Book excerpt:
Viking
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Rebecca Mackay, author of “Great Believers,” returns with “I have some questions for you.” (Viking), a New York Times bestselling novel about a woman who investigates the mystery surrounding the decades-old murder of her boarding school roommate.
Read an excerpt below:
“I Have Some Questions for You” by Rebecca Mackay (Hardcover)
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“You’ve heard of him,” I say—a challenge, a reassurance. From the woman on the barstool at the neighboring hotel who makes the mistake of striking up a conversation, to the dentist who is out of questions about my children and asks what I’m doing with myself.
Sometimes they know it right away. Sometimes they ask, “Wasn’t that where the boy kept it in the basement?” no! No, it wasn’t.
Wasn’t that where he was stabbed? The one where she was sitting in a cab with a different girl. The one where she went to the fraternity party, the one where she used the cane, the one where she used the hammer, the one where she picked him up from rehab and he didn’t. The one where he was watching her walk every day? Where he made the mistake of telling her that her period was late? The one with the uncle? Wait, another one with uncle?
No: It was the one with the swimming pool. That had alcohol—around her hair—with the guy who confessed—right. Yes.
He nodded, reassuringly. What about you?
My barstool neighbor pulls celery from her Bloody Mary, down. My dentist tells me to rinse. They put his name in their mouths, in their memories. “I know that for sure,” he says.
“That,” because what is it now but a story, a story to be known or not known, a story with a limited set of details, a story to be mastered by memorizing maps and timelines.
“One from boarding school!” they say. “I remember, one of the videos. You knew They?”
That’s the one whose picture pops up if you search. The New Hampshire Murders, with mug shots from the math-addled tragedies of recent years. One image—she’s laughing with her mouth but not her eyes, indicating some deep unhappiness—is featured in the clickbait. This is just a cropped shot of the tennis team from the yearbook. If you knew Thalia it was easy to see that she wasn’t actually upset, just smiling for the camera when she didn’t feel like it.
It was a story that was told and told.
It was where she was young enough and white enough and beautiful enough and rich enough that people noticed.
This was where we were all young enough to think that some genius had the answers.
Maybe that was what was wrong with us.
Maybe it was all of us, collectively, each with just a featherweight, gone wrong.
From “I Have Some Questions for You” by Rebecca Makkai, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca McKay Freeman.
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“I Have Some Questions for You” by Rebecca Mackay (Hardcover)
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