We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Halfway into our lunch, Morgan entered the park. Lily shrugged apologetically. We scooted on our blankets, and he sat down. I understood what Lily saw in him: He had green eyes and an Australian accent and a brain that could simultaneously retain the most specific of historical facts and spit them out with a romantic spin. If he was going to interrupt our lunch, he could at least share a classic Morgan tale in exchange. I tried to bait him with a ghost story, some half-remembered lore involving an old fire truck that stood guard in Harvard Yard near the turn of the century.

  “You want to hear a really crazy Harvard story?” he asked and launched into his version of a macabre legend like a well-worn fairy tale.

  In the late 1960s, a beautiful young graduate student in archaeology was found murdered, bludgeoned to death. The rumor was she’d been having an affair with her professor. It started on the dig they were on together in Iran, and when they got back, she wouldn’t give it up. The professor couldn’t have the university find out about their affair, and he went to her apartment one night. They talked, and he struck her with an archaeological stone tool he had taken from the Peabody Museum. Neighbors heard nothing.

  He picked up her body and hid her under his coat. He walked ten blocks back to his office in the Peabody Museum, and lay her on his desk. He stripped her naked and lay three necklaces that they had found together in Iran on her. He transformed her into the princess of their dig site, the one that they had uncovered months before. He sprinkled red ochre powder over her.

  Police found her the next day and questioned the professor. The school forced the Crimson to change its article about the murder. They couldn’t have it point to one of their own. A version ran that morning, and by that afternoon, there was no record of it. Suddenly, everything was hushed up. The press stopped writing, the family never investigated, and the police never arrested anyone.

  Morgan stopped. You’d think I would have memorized his face, or Lily’s, or created some trace that I could follow to how I felt at the time. But all I remember is that I heard the story, and it was sunny, and she was nameless.

  “But the detail that really gets me,” Morgan added, “is that when police found her body, they found cigarette butts burned into her stomach. In some sort of ritualistic pattern that also had meaning at the site. Think about it,” he emphasized, “he’d have to have stayed and smoked all those cigarettes in order to do what he did. A hundred cigarettes, they said. How do you do that? How do you sit calmly and do that?”

  James and Iva

  FROM THE MOMENT I HEARD the story about the murder, so much about it barbed me. It wasn’t because I believed it—it seemed outlandish and obviously embroidered—but because I could believe it. The very things that made me love Harvard—its seductiveness, its limitlessness—also made it a very convincing villain. Harvard felt omnipotent.

  That omnipotence, on most days, was an amazing thing: It manifested as a sense that anything was possible. As an undergrad, I felt like I got three wishes. I had to do my own work, and find my own hidden opportunities, but there was a sense that if I dreamed it, nothing was too big an ask. There was always an expert coming through town, or a professor who was friends with your heroes, or some dream research opportunity that a friend happened to mention.

  The power also manifested as benign glimpses of Harvard’s ability to skirt the rules. Sure, there were drinking laws in Massachusetts, but on Thursday night “Stein Clubs” at the houses, you didn’t necessarily need to be twenty-one. Harvard had its own police force with its own amnesty policy. If you were from a country for which the US had strict visa requirements, Harvard could write you a letter.

  So imagining that power having a dark side—one that could silence an unflattering story, control the press, guide the police—wasn’t too hard. My freshman seminar professor had warned our class that Harvard was an institution on a scale we could not imagine: “Harvard will change you by the end of your four years, but don’t expect to change it.” It wouldn’t be surprising if an institution that prided itself on being older than the US government might have behaved as though it were accountable only to itself.

  But the story lived, filed in my head, as a fable.

  Until it came up again.

  It was the summer of 2010, more than a year after that picnic conversation, and I was early for a guidance chat with my adviser, James Ronan.i James was a doctoral candidate in archaeology, and he had been my resident tutor. He often left his door open, and our chats—about his archaeological digs, or psychogeographic maps, or microbreweries—always made me feel better when Harvard got to be too much.

