There were the woods (the mattresses, yes, but a dozen other meeting spots: notable stumps, part of what used to be a brick wall), although so much of the school year was dark and cold, the ground either unforgivingly hard or boot-suckingly soft and wet.
There were the places accessible by contraband keys, for the brave. A classroom belonging to a teacher who lived off campus was often a safe bet—but then, this was how Jorge Cardenas and Laren Willebrand got caught by Ms. Arena junior year, mostly clothed but still humiliated.
There were ways to get around curfews and door alarms and on-duty teachers. Fran was in a strange category as, technically, a day student—but unlike the twenty or so students who commuted, she was not exiled from campus after the start of evening study hall. Mr. Peloni once caught her crossing the quad at ten p.m. on a school night and tried to make a deal of it, but Fran successfully argued that other day students were not confined to home once they left campus. What if she needed to walk the dog? What if her family grilled on their patio? After that, she was only bolder in her wandering. She’d pull up a chair outside my ground floor window senior year and we’d talk.
I can’t imagine that you saw campus this way—overlaid maps of public and private spaces, the private ones so rare and precious we’d risk everything for them. You had your apartment, you had your classroom. You had a car, and the places a car could take you.
All we had were our feet. For all our freedom—teenagers with few real responsibilities, dozens or thousands of miles from home—we felt trapped. Lab rats whose only option was to retrace the same paths. The stone steps leading into Quincy bore soft grooves in the middle: two centuries of shoes and boots hitting the same spots.
In Anne’s car, NPR was still going.
It was the one where they found green synthetic fibers between her teeth.
It was the one where her shoes were gone.
The one where her bike was gone.
The one where her fingernails were gone, broken in the fight.
Anne was saying, “Even just when someone googles the school, I have to think about that from an admissions perspective. The deep past is one thing, but ongoing drama is a nightmare.”
The tree arms had turned to chaotic blurs, the scratchy handwriting of someone in a hurry, a doctor’s prescription only the pharmacist could read.
I was answering Anne, saying I understood, but I was thinking about the equipment shed. It was beside the rear of the gym, maybe ten yards from the pool’s emergency exit. No floodlights back there. I was thinking about the shed door that half the school knew how to open. I was thinking about the press box above it, where anyone could climb up, where kids often did.
Had they ever luminoled the walls of that dank shed? Had they climbed up to the press box? What about the bleachers? The yards of clanking metal, all the space beneath. What about the places two people might actually go, late at night, to talk? The places close enough to the back pool door that, disaster having occurred, made the pool the most logical place to drag someone? I only remembered that yellow caution tape around the gym itself.
Of course—because if Omar did it, it happened in the gym. Why look elsewhere?
On a whim I texted Alder, whose messages were still high in my queue. I’d talked to him and Britt after that last class about my supporting their podcast if they continued. I told them that if they got too busy I’d maybe do something myself. Here’s a goose chase for you, I wrote. The shed and press box still stood, despite there being no more need, postfootball, for announcers. I wrote, I’m sure things have been painted over, but if anything, that . . . might preserve blood? I wasn’t asking them to play CSI themselves, just suggesting they look into whether those places had been searched, access facilities records to see when things had last been painted over, when the bleachers had last been replaced.
Then I checked my United app to see if I’d been bumped up to business class.
I had no idea what I’d done.
Part II
1
And then, on a frigid Wednesday in March of 2022, I was back.
Not to campus, exactly, but to Kern, where I’d be staying at the Calvin Inn. Kern had changed maybe twenty-five percent from the days of our weekend Wagon runs. There was no more movie theater, and the Blockbuster was now a credit union. But Taste of Asia had the same neon sign. The bar where Geoff had ordered us gin and tonics was still there, under a different name. The tiny shops on Main Street had mostly survived the pandemic.
Aside from a few small motels and campgrounds, the Calvin is the only hotel in town. There’s an Embassy Suites and a couple of bed-and-breakfasts in Granby itself, but the Calvin—rambling and run-down, built for days when Kern was more of a county hub—is closer to the courthouse and counterintuitively cheaper, maybe due to its spotty heat and its inexplicable plethora of rooms. It’s also more willing to accommodate multiple open-ended reservations, especially outside foliage and wedding seasons. I knew the inn’s fa?ade well, its wraparound screen porch topped by two stories of brick, topped in turn by a wood-sided fourth floor with dormer windows. But I’d never been inside.
The defense team had budgeted to fly me in from California and put me up, but I paid my own way. Every penny saved for the defense was a good thing—plus this way, I could stay a few extra days, could get there with a nice buffer and stick around afterward just to be nearby, even if I couldn’t do much. When you’re a witness, you can’t sit in the courtroom, and you can’t talk to other witnesses, at least not about the case—but you can still be around.
Some trivia for you, Mr. Bloch: In a hearing on a motion for retrial, that longest of long shots, innocence is no longer presumed. The onus is on the defense to prove the new evidence strong enough to cast serious doubt on the validity of the original verdict—in other words, to prove that no reasonable jury would now convict. For this reason, the defense goes first. The best result would be the judge vacating the conviction, which would not mean Omar went free; it would mean back to square one, as if he’d just recently been arrested for Thalia’s death. Unless the state then dropped the case, it would mean a new trial—one in which he was again innocent until proven guilty. This happens almost never.
I paused on the porch, looking back out to the town square. There was the courthouse, with two separate clusters of colorful coats mounting the broad steps. Just one news van, plus the giant Court TV truck, nothing happening around them. I feigned interest in the plaque by the door (apparently the inn was founded in 1762 and rebuilt after a fire) so I could scan the lobby. Aside from one elderly couple, it was empty. I stepped in onto carpet that might once have been red. It covered dramatically uneven flooring; if I’d taken my hand off my suitcase handle as I waited at the desk, it might have rolled away.
On my phone, a zillion texts.
Fran had written Welcome, followed it with an upside-down smile emoji. I sent back a photo of my own face: airplane hair, glasses instead of contacts, a cloth face mask with little ferns—voluntary here as of a couple weeks back, but providing me some nice anonymity in addition to protecting my health. I wrote, My cunning disguise. As much as I’d planned to stay behind the scenes of the podcast, it hadn’t necessarily worked out that way.
Leo, now eleven, had texted to ask if I remembered to get batteries for his drone, and if so where they were.