“No.”
“To your knowledge, did Thalia apprise anyone else of a relationship with Dennis Bloch?”
“No.”
“Ms. Kane, to your knowledge, what is the age of sexual consent in New Hampshire?”
“Sixteen. But Granby had rules about—”
“So although you’re accusing Dennis Bloch of breaking Granby’s internal code of conduct, you’re not implying that he broke any law.”
“Besides maybe murder.”
She broke character for a second. “You cannot say that.”
“Right.”
“Did you ever see Thalia and Dennis Bloch kissing?”
“No.”
“Holding hands?”
“No.”
“Engaging in sexual intercourse?”
“No. But as I said, their ankles were touching at the fountain.” It sounded so feeble.
“Have your ankles ever touched the ankles of anyone you were not sexually involved with?”
“Not in that particular way,” I managed.
“And what was that particular way?”
“Their legs were . . . entangled. And they were leaning together.”
“And based on this one incident of their ankles touching—which you perceived from across a crowded public space—you assumed a sexual relationship?”
“That was one of many indicators.” My voice was thin. It dawned on me, sickeningly, that my saying your name in court might make absolutely nothing happen. Whatever fire I started might be immediately squelched.
“So based on this assumption, and based on your theory of these small marks in Thalia’s planner, you feel you could have contributed more to the initial investigation?”
Could I have? Would I have managed, at eighteen, to say any of this to investigators—about periods, about sex with a teacher? Would I have implicated you, my favorite teacher, in a murder? But I knew the correct answer: “Yes.”
“In fact this hearing has a lot to do with your intervention in the case, does it not?”
“I can’t speak to that.”
“You’ve certainly spoken plenty about the case publicly, haven’t you?”
Liz was leaning into this, to the point that I was starting to think she genuinely hated me, that she’d never believed a word I’d said.
“What I’ve spoken about publicly, and here in court, are the same things I knew in 1995, and these are the things I would have told investigators had I been asked.” I said this with a good show of the certainty I lacked.
“That’s good,” Hector said. “Remember how you phrased that.”
“But you were not asked,” Liz said. “Did you approach investigators with the information?”
“No. I was sent to meet with them because I’d been Thalia’s roommate the previous year. But they didn’t ask about her love life. And I never saw the planner. Their focus was entirely on whether I knew anything about the night she died. And I hadn’t seen her that night, except onstage.”
Hector nodded vigorously.
Liz said, “It was on your suggestion that Britt Gwynne instigated the search of the athletic equipment shed on the Granby campus, was it not?”
“Yes.”
“That’s awfully specific. Did you suggest any other place to search?”
“I suggested the equipment shed, the press box on top of that same building, and the bleachers serving the track and the lacrosse field, which used to be the football field.”
“Those are all quite close together. You just happened to suggest that they look in the one place where there was indeed blood evidence?”
My mouth fell open. I said, “Are they really going to do that?”
Liz shrugged. “They could.”
“But if they imply that I had some knowledge of what happened, wouldn’t that mean they definitely should have questioned me back in ’95?”
“They could imply that the evidence was planted there later. Staged.”
“That makes no sense. Does it? Is that even possible?”
“All they need to do is vaguely suggest it. They’re likely to paint you as a nosy person, overinvolved, trying to make a name for yourself. Their goal is to get the judge to dislike you.”
It would be easy to do, I imagined: Just look at her smug little face, this meddling fame whore. She barely even knew these people.
Liz asked if I wanted to take a break. Yes, I did. I very much did.
10
I’d been planning to drive up to campus to see Fran, but I was physically and emotionally exhausted, so I got her to bring the boys to the hotel to swim. A decent-sized pool and a hot tub only half filled the enormous solarium space that jutted out onto the inn’s back lawn. Three walls were glass, as was the gently sloped ceiling—but a thick, green glass that filtered the light softly, trapping the humidity and warmth and the smell of chlorine around us in a blanket of false summer. Fran had bought the boys Cheetos from the vending machine, but now that they were cannonballing into the water, she and I picked at the remaining pieces, staining our fingers orange. I hadn’t had Cheetos in decades. If I let myself eat whatever I wanted, I’d have them every day.
I filled her in on my morning—no harm, since she wasn’t on the witness list—and told her about seeing Sakina and Mike last night.
“What if,” Fran said, pointing a fat Cheeto at me, “what if Mike Stiles left his wife for you and you two got married in Old Chapel?”
“My standards have gone up,” I said.
“The Choristers could sing! Your bridesmaids could wear green and gold!”
“You’re my matron of honor,” I said, “and I need you in head-to-toe green taffeta.”
One of the most delightful pieces of news I’d received in the past few years was that my Granby housemate, Oliver, had married Amber, the sweet young Latin teacher. And Oliver had landed a job at Granby. Fran passed along an invitation to a party at their place on campus the next night, Friday—a celebration of the fact that people could gather, however short this window in the pandemic might prove. It sounded like something the attorneys would object to, but I couldn’t think why. It was just a party, albeit one remarkably close to the scene of the crime.
Three other kids had joined Fran’s boys—two boys and a girl—and their mother jumped gracefully in to swim a couple of laps. She was our age, irritatingly cellulite-free.
Fran cleared her throat, looked meaningfully over my shoulder. I turned to see, across the pool, a man in blue swim trunks, his belly soft but his arms and legs muscled. I took in his face: This was Robbie Serenho. This was his lovely wife. These were his kids. He was blowing up a floatie. The wife emerged from the water, wrapped herself in a towel, grabbed a key card from him, and left.
I spent a panicked moment wondering what to do—diving under the water and staying there seemed out of the question—before I remembered the choice had already been made for me. I wasn’t allowed to talk to him. At least not about the hearing, but that was excuse enough to stay planted. I raised a tentative palm from my leg as offering. He squinted, confused, at both of us. His hairline had receded dramatically.
“I’ll go say hi,” Fran said, before I could even ask her to.
She rounded the pool, pausing to tell Jacob not to splash water in Max’s eyes.
Had I built Robbie up in the past few years into some towering, symbolic figure? Or had he lurked like that in my imagination since high school? Or was my blood pressure rocketing for other reasons: my guilt at upending his life, my fear that he hated me? There seemed to be no oxygen in the room, only gaseous chlorine.