My face was in my hands, because my face was hot and my hands were ice-cold.
Alder slid down to the carpet, lay on his back, stared at the ceiling. He said, “Are we nuts? Maybe we’re nuts. So wait: He picks Thalia up backstage. Maybe he tries to get her to come to the mattresses. Maybe he’s told his friends he’s coming, right? They start fighting, they head toward the gym. Whatever happens, happens. He freaks and realizes he needs an alibi. If he goes back to the dorms, he won’t be accounted for over the past forty-five minutes.”
“Plus he probably wants a drink,” Geoff said.
“Right. And he wants his friends. So he needs to get to the mattresses fast. He looks around and sees a kid’s bike, or maybe there’s some faculty bike, whatever. He rides up, ditches the bike in the woods, and as soon as he’s there he makes sure they see him. He pretends he was there the whole time.”
“They don’t see him come up?” I said. “They aren’t like, Where’d you come from?”
Geoff said, “Okay, so maybe they don’t notice, or maybe they forget. Or maybe they cover for him later. But he sees that Scalzitti still has the camera. The pictures don’t even start till he’s there. Maybe he grabs the camera and turns on the timestamp.”
Alder, still on the floor, said, “Oh my God oh my God. Can I call Britt?”
I said, “I just—that’s a lot of crafty thinking for a drunk guy.”
“Who said he was drunk?” Geoff said. “Maybe he was stone-cold sober. Or sure, maybe he was wasted the whole time. Those aren’t sober actions. Doing it to begin with. Throwing her in the pool. Stealing a bike and plowing through the woods.”
I said, “You’re using circular logic. We’re going off a streak on his sweatshirt. It could have been months old. He’s a teenage boy. It could’ve been from something else. That could be someone else’s sweatshirt.”
“Right,” Alder said. “And this is not particularly useful in court. Robbie had a dirty sweatshirt so Omar’s innocent. That’s not—” He finished the sentence by rolling over onto his stomach, his face on the carpet.
I said, “It’s not a thing.”
But still: I felt my edges blurring.
I’d believed for so many years that it was Omar, that it was settled, even as my doubts about the case against him—and my suspicions about you—started pecking at me, a bird ready to escape its shell. And then the shell cracked, it fell to pieces, and the only plausible explanation was it was you.
It was you, it was you. Everything fit. You had motive, you had opportunity. You’d done one terrible thing, so you must have done another.
The most moronic thought: It couldn’t have been Robbie, because look at the carefree way he’d jumped into the pool the other day.
Alder and Geoff were staring at the photo again. Somewhere in the same building, Robbie and his family slept. Somewhere out there, so did you.
23
There was once a man they caught because he claimed he hadn’t left the state—but the dead bugs on the windshield of his rental car could only have come from outside California.
There was a man they caught because he’d ordered the knife on Amazon.
There was a man they caught because his name was on the Starbucks cup in her trash.
There was a man who was told that his wife’s body had been found in the woods. He arrived on the scene and instead of running toward the police tape, he ran to the exact spot where he’d left her body.
There was a guy whose claim of earlier consensual sex fell apart because his semen was in her body, but not in her underwear or pants. “Because dead women,” the prosecutor explained, “don’t stand up.”
There was a woman who managed to cut her captor’s driver’s license into twenty little pieces and swallow them so when they found her body his ID would be in her stomach. And they arrested him. They brought him in for questioning. But they never pressed charges against him.
24
Back in my own room, I lay in bed trying to think. If Robbie killed her, if Robbie lost his temper and became violent, it was likely over you. What else would make him that angry? Well: Some people have rage right below the surface, and an overcooked potato is enough to incite domestic homicide. As far as I knew, that wasn’t Robbie. She’d never gone to class with bruises on her face. She was coming from your show. Had he seen something between the two of you?
I remembered the seed of my own initial unease: the way Thalia turned her head offstage, the way she mouthed What? as if someone were back there, waiting for her, upset with her. You were in the orchestra pit, conducting. Omar’s presence in the theater would have been noted. Whereas Robbie Serenho could slip backstage, could walk straight through the clusters of waiting actors with no more than a whispered “Robbie, you’re not supposed to be here!” Their fight could have started when she came offstage and told him to leave. Or maybe he was back there because the fight had begun hours earlier. Maybe he was coasting on hours of rage. Maybe he knew exactly what he was planning.
I slept, but my dreams only rehashed things. The photos on Geoff’s bed, the math problem of the bike in the woods. A train leaves Kansas City at 9:00 p.m., headed for the gym. How angry is the driver?
In the morning, I texted Fran: I have a quest for Jacob and Max. Could they time themselves, I asked, riding bikes from the gym to the old mattress spot? Could they avoid any newer paths? I didn’t explain.
Fran wrote back: Who on earth had a bike?? But sure! They need exercise!
It was cold now, and muddy, only a little snow. The conditions were about the same.
We had decided at the end of the night that Alder would fill in both Britt and the defense team. We knew it was a reach—we’d probably sound like lunatics—but Robbie had yet to testify, so maybe they could make something of it. And meanwhile, those of us who had nothing better to do could at least dig harder. I had ridiculous visions of finding a rusty bike in the woods, Robbie’s fingerprints and Thalia’s blood still on the handlebars.
The image I kept returning to was of a tangled necklace chain. In one of the more normal moments of my later childhood, my mother taught me to rub a chain with olive oil, then take a long, straight pin and start working on the tiniest of gaps, the place with the most give. Once one thing loosened, another could loosen, another. I always felt claustrophobic at the start. But over time I’d learned patience, learned the reward of breathing through my discomfort.
What I knew was that we’d found a gap in the knot. I didn’t know what else it would loosen up, and I didn’t want to pull too hard, but I knew if we finessed it, wiggled it gently, other things would follow.
Midday, Geoff and I took our laptops to Aroma Mocha and sat looking through the 1995 interview records for any details of the mattress party timeline, any mention of Robbie being there the whole time or of who walked together. The kids who’d been there listed all nineteen students at the mattress party, confirmed that they’d been drinking, talked about when they’d last seen Thalia. Nothing about how scattered they’d been on the trail.
The only time it came up, either as a question or an answer, was the State Police asking both Sakina and Bendt Jensen whether Robbie had been there the whole time. Sakina said that to the best of her recollection, he was. Bendt said that he assumed so. They asked Sakina if he could have left early and she said no, because she remembered him helping Stiles walk home on his bad leg. Mike Stiles, in his own interview, talked about Robbie and Dorian helping him back.
“It’s amazing,” Geoff said, “that they thought to ask if he left early, but not if he got there late.”
“Right. Because bad stuff happens late at night. Bad stuff happens after you’ve been drinking, not before.”