevators,” the desk boy said. “Our indoor pool is open, but it’s a little cold.” He said this with no awkwardness, as if the people congregating for this particular hearing would love a good swim. He offered no explanation for an indoor pool at a hotel older than the country, but this seemed like the kind of place onto which they’d patched many hopeful additions over the decades.
He gave me the wi-fi code, handed me an actual metal key, told me the elevator button could be tricky. I started to turn away, but I figured I had a chance here, so I leaned in and whispered, “Can you tell me how many reservations there are?”
“Oh, for the, um . . . Right now? Yeah, twelve.”
“Are some of those lawyers, though?”
He shook his head. “I think the—the, like, legal teams are mostly at Embassy Suites. My friend there says they’re packed.”
“Twelve. You can’t tell me who, can you?”
I had hoped his conspiratorial tone meant he’d break the rules, but no.
“I’ll—what I can say, though?” He was whispering now, too. “I definitely recognize some of the names.”
2
That all of our names had become well-known—not just Thalia’s and Omar’s, but Robbie’s and Mike’s and Beth’s and Puja’s and mine and, yes, yours to a certain extent—still feels like the strangest part of all this. The corners of the internet were one thing; the public consciousness was quite another.
I do hope you know they never named you on the podcast. I talked about you in one of my guest appearances, but only as “a male teacher” to whom Thalia was perhaps problematically close. I didn’t even say what you taught. I didn’t fixate on you any more than on other viable suspects, ones the state never looked into in their blinkered focus on Omar. It wasn’t because I wanted to spare you; my hands were tied. We were getting legal advice by that point, and one of the first things we were told was not to name publicly as a suspect anyone who hadn’t been a person of interest in the case. So I was treading lightly, keeping you in my back pocket. But it took only a few hours for the armchair detectives of Reddit to figure out who you were, after a Granby alum—I’ll never know who—eagerly spilled what “everyone knew” about you and Thalia.
I’d been hoping it would be your moment of reckoning. I’d hoped to start hearing from other students of yours, young women from Providence or Bulgaria or Granby who knew things, who could speak to your predation, provide the details that would prove your earnest demeanor masked a capacity for manipulation, obsession, violence. I was waiting for the same flood of recriminations Jerome had faced—everyone he’d ever wronged coming out of the woodwork. I was waiting, at least, for people to dig into your life and prove I wasn’t nuts. Maybe you’d never be arrested in place of Omar, but the attention could protect your current students and ensure that you lost your job. The storm didn’t come, though. Just a few drops—threads on message boards, ones you might not even have seen.
Your enormous luck: Two other big things happened in the case that week. A man who lived in Vermont confessed, but then turned out to have been on a navy ship in the Persian Gulf at the time; and Thalia’s half brother published that Medium article asking everyone to leave the case and his family alone. The chatter about you got buried so quickly. And there were dozens of other conversations: someone saying it was sweet Mr. Levin, of all people, that Thalia had been seeing; someone with dirt on a man who worked at the Hannaford in Kern; people saying it was clearly her half brother himself, or why else would he want to shut the conversation down.
For you to stand out as a suspect, it would have taken someone like Dane Rubra adopting the theory. Lucky for you, he was on to other scents just then, trying to track down Robbie Serenho’s college girlfriend. Plus, he resented the podcast for taking the reins of what he so clearly believed to be his story. He wasn’t about to run with anything we’d brought up.
The important thing, the thing that would help the case, was your name arising at the hearing itself—as a viable suspect, as someone important who was never investigated. Whatever emerged about you before then was up to fate.
I couldn’t be the one to drag your name into it, with no actual evidence, or I might lose credibility as a witness in Omar’s case. I couldn’t even post anonymous things online, in case someone traced them back to me.
Don’t get me wrong: I wanted your head on a pike. I was just willing to wait.
3
In the elevator, a poster advertised the hotel’s “quilt-in” that April. In my room: a stippled white bedspread, a framed old map of New Hampshire.
My room had a balcony with a view of the Connecticut River. We had rowed past this very spot hundreds of times; I had looked up at the rambling old hotel and imagined it was far fancier than this. It was too cold to make good use of the balcony, though, without the excuse of a cigarette to smoke—and I hadn’t smoked a cigarette since 2005.