Becky Cooper was a recent Harvard grad when she was gripped by a whispered-about mystery at her alma mater.
And, yes, she does finally learn the surprising truth about what happened.
Dive into this gripping story its first chapters are excerpted below.
In Cambridge, across the Charles River, the day was equally grim.
A delivery person piled stacks of that day’sHarvard Crimsoninside the undergraduate houses.
Her head was propped on a book.
Her feet were bare.
She had on jeans and a sweater and looked more like a body than a person.
Don’t let the times get you down."
January 7, 1969, was the second day of reading period.
But for a subset of the anthropology doctoral students, that morning was the most nerve-racking one all year.
By 9 a.m., they were packed into a lecture hall at the top of the Peabody Museum.
The students were there to take the first of three parts of their general exams.
They had been studying for months, and the stakes were high.
But that winter morning, all the smells had stilled.
Apthorp, shaped like a wedding cake, isjonquil,that distinctly New England shade of daffodils and buttercream.
It’s the same rickety ladder a crush surprised me by scaling that fall.
Some days I catch myself forgetting that ten years have gone by.
We have, inexplicably, a life-size cutout of him in the basement.
Elves are usually students straight out of graduation.
I hugged my knees, bandaged from a fall that afternoon, to my chest.
Mhmm, I nodded to Lulu.
The heavy brick of the buildings only emphasizes the impermanence of everything here but the institution itself.
Anything in particular, they ask, eager to make some kind of connection.
Not really, I say.
Oh, cool, they say, meaning,You left your job for this?
It’s too weird, too obsessive, too personal.
No one heard any screams; nothing was stolen.
Decades passed, and her case remained unsolved.
Unsolved, that is, until yesterday.
Copyright 2020 by Becky Cooper.
Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing.
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