by Joël Dicker
“By the handwriting analysis,” I cut in.
“Exactly.”
“One last question, Sergeant: Why would Stern be so determined to protect Caleb?”
“That’s something I would very much like to know too.”
*
The inquiry into Pratt’s death promised to be complex; the police did not have any solid evidence or even the smallest clue. A little over a week after Pratt’s murder, on Wednesday, July 30, Nola’s body was finally buried, having been returned to her father. The ceremony took place at the cemetery in Somerset in the early afternoon, under unexpected drizzle and before a sparse gathering of mourners. David Kellergan rode his motorcycle all the way to the grave, but nobody there dared say anything. He was listening to music on his earphones, and apparently his only words were: “Why did we dig her up if we’re just going to bury her again?” He did not cry.
I didn’t go to the funeral because just when it was starting, I was doing something that seemed important to me: I was keeping Harry company. He was sitting in the parking lot, shirtless under the warm rain.
“Come in and dry off, Harry,” I told him.
“They’re burying her, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“They’re burying her and I’m not even there.”
“It’s better this way. It’s better that you’re not there … because of everything that’s happened.”
“To hell with what would people say! They’re burying Nola and I’m not even there to say goodbye to her, to see her one last time. To be with her. I’ve spent thirty-three years waiting to see her again, even if only for one last time. Do you know where I would like to be?”
“At the funeral?”
“No. In writers’ heaven.”
He stretched out on the asphalt and didn’t move a muscle. I lay down next to him. The rain fell on both of us.
“Marcus, I wish I were dead.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Friends can sense that kind of thing.”
There was a long silence. Finally, I said: “The other day, you said we couldn’t be friends anymore.”
“It’s true. We’re slowly saying goodbye to each other, Marcus. It’s as if you knew I was going to die soon and you had a few weeks to make your farewells. It’s the cancer of friendship.”
He closed his eyes and held out his arms as if he were on a cross. I imitated him. And we stayed like that, stretched out on the asphalt, for a long time.
*
Later that day, I went to Clark’s, hoping to talk to someone who had attended Nola’s funeral. The place was practically empty; there was only one employee there, halfheartedly polishing the counter. He managed to gather enough strength to pour me a draft beer. That was when I noticed Robert Quinn, sitting at the back of the room, eating peanuts and filling in crossword puzzles in the old newspapers that lay on the tables. He was hiding from his wife. I went over to him. I offered him a pint; he accepted, and made room for me to sit next to him. It was a touching gesture: I could easily have sat opposite him, or on one of the fifty-odd empty chairs in the place. But he moved over so I could sit next to him.
“Were you at Nola’s funeral?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How was it?”
“Horrible. Like this whole story. There were more journalists than loved ones.”
We said nothing for a moment, and then, to make conversation, he said: “How’s your book going?”
“It’s progressing. But I reread it yesterday and realized I still have some gray areas I need to make clearer. Particularly regarding your wife. She told me she had a compromising note, written by Harry Quebert, which mysteriously disappeared. I don’t suppose you know what happened to it, do you?”
He took a long swallow of beer and even ate a few peanuts before replying.
“It burned,” he said. “That’s what happened to that cursed piece of paper.”
“What?” I said, stunned. “How do you know that?”
“Because I’m the one who burned it.”
“Are you serious? Why? And why did you never say anything?”
He shrugged. “No-one ever asked me,” he replied pragmatically. “My wife has been talking about that note for thirty-three years. She screams, she yells, she says, ‘But it was there! In the safe! There!’ She never said: ‘Robert, darling, did you ever happen to see that note?’ She never asked me, so I never told her.”
I tried to hide my astonishment so he would continue talking. “So what happened?”
“It all began one Sunday afternoon. My wife organized a ridiculous garden party for Quebert, but Quebert didn’t come. She was so mad, she decided to go see him at his house. I remember that day clearly: it was July 13, 1975. The same day Nola tried to kill herself.”
