“Probably not.”
Britt looked a little dreamy, like she was planning a reason to stop by this girl’s room, to check the inside of her closet for Thalia’s initials. “But upstairs means she couldn’t have left her room in the middle of the night.”
“Not unless she went out through a ground floor room. But even so, the latest time of death they gave was midnight,” I said. “And no one ever saw her back in the dorm, or outside after the fire alarm.”
“But no one noticed she was missing till they found her?”
“Right. And that was Saturday afternoon.” I was pleased that I had something firsthand to relate now. “I rowed crew, and we had our preseason swim test, so a few of us were walking together toward the gym. It would have been around four o’clock. Suddenly this police car and ambulance come barreling down the access road. They must’ve been the first ones.”
“Did you see anything?” Britt affected calm professionalism, but her eyes glowed.
I shook my head, then remembered to say “no” aloud for the podcast. I was usually holding a script for these things. “Eventually there was a crowd outside. The crew girls, some volleyball players, teachers. At some point, we heard it was a drowning. There was a fire engine, too, by that point. I guess they sent the whole emergency squad.”
“When did you know it was Thalia?”
I tried to remember. Maybe an hour later, I told her, a stretcher emerged from the pool’s side door, the figure on top covered with a white sheet. It was dark by then, everything glowing in the gym floodlights. But we had no idea who it was yet, and somehow I didn’t think it was a Granby student. It must have been one of those white-haired ladies from the local swim club, suffering a heart attack mid-lap. Or it was a janitor, or maybe that creepy townie who liked to watch basketball practice. Even when whispers started in the crowd that it was a student—it was Hani Kayyali, it was Michelle McFadden, it was Ronan Murphy—that seemed too dramatic to be true.
I said, “They sent us away, and we still didn’t know. By the time I got back to the dorm they’d already put up signs that we had mandatory dorm meetings before dinner and Camelot was canceled. We met in the common room and there were already girls crying, ones who’d figured it out.” Fran had come out of the Hoffnungs’ apartment, which she didn’t do for most dorm meetings. I remember her sitting with me on the coffee table. Her parents came out, too.
I knew who it was before the teachers spoke; word had spread through the room, and, of course, Thalia was the only one missing.
“Who announced it?” Britt asked.
“Miss Vogel. She was young. I don’t think she stayed much longer. She taught physics and coached girls’ skiing.” It occurred to me that Angela Vogel must, as dorm head, have been the one to clear out Thalia’s room, after the police went through it. It would have fallen to Dr. Calahan, as headmistress, to call the Keiths. I couldn’t imagine breaking that news to anyone, ever. It wasn’t like being a surgeon, someone who’d trained for this moment and expected it. And then, my God, two other kids the same year. It was a miracle Dr. Calahan had stuck around another decade, hadn’t run off for some cushy fundraising job at a museum.
I said, “They ordered pizza for anyone who didn’t want to go to the dining hall.” Fran and I absconded to my room with our slices, sat cross-legged on my bed. I remember Fran saying she knew it wasn’t the point, it wasn’t the main thing, but it sucked that we’d only had two of four performances and now the show was over. Fran had been playing Mordred, putting on a husky tenor and a swagger. I said, “Jesus, Fran, she was my roommate.” Fran said, “I thought you hated her.” If this hadn’t been my room, I’d have stormed out. Instead I just stared at her, dead in the eye, until she looked mortified and hugged me and I started sobbing on her shoulder.
“At that point,” I said, “we still thought it was an accident. That either she’d been swimming drunk at night, or she’d gone over in the morning to exercise and—who knows.”
Britt said, “When did it become clear they were investigating the death as a murder?”
“Not for a few days. They did an autopsy, which I guess is standard for accidental deaths, and after that the State Police showed up.”
Britt referred to her notebook. She said, “So, the State Police came on Tuesday, and the family’s own investigators did, too. That’s three full days after the body was found, and meanwhile the Granby police hadn’t even secured the scene.”
I said, “Well, they thought it was an accident.”
“You’re supposed to secure the scene, but apparently they just left. They didn’t even take good pictures. And the school didn’t keep kids out of the gym.”
I nodded slowly. “They actually drained the pool. You knew that, right?”
Britt hadn’t known. Her eyes went wide and she covered her mouth, but she ought to say something, for the sake of the podcast. I nodded at her phone.
What she said was, “Holy wow.”
“What I remember,” I said, “was Alumni Weekend was coming up, I think that next weekend. The last thing they wanted was yellow tape around the gym.”
Leave it to Granby to schedule Alumni Weekend not for a gorgeous spring day but for the end of ski season, so alumni could day-drink at the Granby Invitational.
I said, “You’d think they might have canceled the weekend, but they went right ahead. They strung up those Welcome Back banners. I remember they had the State Police park behind the gym so no one would see.” We’d rolled our eyes at the time, but saying it aloud in 2018, I found myself kind of shocked. By the school’s callousness, but also by the way the police apparently just did whatever Dr. Calahan asked.
“So that same weekend,” Britt said, “that’s when they started interviewing students. A whole week after her death.”
Was that right? I remembered people missing class right away, but maybe that was to meet with counselors rather than detectives.
I wouldn’t have dared to sign up for counseling on the bulletin board. Nor was I one of the girls with just enough claim to Thalia that I could walk around the next few weeks collapsing whenever I wanted out of a test. Perhaps that’s unkind, but really—there were a few girls vying for Oscars that spring.
I was on the detectives’ list, though, and one night I was called into Miss Vogel’s apartment to sit at her table with two men from the Major Crimes Unit, Miss Vogel’s parakeet chirping in a cage over the sink. The detectives were both tall—one beefy, one gray-haired. They were far too loud for that little kitchen.
I told Britt, “They interviewed me for maybe ten minutes. I remember they asked if I knew of anyone she was fighting with. In the past few days I’d heard other kids talk about Omar, but it was secondhand so I didn’t bring that up. I did tell them this random story, and I thought it was surreal how they wrote down whatever I said. It made me feel important.”
I’d felt at the time like it was at least something to give them, and I felt the same way with Britt now. At least I had one story no one else would have.
I said, “That past September, I was babysitting for a family in one of those stone houses.” It was the one to the right of Fran and Anne’s. The Pelonis’ house, if you remember them. Three obnoxious kids who thought it was funny to spin each other in Mr. Peloni’s desk chair till they were sick. “There were a couple dumpsters behind those houses, between their backyards and the loading dock of the dining hall.”