by Joël Dicker
Kellergan got up and, as if possessed, threw himself at me, grabbing my throat with a strength I would never have guessed he had. “Get the hell out of my house!” he screamed, shoving me backward. I would probably have fallen over had not Gahalowood taken hold of me and dragged me outside.
“Are you insane, writer?” he said when we got back to the car. “Or are you just unusually stupid? Do you want to antagonize all our witnesses?”
“You have to admit there’s something fishy about it.”
“Something fishy? We just implied that his daughter was a slut, and he got mad. Seems normal to me. On the other hand, he almost gave you a good beating. Pretty impressive for an old man. I’d never have thought he had it in him.”
“I’m sorry—I don’t know what got into me.”
“And what’s this stuff about Alabama?” he asked.
“I told you about it: The Kellergans left Alabama to come here. And I’m still sure there was a good reason for their departure.”
“I’ll find out. If you promise to behave from now on.”
“We’ll get there, won’t we, Sergeant? We’re going to prove Harry’s innocence, aren’t we?”
Gahalowood stared at me.
“What worries me, writer, is you. I’m doing my job: I’m investigating two murders. But you seem obsessed by the need to prove Quebert innocent, as if you wanted to tell the rest of the country: See, he didn’t do it, what do you have against this good man, this great writer? But what we have against him, Goldman, is that he was in love with a fifteen-year-old girl!”
“I know that! I think about it all the time, believe it or not. I came here as soon as the news broke, without thinking twice. My only concern was for my friend, my blood brother, Harry. If things had gone normally, I would have stayed only two or three days—long enough to ease my conscience—and I would have gone back to New York as quickly as possible.”
“So why are you still here to piss me off?”
“Because Harry Quebert is the only friend I have. I’m twenty-eight years old, and he’s my only friend. He taught me everything. He’s been my only human connection for the last ten years. Apart from him, I have no one.”
I think Gahalowood must have felt sorry for me then. “Come tonight, writer. We’ll take stock of the investigation, have a bite to eat. You can meet my wife too.” And as if it were killing him to be nice to me, he then added in his most disagreeable voice: “Well, my wife will be happy anyway. She’s been pestering me to invite you over ever since I mentioned you. She dreams of meeting you. Some dream!”
The Gahalowood family lived in a cute little house in a residential area west of Concord. Helen, the sergeant’s wife, was elegant and extremely pleasant—the exact opposite of her husband. “I loved your book so much,” she told me. “So are you really investigating with Perry?” Her husband grumbled that I was not investigating anything, that he was the boss, and that I had just been sent to ruin his life. His two daughters—two clearly well-adjusted teenagers—came to greet me politely before disappearing into their rooms.
“So you’re the only one in the house who doesn’t like me,” I said to Gahalowood.
He smiled.
“Shut it, writer. Shut your mouth and come outside and have a nice cold beer. It’s a beautiful evening.”
We spent a long time on the deck, sitting comfortably in rattan chairs and consuming the contents of a plastic cooler. Gahalowood was wearing a suit, but he had put on a pair of old slippers. It was a hot evening, and we could hear children playing in the street. The air smelled of summer.
“You have a beautiful family,” I told him.
“Thank you. How about you? Wife? Kids?”
“No, nothing.”
“Dog?”
“Nope.”
“Not even a dog? You must really be lonely, writer. Let me guess: you live in an apartment that’s much too big for you in a trendy part of New York. A big apartment that’s always empty.”
I didn’t even try to deny it.
“My agent used to come over to watch baseball with me. But after everything that’s happened, I don’t know if he’ll want to come to my apartment anymore. I haven’t heard from him in weeks.”
“So you’re scared, huh?”
“I am. But the worst thing is I don’t even know what it is I’m afraid of. I’m writing my new book about this case. It’s going to earn me at least three million dollars, and I’m sure it’ll be a bestseller. And yet, deep down, I’m unhappy. What do you think I should do?”
He looked at me, almost surprised.
“You’re asking advice from a guy who earns seventy thousand dollars a year?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, writer.”
“If I were your son, what would you say?”
“You, my son? Just give me a minute to throw up. Why don’t you go see a therapist? You know, I have a son. Younger than you—he’s twenty.”
“I didn’t know.”
He rummaged in his pocket and came up with a small photograph he had glued to a piece of card stock to maintain its shape. It showed a young man in uniform.
“Your son is in the military?”
“Second Infantry Division, deployed in Iraq. I remember the day he signed up. There was a mobile recruitment station in the mall parking lot. It was an obvious choice for him. He came home and told me he’d made his decision: he was dropping out of college and going off to fight in the war. Because of the images of 9/11 that kept racing through his head. So I got out a map of the world and asked him, ‘Where’s Iraq?’ He replied, ‘Iraq is where we have to be.’ What do you think of that, Marcus?” (This was the first time he had ever called me by my first name.) “Was he right or wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. All I know is that life is a series of choices, and that you have to keep making them.”
