I AUDITED A FEW MORE of Karl’s classes, but I was starting to feel like I had learned everything I could from his presence alone. Karl was certainly charismatic enough to support the kind of legend that students would tell and retell for four decades, but whether or not he was responsible for Jane’s murder was a question I was no closer to answering than when I arrived in Cambridge.
I returned to New York where I slinked around the periphery of the story. I approached a handful of recent graduate students in archaeology to see if they had heard the same things that James and Iva had. The convergence of their stories was unmistakable. In every version, three facts stayed the same: A young woman was murdered. She had had an affair with her professor. He sprinkled red ochre on her.
I had initiated those conversations carefully. Over the months, the threads that connected generations of people in the Anthropology department had become more visible. I realized that even Morgan Potts, the person from whom I first heard the story, was at the heart of that web; when I emailed him to make sure I had remembered all the details of the story correctly, his address populated the field: danielmpotts—Dan Potts. I knew that name. It was the name of the editor who had assembled the third Tepe Yahya monograph—the one with that photo of Jane lying at everyone’s feet. Morgan, it turned out, was his middle name; he was the son of that disciple of Lamberg-Karlovsky’s. The world of archaeology felt claustrophobically small.
For the same reason, the graduate students were as skittish to talk to me as I had been to reach out to them. Two recent alumni only agreed to speak on the condition of total anonymity. One of them said: “I don’t have any direct information on the whole story myself,” but the fact that both he and James were “holding on to the story tells you something about its importance inside the institution.”
Jane’s case itself was also riddled with rabbit holes. I learned from a Harvard Crimson article that a year after Jane’s death, Ravi Rikhye, the apparent witness to two men running to an idling vehicle, was arrested for international drug smuggling. Jessie Gill, the head of the tenant union, who led the charge against Harvard for being a neglectful landlord of the University Road building, was reportedly an FBI informant on radical activity by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
And I learned that another murder occurred in Cambridge less than a month after Jane’s, on Linnaean Street near Radcliffe Yard. The similarities were striking: Ada Bean lived alone and had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy, blunt instrument. She was naked from the waist down and her head and chest had been covered with a blanket. She was fifty, but she looked much younger, and she, like Jane, had dark hair and hazel eyes. Of the four murders in Cambridge in 1969, only two remained unsolved forty-five years later: Jane’s and Ada’s. I feared that Jane’s death was not an isolated incident.
When I asked an old mentor, a professor of investigative journalism, how to keep myself safe while doing this research, he replied: “Don’t do it.”
* * *
I moved out of my parents’ place and into my first apartment in Brooklyn. I started working at a café down the block because I told myself that this way I would have time for Jane: I would make terrible cappuccinos by day, and at night, I would work on the story. But in reality, for more than a year, I dragged my heels and hid from it. I had deluded myself into thinking that I had some choice in whether or not to pursue her story, not realizing that the truth was that she had already started to seep into the borders of me.
By December 2013, I had been dating Jay, a café regular, for five months, though I still spilled cups anytime my ex Bobby walked into the store. Jay worked in intelligence and wrote music on the side. I had never been in a serious relationship before. Though I had been skeptical of Jay at the beginning––he was too eager to impress, too insecure in himself–—over the months, we had built a relationship on holding each other away from the darkness. (When we met, Jay had just called off his engagement. He had found out shortly before the wedding that his fiancée was in love with someone else.) He was broken; I feared that I was; and we were both afraid we were fundamentally unlovable in some way. Our bond felt like the one in High Fidelity: “Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition.”
One night, Jay and I walked to the Mountain Cabin restaurant in our neighborhood. We were having wine, and I was facing the door when Bobby walked in with a date. The hostess escorted them to the empty table in front of us. I had to look at him the whole time. I could hear him laugh. Jay and I hurried to finish our wine, and we got up to leave. Bobby stood up, maybe to go to the bathroom, I thought, and then he hugged me.
When Jay and I got to his place, he could see that I was still shaken. He had heard about Bobby and knew the thorns were still there. He poured Negronis and put on the record player. We pulled the chairs to the perimeter of his living room and started slow dancing. I don’t think we’d said anything to each other since we walked in. I was holding his shoulder, but it felt like clutching a shield. The next song started. “You’ve changed / The sparkle in your eyes is gone / Your smile is just a careless yawn / You’re breaking my heart.” We held each other tight against the encroaching lyrics. But the song wasn’t really about us. It was about Bobby. It was about Jay’s ex-fiancée. It was about our relationship stopping our skid down into the dark. And suddenly, I realized, we weren’t alone in the room. The reason we were together, the reason we were clinging to each other, was because of the people we carried. The people who let us believe for a moment that we weren’t truly alone and then pulled the promises away. I could feel that as we circled the room, we were trying to protect each other from all that haunted us, the invisible burdens that laced our every interaction. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t have to.
I couldn’t tell you at the time, but that was the moment that I gave in to Jane’s story. I thought that despite the decades that separated us, I had found a companion in my loneliness in her. I couldn’t help but imagine time collapse. I saw her doing the exact same choreography, fending off her shadows in the arms of Jim Humphries. My dance with Jay and her dance with Jim overlaid perfectly. It was an imagined scene, I knew, but the line between her and me had started to blur irrevocably. Here I was thinking that I was bearing witness to her story, while the truth was, she was watching over mine. Shaping it. Guiding me, like we were dancing.