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?
43
“Can we listen to music?” Jamila asked, so we did.
It seemed we were waiting for midnight. These kids were young enough that the stroke of twelve still connoted mischief, parties, ghosts, rather than work deadlines and colicky babies and red-eye flights.
I had not yet mentioned the flask, the timing. I wanted to think about it, clearheaded, in the morning. I wanted to triple-check my math.
“We should turn the lamps off,” Alder said at 11:58. “We should sit totally silent and send out welcoming vibes. And we should record again!”
Jamila said she’d fall asleep—she was already lounging on the floor—but Alder’s motion passed.
Let’s say that instead of Britt and Alder giggling uncontrollably, shushing each other, instead of Lola shrieking when Alyssa tickled their neck, instead of the hush that finally settled over us, let’s say that Thalia showed up, that her face glowed in the window. Say she had a flask in her hand.
I’d been thrown back, that week, to a mental state in which I could remember the sound of her voice. The way, for instance, she said “How random!” The way she’d get hiccups when she laughed. The way she’d sing choir music as she got dressed, the soprano part of “Wade in the Water” rising over her open closet door.
So let’s say that this night in Gage House, her face appeared and she said what she’d say if she could: Bodie. The drug theory came from you. You made it up, and they listened. Omar was on the phone. What did they know about DNA in 1995?
Let’s say she said: Who has more reason to kill a girl? The guy who tapes her elbow, or the guy she’s sleeping with?
Let’s say she said: How often have you thought of my body in the ground? How often have you thought of Omar’s body in prison? Whose body gets to be free?
Maybe she said: It was all of them. Denny Bloch and Omar Evans and Robbie Serenho and the teachers who didn’t intervene and the boys who thought it was all so funny. Dorian Culler and the cast of the play and Mrs. Ross and Rachel and Beth and my parents, who sent me away, and Khristina, who made my bras and my body a topic of conversation, and you and you and you and you and you.
But no—my eyes were closed and I was drifting off. At 12:05, Alder turned one lamp back on, and we sat there with the calm of people who’d just finished yoga class. “I felt something,” he said.
Lola said, “That’s what she said,” and they were gone again in chatter and giggles.
#5: ME
I did it myself. I don’t remember it, I don’t know how it’s possible, but I did it in a fit of jealousy and I blocked it from my mind completely, and all the subconscious tugs bringing me back to Granby, leading me to this moment, came from the molten core of guilt in my soul.
A ridiculous thought, but as I spiked a fever Sunday morning, as my body paid for those hours in the ravine, I half slept and rechewed the same dreams and occasionally became convinced that I’d followed Thalia to the pool. No, I’d led her to the pool. Or I found her in the pool, and we swam together until she looked at me and held a hand to her bleeding head.
What alibi did I have? That I shut down the lights and the soundboard, that I reset the props and locked up the theater, went back to the dorm, studied alone until the fire alarm went off.
What if my memories were as false as dreams? What if my dreams were really memories? What if we swam together in borrowed suits until the water became heavy and thick, until Omar tried to throw us the life preserver, but it only sank? There you were, throwing rocks from the observation deck, and they kept missing us, so I grabbed one and helped you, I lifted it over Thalia’s head and brought it down. Then I sank to the bottom, a rock myself; I sank there and lived there for years.
44
That afternoon, with most of my fever slept away and the rest medicated down, I FaceTimed Jerome. The kids tore around the house with the iPad, showing me the gerbil, the fish, the cat’s butt. Leo wanted to know if there was snow in New Hampshire, so I took my phone outside and showed him the unimpressive crust. He requested that I make a snowball, and I did my best.
“Mommy,” Silvie said, “I’m eating my hay.” Pieces of yellow yarn hung from her mouth.
Jerome sent them to the basement and I asked how he was holding up.
He said, “I don’t think this is going away.” He meant for himself.
I said, “So I got in some hot water defending you.”
He rolled his head back. He said, “I know. You shouldn’t have done that. I mean, you didn’t need to. You go into mama bear mode.”