It dawned on me that she wanted an apology. Instead I said, “This must be a lot for you.”
“Oh! Well, yes. But the great thing about Robbie testifying, he can clear it up. We’ve been getting emails, phone calls. We took down our Facebook. Any package that comes, we have to double-check it’s something we ordered. I know people only want justice, but they’re so confused. You know, I saw someone with a T-shirt once that just said The Husband Did It, and I asked what it meant, I thought maybe it was from a TV show, and she said it meant when a woman is murdered, it’s always the husband or boyfriend. We’ve been trained to think that way.”
I wanted to tell her the shirt wasn’t wrong; the issue was that Thalia had more than one boyfriend. And I wanted to tell her that whatever suspicion Dane Rubra had sent their way, I’d hopefully just made things better.
“The stress is so much for him,” she said. “I know he’ll be better once we just get through it. You know, we got here yesterday because they thought they’d call him before the weekend, but oops! I know what they want to ask him, they want to know why he wasn’t investigated more, and you know what his take on it is? He should have been investigated. He’s going to say that. They should’ve given him a polygraph. And then we wouldn’t have this cloud of suspicion. They should have looked at him and at that guy, you know the rumors about that guy living in the woods. They should have looked at other kids, the girls even. Some of those kids, my God, do you remember this kid Peewee Something, he’s been arrested for domestic violence more than once. And he wasn’t at the party with them all! Did they ever ask where he was?”
“He gave my friend breast cancer,” I somehow said aloud.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing. I’m glad you understand. The issue is they barely looked at anyone. They picked a guy, they said he did it, and they put their blinders on.”
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s it. And when you get up there, when you testify—you haven’t gone yet, have you? That’s what you’ll say, I know. Maybe you can even say something about how you knew Robbie, how—”
My alarm must have shown in my eyes, because she stopped.
She said, “I shouldn’t be talking your ear off. Can I give you a hug? Robbie’s down the street getting the kids lunch, and I should go find them, but I just want to give you a hug.”
I let her envelop me in the sleeves of her wool maroon coat, in her delicate perfume, her curtain of honey hair.
Jen started to leave, but turned back a few feet away. “I think I would have liked her,” she said.
“You would have.”
“I don’t know that she’d have liked me.” She laughed. “I was so uncool. I wasn’t sophisticated, just a bookworm. Public high school in Nowhere, New York. But I’d have liked her.”
I said, “Everyone did.”
After she left, I picked three pairs of jangly tin earrings and a pewter necklace. I paid cash, and when the woman’s back was turned I left the twelve dollars in change on the counter, hurried out before she could stop me.
I felt sick to my stomach about Jen, but still: I did find it delightful that Robbie Serenho had married the overtalkative nerd of her rural public high school class.
I was leaving the store when my phone pinged with a text from Alder. It said, Ur boyfriend is going bananas. U will love. Alder thought it was funny to call Dane my boyfriend. There was a link to a YouTube video. I stood on the sidewalk in the wind and waited for it to buffer.
Another message from Alder: We’re starting with a bench conference, kill meeeeee. Then a GIF of a cat staring at a clock.
I fished my AirPods out of my purse and ducked inside a coffee shop.
“Major news here in Kern,” Dane Rubra was saying. He was breathless, sitting on a bed with a dark hotel window behind him. He must have filmed this last night, after we talked. “I have exclusive sources, so you’ll have to trust me here. This is why, listen, this is why you have to travel, this is why you have to be on the ground. I’m gonna phrase this carefully, but I have reason now to believe that we’ve been overlooking something huge. As I’ve mentioned a few times, there was a music teacher at Granby by the name of Dennis Bloch. Born April of 1962 in Olivette, Missouri. Most recently teaching in Providence, Rhode Island, but seems to have left that job a couple years back. I’ll be posting some relevant links in the comments, and I know you all love to dig.
“All I’m saying for now is Dennis Bloch might know something significant about this case, something he should have revealed twenty-seven years ago. This is a guy who’s stayed in education, he’s gone on and worked with other kids. Some of them out there, they might know something. And look—” He leaned closer to the camera, shook his head slightly, clenched his jaw, gathered himself, continued. “He might be having relationships with young girls, he might’ve been doing this unchecked for decades. Here’s what we want: employment records, any complaints filed against him, current contact information. In particular, we want anything any Granby student knows. Not rumors, okay, not hearsay, but did you witness something, did you see something, do you know something.”
I realized I’d been standing numb, just inside the coffee shop door, without approaching the counter. I joined the short line, kept staring at my phone as Dane cautioned his followers not to approach you themselves, not to take matters into their own hands, to stay within the bounds of the law, to keep records.
“It’s for your safety,” he said, “as well as the integrity of the investigation.”
Behind him, jumbled heaps of clothes on the hotel bed. The alarm clock blinked 12:00.
16
Fran picked up both me and Geoff that night to ferry us to campus for the party. Geoff cracked himself up playing “Radio Ga Ga” on his phone; it was the song we used to put on repeat in Fran’s mom’s car when Fran would sneak us off campus midday to Frogurt Bar.
Over the past four years, it would hit me hard as I headed to a dinner, stepped out for a run, boarded an airplane, that I was doing these things and Omar was locked in a cell. During lockdown, friends complained about having nothing but their jigsaw puzzles and sourdough starters, and I would bite my tongue—or not. But riding to a party so close to the happenings at court felt particularly egregious, even if the Omar I had known would’ve hoped it was a rager.
When the song ended Geoff said, “I’m not allowed to tell Bodie what happened in court.” He was talking over his shoulder, to where I sat in the back. “But I need to tell you that it was disturbing to see Omar. He—for one thing, he’s cuffed. Wrists and ankles, and his wrists are attached to this chain around his middle. So there’s no way he can move normally. But you remember how he was always springing around, he was always—he was an athlete. He’s so stiff now. He looks like he’s in pain. He had to turn to the attorney and he turned his whole body, like he couldn’t turn just his head.”
I’d thought a lot about the hard beds, the physical violence, the cold. But it occurred to me only now that the last thing they’d let you see a doctor for in prison was chronic pain, some chiropractic concern. A small thing, but a huge thing.
Geoff said, “Holy shit, we’re on campus. Did they shrink it? Fran, how did they shrink everything?”