by Joël Dicker
“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 eight, 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?”
“All right. 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 TV. 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.
“I don’t understand,” Nancy told me. “I never said anything about Nola’s mother.”
“But you did tell me about 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.”
“There!” I shouted, pausing the recorder. “You see? You talk about the mother.”
“No,” Nancy replied. “I told you how shocked I was when Nola mentioned her mother. I was trying to explain that there was something strange going on at the Kellergans’ house. I was absolutely sure you already knew her mother was dead.”
“But I didn’t know anything! I mean, I knew her mother was dead, but I thought she must h
ave died after her daughter disappeared. I even remember David Kellergan showing me a photograph of his wife the first time I went to see him. I remember being surprised by how friendly he was. And I remember asking him something like: ‘What about your wife?’ And he replied: ‘She died a long time ago.’”
“Now that I’ve heard the recording, I can understand how you got the wrong idea. It’s a terrible misunderstanding, Mr. Goldman. I’m sorry about that.”
I pressed Play again:
“. . . like the nurse at the high school, for example. But Nola told me she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“What happened in Alabama?”
“I have no idea. I never found out. Nola never told me.”
“Was it connected to their moving here?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to help you, but I just don’t know.”
“It’s all my fault, Ms. Hattaway,” I said. “After that, I forgot about Alabama.”
“So it was her father who used to beat her?” Gahalowood asked, puzzled.
Nancy thought about this for a moment. She seemed a little confused. Finally she answered: “Yes. Or no. Oh, I don’t know. There were those marks on her body. When I asked her what happened, she told me she was punished at home.”
“Punished for what?”
“That was all she said. But she never said it was her father who beat her. I just don’t know. My mother saw bruises on her body one day at the beach. And then there was that deafening music that the father used to play all the time. People suspected that Mr. Kellergan beat his daughter, but nobody dared say anything. He was our pastor, after all.”
After we left Nancy Hattaway’s store, Gahalowood and I sat on a bench outside for a long time in silence. I was in despair.
“Just a stupid misunderstanding,” I said finally. “All this because of a stupid fucking misunderstanding! How could I have been such an idiot?”
“Calm down, writer. Don’t be so hard on yourself. We were all fooled. We were so excited by what we were discovering that we didn’t see what was clearly in front of us. It’s just a psychological block—everyone gets them.”
Just then his cell phone rang. It was the state police returning his call.
“They found the name of the old guy from the motel,” he whispered to me while waiting to hear the news.
Then a strange expression appeared on his face. He removed the receiver from his ear and said:
“It was David Kellergan.”
• • •
The never-ending music reverberated from 245 Terrace Avenue. Evidently Mr. Kellergan was home.
“We have to find out what he wanted from Harry,” Gahalowood said to me as we got out of the car. “But please, writer, let me do the talking!”
When interviewing Mr. Kellergan at the Sea Side Motel, the state troopers had found a shotgun in his car. He did, however, possess a license for it. He had explained that he was on his way to the shooting range and had stopped at the motel restaurant for coffee. The troopers, having no reason to hold him or charge him, had let him go.
“Pry it out of him, Sergeant,” I said as we walked down the driveway to the house. “I’m curious to know what that letter was about. Kellergan told me he barely knew Harry. You think he lied?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
David Kellergan must have seen us arriving, because he opened the door before we even rang the bell. He was holding his shotgun. He looked mad as hell. I got the distinct impression that he wanted to kill me. “You’ve desecrated the memory of my wife and my daughter!” he screamed at me. “You bastard! You son of a bitch!” Gahalowood tried to calm him down. He asked him to put his shotgun away, while explaining that we were there so we could work out what actually happened to Nola. Neighbors, alerted by the noise, rushed over to see what was going on. Soon there was a crowd of onlookers in front of the house while David Kellergan continued to yell and Gahalowood signaled to me that we should move away slowly. Two Somerset police cars arrived, sirens on. Travis Dawn got out of one, visibly unhappy to see me. “Don’t you think you’ve already caused enough trouble in this town?” he said. Then he asked Gahalowood if there was a good reason for the state police to be in Somerset without giving him prior notice. Because I knew we were running out of time, I shouted at David Kellergan:
“So you turned the music up loud and you had a ball, didn’t you, Reverend?”
He made a threatening motion with his shotgun.
“I never raised a hand to my daughter! She was never beaten. You’re full of shit, Goldman! I’m going to hire a lawyer, and I’m going to take you to court.”
