by Joël Dicker
“What is it? You can tell me anything, David—you know that.”
“Jeremy … when I got home, there were those flames. The entire second floor was on fire. I wanted to go upstairs to save Louisa, but the staircase was already ablaze. I couldn’t do anything. Nothing!”
“Heavens above! And Nola?”
David Kellergan choked.
“I told the police that I went upstairs and carried Nola from the house, but that I couldn’t go back for my wife …”
“And that’s not true?”
“No, Jeremy. When I got home, the house was burning. And Nola … Nola was on the porch, singing.”
*
The next morning David Kellergan went to see his daughter alone in the spare bedroom of Jeremy Lewis’s house. First of all he wanted to explain to her that her mother was dead.
“Sweetie,” he said, “do you remember last night? There was a fire—you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Something very serious happened. Something very serious and very sad that’s going to make you upset. Mommy was in her bedroom when the fire started, and she wasn’t able to get out of the house.”
“Yes, I know. Mommy is dead,” said Nola. “She was wicked. So I set fire to her bedroom.”
“What? What did you say?”
“I went into her room. She was asleep. I thought she looked wicked. Wicked Mommy! Wicked! I wanted her to die. So I picked up the box of matches on her chest of drawers and I set fire to the curtains.”
Nola smiled at her father, who asked her to repeat what she had said. Nola repeated it. David Kellergan heard the floorboards creak, and he turned around. Pastor Lewis, who had come to look in on Nola, had overheard their conversation.
*
They went into the office and closed the door.
“Nola set fire to your house? Nola killed her mother?” Lewis said in disbelief.
“Shh. Not so loud, Jeremy! She … she … says she set fire to the house, but … God, surely that can’t be true!”
“Does Nola have demons?” Lewis asked.
“Demons? No, no! It’s true that her mother and I sometimes noticed that she acted a little strangely, but it was never anything really bad.”
“Nola killed her mother, David. Do you realize how serious this is?”
David Kellergan was trembling and felt sick to his stomach. Jeremy Lewis gave him a wastepaper basket so he could throw up.
“Don’t tell the police, Jeremy! Please, I’m begging you.”
“But this is serious, David.”
“Don’t say anything! Please, in the name of God, don’t say anything. If the police find out about this, Nola could end up in a reformatory or God knows what. She’s only nine years old …”
“Then we have to cure her,” Lewis said. “Nola is possessed by the Devil. She has to be cured.”
“No, Jeremy! Not that!”
“I have to exorcize her, David. It’s the only way to deliver her from evil.”
*
“I exorcized her,” Pastor Lewis told us. “For several days we attempted to force the demon from her body.”
I shook my head in disgust.
Lewis looked at me intently. “Why are you so skeptical? Nola was not Nola: The Devil had taken possession of her body.”
“What did you do to her?” Gahalowood asked roughly.
“Normally prayers are enough, Sergeant.”
“Let me guess: They weren’t enough in this case.”
“The Devil was strong. So we submerged her head in a tub of holy water to finish him off.”
“The waterboard torture,” I said.
“But that wasn’t enough either. So to bring down the Devil and force him to abandon Nola’s body, we beat her.”
“You beat a little girl?” Gahalowood shouted.
“No, not the little girl—the Devil!”
“You’re crazy, Lewis.”
“We had to liberate her! And we thought we had succeeded. But Nola started having some … problems. She and her father stayed with us for a while, and she became uncontrollable. She started seeing her mother.”
“You mean Nola was hallucinating?” Gahalowood asked.
“Worse than that. She developed a sort of split personality. She would become her mother, and she would punish herself for what she had done. One day I found her screaming in the bathroom. She had filled the bathtub and was grabbing herself by her hair and shoving her own head into the cold water. It couldn’t go on like that. So David decided to move away. Far away. He said he had to leave Jackson, leave Alabama. He thought the distance, coupled with time, would help Nola to get better. Then I heard that St James’s in Somerset was looking for a new pastor, and David did not hesitate for a second. That was how he came to move to New Hampshire.”
3
Election Day
“Your life will be punctuated by a succession of major events. Mention them in your books, Marcus. Because if the books turn out to be bad, they will at least have the merit of recording a few pages of history.”
Extract from the Concord Herald, November 5, 2008
BARACK OBAMA ELECTED 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Democratic nominee Barack Obama has won the presidential election against Republican nominee John McCain, and becomes the 44th President of the United States. New Hampshire, which voted for John Kerry in 2004 […]
November 5, 2008
The day after the election, New York was in a state of jubilation. People celebrated Obama’s victory in the streets until late at night. I watched the festivities on television in my office, where I had been living for three days.
That morning Denise arrived at the office at 8 a.m., carrying an Obama sweatshirt, an Obama pin, an Obama cup, and a pack of Obama bumper stickers. “Oh, here you are, Marcus!” she said as she passed my door and saw the lights on. “Did you go out last night? What a victory, huh? I brought you some bumper stickers as mementos.” While she talked to me, she placed her Obama paraphernalia on her desk, turned on the coffee maker, and unplugged the answering machine, then entered my office. When she saw the state the room was in, she stared wide-eyed and cried out: “My God, Marcus, what the hell happened here?”
