At 11 a.m. last Wednesday morning, Jane Friedman presided over a meeting with her publishers and some marketing people on the 15th floor of the HarperCollins building in midtown. The meeting was about digital outreach, and offered an occasion to discuss ideas for how the News Corp.-owned publishing house could use computers to sell more books. This meeting, a regular thing, was held once every two or three weeks as part of an initiative called Publishing+ that Ms. Friedman started a few years ago. Last Wednesday’s meeting was devoted to discussing a podcast for BlogTalkRadio.com, as well as an original video that the publicity department had managed to place on a bunch of blogs to promote a recently published memoir about life in a polygamist cult.

Ms. Friedman, a chatty, 62-year-old blonde whom News Corp.’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, installed as the CEO of HarperCollins in 1997, was engaged and attentive throughout the meeting. She did not behave like a person who knew that her job had been offered to someone else—someone sitting in that very room—two days earlier.

That same morning Ms. Friedman received a phone call from someone at News Corp. asking her to please come see Mr. Murdoch at 4:30 in his office six blocks away. According to one of Ms. Friedman's colleagues, who spoke to her recently, the caller did not explain what Mr. Murdoch wanted to talk to her about. And so Ms. Friedman, fresh off a triumphant turn at Book Expo America the weekend prior, and with strong fourth-quarter results expected at the end of the month, went to the News Corp. building and took the elevator to Mr. Murdoch’s office. When she arrived, he told her that he had given her job to her deputy, a talented young businessman named Brian Murray who, like her, had been with HarperCollins since 1997.

By midnight that night, the entire publishing world knew that Ms. Friedman was out, and her spokeswoman issued a statement announcing that she had decided to retire and would do so immediately.

A week has passed now, and an official story has of course been established: that Ms. Friedman had accomplished everything she wanted to, and had been thinking about resigning anyway. A rumor about her departure that surfaced on Gawker.com shortly after her meeting with Mr. Murdoch had simply moved her to pull the trigger sooner.

There are questions now about what really happened, and the official story does not seem to add up. How long had Ms. Friedman known she was being replaced? Had she really submitted her resignation, or did Mr. Murdoch fire her? If he did, then why?

MORE THAN ANYTHING, HarperCollins staff are mystified by the circumstances under which Ms. Friedman made her exit, and they want to know if the Gawker tip that supposedly set everything in motion came from someone at News Corp.

Indeed, if this was not the hostile transfer of power that it appears to have been, then why was the transition carried out so quickly and unceremoniously? After all, Jack Romanos was allowed to remain CEO of Simon & Schuster for months after he announced last September his intention to retire from his post—he even got a going-away party! And Peter Olson, who until recently was head of Random House, remained CEO for weeks after The New York Times broke the news of his imminent resignation last month.

“Jane or Rupert or [News Corp. COO] Peter Chernin would have to tell us what really went down between them last Wednesday afternoon and what led to it,” as one executive at HarperCollins put it. “I wish I knew. We’d all be helped emotionally if we had a better sense of why this happened.”

News Corp. is saying nothing, though, and Erin Crum, the corporate spokeswoman at HarperCollins, has offered no information beyond what appeared in the short press release that was issued once the Gawker rumor—initially dismissed by insiders in the highest echelons of HarperCollins as so much fake gossip—was confirmed late last Wednesday.

Ms. Friedman has also declined to explain what took place—presumably because she’s negotiating a severance package and is barred from talking—and to the frustration of her staff, she did not go into details when she said her goodbyes at the weekly marketing meeting held last Thursday morning.

Over a hundred people attended that meeting. Some of them had to stand up along the walls because there were not enough chairs. When Ms. Friedman walked in, she received a standing ovation, and some people cried.

When there was quiet, Ms. Friedman said that 10 years at the top had been enough—something she had heard once from Alberto Vitale, who served as the chairman of Random House for a decade before retiring in 1998. Ms. Friedman sounded like she was speaking through tears; she apologized for this and explained that she had caught cold. For two minutes, she gave her assurance that the company was in good hands. Then she left the conference room as her staff gave another standing ovation and her successor, Mr. Murray, prepared to address the room.

THOSE WHO WORKED most closely with Ms. Friedman were perhaps more stunned than anyone that her tenure at HarperCollins was over.

“Her closest friends don’t understand it any more than the rest of the world does,” said Robert Gottlieb, who as editor in chief of Knopf became Ms. Friedman’s mentor when she joined the imprint’s publicity team in 1968. “It’s a dreadful mistake. Jane rescued HarperCollins from decades of sleepiness and irrelevance. ... What can be in the minds of these people, losing somebody that valuable, is simply beyond my comprehension.”

Editors and publishers in the HarperCollins building have spent the past week going over, in their minds and in conversation, the last interactions that they had with Ms. Friedman. Some remember the assuredness with which she’d run that Internet meeting on Wednesday morning. But many more keep coming back to her behavior at Book Expo, the massive publishing convention that had taken place in Los Angeles several days earlier. On the second night of the convention, an exuberant Ms. Friedman threw a party for HarperCollins on the Twentieth Century Fox Lot, smiling the whole way through, drinking margaritas and declaring to Pub Crawl at one point, apropos of nothing at all, “I love being CEO of HarperCollins!” She made sure the quote had been written down, and when I e-mailed her the link to the story on Wednesday afternoon and noted that her remark appeared near the end, she wrote back, “Very nice.” That was at 4 p.m., just a half hour before her meeting with Mr. Murdoch.

One wonders what Mr. Murray was doing at the time. As he told the papers on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch had called him into his office on Monday and surprised him with an offer to take over the job of CEO. This was fully two days before Ms. Friedman was informed that she was being replaced, and it meant that Mr. Murray, widely thought to be an heir apparent to the HarperCollins throne ever since he was given the title of General Book Group president and publisher in the spring of 2004, had known for at least 48 hours what lay ahead for Ms. Friedman, and had kept it to himself.

One person observed that Mr. Murray was not his usual ebullient self during those 48 hours, that he seemed distracted and tense. But colleagues are not begrudging him his silence. As one publisher at a different house who once had to keep mum about a colleague’s imminent firing put it, “Sometimes it’s unbelievably awkward and weird, but that’s what you do.”

What provoked Mr. Murdoch to call that final Wednesday meeting with Ms. Friedman remains a mystery. As several high-level employees at HarperCollins pointed out, if he was unhappy with Ms. Friedman’s performance on the job—or if, as some have suggested, he fired her for mishandling the Judith Regan situation back in December of 2006 and costing News Corp. millions as a result—then it makes little sense for him to have appointed a man whom she’s been openly grooming for the job.

As one source at the house put it, “The thing that still doesn’t add up to me is that the company’s performing well, and they’re essentially ratifying the succession. He’s the heir apparent that she handpicked. So they’re not saying they want to go in a different direction.”

From this train of thought springs fear that Mr. Murdoch is thinking about selling HarperCollins. These are old fears, of course, dating all the way back to the early 1990s, but recent rumblings out of Germany about informal talks between News Corp. and Random House’s parent company Bertelsmann AG have lent the scenario a renewed urgency. Though Mr. Murray, who has discussed the issue with Mr. Murdoch, has assured staff that the company is in no danger of being sold, many in the building still say that anything is possible—that because Mr. Murray is a skilled businessman with a knack for administrative strategy and little interest in the literary aspects of publishing, he might be well suited to tie the bow around the box if News Corp. ever puts its feelers out again.

Mr. Murray did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Ms. Friedman, who told staff that she is taking the summer off and is said to be splitting her time between her home in Manhattan and her summer place in Amagansett.

lneyfakh@observer.com