Note: In the course of our many moves around the country throughout the 1990s, the first chapter of the Herschberg serial was lost. What follows is a synopsis of the events of that chapter as we remember it.
Chapter One
“Nine Little Undergrads”
(synopsis)
On the night of the 13th of November, in the small mid-western college town of Herschberg, Minnesota, nine little undergraduates are holding an impromptu gathering in room 236 of O’Henry dormitory, the single of deeply misanthropic (if pathologically observant) college junior Albert Feinstein.
Albert himself barely pays attention to his guests, who do not seem to interest him much. He is far more concerned with observing, in excruciating detail and with cynical disdain, every last physical attribute of his squalid collegiate dorm room.
At exactly 10:36 pm, the lights go out.
When they come back on two minutes later, Albert's girlfriend Jill Mankevich is dead, apparently having been garroted with a "sharpened piece of piano wire."
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