by Joël Dicker
“You’re not ready yet?” he said, noticing that I was shirtless when I opened the door.
“I can’t decide which of these to wear,” I said, holding up two options.
“Wear the blue one.”
“Are you sure this isn’t a mistake, Doug, going out with Lydia Gloor?”
“You’re not going to marry her, Marc. You’re just going to have a drink. You’ll see if there’s still a spark.”
“And what do we do after we’ve had a drink?”
“I booked you a table at a cool Italian place not far from the bar. I’ll text you the address.”
I smiled. “What would I do without you?”
“That’s what friends are for, isn’t it?”
Just then my cell phone rang. I probably wouldn’t have answered had I not seen that it was Gahalowood.
“Hello, Sergeant! It’s good to hear from you.”
“Good evening,” he said, sounding unhappy. “I’m sorry to disturb you …”
“You’re not disturbing me at all.”
“Listen, writer, I think we have a very serious problem.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s about Nola Kellergan’s mother.”
“Louisa Kellergan? What about her?”
“Check your e-mail.”
I went to my computer in the living room. Gahalowood’s e-mail was waiting for me.
“What is it?” I asked, clicking on his message, which had a photograph attached. “You’re beginning to worry me.”
“Open the image. You remember you mentioned Alabama to me?”
“Of course I remember. That’s where the Kellergans came from.”
“We fucked up, Marcus. We completely forgot to look into Alabama. You even told me I should.”
I clicked on the image. It was a photograph of a cemetery headstone with the following words engraved on it:
LOUISA KELLERGAN
1930–1969
BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER
I stared at it, aghast.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed. “What does this mean?”
“That Nola’s mother died in 1969. Six years before her daughter’s disappearance.”
“Who sent you that photo?”
“A journalist in Concord. It’ll be front-page news tomorrow, writer. Which means the whole country is gonna know that your book and our investigation are both wrong.”
*
I didn’t go out to dinner with Lydia Gloor that evening. Douglas got Barnaski out of a business meeting, Barnaski got Richardson from legal out of his house, and we had a particularly heated crisis meeting in a room at Schmid & Hanson. The photograph had actually come from a local newspaper near Jackson, Alabama. Barnaski had just spent two hours trying to persuade the editor of the Concord Herald not to publish this image on the front page of the next day’s paper, but without success.
“Can you imagine what people are going to say when they find out your book is a pack of lies?” he yelled at me. “For God’s sake, Goldman, didn’t you check your facts?”
“I don’t know. This is insane! Nola was beaten by her mother—Harry told me! I don’t understand. Harry told me about the beatings and that waterboard torture.”
“And what does Quebert say now?”
“I can’t reach him. I tried calling him a dozen times tonight. But I haven’t heard from him in two months.”
“Keep trying. You have to get hold of him! Talk to someone who will answer! Find me some kind of explanation that I can give the journalists tomorrow morning when they all start calling.”
At 10 p.m. I finally called Ernie Pinkas.
“But where did you get the idea that the mother was still alive?” he asked me.
“Nobody told me she was dead.”
“But nobody told you she was alive!”
“Yes. Harry told me.”
“Then he was screwing with you. David Kellergan came to Somerset alone with his daughter. The mother was never here.”
“I don’t understand! I feel like I’m going crazy. What will people think of me now?”
“They’ll think you’re a shit writer, Marcus. I have to tell you that nobody is very happy with you here. We’ve been watching you strut all over the newspapers and T.V. for a month now, all of us knowing that what you wrote was a pile of crap.”
“Why didn’t anyone warn me?”
“Warn you? To say what? To ask you if you had, by any chance, made a mistake by writing about a mother who was dead long before any of this happened?”
“What did she die of?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
“But what about the music? And the beatings? I have witnesses to back those things up.”
“Witnesses to back up what? That the pastor played music full blast to drown out his daughter’s sufferings? Yeah, we all suspected that. But in your book you say that Mr Kellergan hid in his garage while Mrs Kellergan beat the kid. The problem with that is that the mother never set foot in Somerset because she was dead before they moved here. So how can we believe anything else you say in the book? And you told me you were going to put my name in the Acknowledgments …”
“I did!”
“You wrote a whole bunch of names with ‘E. Pinkas, Somerset’ among them. I wanted my name in big letters. I wanted people to talk about me.”
“What? But …”
He hung up on me. Barnaski glared at me. “Goldman, take the first plane to Concord tomorrow and sort this shit out.”
“Roy, if I go to Somerset, they’ll lynch me.”
He forced a laugh and said, “Just be grateful that’s all they’ll do to you.”
*
So was the Girl Who Touched the Heart of America also a product of the sick imagination of a writer starved of inspiration? How could such an important detail have been missed? The news story in the Concord Herald was now sowing serious doubt about the entire book.
On Friday morning, October 24, I took a flight to Manchester, where I arrived just after noon. I rented a car at the airport and drove straight to Concord, to the state police headquarters, where Gahalowood was waiting for me. He updated me on what he had managed to learn about the Kellergan family’s past in Alabama.
