by Joël Dicker
They embraced for a long time. Then he gave her the flowers that had been soaking in the sink.
“Didn’t you bring anything?” Harry asked when he noticed she did not have any luggage.
“Nothing. I wanted to be discreet. We can buy what we need on the way. But I brought your manuscript.”
“I was looking for it everywhere!”
“I took it with me. I read it. I love it so much, Harry. It’s a masterpiece.” They hugged again, and then she said, “Let’s go! Let’s go now, as fast as we can!”
“Now?”
“Yes, I want to get far away from here. Please, Harry, I don’t want to risk anyone finding us. Let’s go right away.”
Night was falling. It was August 30, 1975. Two figures left the motel room, ran down the stairs to the parking lot, and got into a black Chevrolet Monte Carlo. The car took Shore Road, heading north, and sped away, vanishing into the horizon. Soon only its shape could be seen. It became a black dot, then a tiny pinprick. For a moment longer you could see just the tiny point of red made by its taillights, and then it disappeared completely.
PART THREE
WRITER’S HEAVEN
(The Book’s Publication)
5
THE GIRL WHO TOUCHED THE HEART OF AMERICA
“A NEW BOOK, MARCUS, is the start of a new life. It’s also an act of great generosity: You are offering, to whoever wishes to discover it, a part of yourself. Some will love it, some will hate it. Some will worship you, others will despise you. Some will be jealous, others will be curious. But you’re not writing it for them. You’re writing it for all those who, in their daily lives, will enjoy a sweet moment because of Marcus Goldman. You may say that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually quite something. Some writers want to change the world. But who can really change the world?”
MY BOOK WAS THE TALK of the town. I could no longer walk the streets of Manhattan in peace. I could no longer go jogging without passersby recognizing me and calling out, “Look, it’s Goldman! It’s that writer!” Some even started running after me so they could ask the questions that were gnawing at them: “Is it true what you say in your book? Did Harry Quebert really do that?” In the West Village café where I was a regular, certain customers felt free to sit at my table and talk to me. “I’m reading your book right now, Mr. Goldman. I can’t put it down! The first one was good, of course, but this one . . . Did they really pay you three million bucks to write it? How old are you? I bet you’re not even thirty. And already a multimillionaire!” Even the doorman at my building, whose progress through my book I was able to note each time I came or went, cornered me for a long talk by the elevator once he had got to the end. “So that’s what happened to Nola Kellergan? That poor girl! But how could it happen? How could such a thing be possible, Mr. Goldman?”
From the day of its publication, The Harry Quebert Affair was the number one bestseller all over the country; it promised to be the bestselling book of the year. They were talking about it everywhere: on TV, on the radio, in every newspaper, all over the Internet. The critics, who had been waiting to ambush me, ended up lavishing me with praise. They all said my new book was one for the ages.
As soon as the book was published, I began a marathon promotional tour that took me to all four corners of the country in the space of only two weeks. Barnaski believed two weeks was all we had before everyone’s attention turned full time to the presidential election. Back in New York I had already appeared on numerous television shows, hopping from studio to studio at a frantic pace. Reporters swarmed my parents’ house. To give my parents some peace, I bought them an RV so they could realize one of their oldest dreams: driving out to Chicago and then down Route 66 and out to California.
An article in the New York Times referred to Nola as the Girl Who Touched the Heart of America, and this was how she was now known. From the letters I received, so many people had been moved by her story. And some literary experts claimed that The Origin of Evil could be read correctly only in conjunction with my book; they suggested a new approach in which Nola no longer represented an impossible love but the omnipotence of love. And so The Origin of Evil, which had been pulled from the shelves of practically every bookstore in the country four months earlier, now saw its sales soaring again. For Christmas, Barnaski was preparing a limited edition boxed set containing The Origin of Evil and The Harry Quebert Affair, along with an analysis of the text written by a certain Frank Lancaster.
I had not heard from Harry since I left him at the Sea Side Motel. I had tried to call him many times, but his cell phone was off, and when I called the motel and asked for room 8, the telephone just rang and rang. In fact I had no contact with Somerset at all, which was perhaps for the best; I had little desire to find out how the book was being received there. All I knew, because my publisher’s legal department had told me, was that Elijah Stern was still desperately attempting to take Schmid and Hanson to court, claiming that the passages about him were defamatory, particularly those in which I wondered about his reasons for granting Luther’s request to paint Nola nude and for not telling the police about the disappearance of his black Monte Carlo. I had called him before the book’s publication to obtain his version of events, but he had not deigned to reply.
• • •
By the third week in October, the presidential election essentially took over the media, exactly as Barnaski had predicted. Requests for my time suddenly dwindled, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I had been through two very tough years: my first success, the writer’s disease, and then, finally, this second book. I felt much calmer, and had a real desire to get away for a while. Since I did not wish to go alone, and wanted to thank Douglas for his support, I bought two tickets to the Bahamas. My plan was to surprise him one night when he came over to my apartment to watch a game with me. But, to my great dismay, he turned me down.
“That would have been cool,” he said, “but I’ve got plans to take Kelly to the Caribbean then.”
“Kelly? Are you still with her?”
“Yes, of course. Didn’t you know? I’m going to ask her to marry me while we’re on vacation.”
“Wow, that’s great! I’m really happy for you both.”
I must have looked a little sad, because he said to me: “Marc, you have everything you could possibly want from life. It’s time you found a girlfriend.”
I nodded. “It’s just that . . . it’s been so long since I went on a date.”
He smiled. “Don’t worry about that.”
It was this conversation that led us to the evening—October 23, 2008—when everything changed.
Douglas had arranged a date for me with Lydia Gloor, whose agent had told him she still had a crush on me. He had persuaded me to call her, and we agreed to meet at a bar in SoHo. At exactly 7 p.m. Douglas came by my apartment to offer me some moral support.
“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 di
sturbing 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 and 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 release this image.
“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. He 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 TV 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 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 under water. 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 doesn’t your father 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.”