  The meeting was in the Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering, a shiny building in the part of campus I never went to—a little glass-and-steel enclave between the brick of the Yard and the brick of the Peabody and the Geological Museums. It was largely for engineers and biochemists, but it had a nice café in the lobby, which was pin-drop quiet. People didn’t leave their labs very much.

  James saw me loitering awkwardly near the front of the café trying to kill time and waved me over. He was in the middle of a meeting with someone I had seen around campus. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her big, wavy hair and contagious laugh from the dining hall.

  “Becky, Iva;ii Iva, Becky,” James said.

  There were only two seats at their table, so I stood in front of them as they wrapped up their discussion, unsure whether they really wanted me to listen in. Near the end of their chat, I heard enough to piece together that they had moved on to lighthearted speculation about Indiana Jones. Legend at the school was that the character was based on Samuel Lothrop, a former Peabody Museum curator who had doubled as a spy for the US government. “It wasn’t rare for archaeologists to be spies,” they said, turning to include me. For decades, they explained, archaeology provided one of the most convenient covers for espionage, especially during the First and Second World Wars.

  Intrigue, secrets, double identities. I couldn’t help myself. For the first time since Morgan told me the story of the murdered archaeology student, I began to retell it. By the time I got to the implausible dragging of the body back to the museum—How could no one see the body?—I already regretted starting the tale. But I finished anyway. “And nothing happened to the professor.”

  They stared at me.

  “I think,” I backtracked. “I mean. It’s just a story I heard.”

  Finally James said something: “It was in her apartment, not the Peabody.”

  “And he’s still here,” Iva said.

  Footnotes

  iPseudonym.

  iiPseudonym.

  The Body

  THE GENERAL EXAMS FINISHED JUST after noon. As the students packed their bags, a few speculated on where Jane Britton might be. Jane was known for her morbid humor and for her disappearing spells––the kind of girl to blurt out in the middle of a perfectly happy get-together, “Christ, the only reason I get up in the morning is because I hope a truck will run over me.” She seemed to enjoy getting a rise out of people. Like the other time when, after an unexplained absence, she appeared in the Peabody smoking room and announced to those present: “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” People knew she was fundamentally a good student, one of the few who had gone directly from Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister school, into Harvard’s PhD program. Missing Generals would have been out of the question.

  Jane’s boyfriend, Jim Humphries, had called her twice that morning before he left for the Peabody Museum. He was taking the exam that day, too. Jim, twenty-seven, was a few years older than Jane. Canadian and six foot seven, with sandy-blond hair, parted to the side, and horn-rimmed glasses, Jim looked more like an engineer or architect than the archaeologist he was training to be. He was a quiet person, reserved to the point of brooding, whose face wasn’t expressive even at the best of times. He was known around the Peabody as The Gentleman, for doing old-fashioned, courtly things like helping girls with their coats and writing than
k-you notes for dinner parties.

  Jane and Jim had met in the spring of 1968, during a seminar to prepare for a summer expedition in Iran. The site was called Tepe Yahya, and the dig was led by a young Harvard professor named Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky. Graduate students called him Karl or CCLK, or, more covertly, Count Dracula, due to his rumored Eastern European aristocratic background and air of mystery. The young professor was a rising star in the department and an emerging leader in Near Eastern archaeology. The success of the ’68 season only enhanced this reputation. Not long after the expedition crew returned to the States, the Boston Globe hailed Lamberg-Karlovsky as the discoverer of what appeared to be Alexander the Great’s lost city of Carmania.

  It was on this dig in southeastern Iran that Jane and Jim’s relationship blossomed. “They had a chance to feel for each other’s loneliness,” a fellow digger would later tell reporters. Recently, Jane had talked to her friends about the possibility of marriage. She liked to joke that it would be held at the Church of the Unwarranted Assumption.