“David and Louisa Kellergan were married in 1955,” he told me. “He was already the pastor of a flourishing congregation, and his wife helped him to grow it. Nola was born in 1960. Nothing noteworthy occurred in the years that followed. But one night in the summer of 1969, the house burned down. The girl was saved, but the mother died. A few weeks later the pastor left Jackson.
“A few weeks?” I said, surprised. “Yes. And they moved to Somerset.”
“But then why did Harry tell me that Nola was beaten by her mother?”
“It must have been her father.”
“No! No!” I exclaimed. “Harry told me about her mother. It was the mother! I even have the recordings.”
“Well, let’s listen to them, then,” Gahalowood said.
I had brought all my minidiscs with me. I spread them out over Gahalowood’s desk and attempted to find the right one. I had labeled them carefully, by person and by date, but I still couldn’t manage to locate the recording in question. Only when I emptied my bag did I find one last disc, undated, that I had missed. I put it in the recorder.
“That’s strange,” I said. “Why didn’t I write the date on this disc?”
I pressed PLAY and heard my voice announce that it was Tuesday, July 1, 2008. I was recording a conversation with Harry in the prison visiting room.
“Is that why the two of you wanted to leave? I mean, when you arranged to elope, the night of August 30—why did you do that?”
“That was because something awful happened. Are you recording this?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to tell you about a very serious incident, so that you’ll understand. But no-one else can know about it.”
“You can trust me.”
“You know,
for our week on Martha’s Vineyard, instead of saying she was with a friend, Nola had simply run away. She left without saying a word to anyone. When I saw her again, the day after our return, she was terribly upset. She told me her mother had beaten her, and indeed her body was covered in bruises. That day, she told me her mother often punished her for nothing. That she hit her with a metal ruler, and also did a really terrible thing: She filled a bowl with water, took her daughter by her hair, and forced her head underwater. Just like they do to terrorist suspects. She said it was to deliver her.”
“Deliver her?”
“Deliver her from evil. A kind of baptism, I imagine. Jesus in the Jordan River, or something like that. At first, I couldn’t believe it, but the evidence was there. So I asked her why her father didn’t intervene, and she said he locked himself in the garage and played music very loud whenever her mother punished her. He didn’t want to hear, she said. Nola couldn’t take it anymore—she’d had enough. I wanted to go see the Kellergans, to deal with this problem, to put an end to it, but Nola begged me not to. She told me she would get in terrible trouble, that her parents would move away, and that we would never see each other again. But still, this couldn’t be allowed to continue. So, toward the end of August—around the twentieth—we decided we had to leave. Soon. And secretly, of course. We were going to go to British Columbia, maybe, and live in a cabin. Have a simple life by the edge of a lake. Nobody would ever have known.”
“So that’s why you decided to elope?”
“Yes.”
“But why don’t you want anyone to know this?”
“That’s only the beginning of the story. Soon afterward, I made a terrible discovery about Nola’s mother—”
“Time’s up.” Another voice—the guard, interrupting.
“Let’s finish this conversation next time, Marcus. But in the meantime, keep it to yourself.”
“So what did he discover about Nola’s mother?” Gahalowood asked impatiently.
“I don’t remember,” I replied, frowning, as I searched through the other minidiscs.
Suddenly I felt myself go pale and stopped searching. “Oh, God, I don’t believe it!”
“What, writer?”
“That was the last recording of Harry. That’s why there’s no date on the disc—I’d completely forgotten it. We never finished that conversation. Because after that there were the revelations about Pratt, and then Harry no longer wanted to be recorded, so I continued my interviews by taking notes. And then there was the leak of my notes to the press, and Harry got angry at me. Oh, shit, how could I have been such an idiot?”
“We have to talk to Harry,” Gahalowood said, grabbing his coat. “We need to know what he discovered about Louisa Kellergan.”
We left for the Sea Side Motel.
*
To our surprise, the door to Room 8 was opened not by Harry but by a tall blond woman. We went to see the front-desk clerk, who told us: “There hasn’t been any Harry Quebert here recently.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “He was here for weeks.”
At Gahalowood’s request, the clerk looked through the register for the past six months. But he remained categorical: “No Harry Quebert.”
“But I saw him here myself!” I said, struggling to conceal my irritation. “A tall guy with messy gray hair.”
“Oh, him! Yes, he was here a lot. He often hung around the parking lot. But he never had a room here.”
“He had Room 8!” I shouted. “I know he did. I often saw him sitting in front of the door.”
“That’s right—he sat in front of it. I kept asking him to leave, but each time I did, he gave me a hundred-dollar bill! At that rate I figured he could stay there as long as he liked. He said being here brought him good memories.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Gahalowood asked.
