Princeton, New Jersey

Princeton, New Jersey, anchors the 1987 portion of Richard Flynn’s account, joining the ordinary geography of student life to the relationships and violent events that changed his future. Its campus routines and domestic interiors give the story a specific setting; after Joseph Wieder’s murder, that setting becomes inseparable from police scrutiny, departure, and the memories Flynn eventually turns into a manuscript.

Student Life and Local Geography

Flynn recalls being a student in Princeton for a little over three years. He lived in an old building on Bayard Lane, positioned between the art museum and the theological seminary library. The arrangement was modest and clearly described: a living room and open kitchen on the ground floor, with two double bedrooms upstairs, each adjoining a bathroom. McCosh Hall, where he attended most of his English courses, was a ten-minute walk away. These details map a compact daily world in which study, home, and the institutions around him were close together.

The building is not presented as an idealized college residence. Flynn calls it ugly and old, making its practical layout more memorable than any suggestion of comfort or prestige. Its kitchen, in particular, becomes the site of an encounter that alters his private life. The physical setting thus works through familiar spaces rather than grand landmarks: a walk to class, a shared living arrangement, and a chance meeting at home.

Meeting Laura Baines

In October, Flynn returned to the Bayard Lane building and found Laura Baines in the kitchen. She was tall and slim, with long blonde hair parted in the middle and thick-framed spectacles. She was trying to open a tube of mustard without realizing that its foil seal had to be removed first. Flynn took off the seal and handed it back; Laura spread the mustard over a jumbo hot dog she had boiled. Their first exchange began with this small, practical favor rather than a formal introduction.

The domestic detail gives Princeton’s setting an intimate scale. Laura’s arrival is registered through the kitchen, the mustard tube, and the food she is preparing, while her Midwestern accent marks her as someone who has brought a different background into Flynn’s immediate surroundings. The episode precedes the story’s more consequential connections, but its casualness matters: their relationship begins in an ordinary shared space before Flynn understands how deeply Laura’s life is entangled with Wieder’s work.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, as the weather grew gloomy, Laura proposed introducing Flynn to Professor Wieder. She was working under his supervision on research for her graduate thesis. Her specialty was cognitive psychology, then a pioneering field amid public excitement about artificial intelligence and computers. Flynn admits that he listened to her explanations without making much effort to understand them. What he retained was the project’s ambition: Wieder was nearing the end of a major investigation into how the mind works, how mental stimulus relates to reaction, and how recollections form. Laura’s mathematical ability helped with the work because Wieder’s research used formulae to quantify variables, an area in which he was less strong.

A Private World Under Pressure

Princeton is also the setting for Flynn’s growing isolation and attachment. His father had died suddenly, and Flynn describes the difficulty of accepting that absence. The dead, in his account, can acquire an authority they did not exert in life: memory makes the living try to please them, while loss leaves the deceased surrounded by an aura of infallibility. At the time, Flynn felt more responsible and less able to drift, but also lonelier. Laura’s friendship blossomed against that emotional background, making her presence especially important to him.

The manuscript frames 1987 as the year Flynn fell in love and discovered that evil existed. That retrospective description casts the town’s everyday scenes in the shadow of what follows, without erasing their ordinary character. Princeton contains the beginning of the relationship and Flynn’s introduction to Wieder, but it also becomes the point of departure after the story turns tragic.

Murder, Departure, and Memory

Wieder was murdered in his home on the night of December 21–22, 1987, a couple of days after Flynn and Laura had dinner with him. The police did not find the perpetrator despite extensive investigations, and Flynn says he became one of the suspects. Wieder’s body was discovered by Derek Simmons, the handyman who worked at the house. At 6:44 a.m. on December 22, Simmons called emergency services from the residence and reported finding the professor in a pool of blood. The inquiry and its consequences brought detectives and reporters after Flynn for a considerable period.

The pressure contributed to Flynn’s decision to leave Princeton and pursue his master’s degree at Cornell. He spent two years in Ithaca. The departure makes the town more than the backdrop to a student romance: it is also the place from which public suspicion forced him away, and the setting of a story whose full truth remained unknown at the time.

Years later, Flynn says that memories of those months in 1987 returned with exceptional force and overtook his present life. He began writing, describing the act as a rediscovery of himself, and ultimately completed a manuscript titled The Book of Mirrors. Princeton therefore exists in the narrative both as a remembered physical place and as the center of an unresolved past. Its walks, rooms, and academic connections supply the concrete world of the recollection; its association with Wieder’s murder gives those familiar details their lasting weight.