“Amy wanted me to remind you about sequestration,” the younger attorney, Hector, said. I cringed, assuming I was in trouble, but he handed me a sheet from a pile, one with the judge’s orders typed out in bullet points. It wasn’t personal. “It’s a small town,” he said, “so it’ll be hard, but just don’t do anything that would look bad, okay?” Hector was right out of law school, with a trace of what I’d learned was a Colombian accent, and pained, intelligent eyes. He came across as nervous in person as he had on Zoom, every sentence quavering out like he was onstage and hated public speaking.
The older one, Liz, looked like Lisa Kudrow. Liz, who would be playing Amy for the session, launched right in. Hector recorded everything on his phone for Amy to review later. Easy questions first: my name, my job, the dates I attended Granby, the dates I roomed with Thalia. Then some tougher ones about my time on campus in 2018, my role in the podcast, my role in the discovery of the blood.
Then: “Defense Exhibit 58 is this Granby planner for the 1993 to 1994 school year. Do you recognize this planner?” In this instance it was only a thin stack of colored Xeroxes, but I nodded, then remembered to say “yes.” I explained the color-coding system; it was good for me to practice aloud.
We went through the ’94–’95 planner next, me offering my interpretation. Which was still, I knew, just an interpretation.
Liz asked, “Do you have knowledge of anyone Thalia Keith had sexual relations with, aside from her boyfriend, Robbie Serenho?”
“I had, and still have, strong reason to believe that she was romantically, if not sexually, involved with the school’s music director, Dennis Bloch.” （Had I practiced that wording many times? Yes, I had.）
“What reasons do you have for that belief?”
I started with the Bethesda Fountain incident, the most specific, the most blatant. Then I detailed the time she’d spent alone with you in your classroom, the times she’d lingered after rehearsals. I talked about her yearbook entry. I was grateful that it was 2022, glad that any reasonable judge would understand how inappropriate this kind of contact was. Or at least the judge in my head understood it.
When I said these words in court, when I named you, it would be the first time I’d said as much in public. It would be the first time the public heard these details, the bread crumbs that had led me to you. I wondered if it would be a matter of hours or minutes or seconds before your name was all over the internet.
“Did you speculate with other students about this relationship?” Liz asked.
“There were at least three friends I specifically spoke about it with, at that time.”
“Did they state that they shared your suspicions?”
“They did,” I said.
That was the easy part. The difficult part was when Liz turned into a cross-examining prosecutor. In that role, in a harsher voice, she asked, “Did Thalia ever tell you what her system of dots and Xs meant?”
“Only the red dots. But the rest—”
“So you have no direct knowledge of what any of these colors or symbols means.”
“No.”
“These Xs could, for instance, indicate homework assignments, as far as you know.”
“Yes.” It didn’t feel worth it to quibble, to protest that I was sure, pretty sure, kind of maybe sure.
“Ms. Kane, did Thalia Keith ever tell you she was romantically or sexually involved with Dennis Bloch?”
“No.”
“To your knowledge, did Thalia apprise anyone else of a relationship with Dennis Bloch?”
“No.”
“Ms. Kane, to your knowledge, what is the age of sexual consent in New Hampshire?”
“Sixteen. But Granby had rules about—”
“So although you’re accusing Dennis Bloch of breaking Granby’s internal code of conduct, you’re not implying that he broke any law.”
“Besides maybe murder.”
She broke character for a second. “You cannot say that.”
“Right.”
“Did you ever see Thalia and Dennis Bloch kissing?”
“No.”
“Holding hands?”
“No.”
“Engaging in sexual intercourse?”
“No. But as I said, their ankles were touching at the fountain.” It sounded so feeble.
“Have your ankles ever touched the ankles of anyone you were not sexually involved with?”
“Not in that particular way,” I managed.
“And what was that particular way?”
“Their legs were . . . entangled. And they were leaning together.”
“And based on this one incident of their ankles touching—which you perceived from across a crowded public space—you assumed a sexual relationship?”
“That was one of many indicators.” My voice was thin. It dawned on me, sickeningly, that my saying your name in court might make absolutely nothing happen. Whatever fire I started might be immediately squelched.
“So based on this assumption, and based on your theory of these small marks in Thalia’s planner, you feel you could have contributed more to the initial investigation?”
Could I have? Would I have managed, at eighteen, to say any of this to investigators—about periods, about sex with a teacher? Would I have implicated you, my favorite teacher, in a murder? But I knew the correct answer: “Yes.”
“In fact this hearing has a lot to do with your intervention in the case, does it not?”
“I can’t speak to that.”
“You’ve certainly spoken plenty about the case publicly, haven’t you?”
Liz was leaning into this, to the point that I was starting to think she genuinely hated me, that she’d never believed a word I’d said.
“What I’ve spoken about publicly, and here in court, are the same things I knew in 1995, and these are the things I would have told investigators had I been asked.” I said this with a good show of the certainty I lacked.
“That’s good,” Hector said. “Remember how you phrased that.”
“But you were not asked,” Liz said. “Did you approach investigators with the information?”
“No. I was sent to meet with them because I’d been Thalia’s roommate the previous year. But they didn’t ask about her love life. And I never saw the planner. Their focus was entirely on whether I knew anything about the night she died. And I hadn’t seen her that night, except onstage.”
Hector nodded vigorously.
Liz said, “It was on your suggestion that Britt Gwynne instigated the search of the athletic equipment shed on the Granby campus, was it not?”
“Yes.”
“That’s awfully specific. Did you suggest any other place to search?”
“I suggested the equipment shed, the press box on top of that same building, and the bleachers serving the track and the lacrosse field, which used to be the football field.”
“Those are all quite close together. You just happened to suggest that they look in the one place where there was indeed blood evidence?”
My mouth fell open. I said, “Are they really going to do that?”
Liz shrugged. “They could.”