“Okay.” I placed my hands palm-down on the table and then, thinking about body language, turned them faceup. “I appreciate how open you were the other day. I was thinking about it afterward, how awful that must have been for you—the thing about Stiles’s house. That was assault.”
“Sure.”
“It was assault from all of them, from everyone who saw it.”
“By modern standards, sure.” She brought her ice water halfway to her lips but put it down again.
“There was such a code of silence around things like that. All those boys. They made an impenetrable wall together, wherever they went.”
She shrugged. “Well, the girls, too.”
“I was thinking,” I said, as if I’d been driving by this resort and it had just occurred to me. “The night of March third. You were there in the woods.”
“You want to ask about that? Yes, I was in the woods. I was not in the pool with Thalia or whatever the fuck you’re thinking.”
“It’s only one thing, hang on. You remember walking back with Robbie at the end of the night, along with everyone else.”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember walking there with him? Like, do you have specific memories of him being there on the walk out?”
She squinted at me like I was crazy, then looked up at Bing Russell’s photo.
“What I remember,” she said, “is he jumped out from behind a tree and scared the shit out of me.”
This was new.
“How so?”
“Like—we were all up there, drinking, and suddenly he’s jumping out at us, like, Ha ha, I was hiding back here and you didn’t even know, what if I was an axe murderer, blah blah blah.”
“So he just appeared?”
“That thing—you remember how in middle school, boys were always riding their skateboards straight at you, and at the last minute they’d swerve and laugh at you for being scared? Or they’d cover your eyes from behind and if you didn’t find it funny you were frigid or something? You just have to roll with the abuse, otherwise you’re a crazy bitch.”
“So, how long, would you say? Before he popped out?” My heart was an entire percussion section.
“Long enough that it was weird and funny. Not five minutes. Like half an hour.”
“And you hadn’t seen him up there before then?”
“No. That was the joke.”
I said, “Okay. Okay.”
“Why. What.”
“Let me show you something,” I said, and I brought up the photo of Robbie’s sweatshirt back, zoomed in on the streak of mud splatter, explained Alder’s theory and what that would mean for the timing.
She said, “I see what you’re seeing, but I think you’re grasping at straws.”
“You don’t think this might be interesting to the defense team?”
“Jesus.”
“I don’t mean—”
“Jesus. You’re not, like, recording this, are you?”
I wasn’t, this time, but just to prove my point I set my phone on the table, pressed the side button till it powered down.
She said, “What I do not want, Bodie, is to be, like, a key witness or something. I wanted nothing to do with this. I would like to forget those entire four years completely. You know that movie where they erase people’s memories?”
“No one asked for this. No one asked to be a witness.”
“Well, you kind of did.”
“Absolutely not.” I felt the need to explain myself, but also felt like the less I said, the better. What I did say was, “Between us, I remember Robbie being awful to her, too. When I roomed with her, I noticed a lot. Or at least, I look back as an adult, and I notice things.”
Here was the waiter, and I ordered us both glasses of Malbec as Beth gazed over my head.
When he was gone she said, “He was always accusing her of stuff. He’d wait outside her class and walk her to her next one, and everyone thought that was so cute. I did not. He always had one hand on her. He stole her retainer.”
“He what?”
“You know how she was supposed to wear her retainer at night? She was planning to go with some of us to Anguilla for spring break junior year. Puja’s family invited everyone. There were other guys going, Dorian and Kellan and all them. But we had to pay for the flights, and Robbie wasn’t going to be able to pay. So he took Thalia’s retainer and told her if she went, he was keeping it the whole time. She’d come back two weeks later with her teeth all fucked up. And she was scared of what her orthodontist would say.”
“So she stayed back?”
“Yeah, I think she went home instead. It’s not even like she was with him, she just wasn’t with us.”
“I’d forgotten,” I said, “but I remember you all talking about Anguilla. I’d never heard of it, and I thought you were saying Aunt Willa. Like, you were going to Puja’s Aunt Willa’s place.”
“That’s so funny,” she said without laughing. “You’re from the Midwest, right?”
I thought, pointlessly, that Indiana was closer to Anguilla than New Hampshire was, but I knew what she meant.
She said, “This other time, senior year, he threw out all her photo collages. Those ones she had up of her friends back home, he was jealous of some guy in the pictures. She came back to her room one day and they were gone. She knew it was him. She even went through the trash in his dorm hall, nothing.”
I remembered the collages—she’d had them junior year, too. And I wondered, suddenly, if she might have circled various campus dumpsters, searching for them. If she might not have run out in her pajamas, looking dazed, even drugged, in her disbelief.
I asked, “Did he ever hit her?”
“Imagine if I’d said all this up there on the stand. The hearing would go on forever. They’d be dragging Robbie up. I’d be testifying for days.”
“Well, you wouldn’t just randomly be saying it, you’d have gone to the defense team and they’d have a chance to figure out how to frame it all and they’d disclose it to the prosecution and so on.”
“Which is all a moot point, because I’m done.”
“Listen, it could seriously help Omar’s case. It would be tricky because they’d have to get the judge’s permission to recall you. There’s a ton of red tape, but it’s so important. Don’t you think?”
The waiter arrived, not only to give us our wine but to ask where we were from, if we were enjoying our stay, if we were disappointed there wasn’t fresh powder out there. “I’ve never skied in my life,” I said, impatiently enough that he left us alone.
When I looked back at Beth she’d closed her eyes, was holding the stem of her glass meditatively between her thumb and middle finger.
She said, “He went around to us all, after they found Thalia. He made sure we remembered him being there, at the mattresses. I was like, of course I remember, you popped out and we screamed. I might’ve been a little drunk, but I remembered that. It made sense that he was afraid of being blamed. And I’ve never thought for a second he had something to do with it.” Her eyes widened, blue blue blue. “He couldn’t, right? This stuff you’re saying, it’s all—this is just that they should have looked at him.”