“Oh yeah? So how come you haven’t already done that? Why aren’t we in court now? Maybe you don’t want people looking into your past? What happened in Alabama?”
He spat in my direction.
“People like you would never understand, Goldman.”
“What happened with you and Harry Quebert at the Sea Side Motel? What are you hiding from us?”
Just then Travis started yelling too, threatening Gahalowood that he would inform his superiors, and we had to leave.
We drove in silence toward Concord. Finally Gahalowood said, “What are we missing, writer? I have a feeling it’s something we’ve been looking at the whole time but we’ve somehow failed to see.”
“We now know that Harry was aware of something about Nola’s mother that he didn’t tell me.”
“And we can assume that Mr. Kellergan knows that Harry knows. But knows what, for God’s sake?”
The press was having a field day.
New development in the Harry Quebert case: inconsistencies discovered in Marcus Goldman’s account call into question the credibility of his book, which was acclaimed by critics and presented by publisher Roy Barnaski as an accurate depiction of the events leading up to the murder of Nola Kellergan in 1975.
Knowing I could not return to New York until I had cleared up this case, I took refuge in my suite at the hotel in Concord where I had stayed over the summer. The only person who knew where I was was Denise; I had told her so she could keep me informed of events in New York and the latest developments regarding the ghost of Nola’s mother.
That evening Gahalowood invited me to dinner at his house. His daughters were volunteering for the Obama campaign, and they dominated the conversation. They gave me bumper stickers for my car. Later, as I was helping wash the dishes, Helen mentioned that I looked upset.
“I don’t understand what I did wrong,” I explained. “How could I have messed up this badly?”
“There must be a reason, Marcus. You know, Perry has great faith in you. He thinks you’re an exceptional person. I’ve known him for thirty years, and I’ve never heard him use that word about anyone. I’m sure you haven’t messed up, and that there’s a rational explanation for all this.”
That night Gahalowood and I stayed up late in his office, reading the manuscript that Harry had left me. The unpublished novel The Seagulls of Somerset turned out to be a wonderful story about Harry and Nola. The manuscript was undated, but I guessed it must have been written after The Origin of Evil. While the latter was the story of an impossible love affair that was never consummated, in The Seagulls of Somerset, Harry recounted how Nola had inspired him, how she had always believed in him and encouraged him, helping him to become the great writer he was. But at the end of the book, Nola did not die; a few months after his success, the central protagonist, named Harry, goes to Canada, where Nola is waiting for him in a lakeside cabin.
At 2 a.m. Gahalowood made us coffee and asked me: “So what do you think he’s trying to tell us with this book?”
“He’s imagining his life if Nola hadn’t died,” I said. “This book is writer’s heaven.”
“Writer’s heaven? What’s that?”
“It’s when the power
of writing turns against you. You no longer know if your characters exist only in your head or if they are truly alive.”
“And how does that help us?”
“I have no idea. It doesn’t. It’s a very good book, and yet he never published it. Why did he keep it in a drawer?”
Gahalowood shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t dare publish it because it was about a girl who had disappeared.”
“Maybe. But The Origin of Evil was about Nola too, and that didn’t stop him from offering it to publishers. And why did he write to me: ‘This book is the truth’? The truth about what? Nola? What does he mean? That Nola never died and is living in a cabin somewhere?”
“That would make no sense at all,” said Gahalowood. “The forensics tests were unequivocal: It was her skeleton we found.”
“So . . . what then?”
“So we haven’t gotten any closer, writer.”
• • •
The next morning Denise called to inform me that a woman had been looking for me, and Schmid and Hanson had given her my office number.
“She wanted to talk to you,” Denise explained. “She said it was important.”
“What was it about?”
“She said she had gone to school with Nola Kellergan in Somerset, and that Nola had talked to her about her mother.”
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Saturday, October 25, 2008
She was in the 1975 Somerset High School yearbook, listed as Stephanie Hendorf; only two photographs separated her from Nola. She was one of the students Ernie Pinkas had been unable to find. Having married a man of Polish origin, she was now named Stephanie Larjinjiak and lived in an opulent house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That was where Gahalowood and I met with her. She was forty-eight, the same age Nola would have been now had she lived. She was pretty, twice married, and the mother of three children, and she had taught art history at Harvard and now ran her own art gallery. Growing up in Somerset, she had been in the same year in school as Nola, Nancy Hattaway, and a few other people I had met during my investigation. Listening to her tell the story of her life, I thought of her as a survivor. On the one hand there was Nola, murdered at the age of fifteen, and on the other there was Stephanie, who had lived and had a family and a career.