by Joël Dicker
“Mrs Mitchell,” said Gahalowood, “how was your relationship with your brother?”
She smiled. “He was such a special person. He was so gentle! He loved flowers, he loved art. He should never have ended up a limousine driver. Not that I have anything against chauffeurs, but Luther was very special. He often came to have lunch with us on Sundays. He would arrive in the morning, spend the day with us, and go back to Concord in the evening. I loved those Sundays, particularly when he started painting again. His old room was transformed into a studio. He had great talent. As soon as he started drawing, this incredible beauty seemed to radiate from him. I used to sit in a chair behind him and watch him work. I watched him draw lines that initially seemed chaotic but that gradually formed scenes of staggering realism. At first it would look like he was just scribbling, and then suddenly an image would appear among all those lines until finally every line became part of a whole. It was incredible, watching that happen. I told him he had to keep drawing, that he should think again about going to art school, that he should exhibit his paintings. But he didn’t want to do that anymore. Because of his face, because of the way he spoke. Because of everything. Before the attack he used to say he painted because it was inside him. When he finally started painting again, after the attack, he said he did it to feel less lonely.”
“Can we see some of his paintings?” Gahalowood said.
“Yes, of course. My father put together a sort of collection, made up of all the paintings left in Portland and those taken after Luther’s death from his room on Stern’s property. He said that one day we could give them to a museum. But all he did in the end was keep them in crates. I have them all now that my parents are dead.”
Sylla led us to the basement, where one room was filled with large wooden crates. There were several large paintings as well as sketches and drawings piled up between the frames. The sheer number of pictures was impressive.
“Sorry it’s such a mess,” she said. “There’s no order to the pictures, but they all remind me of Luther, so I haven’t thrown anything away.”
Rummaging through the pictures, Gahalowood uncovered a painting of a young blond girl.
“That’s Eleanore,” Sylla said. “Those paintings are from before the attack. He loved to paint her. He said he could paint her all his life.”
Eleanore was a pretty young blonde with one intriguing detail: She looked strikingly similar to Nola. There were many other portraits of different women, all blondes, and all painted after the attack.
“Who are all these other women?” Gahalowood asked.
“I don’t know,” Sylla said. “They probably just came from Luther’s imagination.”
It was then that we came upon a series of charcoal sketches. In one of them I thought I recognized the inside of Clark’s, with a beautiful but sad young woman standing at the counter. The resemblance to Jenny was stunning, but I thought it was a coincidence. Until, turning over the sketch, I found an inscription: Jenny Quinn, 1974.
“Why was your brother obsessed with painting all these blond women?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sylla said. “Honestly.”
Gahalowood gave her a gentle, serious look, and said, “Mrs Mitchell, it’s time you told us why, on the evening of August 31, 1975, your father said he thought Luther had done ‘something terrible.’”
She nodded.
August 31, 1975
At nine that morning, as Jay Caleb hung up the telephone, he realized that something was terribly wrong. Elijah Stern had just told him that Luther was on vacation for an indeterminate length of time.
“What did he tell you exactly?” he’d asked Stern.
“He said he would probably have to stop working for me. That was two days ago.”
“Stop working for you? But why?”
“I don’t know. I thought you would know.”
Jay now picked up the phone again so he could call the police. But he never dialed the number, feeling a strange foreboding.
Nadia, his wife, burst into the office. “What did Stern say?” she said.
“That Luther resigned on Friday.”
“Resigned? Why on earth would he do that?”
Jay sighed. He was exhausted after his largely sleepless night.
“I have no idea,” he replied. “I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t understand anything … I need to go look for him.”
“Where, though?”
He shrugged. He didn’t have the faintest idea.
“Stay here,” he told Nadia, “in case he shows up. I’ll call you as often as I can to check in.”
He grabbed the keys to his pickup truck and set off, without even knowing where to begin. He finally decided to go to Concord. He hardly knew the town, and crisscrossed it blindly; he felt lost. Several times he drove past a police station. He would have liked to stop there and ask for help, but each time he considered this, something held him back. In the end he went to see Elijah Stern. But Stern was away, and it was one of the housekeeping staff who led Jay to his son’s room. Jay had been hoping that Luther had left a message, but he found nothing. The room looked normal in every way: There was no clue to why he’d suddenly taken off.
“Did Luther say anything to you?” Jay asked the maid.
“No. I haven’t been here for the last few days, but I’ve heard that Luther isn’t coming back for a while.”
“What does that mean? Has he resigned or just taken some vacation time?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, sir.”
It was strange, all this confusion surrounding Luther. Jay was now convinced that something serious must have happened to make his son disappear like this. He left Stern’s estate and went back to town. He stopped at a restaurant for a sandwich and to call his wife. Nadia told him that there was no news. He skimmed the newspaper while he ate. The biggest story was the incident with the young girl in Somerset.
“What’s this about a disappearance?” he asked the restaurant manager.
“Bad news … It happened in a little town about an hour from here. Some poor woman was murdered and a fifteen-year-old girl was kidnapped. Police all over the state are searching for her.”
