The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

by Joël Dicker

  He began to cry.

  “You don’t understand. It’s not because of you. None of this is your fault, and yet I can’t forgive you.”

  “Forgive me for what?”

  “I can’t tell you. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Harry, please, no more riddles! What the hell is going on?”

  He wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.

  “Do you remember my advice?” he asked. “When you were my student, I told you one day never to write a book if you don’t know how it will end.”

  “Yes, I remember. I will always remember that.”

  “What’s the ending to your book like?”

  “It’s a beautiful ending.”

  “But she dies at the end!”

  “No, it doesn’t end with the death of the heroine. Some good things happen afterward.”

  “Like what?”

  “The man who spent more than thirty years waiting for her begins to live again.”

  EXTRACT FROM THE ORIGIN OF EVIL (final page)

  When he understood that nothing would ever be possible and that his hopes were merely lies, he wrote to her for the final time. After all the love letters, now it was time for a letter of sadness. He had to accept the truth. From now on, he would do nothing but wait for her. He would spend his whole life waiting for her. But he knew perfectly well that she would never return. He knew he would never see her again, never hear her again, never find her again.

  My darling,

  This is my final letter. These are my last words. I am writing you to say goodbye.

  From today on there will be no more “us.”

  Lovers separate and never find each other again, and that is how love stories end.

  I will miss you, my darling. I will miss you so much.

  I am crying. Inside, I am burning.

  We will never see each other again. I will miss you so much.

  I hope you will be happy.

  You and me: That was a dream, I think. And now we must wake up.

  I will miss you all my life.

  Goodbye. I love you as I will never love anyone again.

  12

  The Man Who Painted Pictures

  “Learn to love your failures, Marcus, because it is your failures that will make you who you are. It is your failures that will give meaning to your victories.”

  The weather was glorious on Friday, July 18, the day we went to visit Sylla Caleb Mitchell, Luther’s sister, in Portland, Maine. The Mitchell family lived in an elegant house in a residential neighborhood close to the center of town. Sylla received us in the kitchen; she had already set out on the table two steaming cups of coffee and a stack of photo albums.

  Gahalowood had managed to get hold of her the day before. On the drive from Concord to Portland, he told me how, when he spoke to her on the phone, he had the feeling she’d been waiting for his call. “I introduced myself as a policeman, and I told her I was investigating the murders of Deborah Cooper and Nola Kellergan and that I wanted to meet to ask her a few questions. Usually people become nervous when they hear the words state police: They ask what it’s about. But Sylla Mitchell just said: ‘Come tomorrow whenever you like. I’ll be here. It’s important that we speak.’”

  She sat across from us. She was attractive: a sophisticated-looking mother of two, who wore her fifty-something years well. Her husband stood farther back from the table, as if he did not wish to intrude.

  “So is it all true?” she asked.

  “Is what all true?” Gahalowood said.

  “Everything I’ve read in the papers, all those dreadful things about that poor girl in Somerset.”

  “Yes. The press twisted things slightly, but the basic facts are true. Mrs Mitchell, you didn’t seem very surprised when I called you.”

  She looked sad.

  “As I told you yesterday on the phone,” she said, “the newspaper did not name names, but I understood that ‘E.S.’ was Elijah Stern. And that his chauffeur was Luther.” She picked up a newspaper and read aloud from it, as if to help her understand: “‘E.S., one of the richest men in New Hampshire, sent his chauffeur to bring Nola from the center of town to his house in Concord. Thirty-three years later, one of Nola’s friends, who was only a child at the time, said she was once present at one of these meetings with the chauffeur, and that Nola left as if she were going off to her death. This young witness described the chauffeur as a frightening man, with a powerful body and a deformed face.’ With a description like that, it could only be my brother.”

  She stopped talking and looked at us. Gahalowood put our cards on the table: “We found a portrait of Nola Kellergan, more or less naked, in Elijah Stern’s house,” he said. “Apparently Nola agreed to pose for the painting in return for money. Luther went to get her in Somerset, and he took her to see Stern in Concord. We don’t really know what happened there, but we do know that Luther painted a picture of her.”

  “He painted a lot!” Sylla said. “He was very talented. He could have made a career out of it. Do you … do you suspect him of having killed that girl?”

  “Let’s just say he’s on our list of suspects,” Gahalowood replied.

  A tear rolled down Sylla’s cheek.

  “I remember the day he died. It was a Friday at the end of September. I had just turned twenty-one. We received a call from the police, who informed us that Luther had died in a car accident. I vividly remember the telephone ringing, and my mother picking it up. My father and I were standing close to her. Mom answered, and then whispered to us: ‘It’s the police.’ She listened intently and then said, ‘O.K.’ I will never forget that moment. After that she hung up, looked at us, and said, ‘He’s dead.’”

  “What happened?” Gahalowood said.

  “The car went over some seaside cliffs in Sagamore, Massachusetts, and fell a hundred feet. Apparently he was drunk.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Thirty … he was thirty. My brother was a good man, but … You know, I’m glad you’re here. There’s something I have to tell you. Something we should have said thirty-three years ago.”