Sunday, July 13, 1975
“Robert! Roooobert!”
Tamara burst into the house like a Fury, frantically waving a sheet of paper. She went through every room on the first floor before finding her husband reading the newspaper in the living room.
“Robert, for goodness’ sake! Why don’t you answer me when I call you? Are you going deaf? Look! Look at this! See how awful it is!”
She handed him the piece of paper she had stolen from Harry’s house, and he read it.
My Nola, darling Nola, Nola my love. What have you done? Why did you want to die? Is it because of me? I love you. I love you more than anything. Don’t leave me. If you die, I die. You are all that matters in my life, Nola.
“Where did you find this?” Robert asked.
“At that son of a bitch Harry Quebert’s house!”
“You stole it from his house?”
“I didn’t steal anything; I took it. I knew it! He’s a disgusting pervert who’s fantasizing about a fifteen-year-old girl. This makes me sick. I want to throw up! I want to throw up, Bobbo—do you hear me? Harry Quebert is in love with a little girl! It’s illegal. He’s a pig! A pig! And he spends all his time at Clark’s just so he can ogle her. He comes to my restaurant just to leer at a girl’s ass!”
Robert read the note several times. There was little doubt about it: Harry had written a love letter. A love letter to a fifteen-year-old girl.
“What are you going to do with this?” he asked his wife.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to call the police?”
“The police? No, Bobbo. Not just yet. I don’t want everyone to know that Quebert the pervert prefers a little girl to our beautiful Jenny. Where is she, by the way? In her room?”
“Actually, that nice young man Travis Dawn came here just after you left, to invite her to the summer gala. They went to have dinner in Montburry So Jenny has already found another date for the gala—isn’t that great?”
“Oh, Bobbo, just shut up! And now get the hell out of here. I need to hide this note somewhere, and I don’t want anyone to know where.”
Robert obeyed, shuffling off to finish his newspaper on the porch. But he couldn’t read a thing; he was too preoccupied by what his wife had discovered. So Harry, the great writer, was writing love letters to a girl half his age. Sweet little Nola. It was so disturbing. Should he warn Nola? Tell her that this Harry was driven by strange urges, and that he might even be dangerous? Shouldn’t he call the police, so Harry could get professional help?
*
The summer gala was the following weekend. Robert and Tamara Quinn were standing in a corner of the room, sipping virgin cocktails, when Tamara spotted Harry Quebert. “Look, Bobbo,” Tamara hissed. “There’s the pervert!” They watched him for a long time, while a flood of insults poured from Tamara’s mouth, loud enough to be heard only by Robert.
“What are you going to do with that note?” Robert finally asked.
“I don’t know. But I do know that the first thing I’m going to do is make him pay what he owes me. He has five hundred dollars on the restaurant’s tab!”
Harry see
med ill at ease. He got a beer from the bar for appearances’ sake, then headed toward the restroom.
“There he is, going to the bathroom,” Tamara said. “Look, look, Bobbo! You know what he’s going to do?”
“A number one?”
“No, he’s going to jerk off while thinking about that little girl!”
“What?”
“Oh, shut up, Bobbo. You talk too much. I don’t want to hear you anymore. Stay here, will you?”
“Where are you going?”
“Don’t move. Just watch and learn.”
Tamara placed her glass on a high table and walked surreptitiously toward the bathroom that Harry Quebert had just entered. She followed him in, then came back out a few moments later, hurrying over to her husband.
“What did you do?” Robert demanded.
“Shut up—I told you already!” his wife scolded him as she picked up her drink. “Shut your mouth or you’ll give us away.”
Amy Pratt told her guests that they could now proceed to dinner, and a crowd of people converged slowly on the tables. Harry came out of the bathroom. He was sweating, in a panic. He joined the crowd.
“Look at him, bolting like a rabbit,” Tamara whispered. “He’s scared.”
“Tell me what you did,” Robert insisted.