I was sitting in my chair and looking at one of the walls, which I had spent half the night covering with my notes and diagrams from the investigation. I had listened to the recordings of Harry, Nancy Hattaway, and Robert Quinn over and over again.
“There’s some aspect of this case that I just don’t understand,” I said. “It’s driving me crazy.”
“Were you here all night?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Marcus. And I thought you must be out somewhere enjoying yourself. How long is it since you last had any fun? Are you worrying about your book?”
“I’m worrying about what I discovered last week.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not sure—that’s the problem. Denise, what do you do when you discover that someone you have always admired has betrayed you and lied to you?”
She thought for a moment, and then said: “It happened to me. With my first husband. I found him in bed with my best friend.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. It was in the Hamptons. We’d gone for the weekend to an oceanfront hotel with my best friend and her husband. On Saturday evening I went for a walk on the beach. Alone, because my husband had told me he was tired. I came back much earlier than I’d intended to: Walking on my own turned out not to be much fun. I went up to our room, opened the door with my key card, and there they were in bed. He was on top of her, my best friend. It’s funny … with those key cards you can enter a room without making any noise. They didn’t see me or hear me. I watched them for a few moments—watched my husband shaking his butt like crazy to make her moan like a little dog—and then I silently left the room, went to vomit in the lobby bathroom, and started off on my walk again. I cam
e back an hour later: My husband was at the hotel bar, drinking gin and having a good laugh with my best friend’s husband. I didn’t say anything. We all ate dinner together. I pretended nothing had happened. That night he slept like a log; he told me it was exhausting, doing nothing. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything for six months.”
“And in the end you asked for a divorce …?”
“No. He left me for her.”
“Do you regret not doing anything?”
“Every day.”
“So I should do something. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. Do something, Marcus. Don’t be a pathetic dope like I was.”
I smiled.
“You’re definitely not a dope, Denise.”
“Marcus, what happened last week? What did you discover?”
Five days earlier
On October 31, Dr Gideon Alkanor, one of the most respected child psychiatrists on the East Coast and a man Gahalowood knew well, confirmed what now seemed obvious: Nola had been suffering from serious psychological problems.
The day after our return from Jackson, Gahalowood and I drove down to Boston, where Alkanor met us in his office at Children’s Hospital. On the basis of the evidence that had been sent to him the day before, he believed it was possible to diagnose infantile psychosis.
“So what does that mean in layman’s terms?” Gahalowood asked impatiently.
Alkanor took off his glasses and slowly cleaned the lenses while he considered what he would say. Finally he turned toward me.
“It means that I think you are right, Mr Goldman. I read your book a few weeks ago. Considering what you describe and the evidence that Perry has provided me with, I would say that Nola sometimes lost her grip on reality. It was probably during one of those fits that she set fire to her mother’s bedroom. That night of August 30, 1969, Nola had a skewed view of reality: She wanted to kill her mother, but for her, at that particular moment, killing meant nothing. She performed an act without any understanding of its significance. On top of that first traumatic incident, there was also the exorcism, the memory of which could easily trigger the split-personality fits in which Nola becomes the mother she killed. And that’s where it gets complicated. When Nola lost touch with reality, the memory of her mother and what she did to her came back to haunt her.”
For a moment I was stunned. “So you mean she—”
Alkanor nodded before I could finish, and said: “Nola beat herself during these breakdowns.”
“But what could set off these fits?” Gahalowood asked.
“Probably major emotional upheavals: stress, sadness, and so on. What you describe in your book, Mr Goldman: the meeting with Harry Quebert, where she falls head over heels in love, then his rejection of her, which leads to her suicide attempt. I would say that’s almost a classic pattern. When her emotions snowballed, her psychological defenses broke down. And when that happened, she saw her mother again, come back to punish her for what she’d done.”
*
All that time Nola and her mother had been the same person. We now needed David Kellergan’s confirmation, so on November 1, Gahalowood and I went to 245 Terrace Avenue, along with Travis Dawn, whom we had informed of what we had discovered in Alabama, and whose presence Gahalowood had requested in order to reassure David Kellergan.
When he found us standing at his door, he immediately told us: “I have nothing to say to you. Not to you or to anyone.”
“I’m the one with things to say,” Gahalowood calmly explained. “I know what happened in Alabama in August 1969. I know about the fire, I know everything.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“You should listen to them,” Travis said. “Let us in, David. It would be better to talk about this inside.”
Finally David Kellergan let us in and led us to the kitchen. He poured himself coffee, not offering us any, and sat at the table. Gahalowood and Travis sat opposite him, and I remained standing, farther back.
“So what do you want?” Kellergan demanded.