  And, her voice trembling, Sylla told us about an incident that occurred about a month before the accident. It was Saturday, August 30, 1975.

  August 30, 1975, Portland, Maine

  The Caleb family had planned to have dinner that evening at Sylla’s favorite restaurant, the Horseshoe, to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, which was two days later. Her father, Jay Caleb, had reserved the private room on the second floor for a surprise party. He had invited all her friends and a few relatives: thirty-odd people in all, including Luther.

  The Calebs—Sylla; her father, Jay; and her mother, Nadia—arrived at the restaurant at 6 p.m. The other guests were already waiting for Sylla, and everyone cheered when she entered the room. There was music and champagne. Luther had not yet arrived. His father thought at first that he must have been held up in traffic. But by 7.30 p.m., when dinner was served, his son was still not there. Luther was not the type of person to be late, and his father began to worry. He tried calling Luther at his room on Elijah Stern’s property, but there was no answer.

  Luther missed dinner, dessert, and the dancing. At 1.30 a.m., the Calebs went home, worrying silently. They knew Luther wouldn’t have missed his sister’s birthday celebration for anything in the world. Back at home, Jay unthinkingly turned on the radio in the living room. One of the news items was about a major police operation in Somerset, following the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl. Somerset was a name they recognized. Luther had told them that he went there regularly to take care of the rosebushes on the grounds of a beautiful house near the ocean that Elijah Stern owned. Jay Caleb thought this was a coincidence. He listened attentively to the rest of the news, then to several other stations, to find out if maybe there had been a car accident in the area, but nothing was mentioned. He stayed up half the night, worrying, unsure whether to call the police or the hospitals, or j
ust to wait at home, or to get in his car and search the road that led to Concord. He eventually fell asleep on the couch in the living room.

  Early the next morning, still not having heard anything, he called Elijah Stern to ask if he had seen his son. “Luther?” Stern replied. “He’s not here. He went on vacation. Didn’t he tell you?” This whole thing was very strange. Why would Luther have gone away without telling them, especially when it meant missing his sister’s birthday? And so, no longer content just to wait, Jay Caleb went out to look for his son.

  *

  Sylla Mitchell began to tremble. She got up abruptly from her chair and made some more coffee.

  “That day,” she said, “while my father went to Concord and my mother stayed at home in case Luther showed up, I was with friends. It was late when I got home. My parents were in the living room, and I heard my father say to my mother: ‘I’m afraid Luther has done something terrible.’ I asked him what was going on, and he told me not to tell anyone about Luther’s disappearance, particularly not the police. He said he was going to try to find Luther himself. He searched in vain for nearly a month. Until the accident.”

  A sob escaped her.

  “What happened, Mrs Mitchell?” Gahalowood asked in a soothing voice. “Why did your father think Luther had done something wrong? Why didn’t he want to call the police?”

  “It’s complicated, Sergeant. Everything is so complicated …”

  She opened the photograph albums and began telling us about the Caleb family: about Jay, their kind father; about Nadia, their mother, a former Miss Maine who had passed on her love of art to her children. Luther was the firstborn; he was nine years older than she was. They were both born in Portland.

  She showed us photographs from her childhood. The family home; vacations in Colorado, where she and Luther had spent their summers; the huge warehouse belonging to her father’s company. There was a series of photographs of the family taken in Yosemite in 1963. Luther was eighteen years old, a handsome young man, slim and elegant. Then we came to a picture from the fall of 1974: Sylla’s twentieth birthday party. The people in the photograph had all aged. Jay, the proud father, was now a pot-bellied sixty-something. The mother’s face was wrinkled. Luther was nearly thirty, and his face was deformed.

  Sylla looked at this picture for a long time.

  “We were a great family, before,” she said. “We were so happy, before.”

  “Before what?” Gahalowood asked.

  She replied as if the answer were obvious: “Before the attack.”

  “What attack?” Gahalowood said. “I don’t know anything about this.”

  Sylla placed the two photographs of her brother side by side.

  “It happened in the fall after our vacation in Yosemite. Look at this photograph. See how handsome he was? Luther was a very special young man. He loved art. He had graduated from high school and been accepted to the Maine College of Art, here in Portland. Everyone said he could become a great painter, that he had a gift. He was happy too. But the Vietnam war had begun and he had just been called up by the army. He said that when he got back, he would go to art school and marry his fiancée, Eleanore Smith. She was his high school sweetheart. As I said, he was happy. Until that evening in September 1964.”

  “What happened?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Field Goals Gang, Sergeant?”

  “No, never.”

  “That’s the name the police gave to a group of thugs who were running wild in the area back then.”

  September 1964

  It was about 10 p.m. Luther had spent the evening with Eleanore, and he was walking back to his parents’ house. He had to leave the next morning for boot camp. He and Eleanore had just decided that they would marry when he returned; they had sworn to stay faithful to each other, and they had made love for the first time, in Eleanore’s childhood bed, while downstairs in the kitchen her unsuspecting mother made cookies for them.

