I told her everything I suspected about your relationship with Thalia, and she was disgusted but not shocked. How could any woman truly be shocked by predation?
We pored over the planners for the next twenty minutes, both of us mindful of the time—I’d have to race back for class—and there were definite patterns, like the correlations back in the fall between purple Xs and the nights we had Follies practice. And then, a gold mine: During the October opera trip to New York, three blue Xs and two purple ones. “There were only two other guys on the trip,” I said. “Definitely not Omar Evans.” I wrote the other names on a napkin for Vanessa: Kellan TenEyck, who was dead, and Kwan Li, now a principal tenor with the English National Opera. I told Vanessa what I’d seen at Bethesda Fountain.
Even so, the purple and the blue could both have been Robbie—could have been, for instance, intercourse and blow jobs. Vanessa was the one who proved otherwise. I went through ’94–’95 and she went through ’93–’94. We were quiet until she hit her pen on the table. “Here,” she said. Thalia had written Ski Team—away at Hebron across the whole weekend of March 4 to 6, 1994. A time when the ski team was definitively gone to Maine. But there was a purple X that Saturday. “She wouldn’t have gone with the ski team, would she?”
I shook my head. “They didn’t let friends travel with the team. She maybe could have signed out to someone’s house and—but no, look, she had tech rehearsal that weekend.” Little Shop wet tech was written in much smaller letters than Robbie’s ski team commitment, but it was there. And if Thalia had failed to show for tech rehearsal, the one vital day when I was fully in charge, it would have been seared in my memory.
“So,” she said.
I nodded. “So.”
Vanessa pulled the senior planner to the middle of the table. “The week she died,” she said. “The blue X here on Wednesday, in brackets. What are the brackets?”
“Maybe she still had her period,” I said, “and they—maybe it was something other than sex.”
“Maybe he pulled out,” she said, and I reminded myself that yes, Vanessa was an adult, not someone I needed to protect from any of this.
I said, “She was with both of them on Thursday.”
“It’s so much sex,” Vanessa said, and laughed drily. “Can you imagine being that young?”
I shook my head. I said, “My impression—and maybe you know more than I do—my impression is that Denny Bloch was never really investigated. For Thalia’s death.” I didn’t know how this would go over, didn’t know how upset she might be at the suggestion that the case wasn’t settled, hermetically sealed.
Vanessa was focused on something other than my face, something over my shoulder. “He was how old, again?”
“Thirty-three,” I said. “Married, two kids. He’s still teaching.”
Her fingers went to the bridge of her nose. “Christ.”
I said, “I worry—I mean, the kids all talked together before anyone got interviewed. You know how the rumor mill can be. And I’m sure they were all concerned with protecting Robbie, since he’d obviously be the first person they looked at. I never thought I knew more than her friends. I assumed if they were pointing at Omar they had information I didn’t. But what’s occurred to me lately is that maybe I knew more. Or at least I knew this one thing, this one important thing, and no one ever asked me.”
There was a crash behind the coffee counter and then a shrieking giggle. Vanessa turned, and in the light her face looked even older—resigned, hardened. Suddenly, she was every sister of every murdered girl they ever put on the news.
She looked back at me, her face unreadable aside from a general bewilderment. She said, “I’m glad you told me this. It’s hard to know what to do with it.”
I tried to read her face, to see if she could ever entertain doubts about Omar’s guilt, or would want him to stay behind bars forever. Or if she was like I’d been only a few days ago, deeply unsettled by any step away from certainty.
I said, “It shouldn’t have to fall to you. They should have done their job, the investigators, way back. I mean, the police, but also—Omar didn’t have a good defense team. The defense investigators are supposed to do a lot of this work, looking at other suspects. If only to put everyone’s mind at ease.”
Vanessa said, “I need time to process.”
I nodded. “If you happened to have—in her letters, or her yearbooks—if there were anything from Denny Bloch, or anything about him . . . I wonder if he wrote to her over the summer, for instance.”
I got the sense she wasn’t listening. She said, “I didn’t expect anything to come of this.”
“I don’t know if Omar could ever get another appeal. And I don’t know how you’d feel about that. But if my students keep working, if they dig stuff up, maybe things at Granby the investigators never bothered with—”
Vanessa said, “I’m in touch with him. With Omar.”
I’d been about to stand up, to awkwardly hug her goodbye, but now all my weight sank into my chair.
“It was something my therapist suggested, a few years ago. To work on forgiveness and peace. I drive up to Concord once a month to see him. I mean, first I wrote, and then we talked on the phone, then I started to—like, we don’t talk about it. He told me once that he didn’t do it, that he barely knew Thalia, and we haven’t mentioned it since. We more . . . we talk about our lives. My parents don’t know. They wouldn’t understand.”
I said, “That’s amazing. Not everyone could do something like that.” And then, because I couldn’t help myself, “My students would love to talk to you, and to him, too.”
She lowered her voice. She said, “I’m not supposed to know this, and you’re definitely not supposed to know this, but he’s in the hospital right now. Or at least he was, a couple days ago.”
I said, “Oh. Is it something serious?”
She looked at me like I was dumb. “They only take them to the hospital for life-and-death crises. I went to visit the prison Wednesday, and this woman I’ve gotten friendly with, this woman who visits her husband, she was coming out and she told me Omar was attacked and he wasn’t there. I mean, she didn’t really have the details. I’m so worried, and there’s no way to get more info. But listen, you’re not supposed to know. His family probably doesn’t know, even, or they won’t till he’s back in his cell. Prisoner movements aren’t—”
“I won’t say anything.”
It had somehow not occurred to me that our window to help Omar might be small. I’d imagined a long life for him. Hadn’t he always been brimming with health? Idiotically, I hadn’t considered how easy it was to die in prison.
I said, my voice thin, “Maybe—if you’re willing to chat with my students sometime, if it goes well, and once he’s better, assuming he’s okay—maybe you’d be willing to make the introduction, vouch for them. They’re not trying to make trouble. They’re great kids.” I chose my next words carefully, aware that Vanessa, despite her visits to Concord, still believed—unless I’d just convinced her otherwise—that Omar was guilty. “If there are unanswered questions, maybe they could put some of them to rest.”
She closed her eyes and half smiled, made the slightest dip of her head. It didn’t particularly mean anything, but it was an end to the conversation, or a bookmark at least.