  Jane hadn’t answered either call, which Jim thought was odd, but he assumed she couldn’t sleep and had gone over to her neighbors’ place for breakfast. He had seen her the night before and, other than being nervous about the test, she had seemed fine. But when she wasn’t in the exam, either, he knew something had gone wrong—she was sick or had slept in. He didn’t let himself consider worse.

  After turning in their tests, a group of graduate students headed for lunch, and they invited him along. Jim politely declined and went outside and across the road to call Jane one more time. He didn’t want to use the telephone in the museum because he knew everyone would be listening. Again, Jane didn’t answer.

  Jim started the fifteen-minute walk from the museum to Jane’s apartment, a four-story walk-up, a short block past the Square, on a side street that connected Mount Auburn Street to the Charles River (where John F. Kennedy Park would eventually sit). Her address—6 University Road—was one of five entrances to a red-brick-and-limestone building known as The Craigie. It took up a full square block and was commissioned by Harvard in the late 1890s to provide a less expensive housing option for students.

  The suites were small, but the building was full of lovely touches—natural wood trim, a large courtyard, and corner bay windows. Over the years, however, particularly as Harvard’s housing system developed and provided undergraduates with on-campus accommodations, the building had fallen into disrepair.

  The surrounding area had also deteriorated. It became a kind of no-man’s-land of Harvard Square, home to parking lots, a trolley yard, and an alley that led to the river. Before developers turned those lots into the upscale Charles Hotel in the ’80s, the only reason to walk to that part of town was the Mount Auburn post office across the street and Cronin’s, a watering hole with a small TV screen and cheap beers.

  But the rents were low—Jane’s was $75 a month—and the building was centrally located, so it was still real estate coveted by graduate students, particularly in the Anthropology department, where units were passed down from one generation to the next. Jane had secured her apartment thanks to her now next-door neighbors, Don and Jill Mitchell, who were students specializing in Pacific Island anthropology.

  Besides, Jane wasn’t bothered by the building’s shabbiness. While the Mitchells always used their dead bolt, Jane almost never locked her door. She seemed to live with a sense of invulnerability.

  Jim reached University Road around 12:30 p.m. He pushed in the front door and walked up the stairs, flooded by the gray winter sun from the skylight. The stairwell dead-ended at the fourth-floor landing. The hallway walls were apple green and peeling. Jim walked past the Mitchells’ place. Jane’s, the smallest of the three apartments on this floor, was at the end of an alcove. It was unmistakable. Blue, green, and yellow polka dots decorated the left side of her hallway, and on her front door, which she had painted gold, was a piece of typewriter paper with a quote she had found amusing. Police would later remove the paper as evidence:

  “Maybe,” said Mrs. Kylie, “(she’s) an archaeologist because (she) didn’t have a sandbox when (she) was little.” September, 1968.

  Jim knocked on Jane’s door, even though he knew better than anyone that it would be unlocked, especially in the winter when the radiator heat made the wood swell and the lock finicky.

  Don and Jill Mitchell heard the noise and thought it might be Jane coming home from her exam. Don, whose thick mustache made him look much older than his twenty-five years, walked into the hallway.

  “Is Jane home?” Jim asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, she didn’t take her quiz.”

  Don’s face changed. He encouraged Jim to go in and check, so Jim knocked on Jane’s door again. No answer. This time Jim reached for the handle and gave it a shove, and it opened.

  “Can I come in?” Jim called out. Don waited by the door. Again no answer. Jim felt a cold gust of air coming from the kitchen and saw that the window was wide open. He was certain it hadn’t been open the night before. Jim reached his head back to look into the kitchen. There was no one there except Jane’s pet Angora cat, Fuzzwort. Jane sometimes left the window open because she thought there was a gas leak in her kitchen, but she’d only do that when the Mitchells were looking after her cat; the screen had long ago rotted off, and Fuzzwort liked to run out onto the fire escape.

