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send a text when they thought Vera wasn’t looking and even when they knew she was; girls who looked at her shrewdly when they wanted to give off the impression of being good, of paying attention. They had none of the morning class’s quiet sense of expectancy. There was something to be said for students who came in with no expectations.
    Though the students in her second and third classes were a less interesting mix than her first, Vera had become progressively more comfortable in how she presented herself—honing and retooling the aspects of the discussion that hadn’t gone so well the first time around, keeping her topics on track, and even managing a few jokes that had made the girls in the later sections smile. Indulgent smiles, a small sop to Vera, but smiles nonetheless. The morning class, she thought, was never going to see her at her best; they were always going to be her trial run for the day. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, guinea pigs that they were.
    At home Vera sat at her worktable and scrawled a few illegible notes about the first four chapters of
The Catcher in the Rye
. She typed up a list of discussion questions, a handout for the students; since the handout was a last-minute idea, she would have to go to school even earlier the next morning to make the photocopies.
Really,
Vera scolded herself,
you need to plan better in advance.
Again, the feeling of fraudulence nagged at her. A real teacher would be better prepared. Disconsolate at this thought, she tried to cheer herself with a bit of mindless TV, flipping between a reality show about brides and a reality show about people who were hiding in bunkers because they believed a deadly apocalypse was coming.
    She picked up the remote again and paused at a local news station when the mug shot of a familiar face appeared in the upper corner of the screen. “As the date for the trial of the Angela Galvez murder draws closer, twenty-five-year-old Ritchie Ouelette of Biddeford, Maine, has changed his plea from guilty to innocent,” the news anchor said in liquid tones that barely masked her broad Maine vowels, but Vera was concentrating more on Ouelette’s mug shot. The young man had an elongated face, prematurely thinning hair, and an expression so incredulous, so seemingly without guile, that his picture was hard to look at. Vera had known he would come around to pleading innocent. Seeing this mug shot anew, she was even more convinced of her earlier hunch that he was, in fact, as innocent as he now claimed.
    Vera prided herself in knowing a great deal about the criminal mind and considered herself intuitive when it came to determining a suspect’s guilt. Local serial killer Ivan Schlosser was a prime example—there had never been any doubt in her mind of
his
culpability. But Ouelette was young and nervous, the sort who could easily be coerced into his initial false confession, especially in light of the mounting circumstantial evidence against him—the carpet fiber from the trunk of his Ford found on the girl’s body, the unspecified DNA (blood, Vera imagined) that had been found on the vehicle’s front seat. There were some who also falsely confessed because they thought it would give them their fifteen minutes of fame, but Ritchie Ouelette didn’t strike her as that type. In all the news footage Vera had seen of him, he hunched his tall frame as though he wished to disappear into himself.
    She thought again of her early morning class and what they had had to say about Angela Galvez. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that Dorset, ordinarily so complacent, was still shaken by the crime that had occurred a few months before. The Dorset murder had, in fact, had some influence on her decision to relocate to that town. Still in Bond Brook when the story broke, she had started collecting news clippings about the Galvez murder, comparing her findings to other true-crime cases that bore some similarity to the case. She had even come up