“I went to Jackson,” Gahalowood replied. “I talked to Jeremy Lewis. I know what Nola did.”
“Shut your mouth!”
“She was suffering from infantile psychosis. She had schizophrenic episodes. On August 30, 1969, she set fire to her mother’s room.”
“No!” David Kellergan yelled. “You’re lying!”
“You found Nola on the porch that night. She was singing. You finally understood what had happened. You exorcized her. You thought you were helping her. But it was a disaster. She began having split-personality episodes in which she would attempt to punish herself. So you went far away from Alabama. You moved north, hoping to leave your ghosts behind. But the ghost of your wife pursued you, because she still haunted Nola’s mind.”
A tear rolled down Kellergan’s cheek.
“She would have fits sometimes,” he said hoarsely. “There was nothing I could do. She beat herself. She was the daughter and the mother. She hit herself, and she begged herself to stop.”
“So you blasted music and locked yourself in the garage because you couldn’t bear to watch, to hear.”
“Yes! Yes! It was unbearable! I didn’t know what to do. My daughter, my sweet daughter, she was so sick.”
He began to sob. Travis looked on, horrified by what he was hearing.
“Why didn’t you get her professional help?” Gahalowood asked.
“I was afraid they would take her away from me. That they would lock her up. And then, over time, there were fewer fits. I even thought, for a few years, that her memory of the fire was fading; I thought it was possible that her fits would stop altogether one day. She was getting better and better. Until the summer of 1975. Suddenly, and I had no idea why, she started having these violent fits again.”
“Because of Harry,” Gahalowood said. “The meeting with Harry was emotionally overwhelming for her.”
“That was a terrible summer,” Kellergan said. “I could sense the fits coming. I could almost predict them. It was so horrible. She hit herself with a metal ruler on her breasts and her fingers. She filled a tub with water and shoved her head into it while begging her mother to stop. And her mother, in Nola’s voice, would yell the most hideous things.”
“The water-torture—you put her through that during the exorcism?”
“Jeremy Lewis swore it was the only solution. I’d heard that Lewis performed exorcisms, but he and I had never discussed it. And then suddenly he was saying that the Devil had taken possession of Nola’s body and he had to liberate her. I only agreed to it so he wouldn’t turn her in. Jeremy was a madman, but what else could I do? I had no choice—she could have gone to jail!”
“Tell us about Nola’s running away from home,” Gahalowood said.
“She sometimes ran away. She was gone for a whole week once. It was at the end of July, 1975. What should I have done? Call the police? And tell them what? That my daughter was going insane? I decided to wait until the end of the week before alerting the police. For a week I searched everywhere, day and night. And then she came back.”
“And what happened on August 30 of that year?”
“She had a very bad fit. I had never seen her in a state like that before. I tried to calm her, but nothing worked. So I hid out in the garage and worked on that damn motorcycle. I turned the music up as loud as possible. I stayed there for most of the afternoon. You know the rest: When I went to look for her again, she wasn’t there. I went out to look around the neighborhood, and then I heard that a girl had been seen, covered in blood, near Side Creek. I realized the situation was serious.”
“What did you think had happened?”
“To be honest, I first assumed that Nola had run away and that the blood was from the beatings she had given herself. I thought Deborah Cooper had perhaps seen Nola in the middle of one of her fits. It was August 30, after all: the anniversary of the fire.”
“Had she suffered fits before on that date?”
<
br /> “No.”
“So what could have triggered such a violent fit?”
David Kellergan hesitated for a moment before replying. Travis Dawn realized he needed encouragement.
“If you know something, David, you have to tell us. It’s very important. Do it for Nola.”
“When I went into her room that day, and she wasn’t there, I found an envelope on her bed. It was opened, her name was on it, and inside was a letter. I think that letter caused the fit. It was a break-up letter.”
“A letter?” Travis exclaimed. “You never told us about that letter!”
“Because it was written by a man who, judging from the way he wrote, was clearly too old to be going out with my daughter. What else could I have done? Should I have let the whole town think that Nola was a slut? I was sure the police were going to find her and bring her home. And that I would be able to cure her for good.”
“And who was the author of the letter?” Gahalowood asked.
“Harry Quebert.”
We were all struck dumb. Kellergan stood up and left the room for a while before returning with a shoebox full of letters.
“I found these after her disappearance, hidden in her room, under a loose floorboard. Nola had been corresponding with Harry Quebert.”
Gahalowood picked a letter at random and quickly read it. “How do you know it was Harry Quebert?” he asked. “These letters aren’t signed.”
“Because … because these letters are in his book.”
I rummaged through the box. The old man was right: The letters were those in The Origin of Evil. They were all there: the letters about the two of them, the letters to her at Charlotte’s Hill. They were written in the same clear, perfect prose as the letters from the manuscript. I was almost frightened.
“And this is the last letter,” said Mr Kellergan, handing an envelope to Gahalowood.
He read it, then gave it to me.
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.