  Jane’s room was its usual homey mess. Books. Ashtrays. Manuscripts. Cups and cigarette butts. A turtle tank, soupy with algae, rested on her dresser. Shards of light glittered through the wine and brandy bottles she had arranged in her windows to catch the sun––a Dionysian pane of stained glass. Ceramic owls and artifacts from Jane’s travels lined the shelves. Paintings, some of which Jane had done herself, hung in their frames. The walls were white, and on the one by the kitchen, she had painted cats, giraffes, and owls, capricious and dreamy. Their eyes filled the room.

  It was not until he fully walked into the apartment that he could see her. Jane’s right leg hung over the side of her bed, which was a mattress on top of a simple box spring, placed directly on the floor. Her blue flannel nightgown was pulled up to her waist. He didn’t try to shake her awake. He walked out of the room and asked Don to get Jill because he didn’t think anything was seriously wrong, and Jane’s state of undress made it seem more like “a woman’s job.” Jill left her apartment, walked into Jane’s, and came back out almost immediately. She needed to lie on her bed. She felt sick.

  Don walked in this time. He approached the bed and noticed, with a bolt of guilt, that Jane wasn’t wearing underwear. Above her waist was a pile of long-haired sheepskin rugs and her fur coat. She was buried facedown underneath. He walked closer and pulled back the coat until he could see the back of her head. There was blood on the sheets. And the pillows. And on the rugs. And around her neck. He didn’t turn her over. There was no question: She was dead.

  It Begins

  I ASKED IVA AND JAMES to tell me everything they knew. They looked uncomfortable, whispering despite the fact that there wasn’t really anyone there but the barista.

  The professor’s name was Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, they said, and the story James had heard, like the one Morgan told me, was that this Harvard professor—tenured, and still on faculty—had an affair with his student and killed her when she wouldn’t end the liaison and threatened to tell either his wife or the university, he couldn’t remember which. His version also involved red ochre, but none of the cigarette butts. Red ochre, they explained, was used in many ancient burial rituals, either to preserve the dead or to honor them on their way to the afterlife. Its use seemed to limit the circle of suspects to someone with intimate knowledge of anthropology. Everyone in the department at Harvard, they said, knew the story. They had heard that another Harvard archaeology professor got too drunk at a recent faculty dinner and spilled the sordid tale to his students. In fact, they wouldn’t be surprised if most people in the field of archaeo
logy knew and whispered about that particular professor.

  I couldn’t understand how such a huge scandal, if any of it was true, could stay so quiet.

  Iva and James explained that archaeology is a small and venal world. Everyone knows everyone’s business, but the rumors stay within the walls of the discipline. To figure out this murder, they implied, I would have to understand the world of academic archaeology.

  * * *

  From my dorm room that night, I Googled everything I could about the case, starting with “red ochre Harvard,” since I still hadn’t learned the victim’s name. While some of the more salacious aspects of Morgan’s original version turned out to be exaggerations, so much of it was there: the ochre, the Iranian dig, and reports of “hostilities” on the expedition. There was even mention of a cigarette butt that figured prominently in the crime scene. Gone was the jewelry on her neck and the ritual burns, but what my research turned up was stranger still. Jane’s father was the vice president of administration at Radcliffe College at the time of her death. If anyone had the power and clout to investigate, he did. But, it seemed, he never pursued it; in the articles, there was just a single mention of a grand jury hearing, and nothing about its outcome. Her death quietly faded into rumor. The lack of answers didn’t make sense.

  And there was Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky—the one still on faculty—at the Cambridge Police precinct house on the day her body was found. “I came here to be of whatever assistance I can be to police,” he had told the Boston Globe. “I knew Jane both as an undergraduate student and a graduate student. She was an extraordinarily capable and talented girl […] This doesn’t seem possible, her dying. I saw her just three days ago.”

  And there he was again, in the New York Times: Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky pacing in the office of Stephen Williams, the director of the Peabody Museum and the head of the Anthropology department. “Both men have been stung by the impact of the sensational national publicity that has engulfed them,” Robert Reinhold, the Times’s Boston correspondent, wrote.