Haverton College is a Connecticut campus whose role in the novel reaches well beyond education: it becomes the meeting point of Sheila Rogers’s and Julie Miller’s histories, a setting for a drug operation, and the place whose secrets help explain the deaths of Laura Emerson and Julie. Its respectable college environment stands in sharp contrast to the criminal activity concealed within it. When Will Klein and Katy Miller return to investigate, the campus is not simply a backdrop but a route through which scattered relationships and crimes begin to connect.

Campus and setting

Haverton is presented as a college with a recognizable campus life: students walk between buildings with backpacks, and the green surroundings carry for Will the memory of his own college years. He recalls enjoying the independence, informal friendships, late-night pizza, and conversations with professors that belonged to that earlier period. Those memories make the campus feel like a place of possibility and relative insulation from adult danger. They also sharpen the contrast between the life Will remembers and the criminal business that, as he later learns, had taken root there.

The college’s physical and social environment is introduced through the Chi Gamma sorority house. Its white exterior, decorative columns, and soft ornamental details make it resemble a wedding cake. The image suggests a carefully composed, conventionally feminine respectability, but the house is also a point of entry into a history of exploitation and violence. Across the street stands the much more modest home of Rose Baker, the sorority’s former housemother. Baker had retired three years earlier and remained close to campus, making her a living link to the period Will and Katy are trying to reconstruct.

The sorority and its former members

Sheila Rogers and Julie Miller had both belonged to Chi Gamma. Their membership provides the personal connection that brings Will and Katy to Haverton: after learning Baker’s name from the registrar, they drive from New Jersey to speak with her and establish what she remembers. Will recognizes the sorority house from occasional visits during his own college years, but the investigation gives the familiar campus a new meaning. What had been part of his recollection of college becomes a place where other people’s lives were shaped by forces he had not understood.

Baker recalls a change in Julie’s behavior during her time at Haverton. Julie was initially doing well, but later began withdrawing from the people around her and skipping classes. She also ended a relationship with her hometown boyfriend. Baker regarded that breakup as common among students in their first year away from home, but Julie’s came later, around her junior year, and seemed out of character to her. This recollection gives the investigation a personal, gradual dimension: Julie’s involvement in the college’s hidden world is set against a remembered change in her ordinary student life, not presented as something visible from the beginning.

Sheila’s connection to the college was different. She had been ambitious and, according to the account given to Will, Ken Klein helped establish her at the Connecticut school not primarily for her education but as a way to sell drugs. Sheila and Julie later shared an apartment near Haverton and were friends. Ken says he introduced the two women there; Julie became involved with drugs and began working for Philip McGuane. The college and its surroundings thus connect an older criminal arrangement to Julie’s personal life: a setting that first brought Sheila and Julie together also became part of the circumstances in which Julie was drawn into the operation.

The drug operation and its consequences

Haverton’s importance to the criminal plot lies in the advantage its setting offered. Ken describes the college as a comparatively wealthy, less competitive place to establish a drug trade, in contrast to the more openly contested street corners of the city. In this account, the campus’s privilege does not keep criminal activity outside its boundaries; it makes the college a useful market. Sheila’s placement there, Julie’s later involvement, and McGuane’s organization form connected parts of the same operation.

Laura Emerson, another Chi Gamma member, discovered the drug trade at Haverton and intended to report it. According to information Ken gave investigators, John Asselta strangled her because she had learned about the operation and might expose it. Her murder makes the cost of the college’s hidden business explicit: knowledge of the trade placed a student in danger. Julie’s role also extended beyond participation in the operation. Ken says that, after he agreed to return to the witness-protection process, he needed help gathering evidence against McGuane. Julie helped him smuggle out incriminating documents and pass along recordings he had made. The friends’ connection to Haverton therefore became part of both the criminal network and the effort to bring it down.

The wider investigation further ties the college’s drug activity to McGuane’s organization. Joseph Pistillo tells Will that Ken worked for McGuane and that McGuane’s criminal interests included drugs, prostitution, loan-sharking, graft, and kickbacks. Pistillo also says McGuane killed Victor Dober and Curtis Angler, with Ken involved; Ken was arrested on lesser charges six months before Julie’s murder. These details establish that the Haverton trade was not an isolated campus offense but one strand of a larger criminal enterprise. Laura’s discovery and Julie’s assistance with evidence placed people associated with the college on opposite sides of that enterprise, with severe consequences.

The return and the campus’s narrative role

Will and Katy’s visit to Haverton is a deliberate attempt to recover evidence from people and places linked to the past. Will has already made a late-night visit to Livingston and still has the rental car; he and Katy use it for the two-hour drive to the college. Before arriving, Will calls the registrar to confirm that Rose Baker had been the sorority’s housemother. He and Katy approach Baker without an appointment, partly because the registrar has said that she rarely goes far from home and partly because a direct explanation involving a murder investigation might make the meeting harder to arrange. Their decision reflects the uncertainty of the inquiry: they do not know what the visit will yield, but Baker is a specific witness whose memories may clarify the women’s shared history.

The conversation shifts Haverton from remembered campus scenery into a source of testimony. Baker’s account of Julie’s withdrawal gives Will a glimpse of change that was visible to someone who knew her, while the later disclosures about Sheila, Ken, and the drug operation explain why the college mattered to the investigation. The narrative returns to Haverton through several kinds of connection—sorority membership, friendship, recruitment into drug dealing, a murder motive, and the passing of evidence. Its significance lies in how those links converge: the campus’s appearance of conventional student life masks a network whose consequences reach well beyond the grounds, and revisiting it helps Will and Katy assemble a more complete account of the women’s lives and deaths.