Tamara smiled. Under the table, she played discreetly with the lipstick she had used to write on the bathroom mirror.
“Let’s just say I left him a message he won’t forget.”
*
Sitting in the back of Clark’s, I listened, entranced, to Robert Quinn’s story.
“So it was your wife who wrote the message on the mirror?”
“Yup. She became obsessed with Harry Quebert. All she ever talked about was that note. She said she was going to use it to bring him down forever. She said that soon the newspapers would all announce: THE GREAT WRITER IS A BIG PERVERT. In the end, she told Chief Pratt about it. About two weeks after the gala. She told him everything.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
He hesitated for a second before replying. “I know because … it was Nola who told me.”
Tuesday, August 5, 1975
It was 6 p.m. when Robert got home from the glove factory. As always he parked his old Chrysler in the driveway, then, having turned off the engine, he adjusted his hat in the rearview mirror and made the look that the actor Robert Stack used to make when his character Eliot Ness was getting ready to beat the crap out of some mobsters. He often procrastinated like this before getting out of the car; for a long time now, he had not looked forward to entering his own house. Sometimes he took a detour on the way home; sometimes he stopped to buy ice cream. When he had finally managed to drag himself out of the vehicle, he seemed to hear a voice calling him from behind the bushes. He turned, looked around, and then noticed Nola, hidden among the rhododendrons.
“Nola?” Robert said. “Hey, sweetie, how are you?”
“I have to talk to you, Mr Quinn,” she whispered. “It’s very important.”
“Come in then,” he said, his voice still at a normal volume. “I’ll make you some nice cold lemonade.”
She shushed him, then said, “No, we need to find somewhere to talk. Could we get in your car and drive for a while? How about we go to the hot dog stand on the Montburry road. No-one would bother us there.”
Although surprised by this, Robert did not refuse. They got into the car and drove toward Montburry, stopping after a few miles, in front of the hot dog stand. Robert bought fries and a soda for Nola, a hot dog and a nonalcoholic beer for himself. They sat at one of the picnic tables on the grass.
“So what’s up, kiddo?” Robert asked. “What can be so serious that you can’t even come in the house to talk about it over a glass of lemonade?”
“I need your help, Mr Quinn. I know this is going to seem strange to you, but … something happened at Clark’s today, and you’re the only person who can help me.”
Nola then described the scene she had witnessed, by chance, two hours earlier. She had gone to see Mrs Quinn at Clark’s to pick up her pay for the Saturdays she had worked before her suicide attempt. It was Mrs Quinn herself who had told Nola she could come any time she liked. The only people in the restaurant were a few customers eating in silence and Jenny, who was busy putting away dishes and who told Nola that her mother was in her office, without thinking to make it clear that she was not alone. The office was the place where Tamara Quinn did her accounts, put the day’s take into her safe, shouted into the telephone at suppliers who were late with their deliveries, or simply locked herself in with made-up excuses whenever she wanted some peace. It was a small room, the door to which was nearly always closed, and was marked PRIVATE. To get to it you went down the service corridor that led from the back room to the employees’ bathroom.
As she reached the door and prepared to knock, Nola heard voices. There was someone in the room with Tamara. She could tell it was a man. She put her ear close to the door and heard a snippet of conversation.
“He’s a criminal,” Tamara said. “Maybe even a sexual predator. You have to do something.”
“Are you sure it was Harry Quebert who wrote this note?”
Nola recognized Chief Pratt’s voice.
“Absolutely certain,” Tamara replied. “Written in his own hand. He has designs on the young Kellergan girl, and he’s writing pornographic filth about her. You have to do something.”
“O.K. You did the right thing by contacting me about this. But you entered his house illegally, and you stole this piece of paper. I can’t do anything about it for the moment.”
“So you’re just going to wait until that maniac hurts the girl?”
“I said nothing of the sort. I’m going to keep an eye on Quebert. In the meantime, keep this note safe. I can’t take it. I could get in trouble.”