  When Luther left the Smiths’ house, he turned around to look at it several times. On the porch, illuminated by streetlights, he could see Eleanore waving goodbye. After that he walked along Lincoln Road, a poorly lit street that was usually deserted at that time of night. It was the shortest route home; he had a three-mile walk ahead of him. A car passed, the beam of its headlights illuminating the road ahead. Soon afterward a second vehicle passed by at high speed. Its occupants yelled through the open window to frighten him. Luther did not react, and the car stopped dead in the middle of the street, about fifty feet ahead of him. He kept walking—what else could he do? Should he have crossed to the other side of the road? When he went past the car, the driver called out to him: “Hey, you! You from around here?”

  “Yes,” Luther replied.

  They threw beer in his face.

  “Fucking redneck!” the driver yelled.

  The passengers shouted at him too. There were four of them in all but in the darkness, Luther couldn’t make out their faces. He guessed they were young—between twenty-five and thirty—and they were clearly drunk and aggressive. He kept walking, his heart pounding. He wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t want any trouble.

  “Hey, redneck!” the driver yelled again. “Where’re you going?”

  Luther sped up.

  “Hey, come back! Come back here, and we’ll show you how we deal with little shits like you.”

  Luther heard the car doors open and the driver shout: “Gentlemen, let the redneck hunt begin! A hundred dollars for whoever catches him.” Luther started running as fast as he could, praying that another car would pass. But there was no-one to save him. One of his pursuers caught him and threw him to the ground, yelling to the others: “I’ve got him! I’ve got him! The hundred dollars is mine!” They all rushed up to Luther and began beating him. While he was stretched out on the ground, one of his attackers said, “Who wants to play some football? I suggest we practice field goals!” The others cheered and lined up, one by one, to kick his head with incredible force. When everyone had taken his turn, they left him for dead on the roadside. Forty minutes later he was found by a passing motorcyclist, who called for an ambulance.

  *

  “After a few days in a coma, Luther woke up with his face completely smashed up,” Sylla explained. “He went through several operations to reconstruct his face, but the plastic surgeons never managed to give him back his former appearance. He was in the hospital for two months. When he came out he was condemned to live with a twisted face and a severe speech impediment. He didn’t go to Vietnam, of course, but he no longer did anything else either. He stayed in the house all day long, in a deep depression. He didn’t paint; he had no plans. After six months, Eleanore broke off their engagement. She even left Portland. And who could blame her? She was eighteen years old, and she had no desire to sacrifice her life so she could look after Luther, who had become a miserable shadow of his former self.”

  “What about his attackers?” Gahalowood asked.

  “They were never found. Apparently they had done the same thing to others in the area. But Luther was in a more serious condition than their other victims: He almost died. It was all over the press, and the police were after them. So after that they must have given up on their hobby. I imagine they were afraid of being caught.”

  “And what happened to your brother afterward?”

  “Luther haunted the family home for two years. He was like a ghost. He didn’t do anything anymore. My father stayed in his warehouse as late as possible each day, and my mother spent all her days out of the house. Those two years were really hard. And then, one day in 1966, someone rang our doorbell.”

  1966

  He hesitated before unlocking the front door; he hated other people seeing him. But he was the only one home, and it might be important. He opened the door and found, standing in front of him, a very elegant-looking man in his thirties.

  “Hello,” the man said. “I’m sorry to disturb you like this, but my car has broken down. You don’t ha
ppen to know a mechanic, do you?”

  “Vat dependv,” Luther replied.

  “It’s nothing serious. Just a flat tire. But I can’t get my jack to work.”

  Luther agreed to take a look. The car was a luxury coupe, parked on the roadside three hundred feet from the house. A nail had pierced the front right tire. The jack was sticking because it needed grease, but Luther was able to get it working and change the tire.

  “I’m impressed,” the man said. “I was lucky to find you. What’s your line of work? Are you a mechanic?”

  “No. I don’t do anyfing. I ufed to paint. But I had an acfident.”

  “So how do you make a living?”

  “I don’t make a living.”

  The man looked at Luther and offered his hand.

  “My name is Elijah Stern.”

  “Lufer Caleb.”

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Luther. I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  The two men looked at each other for a moment. Finally Stern asked the question that had been nagging at him ever since Luther had opened the door of the house.

  “What happened to your face?” he asked.

  “Have you heard of ve Field Goalv Gang?”

  “No.”

  “Some guyv who ufed to attack people for pleavure. Vey kicked veir victimv in ve head av if it wav a football.”

  “Oh, my God, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry.”

  Luther shrugged, fatalistic.

  “My advice is not to give up on life,” Stern said, smiling. “How would you like a job? I’m looking for someone to look after my cars and to be my chauffeur. I like you, Luther. If you’d be willing to work for me, the job is yours.”

  One week later, Luther moved to Concord.

  *

  Sylla thought that Stern had been heaven-sent.

  “Thanks to Elijah Stern, Luther became someone again,” she told us. “He had a job, he was earning money. It put some meaning back into his life. And best of all, he started painting again. He and Stern got along very well; Luther was not only his chauffeur, but also his right-hand man. Almost a friend, in fact. Stern had just taken over his father’s business; he was living alone in a house that was much too big for him. I think he was glad to have Luther’s company. They were very close. Luther stayed in his service for the next nine years. Until he died.”