“Jeez … it must’ve been quite a few weeks ago. All I remember is that the day he left he gave me another hundred-dollar bill so that if someone called Room 8, I would pretend to transfer the call and let it ring indefinitely. He seemed in a big rush. This was just after the argument—”
“What argument?” Gahalowood demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, your friend had an argument with some guy. A little old guy who came here in a car to bawl him out. It was pretty lively. They were yelling at each other. I was about to intervene when the old guy finally got in his car and left. That was when your friend decided to leave. I would have told him to leave anyway, though; I don’t like it when people make noise like that. The other guests complain, and it can cause me trouble with my boss.”
“But what was the argument about?”
“About a letter, I think. ‘It was you!’ the old guy kept yelling at your friend.”
“A letter? What letter?”
“How should I know?”
“Alright. So what happened after that?”
“The old guy left, and your friend got out of here in no time.”
“Would you recognize him?” Gahalowood asked.
“The old guy? No, I don’t think so. But you could ask your colleagues. Because he came back. My guess was that he wanted to bump off your friend. I know all about police investigations; I watch all the cop shows on T.V. Your friend had already cleared out, but I had the feeling something fishy was going on, so I called the police. Two state troopers got here pretty quickly and talked to the guy. But they let him go. They said it was nothing.”
Gahalowood called the station right away to ask them to retrieve the identity of the person recently interviewed at the Sea Side Motel by the highway police.
“They’re going to call me back as soon as they have the information,” he told me as he hung up.
I felt lost. Running my hand through my hair, I said: “This is insane! Insane!”
The clerk suddenly gave me a strange look and asked: “Are you Mr Goldman?”
“Yes, why?”
“Because your friend left an envelope for you. He said a young guy would come to look for him and that he would undoubtedly say, ‘This is insane! This is insane!’ He said that if that guy came to the motel, I had to give him this.”
He handed me a manila envelope, inside of which was a key.
“A key?” Gahalowood said. “Nothing else?”
“Nothing.”
“But what’s the key to?”
I carefully studied the key. And then I recognized it: “The gym locker in Montburry!”
*
Twenty minutes later we were in the locker room. Inside Locker 201 there was a bound sheaf of papers, accompanied by a handwritten letter.
Dear Marcus,
If you’re reading this, it’s because there is a shitstorm gathering around your book and you’re looking for answers.
This may interest you. This book is the truth.
Harry
The sheaf of papers was a slim typewritten manuscript bearing the title:
THE SEAGULLS OF SOMERSET by Harry L. Quebert
“What’s this about?” Gahalowood asked me.
“I have no idea. It seems to be an unpublished book of Harry’s.”
“The paper’s old,” Gahalowood noted, carefully inspecting the pages.
I skimmed the text.
“Nola used to talk about seagulls,” I said. “Harry told me she loved them. There must be a connection.”
“But why did he say it was the truth? Is this a story about what happened in 1975?”
“I don’t know.”
We decided to postpone reading the manuscript until later, and to first go to Somerset. I was not greeted warmly. In front of Clark’s, Jenny—furious about the way I had described her mother and refusing to believe that her father was the author of the anonymous letters—gave me a public dressing-down. Others, passing by, chimed in and told me to get out of town.
The only person who deigned to speak with us was Nancy Hattaway, whom we went to see in her store.
&n
bsp; “I don’t understand,” Nancy told me. “I never said anything about Nola’s mother.”
“But you did tell me about the Nola’s bruises. And that time when Nola had run away for a week and they tried to make you believe she was sick.”
“But that was just her father. He was the one who refused to let me in the house when Nola disappeared that week in July. I never mentioned her mother to you at all.”
“You told me how she had been beaten on her breasts with a metal ruler. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course, yes. But I never said it was her mother who beat her.”
“I recorded you! It was June 26. I have the disc with me. Look—the date is on it.”
I pressed PLAY:
“I’m surprised by your comments about Mr Kellergan. I met him a few days ago and he seemed like quite a gentle man.”
“He can come across that way. In public, at least. He’d been recruited to save St James’s, which had fallen into neglect, after apparently performing miracles in Alabama. And it’s true that, soon after he took it over, the church was full every Sunday. But apart from that, no-one really knows what went on in the Kellergan house.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nola used to get beaten.”
“What?”
“Yes, she was severely beaten. And I remember one terrible incident, Mr Goldman. It was in early summer. That was the first time I saw those kinds of marks on Nola’s body. We were walking to Grand Beach to go swimming, when out of the blue she asked me if she was ‘a wicked girl.’ She told me that she was bullied at home, that she was called wicked. I asked her why, and she mentioned events in Alabama, but she wouldn’t say any more. She seemed sad; I thought it was because of a boy. There was this guy Cody, a junior who was always hanging around her. Later, on the beach, when she got undressed, I saw she had terrible bruises on her breasts. I asked her what they were, and guess what she replied: ‘It was Mom. She hit me on Saturday.’ Obviously I was completely shocked by this. I thought I must have misheard her. But she went on: ‘It’s true. She’s the one who says I’m a wicked girl.’ Nola seemed desperate, so I didn’t argue with her. After Grand Beach we went home, and I gave her ointment to rub onto her breasts. I told her she should talk to someone about her mother. Like the nurse at the high school, for example. But Nola told me she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”