We spent three hours sifting through things, sometimes sorting them into well-intentioned piles, sometimes reading aloud and dissolving in laughter. Geoff used to review movies for the Sentinel, and in 1994 he’d deemed Pulp Fiction “an iconoclastic piece of cinema, one that would be destined for the halls of greatness had it not already achieved that excellent canonical designation.”
“You’re free to use that in any future lectures,” he said. “Feel free to just quote the hell out of that.”
Alder wanted gossip about every student with an interesting haircut. He loved the youthful pictures of people like Priscilla Mancio. He said, “They had a web surfing club?”
“It was only the biggest nerds,” I said. “I hope they’re all billionaires now.”
By midnight, we were slaphappy and exhausted and would have finally gone to bed, but, to Alder’s glee, we’d just found the full roll of Jimmy Scalzitti’s photos—Camelot and the mattress party and, finally, Jimmy’s dorm room floor. There were more than thirty-six prints in the white business envelope, but then some were doubles. I was amazed that the negatives were still tucked in there; another thing the State Police hadn’t asked for. There was nothing new, alas; these same shots were all online—but still, we got caught up in laying them out in order on the bed.
In late 2018, there’d been great interest online in seeing if anyone’s sneakers were visible, in hopes of identifying the toe print on the equipment shed door. That timeline made no sense, unless someone from the mattresses had gone over later to help clean up the mess, but to those convinced of Omar’s innocence it was still worth a shot. A matching shoe might be a tiny wedge in his case. But the only shoes you could see clearly enough to identify were Asad Mirza’s duck boots.
“You know who would absolutely orgasm over these,” Geoff said, placing a picture of Beth and Fizz on the bed, “is that pasty YouTube guy.”
“I worry that’s literally true.”
We laid them in rows, referring to the negatives to establish chronological order, stacking identical prints. First were twelve shots of Camelot—awful ones, as Jimmy wouldn’t have been allowed to shoot with flash—and then a blur of legs and someone’s blue North Face jacket in the dark in the woods (he must’ve used his flash this time), the timestamp suddenly on: 9:58.
Then came the 9:59 shot with the infamous “blood spatter” that was so clearly just mud up the back of Robbie’s sweatshirt. The framing was slightly wider than the photo I’d seen online. Five kids, three with their backs turned. Two faces—Sakina John, Asad Mirza—glowed in the beams of the flashlight bonfire; the camera had given both red devil eyes. We named everyone for Alder, but he already knew.
Next: the 10:02 photo of Robbie with his arms around Beth and Dorian. Here was his face, not just his back; this was the photo that easily proved his alibi, the one most prominently discussed online. Reddit users had whole threads on it. (How accurate is a random 1990s camera timestamp anyway? This isn’t like a smartphone syncing with GMT. Could be off by a lot. Time zones, DST, etc.!) But even if it were off, the photos spanned forty-one minutes, down to that last one of Fizz drinking a beer—and unless these kids all flew back to their dorms, the right amount of time is accounted for. It would’ve taken someone smarter than Jimmy Scalzitti to change the clock setting multiple times.
I was looking at the last three shots, the ones of Jimmy’s dorm room floor, feeling satisfied that all thirty-six photos were accounted for, when Alder said “Huh.”
Just that, like a small, dull bell.
I peered over his shoulder and tried to see what he was looking at. He picked it up: the mud photo, the kids’ backs.
Alder said, “That’s Serenho, right?” He pointed with a pinky to Robbie’s back. That was him, his floppy hair, the back of the same gold Granby ski sweatshirt he’d been wearing in other shots, the same baggy jeans.
I said, “Yeah. It’s not blood.”
“No, I know.” Alder popped his lips.
“It’s just dirt.”
“Right.”
He took a photo of the photo with his iPhone, adjusted the contrast to its most extreme. He zoomed in on the back of Robbie’s sweatshirt. The splatter of dirt ran straight up the middle, a pattern wider at the bottom, narrower at the top. There were a few more millimeters to this print than to the online photo, so you could see more mud going farther down. But it still wasn’t blood. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “That’s from a bike. That’s from riding a bike through the mud.”
I had no idea what Alder was getting at, but I couldn’t breathe.
“No,” Geoff said. “No one had a bike. Can you even ride a bike on campus now? There’s no point.”
But Alder was right. This was how the backs of Leo’s Tshirts looked when we visited Jerome’s family in Wisconsin and he rode around their farm.
Alder zoomed in as far as he could, as if some answer would be written in the dark spatter. He said, “It’s from a bike.”
“It’s from a bike,” I repeated dumbly.
Geoff said, “Yeah, but who had a bike?”
“I mean—little kids,” I said. “Right? Faculty kids.” I remembered Mr. Levin’s son Tyler riding his kid-sized BMX around and around the all-weather track. It would’ve been idiotic for students to try to navigate campus on wheels, but if you had a five-year-old kid, you still bought them a bike. They had to learn somehow.
Geoff said, “He probably had one at home.”
Alder said, “He rode a bike at home in Vermont over Christmas? In the mud? And brought his sweatshirt back and didn’t wash it for three months?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or Feb Week. It doesn’t sound right. Why is my heart racing?”
Geoff, staring at the photo, said, “Jesus,” as if he’d just figured it all out, too, and I was the only one in the dark.
Alder said, “Talk this through with me. Talk this through.” He sat on the edge of the bed, the other photos sliding together.
It took me so long. It took me a stupid amount of time. And yes, most of the problem was that I was so fixated on you, so laser-focused on your alibi, your motives, your sins, your lies, that what I should have seen as illumination, I saw as a blinding glare. I could only look around the edges of it, like an eclipse.
I said, “He rode a bike because—okay, he rode a bike to get to the party. Everyone else walked, but he rode a bike?”
Geoff was pacing, his hands on his head.
Alder said, “He left Camelot. And they started walking. And so—so they walk there, they stop at the dorms first, maybe they leave at nine. It takes them half an hour. They walk slow because of Mike Stiles’s leg, right?”
And still I didn’t get it.
“He wasn’t with them,” he said. “Not at first. They’re in groups, there are nineteen kids, they’re not taking attendance. Half are already drunk.”
I said, “He wasn’t with them,” or at least I mouthed it. Was that even possible? There was math involved. I grabbed a Calvin Inn notepad and pen from Geoff’s desk and wrote:
8:45-ish? Camelot ends
9:00 start walking
9:30 mattresses
9:58 first mattress photo
9:59 first photo of Serenho
10:45 leave mattresses
11:05 back in dorms
Geoff took the pen from my fingers and drew a circle around the first five items, everything from the end of Camelot to Robbie Serenho’s first photo. Next to it, he wrote 1:14. It was so much time. Even if the show had ended a few minutes later.
He said, “How long do you think it takes to bike from the gym to the mattresses?”
“It was muddy,” I said. Only the dumbest of my thoughts were processing fully. I said, “Alder, you’re not recording this, are you?”
He shook his head. “Should I be?”
“No.”
Geoff said, “I ride a five-minute mile when I’m lazy. Let’s say pedaling fast over 1.4 miles of muddy terrain, maybe on a kid’s bike, let’s say conservatively ten minutes. Extra conservative, fifteen minutes. Even though we’re talking about a teenage athlete with a ton of adrenaline.”
I said, “He’s still got almost an hour.”