“How do I get to Somerset from here?”
“Take Route 4 east. When you get to the ocean, follow Shore Road south, and you’ll be there.”
Jay Caleb headed to Somerset. On Shore Road he was stopped twice by police roadblocks. Then, reaching the Side Creek forest, he was able to see the scale of the search: dozens of emergency vehicles, policemen everywhere, dogs barking, people shouting. He drove into the center of town, and just after the marina he stopped in front of a diner on the main street. The place was packed. He went in and sat at the counter. A beautiful young blond woman served him coffee. For a fraction of a second he thought he knew her. But how was that possible? This was the first time in his life he’d ever been there. He looked at her, she smiled, and then he noticed her name badge. And suddenly he understood: The woman Luther’s charcoal sketch that he loved so much … it was her! He remembered the inscription on the back of the sketch: Jenny Quinn, 1974.
“Can I help you, sir?” Jenny asked. “You look a little lost.”
“I … It’s terrible, what happened here.”
“Tell me about it! They still don’t know what’s happened to the girl. And she’s so young! Only fifteen. I know her pretty well—she works here on Saturdays. Her name is Nola Kellergan.”
“What … what did you say?” Jay stammered, hoping he had misheard.
“Nola. Nola Kellergan.”
Hearing that name for the second time, he felt shaky. He thought he was going to puke. He had to get away from here. Far away. He left a bill on the counter and fled.
*
As soon as he entered the house, Nadia could see that her husband was upset. She moved toward him, and he practically collapsed into her arms.
“My God, Jay, what is it?”
“Remember when Luther
and I went fishing a few weeks ago?”
“Yes. You caught those black bass that turned out to be inedible. Why?”
It was August 10. Luther had arrived in Portland the evening before, and they had agreed to go fishing early the next morning at a small lake. It was a beautiful day, the fish were biting, and they had chosen a particularly quiet area with no-one around to disturb them. The two men had drunk beer and talked about their lives.
“Vere’v fomefing I have to tell you, Dad,” Luther had said. “I’ve met an amaving woman.”
“Really?”
“I mean it. She’ve not like anyone elfe I’ve ever known. I’m in love wiv her, and she lovef me too. She told me fo. I’ll introdufe you to her one day. I’m fertain you’ll really like her.”
Jay had smiled.
“Does this young lady have a name?”
“Nola, Dad. Her name iv Nola Kellergan.”
Recalling that day now, Jay Caleb explained to his wife: “Nola Kellergan is the name of the girl from Somerset who disappeared. I’m afraid Luther has done something terrible.”
Sylla came home just at that moment. She heard what her father said. “What does that mean?” she demanded. “What has Luther done?” Her father explained the situation to her, then ordered her not to tell anyone. No-one must make the connection between Luther and Nola. Jay spent the whole next week searching for his son: He roamed all over Maine, then up and down the coast from Canada to Massachusetts. He checked out the kind of places—lakes and cabins—that his son loved. He thought perhaps he had panicked and gone into hiding in one of those out of the way spots, hunted like an animal by police from all over the country. But he found no trace of him. Every night he waited for him, listening for the faintest sound. When the police called to announce Luther’s death, Jay seemed almost relieved. He insisted that his wife and daughter never speak of it again, so that the memory of his son would remain unsullied.
*
When Sylla had finished her account, Gahalowood asked: “Are you telling us you think your brother had something to do with Nola’s abduction?”
“Let’s just say he behaved strangely with women. He loved to paint them. Especially blondes. I know he sometimes drew them without their knowledge, hiding while he observed them. I never understood why he did that. So yes, I think something might have happened between my brother and that girl. My father thought Luther must have lost control of himself, that she rejected him and he killed her. When the police called to tell us he was dead, my father wept for a long time. But through his tears I heard him say: ‘It’s better this way. If I’d found him, I think I might have killed him, so he wouldn’t end up on death row.’”
Gahalowood glanced around again at Luther’s belongings and noticed a notebook. He opened it.
“Is this your brother’s handwriting?”
“Yes. Those are instructions for pruning roses. He took care of the roses at Stern’s place. I don’t know why I kept this notebook.”
“Can I take it?” Gahalowood asked.
“Yes, of course. But I doubt it will help much with your investigation. I’ve looked through it: It’s all about gardening.”
Gahalowood nodded. “I’m going to have to get a handwriting analysis done,” he said.
11
Waiting for Nola
“Hit this bag, Marcus. Hit it as if your life depended on it. You should box like you write and write like you box: You should give everything you have because each match, like each book, might be your last.”
The summer of 2008 was unusually calm. The battle for the presidential nominations was over by June, when Barack Obama was able to secure enough votes to lock up the Democratic nomination, while John McCain had become the presumptive Republican nominee in March. It was now time for the two parties to gather their forces; the conventions would not take place until the end of the summer.