• • •
That was a nice evening. It had been a long time since I had felt so surrounded by good feeling. After the meal, I went back out on the deck while Gahalowood helped his wife clean up. Night had fallen; the sky was the color of ink. I saw the Big Dipper glinting. All was calm. The children were no longer out in the street, and the only sound was the soothing chirp chirp of the crickets. Gahalowood came out to join me, and together we went over the investigation. I told him how Stern had generously allowed Harry to stay at Goose Cove.
“The same Stern who was in a relationship with Nola?” he asked. “This whole thing is very strange.”
“You’re not kidding, Sergeant. And I can confirm that someone did know, back then, about Harry and Nola. Harry told me that at the summer gala, someone scrawled PEDOPHILE SCUM on the bathroom mirror while he was in one of the stalls. Speaking of which, where are we with the inscription on the manuscript? When will you have the handwriting analysis?”
“Sometime next week, theoretically.”
“So we’ll know soon.”
“I’ve been through the police report on Nola’s disappearance,” Gahalowood told me. “The one written by Chief Pratt. I can confirm that there is no mention in there of Stern or of Harry.”
“That’s strange, because Nancy Hattaway and Tamara Quinn both told me they had informed Chief Pratt of their suspicions about Harry and Stern at the time of Nola’s disappearance.”
“But the report is signed by Pratt himself. So he knew and didn’t do anything?”
“What can all this mean?” I asked.
Gahalowood looked somber.
“That he too might have had a relationship with Nola Kellergan.”
“You think that . . . Jesus Christ! Chief Pratt and Nola?”
“The first thing we will do tomorrow, writer, is go and ask him.”
On the morning of Thursday, July 3, Gahalowood came to pick me up a
t Goose Cove, and we went to see Chief Pratt in his Mountain Drive house. It was Pratt himself who opened the door. At first he saw just me, and his greeting was friendly.
“Mr. Goldman, what brings you here? I’ve been hearing that you’re leading your own investigation—”
From inside the house I heard Amy asking who it was, and Pratt replied, “It’s Goldman, the writer.” Then he noticed Gahalowood, a few steps behind me, and said, “Oh, so this is an official visit . . .”
Gahalowood nodded.
“Just a few questions, Chief,” he said. “The investigation is getting bogged down, and there are parts of the story that seem to be missing. I’m sure you understand.”
We sat in the living room. Amy Pratt came in to greet us. Her husband suggested that she go outside to do some gardening, and without further ado she put on a hat and went out to tend to her rosebushes. It might have been funny were it not for the fact that, for reasons I could not yet explain, the atmosphere in the Pratts’ living room had suddenly become very tense.
I let Gahalowood ask the questions. Despite his latent aggressiveness, he was a very good cop, with a strong grasp of psychology. He asked a few questions to begin with, nothing out of the ordinary. He asked Pratt to give a brief rundown of events leading up to the disappearance of Nola Kellergan. But Pratt quickly lost his patience: He said he had already made his report in 1975, and that all we had to do was read it.
It was at this point that Gahalowood replied: “Well, to be perfectly honest, I read your report, and I’m not convinced by it. For instance, I know that Mrs. Quinn told you what she knew regarding Harry and Nola, and yet that is not even mentioned in the case file.”
Pratt did not get flustered. “Mrs. Quinn came to see me—that’s true. She told me she knew everything, that Harry was fantasizing about Nola. But she had no evidence, and neither did I.”
“You’re lying,” I said. “She showed you a page containing Harry’s handwriting that clearly compromised him.”
“She showed it to me once. Then that page disappeared. She had nothing. What could I have done?”
“What about Elijah Stern?” Gahalowood said, softening his tone. “What do you know about Stern?”
“Stern?” Pratt repeated. “Elijah Stern? What does he have to do with this?”
Gahalowood held the whip hand now. In a calm voice that brooked no argument, he said: “Cut the crap, Pratt. I know what’s going on. I know you didn’t carry out your investigation the way you should have. I know that when the girl disappeared, Tamara Quinn told you her suspicions about Quebert, and Nancy Hattaway informed you that Nola had been in a sexual relationship with Elijah Stern. You should at least have questioned them, searched their houses, clarified this story, and written it up in your report. That’s standard procedure. But you didn’t do any of that. Why? You had a murdered woman and a missing girl on your hands!”
I sensed Pratt’s composure slipping. He raised his voice. “I combed the whole area for weeks,” he said, “even on my days off! I went all out to find that girl! So don’t come here—to my home—to insult me and question my work! Cops don’t do that to other cops!”
“Sure, you carried out a huge search,” Gahalowood said, “but you knew perfectly well there were people you should have questioned, and you didn’t do it! Why, for God’s sake? What were you covering up?”
There was a long silence. Gahalowood stared at Pratt with an icy calm.
“What were you covering up?” he asked again. “What happened with that girl?”
Pratt looked away. He stood up and went to the window, where he could avoid our eyes. For a moment he watched his wife out in the yard, clearing the weeds around her rosebushes.
“It was at the beginning of August,” he said, his voice barely audible, “of that cursed summer. This is what happened, whether you believe me or not: One afternoon the girl came to see me in my office at the police station. There was a knock at the door, and Nola Kellergan came in, without waiting for me to answer. I was sitting at my desk, reading a case file. I was surprised to see her. I said hi, and asked what was going on. There was something strange about her. She didn’t say a word. She closed the door and locked it behind her, then came toward me. Toward the desk, and . . .”
