By the time you get to the meeting point, Thalia’s not there. You try the front gym door and it’s open, which it shouldn’t be. You look around inside, not wanting to call her name, but everything in the building is dark.
You go home to your wife and your kids. The next morning you look for Thalia at brunch, but it’s the weekend and kids sleep in, so you’re not worried, only irritated, and you wish you could call her. You think of ringing the Singer-Baird pay phone, asking for her in a disguised voice. Maybe you even do it, but the girl who answers just tells you Thalia isn’t in her room. You’ll see her at dinner, and if not, certainly you’ll see her that night for Camelot.
Of course you don’t tell the police she was there to meet you. You don’t tell them where she might have been standing when someone came across her. You don’t tell them that you know she wasn’t sleeping with Omar. You know the older guy her friends heard about was you. You don’t tell the police anything at all, except to give your own alibi and tell them what a lovely girl she was, what a promising student. A great kid, a great kid, a great kid.
You’ve had to live with yourself for a quarter century.
50
I must have slept a few minutes at least, because I woke having dreamed about Yahav. I felt like I could turn and he’d be there—hadn’t he just been spooning me?—but no, that pillow was cold, with none of the dark, soft hairs I’d always find after he’d shared my bed. There was an urgency to the dream, though, a sense that I was supposed to ask him something, tell him something.
And maybe I should. Not about me, not about him, but about the case.
Yahav wasn’t a practicing criminal lawyer, but he did teach evidence law, which seemed quite relevant. Yahav and his parents had become US citizens when he was seventeen, the same year he caught Paul Newman’s The Verdict on TV and became obsessed with the American legal system. He excelled at dismantling the legal premise of anything we watched together. I questioned my own motivations—did I simply want his attention?—but I knew my only chance of getting him back was to leave him alone. Instead, I needed to do the opposite.
I sent him a link to the Free Omar website, and I sent him the Dropbox link. I wrote, I’d love your take on this. You remember what I told you about my roommate. Does this conviction seem solid to you?
Alone in my classroom in Quincy half an hour before class started, I remembered I could google Granby + Thalia + dots + planner to confirm that I knew the answer to that particular riddle. I should have been listening to the students’ revised episodes—though I’d already decided to give them all As, regardless. Who was I to come in and blow someone’s GPA?
I wonder if you’ve seen the scanned pages yourself, if you’ve googled the minutiae of Thalia’s case alone in your office late at night—or if you’ve put up a wall, never let yourself type the letters of her name.
Although the planner had never been admitted into evidence, multiple websites now showed the layout. Someone—the police? Thalia’s family?—had made public the two pages for the week ending Friday, March 3, 1995, with the weekend of the fourth and fifth compressed in the margin. As I’d imagined, the dots in question occupied the bottom corner of each day’s box. It looked legitimate; I recognized Thalia’s careful handwriting.
Something Fran hadn’t mentioned: It wasn’t only dots. At the bottom of Monday, February 27, one red dot. Nothing on Tuesday. On Wednesday the first, a blue X in brackets. On Thursday the second, both a blue X and a purple one.
One Reddit theorist insisted the marks were times Omar hit her. That she was documenting them in order to report Omar, and he killed her before she could. Someone trolling that poster kept insisting it was about bowling scores, that the Xs were strikes. You’re only proving my point, the original poster wrote. If an X is a strike, maybe that was her association. Today I was struck.
I understood why they hadn’t used this in court, not without an explicit key in the back of the book. Still, I would have loved to see the rest of the planner. If the red dots went back a few days, that was obviously her period. If she’d followed my system (could I flatter myself to think so?) that would mean the Xs were sexual contact. Perhaps the parentheses meant a different sex act, or a truncated effort. Maybe the blue X and the purple X meant different people she was sleeping with. One for Robbie, one for you? Or maybe one was for protected sex, one for unprotected.
Vanessa hadn’t written back after I’d thanked her for the Dropbox files, but I sent her another email: I absolutely understand if you aren’t interested in additional information at this point, but I can’t help but mention that I think I know how to read the dot and X codes in Thalia’s planner, which I didn’t see until recently. They’re based on something I used to do myself. Please disregard this if it’s too much to deal with.
And then I dove back into Reddit.
The Xs were times she cut herself.
The dots were hang-up calls she’d gotten, and the Xs were threatening letters. Well, we didn’t have phones in our rooms, so that one didn’t work, did it.
It was about diet, several people insisted. Times she’d binged and purged. I had the exact same system, someone wrote. That one was possible, I had to admit.
Britt entered the classroom first, and I don’t know what look was on my face, but she took a step back, said, “Oh—am—is it too early?” Britt wore a long floral dress with Docs poking out underneath, a long ratty cardigan over that. Like a sweet, ironic girl right out of 1994.
I said, “Lord help me, but I think I’ve fallen into this dot conspiracy. Thalia’s planner.”
She grinned. She said, “I knew we’d get you hooked.”
Just before class started, a text from Yahav. I hadn’t actually expected him to delve into details. I’d imagined that if he replied at all, it would be some kind of “Looks interesting, but these things are difficult” response.
But what he wrote was: Been reading up all morning. Give me a call? I have a lot of thoughts.
51
The kids played new material that day, things they’d use in their second episodes. Alyssa had distilled our séance to two fun minutes, with jaunty music.
Lola had tape of a Foxie’s waitress saying, “My nephew, he applied up there because you figure, aren’t they gonna educate the kids right here in town? They got scholarship money to hand out, but they can’t see fit to give it local, they go look for kids in California. He’s flat-out rejected. And they never did tell us why. He’s got mostly Bs and As, some Cs. You’re gonna reject someone whose family has worked for the school a hundred years, no explanation?”
That one gave the students pause. I could tell it bothered them, despite their default progressive stance—this assertion that a random B student from town, someone without innate genius or a story of trauma overcome, might just pop into the Granby freshman class on a scholarship that could have gone to someone extraordinary.
Alder said, “Did you, like, try to explain it to her?”
Lola shrugged. “I’m an impartial reporter.”
When it was Britt and Alder’s turn, Alder raised his hand tentatively, as if he were about to swat a bug that might startle. He said, “We have something we don’t know what to do with.”
Britt looked frustrated; clearly, he wasn’t supposed to bring this up. She said, “It’s not even audio.”