Book Excerpt
“So
what do you think?” Jack asked me as I sat down.
“About?”
“About
the murder.”
“I
think I’m going to murder someone if I don’t get some coffee soon.”
“Hopefully
it’s Sanders or Wynne,” Jack said with a cackle. “But what about the dead girl?
Who do you think killed her?”
The
pounding in my skull was louder than his voice; I paused to press my head into
my hands.
“How
would I know?”
“You
wouldn’t, I just wanted your best guess.”
“I
don’t have a guess,” I told him. I hadn’t liked hearing about the girl in the
first place and wanted no reason to talk about her more. “Why would you want to
think about something like that?”
He
shrugged and took a bite of his English muffin.
“I
can’t help it, Nim – I love a good mystery.”
His
eyes were alight and mischievous. I could almost see the conspiracies forming
in his mind behind the dark irises, undoubtedly searching for alternatives to
the mundane theory we had settled on just hours before.
“I
know you do,” I said. “But check one out of the library – don’t go looking for
them.”
“Like
I’d ever go to the library,” he said. “But it does have me thinking ...”
“What?”
I asked warily.
“We
should go to the boathouse.”
“What?
How do those two thoughts even go together?”
“Think
about it, Nim: it’s the perfect time to break the rules.”
“How
is it the perfect time? The police are swarming the place.”
“Hardly,”
he said. “Did you see even one officer on campus this morning? They’ve all
cleared out.”
“Only
because Barker’s hoping that no one will know what’s going on,” I countered. “I
bet they’ll be back tonight after we’re all in our rooms.”
“Alright,
forget the police, Nim – it’ll be fun.”
Even
his most earnest of expressions couldn’t convince me to sneak out to the boat
house and steal one of the rowing boats again. We had done it a few times in
the past, of course, to feed his insane idea that it was possible to row all
the way to the mainland and escape Bickerby, but we had certainly never
achieved the feat.
“No.”
“Why
not?” he pestered. “We haven’t done anything fun all semester.”
“We
haven’t been in trouble all semester, either,” I said. “And I’d like to keep it
that way.”
“Why?
It’s not like we’ve ever gotten caught before. Besides, I hear Barker’s in the
market for a new stadium to match that nice sporting field he had installed
...”
“Karl
will kill me. Besides, it’s too cold to go out to the ocean. We’ll freeze to
death.”
“Better
than dying of boredom,” Jack muttered, but he let the idea drop all the same.
About The Book
Title: Damnatio Memoriae
Author: Laura Giebfried
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Nothing
ever happened at Bickerby. Located on an island off the coast of Maine,
its prestige, remoteness, and near-inaccessibility in the winter months
were the reasons that Enim Lund’s father sent him there in the first
place. With only a year left of school until graduation, Enim’s only
focus is to keep his grades high enough to scrape by and keep his
unforgiving involvement in his mother’s critical accident secreted away.
But when a body washes up on the school’s shore and a teacher vanishes
without explanation, the thought of a quiet, uneventful year becomes
unlikely – especially given that his best friend has planted himself in
the middle of the crime. Worse than the thought of a killer loose on the
island with them, though, is that the unfolding events are dredging up
horrors in Enim’s past that, if uncovered, will result in his own
misdeeds being found out.
As
Enim is pulled further and further into crimes that he both has and
hasn’t committed, he finds that his mind is slowly unraveling and his
grip on reality is faltering, and unwanted comparisons are being drawn
between his mother’s withering health and his own. Soon, discovering who
the killer is becomes his only concern. Yet before long, it becomes
clear that there’s an even more difficult task at hand than who’s
responsible for the horrid crimes: getting anyone to believe him.
Author Bio
Laura
Giebfried was born in Bangor, Maine in June of 1992. She is the
youngest child of Joseph and Rosemary Giebfried, who moved to Maine from
New York in order to raise their family. Giebfried currently lives in
Bangor and attends the University of Maine where she is earning her
degree in psychology.
Buy on Amazon
