A report by Michael Keir Donnelly
The sentence in the email was innocent enough.
“I don't know if this is important, but...”
That's how the email from a Harvard University student began.
She wrote that she had read my last article — especially the request at the end to get in touch if anyone had ever heard the name Alpha Iota Tau. She wasn't sure if that would help. But about a month ago, she had been approached on campus by a man who introduced himself as a journalist. He had asked questions about student fraternities, especially Alpha Iota Tau, whether she knew anyone who was a member, or whether the fraternity was still active.
I called her. Her version of the encounter was simple.
It had been a sunny fall afternoon on campus. She had been sitting on the lawn when the man appeared—in his mid-fifties, looking very eager. He apologized and asked if he could interrupt for a moment, saying he was researching student fraternities. He asked if she was in one, if she knew any, if she was familiar with Alpha Iota Tau.
“I said I didn't know anyone from them personally,” she told me. “He seemed disappointed. As if he had hoped I could help him with something that was important to him. Then he thanked me and left.” She said she would have liked to help him, but she couldn't.
I didn't need to ask for the journalist's name: David Martinez.
The man whose estate had given me the box with the yearbooks, the clippings, Linda's diary, and small mementos. The man who had died a few weeks ago in a fall in his apartment. Officially an accident.
I hung up and stared at the screen for a moment. The date of the encounter, the date of his death—the sequence was uncomfortably close. Why had he asked about Alpha Iota Tau? Or rather, why now, after so many years? Had he perhaps not had the diary all these years, as I had assumed, but only recently received it? Or had something happened that had reawakened his curiosity about this story?
It was time to ask his family what had happened in the last weeks of his life. The box bore the return address of R. Martinez, who turned out to be David's brother.
We met in a small bar in Somerville, a place quiet enough to talk without anyone listening. We ordered beer and it didn't take long before we got to the point.
I told him that I wasn't getting anywhere with the documents David had left me. David had obviously wanted me to solve a case he had been working on before his death—and that I found it strange that he had been so thoughtful as to have the documents sent to me in the event of his death.
I was stuck, but I knew that David had just started asking questions again at Harvard. That I knew the documents, but not the trigger for this new research. And that I hoped he might know something I was missing.
He thought for a long time, long enough for me to realize that he wasn't searching for the right words, but for the right place to start the story.
“A few weeks ago,” he finally began, “I was with David. He was... strangely agitated.”
He said that David had seen a woman in Boston the day before whom he knew from his college days. Someone who had meant a lot to him back then. He had spontaneously approached her. Then security guards had appeared. Not aggressively, but clearly. They had stood between the two of them. One of them had asked David to move on.
“He didn't understand,” his brother said. "He was hurt. And irritated. He just said, ‘Why does she have security guards? Why can't I even say hello?’“
The next day, two men stood at David's door. Government agency, official IDs. They suggested it would be better if old stories were left alone.
”But,“ his brother continued, ”when you told him to leave something alone... he did the opposite. Maybe you journalists are all like that. You can't help sticking your nose into things that are none of your business. Or maybe it was because of that woman—David was really smitten at the time, even though I never found out who she was. I was in the Army at the time, but I remember how he raved about her in every message for quite a while."
David went up to the attic. He took out the box. The yearbooks. The diary. His old notes. He started looking for names again. And at some point he went to Cambridge to ask questions on campus.
“I don't know exactly what he was after,” his brother said. "Only that it was important. And that it was on his mind. More than I would have liked. A few weeks later, David was dead."
I left the bar with a knot in my stomach. I couldn't gain any certainty from it. But I did gain questions.
I drove to Cambridge myself.
I had contacted the press office in advance to ask for a tour and an interview, and to ask if the fraternity that a friend of mine had belonged to was still active.
I was told that Alpha Iota Tau still existed. Small, quiet, academic. Not a big fraternity, not loud. They met occasionally and cultivated values that could best be described as “structure, calm, and personal development.” And, as I had hoped, I was offered a tour by a member of the fraternity.
The young man was open, friendly, politely irritated that a reporter was interested in a fraternity that rarely even appears in the campus newspaper. He explained to me what they do: conversations, joint projects, a bit of academic mentoring.
It was the most normal thing I had heard during this whole story so far. And my further inquiries on campus revealed nothing else. No story that went beyond the usual dynamics of a small fraternity.
I drove back to the office and placed the box in front of me again.
The yearbooks. The newspaper clippings. The diary. Memorabilia.
Everything David had collected and kept.
If the fraternity itself yielded nothing—and everything pointed to that—then one question remained that had been on my mind since talking to his brother:
Why had David, who apparently had such strong feelings for Linda, never spoken to her? Why had he only pined for her from afar and, judging by the small items in the box, such as a silk scarf and a single ladies' glove, collected souvenirs of her?
Why this caution — or fear?
Whatever he had felt back then, it had been strong enough that he had kept all of this and recognized her immediately decades later. Strong enough that a chance reunion triggered a chain of events that he himself might no longer be able to comprehend.
I leafed through the diary again, then David's notes and my own. I had a feeling that somewhere between the lines lay the answer—not to Alpha Iota Tau, but to her. Linda Harper.
Her trail was not linear. An old address, a marriage announcement with a blacked-out name. Hints of a life that was deliberately kept discreet—a biography in the shadows. The closer I looked, the clearer it became to me:
The key was not Alpha Iota Tau.
The key was Linda.
She is the one I must find to solve the mystery David left me, one that haunted him his entire life.
To be continued.
Kommentar hinzufügen
Kommentare