THE PRESS CONFERENCE DOESN’T HAPPEN on Monday. Or that week. Or that month. There are no further updates from Sennott or from the DA’s office.

In the meantime, the students come back to school, and the dining hall comes back to life.

Don, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring, is in his final weeks of radiation treatment.

Richard Conti, who had served as foreman of the grand jury, passes away. He dies never knowing that the case was solved.

Don, Boyd, Elisabeth, and I wait and wait and wait and wait. We’ve gone from the maddening silence of not knowing to the stifled silence of knowing but being able to tell no one.

*  *  *

In mid-September, Elisabeth gets in touch with me. She says she would have accepted law enforcement’s story unquestioningly—that she would have been happy to think that investigators finally did what they had promised all those years ago—if only they had announced their results weeks ago. But in the pause that followed, questions began festering again, like: Hadn’t the cops been sure that Jane wasn’t raped? She wants to know if I have any insight into what’s taking so long.

I give her my best guess: that detective work takes time and that maybe they’re trying to coordinate the announcement with DA Marian Ryan’s reelection campaign. But I admit that I, too, can feel the vines of speculation climbing again. Isn’t it a little too convenient that the suspect is dead and Black and can’t defend himself? But I don’t know if I can trust that feeling. Still burned from my years-long investment in stories that turned out to be untrue, I worry my reluctance to believe is less an indication that something is amiss than it is the return of my desire to construct a story to hide behind.

But unlike Don and me, Elisabeth says she actually finds the police’s version somewhat comforting. It transforms the red ochre from a sadistic clue to the vestige of Jane kicking the shit out of a stranger. She even finds a bit of dark humor: “It’s like a Hercule Poirot story with a postmodern ending,” she says, where Poirot combs through suspect after suspect only to discover on the last page: “It was a brick. Sorry guys.”

And more than anything, Elisabeth finds solace in knowing that Jane, who had had such bad luck with men throughout her life, didn’t have to look into the eyes of her killer and feel betrayal as her last waking feeling.