Caroline’s got an entire room of her own. Well, shared with Maura. A display about Caroline’s murder starts on one end of the room, and as you walk corner to corner, it morphs into an exhibit on Maura’s bestselling book, Seaview becoming a tourist town, and the movie adaptation. Diana stops in the center of the room, throwing up her arms and doing a turn.

“Everything you need is here. But I’m happy to answer any questions.”

I’m not so sure that would be true if she knew the scope of my queries.

“Diana?” bellows a voice from afar. The mayor. Speak of the devil.

Always in motion and already halfway to the door, Diana drops a “Holler if you need me,” and then she’s gone.

“I’ll meet you in the resource library?” Gabriel ends on a question, but it seems he intended a statement; he’s gone before I can confirm.

It’s fine, though. Feels strangely appropriate—reverent, even—to be alone with Caroline and her impact on this town. The teen queen who started it all.

I skip past the photos of Seaview High before, with its sock hops and all-American football players, and instead look for the after.

Ah, there it is: a newspaper glows on a backlit white wall, its headline screaming:

HOMECOMING QUEEN SLAIN

I move on quickly, as the article’s details are now familiar.

The maze directs me past a dark corner to a windowless room with three rows of benches before a projection screen that’s playing washed-out footage. I’m not alone. A woman sits in the front row, cast in shadowy relief, like a modernist work of art.

Lone woman observes the long dead. 2022, I think, as though she is part of the museum exhibit herself.

But it’s what’s on the screen that holds our joint interest. Caroline looms over us, her white homecoming dress a shining beacon against the dishwater grays, murky browns, and faded greens of the video. I recognize the field, the concrete stadium steps in the distance—this is the homecoming-court procession. The future queen waves from a raised dais, eyes button-smooth, features blurry, a rosy-cheeked boy with buttery shoulder-length curls on her arm. That’s all that remains of the old home-movie film—implications of vibrancy, of detail. You have to close your eyes to imagine she was a real person at a real event. In twenty-four hours, she’ll be dead. But for now, she’s immortalized in soundless moving picture.

The video changes to a press conference, and a jump in quality. This clip has sound; I startle when an eerily young version of Ben’s grandfather speaks into a scratchy mic.