Pratt broke off. He was visibly shaken. He could no longer find the words. Gahalowood showed no sympathy whatsoever. Coldly, he asked: “And what, Chief Pratt?”
“This is the truth, Sergeant—I don’t care if you believe me. She crawled under my desk, and . . . she . . . she unzipped my pants, and she took me in her mouth.”
I jumped to my feet. “What the hell are you saying?”
“I’m telling you the truth. She sucked me off, and I let her do it. She told me, ‘Let yourself go, Chief.’ And when it was all over, she wiped her mouth and said, ‘Now you’re a criminal.’”
We were dumbstruck. So that was why Pratt hadn’t interrogated Stern or Harry. Because he was directly involved in this case, just as they were.
Now that he had begun to clear his conscience, Pratt needed to go all the way. He told us there was another blow job afterward. But while the first had been initiated by Nola, the second was forced on her by him. He told us about an incident when, while out on patrol alone, he had found Nola walking home along Shore Road. She was close to Goose Cove, and she was carrying her typewriter. He offered to accompany her, but instead of heading toward Somerset, he took her into the woods at Side Creek.
“It was a few weeks before her disappearance,” he told us. “I parked on the edge of the forest. There was nobody around. And I took her hand and made her touch me, and I asked her to do again what she’d done to me before. I unzipped my pants, I grabbed her by the back of her neck . . . I don’t know what got hold of me. This has been haunting me for more than thirty years! I can’t bear it anymore! Arrest me, Sergeant. I want to be questioned, I want be judged, I want to be forgiven. Forgive me, Nola! Forgive me!”
• • •
When Amy Pratt saw her husband being led from the house in handcuffs, she screamed so loudly that the whole neighborhood was alerted. The more curious came out onto their lawns to see what was happening, and I heard a woman call her husband so that he wouldn’t miss the show: “The police are arresting Gareth Pratt!”
Gahalowood took Pratt in his car and drove, sirens wailing, to the state police headquarters in Concord. I remained on the Pratts’ lawn. Amy was crying, on her knees in front of the rosebushes, and the neighbors—and the neighbors’ neighbors, and the whole street, and the whole district, and soon half of Somerset—congregated in front of the house on Mountain Drive.
Stunned by what I had just learned, I ended up sitting on a fire hydrant and calling Roth to tell him what had happened. I did not have the courage to face Harry; I did not want to be the one to tell him. The television took care of that in the hours that followed, and the media hype began all over again: Gareth Pratt, former chief of police in Somerset, has admitted to performing sexual acts on Nola Kellergan and is now a suspect in her murder. Harry called me collect from the prison in the early afternoon. He was in tears. He asked me to come to see him. He could not believe that all of this was true.
In the prison visiting room, I told him about our interview with Chief Pratt. He was a mess. Finally I said, “That’s not all . . . I think it’s time you knew—”
“Knew what? You’re scaring me, Marcus.”
“The reason I mentioned Stern to you the other day is that I went to his house.”
“And?”
“I found a painting of Nola there.”
“A painting?”
“Stern has a nude painting of Nola in his house.”
I had brought with me one of the blown-up photographs of the painting, and I showed it to Harry.
“It’s her!” he cried. “It’s Nola! It’s Nola! What does this mean?”
&nb
sp; A guard poked his head in to warn him to cool it.
“Try not to lose your temper,” I said.
“But what does Stern have to do with all this?”
“I don’t know . . . Did Nola ever mention him to you?”
“Never! Never!”
“Harry, as far as I’m aware, Nola had a relationship with Elijah Stern during that same summer you did.”
“I don’t believe that . . .”
“At least, from what I understand . . . Harry, you might have to accept that maybe you were not the only man in Nola’s life.”
Springing to his feet, he threw his plastic chair against the wall and screamed: “Impossible! Impossible! I was the one she loved! Do you hear me? She loved me!”
Guards rushed into the room and took him away. As he left, I heard him screaming: “Why are you doing this, Marcus? Why are you screwing everything up? Go to hell! You, Pratt, and Stern!”
It was after this episode that I began to write the story of Nola Kellergan, the fifteen-year-old girl who had captivated an entire New England town.
16
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL
(Somerset, New Hampshire, August 11–20, 1975)
“HARRY, HOW LONG DOES it take to write a book?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On everything.”
August 11, 1975
“Harry!”
Nola ran into the house. It was early morning—not even nine o’clock. Harry was in his office, reorganizing piles of papers. She appeared at the door, brandishing the satchel that contained the manuscript.
“Where was it?” Harry asked, clearly annoyed. “Where the hell was that manuscript?”
“I’m sorry, Harry. Don’t be mad at me. I took it last night. You were sleeping, and I took it so I could read it at home. I shouldn’t have. But it’s so wonderful! It’s incredible! What a beautiful book.”
Smiling, she handed it to him.
“So you liked it?”
“Did I like it?” she said. “I adored it! It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. You’re going to be famous, Harry. I mean it!”