THE PRESS CONFERENCE, DON TELLS me, is supposed to happen in two weeks. And then two weeks gets pushed to three. We speculate that part of the delay is the police trying to firm up evidence connecting Jane’s case to Ada Bean’s, the unsolved murder in Harvard Square that happened a month later. But Sennott doesn’t reveal anything.

In the absence of information, all I can do is watch as my feelings about this conclusion warp with all the waiting. After the initial shock, I’m left with a bodily fear, a sense of vulnerability more acute than at any other point in investigating Jane’s story. The single bogeyman is replaced by a pervasive, expansive evil—one capable of killing without reason or motive. There had never been any puzzle to be solved; no code to decipher. And because of that, I can no longer believe that I have any power to protect myself. The fear oozes like a hot caramel that has seconds to be poured before it hardens; I have to will myself to go outside.

Then, like Don, I grow angry at myself. I had been reassuring myself that I was doing the right thing by telling Jane’s story, but I, too, had been propagating the things we preferred to believe. I was wrong—we were wrong.

I hear Gramly’s gravelly voice saying that Massachusetts is the same state that started the Salem witch trials. And Karl reminding his readers that “All archaeology is the re-enactment of past thoughts in the archaeologist’s own mind.” Narratives are seductive. These stories are dangerous.

Jane’s favorite quote, pinned to my wall—“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all”—might have prepared me for this conclusion long ago, but this is exactly the kind of retrospective pattern-matching that demands mistrust. People are more than symbols. Not everything has thematic heft. The tools of storytelling can blind us from the truth. How then do you tell a responsible story about the past after all?

And then, finally, Sennott gives Don a date: Monday, August 20, 2018.

*  *  *

Four days before the conference, I notice a missed call from Boyd. He and I haven’t talked in half a year, and he doesn’t know that I know anything, because I promised I wouldn’t betray Don’s confidence.

I call Boyd back as soon as I can. It’s the night before his birthday, and I expect he’s just going to thank me for the slightly lewd birthday card I sent. But when he picks up, he booms, “I have an interesting story to tell you.”

He lays it all out. The random intruder. The rape. The DNA results.

And then he says that he and Peter Sennott had spoken to each other again a few days ago. After nearly fifty years, Boyd finally learned the name of the man who killed his sister: Michael Sumpter.

The name means absolutely nothing to me. I’ve never come across it before.

Sennott, who told Boyd he had been on vacation in Nantucket the previous two weeks (is that what we’ve been waiting for?, I wonder), described Sumpter as “an African American career criminal.”

My heart sinks. I hate that he’s Black. I realize that of all the suspects that had been considered over the years, no one’s ever suspected someone Black, which in retrospect is a small, strange comfort. But, I remind myself, that’s also because the anthropology community was so white. The lack of Black suspects wasn’t a lack of racism, but a product of yet another systemic bias.

“How are you feeling about all of it?” I ask.

“Well, fine. They’ve got the answer they wanted. I had the answer I wanted a long time ago.”

“Which was…?”

“Which is, she got killed.”

He takes a beat and offers a more expansive response. As always with Boyd, it feels like vulnerability is doled out like a gift: “I’m relieved, you know? I don’t have to sit around wondering anymore.”

Fifty years ago tomorrow, he reminds me, he was celebrating his birthday, getting his first legal drink with a sergeant and a corporal from Fort Worth, Texas. Forty-nine years ago tomorrow, I remind myself, he was back from Vietnam and his sister was dead.

I ask if he’s told Elisabeth Handler. Yes, he says, two hours ago, which I realize is the same time I missed his first call. I’m warmed by the realization that he had contacted me at the same time as Jane’s best friend.

We chat a little while longer, until he grows tired of either me or being on the phone. “I suggest you prepare to find out where that thing is on Monday and attend it,” he says. He gives me permission to call the DA’s office and get the details; Sennott didn’t swear him to secrecy. “Take care and enjoy the show Monday. You have the script now.”