The Secret History - Donna Tartt [0]
PUBLISHED BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
____________________________________ Copyright © 1992 by Donna Tartt
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and Faber and Faber Limited for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Fire Sermon” in “The Waste Land” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Rights outside the U.S. administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76569-7
LC 92-53053
v3.1
For Bret Easton Ellis,
whose generosity will never cease to warm my heart;
and for Paul Edward McGloin,
muse and Maecenas,
who is the dearest friend I will ever have in this world.
I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following:
1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are.
2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,
Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen
Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.
—PLATO,
Republic, BOOK II
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Binky Urban, whose dauntless efforts on behalf of this book leave me speechless; to Sonny Mehta, who made everything possible; to Gary Fisketjon il miglior fabbro; and to Garth Battista and Marie Behan, whose patience with me sometimes makes me want to weep.
And—despite the risk of sounding like a Homeric catalog of ships—the following people must all be thanked for their aid, inspiration and love: Russ Dallen, Greta Edwards-Anthony, Claude Fredericks, Cheryl Gilman, Edna Golding, Barry Hannah, Ben Herring, Beatrice Hill, Mary Minter Krotzer, Antoinette Linn, Caitlin McCaffrey, Paul and Louise McGloin, Joe McGinniss, Mark McNairy, Willie Morris, Erin “Maxfield” Parish, Delia Reid, Pascale Retourner-Raab, Jim and Mary Robison, Elizabeth Seelig, Mark Shaw, Orianne Smith, Maura Spiegel, Richard Stilwell, Mackenzie Stubbins, Rebecca Tartt, Minnie Lou Thompson, Arturo Vivante, Taylor Weatherall, Alice Welsh, Thomas Yarker and, most of all, that dear old bad old Boushé family.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Book I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Book II
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
THE SNOW in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.
It is difficult to believe that Henry’s modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn’t intended to hide the body where it couldn’t be found. In fact, we hadn’t hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing. This was a tale that told itself simply and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow that fell that night; it covered him without a trace, and ten days later, when the thaw finally came, the state troopers and the FBI and the searchers from the town all saw that they had been walking back and forth over his body until