“I’ll keep it in this safe,” Tamara said. “No-one else has access to it. It will be perfectly secure. But please, Chief, you have to do something. That Quebert’s a criminal and a piece of shit!”
“Don’t worry. You’ll see how we deal with guys like that around here.”
Nola heard footsteps and instantly fled the restaurant.
*
Poor little girl, Robert thought, upon hearing Nola’s account. It must have come as a shock to learn that Harry had these fantasies about her. She had needed to confide in someone, so she came to find him; he had to prove himself worthy of her trust and explain things to her, tell her that men were strange creatures, Harry Quebert in particular, and that she must keep her distance from him and call the police if she ever felt afraid he was going to hurt her. But what if he had already hurt her? Did she need to tell him that she had been abused? Was he up to dealing with such a revelation—he who, according to his wife, did not even know how to set the dinner table properly? Chewing his hot dog, he tried to come up with some comforting words, but just as he was preparing to speak, Nola told him:
“Mr Quinn, you have to help me get ahold of that piece of paper.”
He almost choked.
*
“You can imagine how I felt,” Robert Quinn said to me in Clark’s. “I could hardly believe my ears. She wanted me to get that damn note for her. Would you like another beer?”
“That would be great, thanks. By the way, would you mind if I recorded this?”
“You want to record me? Go ahead. That’s no more strange than the idea that anyone would have any interest in what I have to say.”
He hailed the waiter and ordered two more beers. I took the recorder out of my pocket and pressed RECORD.
“So you were sitting outside the hot dog stand and she asked you for help,” I prompted him.
“Yes. Apparently my wife was willing to do anything to destroy Harry Quebert. And Nola was willing to do anything to protect him. That conversation came as such a shock to me. That was how I learned there really was something between Nola and Harry. I remember the sparkle in her eyes when
she told me. I said, ‘What do you mean, get ahold of that piece of paper?’ ‘I love him,’ she replied. ‘I don’t want him to get in trouble. He only wrote that note because I attempted suicide. It’s all my fault—I should never have tried to kill myself. I love him. He’s everything I have, everything I could ever dream of having.’ And we had this conversation about love. ‘So, you mean that you and Harry Quebert, you …’ ‘We love each other!’ ‘Love? What are you talking about? You can’t love him!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because he’s too old for you.’ ‘Age doesn’t matter.’ ‘Of course it matters!’ ‘Well, it shouldn’t.’ ‘Look, this is just how it is: A young girl of your age should have nothing to do with a guy of his age.’ ‘I love him!’ ‘Stop saying that. Eat your fries.’ ‘But, Mr Quinn, if I lose him, I lose everything!’ It was incredible: That girl was madly in love with Harry. What she felt for him was something I had never felt myself, or I couldn’t remember ever having felt, for my own wife. And it was at that moment that I realized, thanks to a fifteen-year-old girl, that I had probably never been in love. That lots of people have never been in love. That they make do with good intentions; that they hide away in the comfort of a crummy existence and shy away from that amazing feeling that is probably the only thing that justifies being alive. A cousin of mine, who lives in Boston, works in finance. He earns a fortune, he’s married, three kids, beautiful wife, beautiful car. The perfect life, right? One day, he goes home and tells his wife he’s leaving—he’s fallen in love with a Harvard student he met at a conference, a girl young enough to be his daughter. Everyone said he’d lost his mind, that he was having a midlife crisis, but I think he simply found love. People think they love each other, so they get married. And then one day they discover real love, without meaning to or even realizing it. It hits them right between the eyes. It’s like hydrogen coming into contact with air: There’s a huge explosion and everything gets destroyed. Thirty years of frustrated marriage blown to pieces in a single second, as if a gigantic septic tank, brought to boiling point, explodes, splattering filth all around it. The midlife crisis, the seven-year itch—call it what you want. For me, those are just people who grasp the scale of true love too late, and their life is overturned as a result.”