This relative calm, prior to the media storm that would culminate on Election Day on November 4, left the Harry Quebert case as the country’s number one news item. There were now “pro-Queberts” and “anti-Queberts”: those who believed in the conspiracy theory and those who thought his release on bail was due only to a financial deal with David Kellergan. Ever since the publication of my notes in the press, my book had been on everyone’s lips; the talk was all of the “new Goldman that will come out this fall.” Elijah Stern, despite the fact that his name was not directly mentioned in the notes, had sued for defamation, hoping to prevent the book’s publication. David Kellergan had also made clear his intention to go to court in order to defend himself from allegations that he had mistreated his daughter. And amid all this hype, two people were particularly happy: Roy Barnaski and Benjamin Roth.
Barnaski, who had sent his army of New York lawyers to New Hampshire to prepare for any legal imbroglio likely to delay the book’s publication, was ecstatic. The leaks to the press—and there was now no doubt whatsoever that he was responsible for them—had guaranteed him extraordinary early orders from bookstores and enabled him to dominate the airwaves.
As far as the legal battle was concerned, there was now little doubt that the criminal case was about to collapse. Benjamin Roth was well on his way to making himself the most famous lawyer in the country. He accepted all requests for interviews and spent most of his time in local television and radio studios. The only condition he set was that they had to talk about him. “Think about it, Goldman,” he told me. “I can charge a thousand dollars an hour now. And each time my name appears in a newspaper, I add another ten dollars to my hourly rate for future clients. It doesn’t matter what the newspapers say about you; what matters is that you’re in them. People remember having seen your photograph in the New York Times; they never remember the story.” Roth had waited his whole career for the case of the century to fall into his lap, and now it had. He hogged the spotlight, telling the press everything it wanted to hear: He told them about Chief Pratt and Elijah Stern, he constantly repeated his opinion that Nola was a manipulative seductress and that Harry was, in fact, the real victim. In order to titillate his audience, he even began hinting—with made-up details to support his point—that half the men in Somerset had been intimately involved with Nola. This eventually became so unbearable that I was forced to call him.
“You need to give your pornographic fantasies a rest, Benjamin. You’re dragging everyone’s name through the mud.”
“But that’s exactly the point, Marcus. Ultimately my job is not to clear Harry’s name but to show how filthy and disgusting everyone else is. And if there has to be a trial, I’ll summon Pratt, I’ll summon Stern, I’ll call every man in Somerset to the stand so they can publicly atone for their carnal sins with the Kellergan girl. And when it came down to it I will prove that the only thing Harry did wrong was to allow himself to be seduced by that perverted young woman, like so many others before him.”
“What are you talking about?” I said angrily. “That’s not true at all!”
“Oh, come on—let’s call a spade a spade. That girl was a slut.”
“You’re despicable,” I said.
“Despicable? All I’m doing is summarizing what you yourself wrote in your book.”
“No you’re not, and you know that perfectly well. There was nothing flashy or provocative about Nola. She loved Harry, and he loved her.”
“Love, love, always love! But what is love? It doesn’t mean anything! Love is just a trick invented by men so they don’t have to do their own laundry!”
*
The D.A. had been crucified by the press, and this affected the mood in the headquarters of the Investigative Services Bureau of the state police. The rumor was that the governor himself had ordered the police to solve the case as quickly as possible. Since the interview with Sylla Mitchell, Gahalowood had a clearer vision of the case; all the evidence pointed to Luther, and the sergeant was nervously awaiting the results of the handwriting analysis to confirm this. In the meantime he needed to find out more, part
icularly regarding Luther’s presence in Somerset. And so on July 20 we met with Travis Dawn so he could tell us what he knew.
Because I still did not feel ready to return to Somerset, Travis agreed to meet us in a roadside diner near Montburry. I expected a hostile reception, due to what I had written about Jenny, but he was very polite.
“I’m sorry about those leaks,” I told him. “They were personal notes. They should never have been published.”
“I can’t blame you, Marc—”
“You could—”
“All you did was tell the truth. I’m well aware that Jenny had a crush on Quebert. I could see the way she looked at him back then. In fact I think your theories are pretty solid, at least as far as I’ve seen. Anyway, what’s the latest on the investigation?”
It was Gahalowood who replied. “The latest is that we have very strong suspicions regarding Luther Caleb.”
“Luther Caleb—that nutcase? So the painting thing is true, then?”
“Yes. Apparently the girl went to see Stern quite often. Did you know about Chief Pratt and Nola?”
“No! I was shocked when I found out. You know, while I admit he got out of control, I have to say he was always a good cop. I don’t think we should be calling into question his whole investigation, as the papers seem to be doing.”
“What do you think of the suspicions back then about Stern and Quebert?”
“I think you’re making too big a deal of them. Tamara Quinn says she told the chief about Quebert. But I think we need to put that in perspective. She claimed she knew everything, but she didn’t really know anything at all. She had no proof of what she was saying. All she could say was that she’d had concrete proof, but that it had mysteriously disappeared. Nothing credible. You know yourself, Sergeant, how cautiously unsubstantiated accusations must be treated. The only evidence we had against Quebert was the black Monte Carlo. And that wasn’t enough—far from it.”