by Joël Dicker
A few old photographs were scattered on the coffee table in her living room.
“I’ve been following the case from the beginning,” she told us. “I remember the day Nola disappeared; I remember it all—just like all the girls my age who lived in Somerset then, I imagine. So when her body was found and Harry Quebert was arrested, I obviously felt very involved. What a story. I really liked your book, Mr. Goldman. You described Nola so well. I felt like I’d got her back a little bit, thanks to you. Is it true they’re going to make a movie?”
“Warner Brothers wants to buy the rights,” I said.
She showed us the photographs: they were from a birthday party in 1973.
“Nola and I were very close,” she said. “She was a wonderful girl. Everyone loved her in Somerset. Probably because people were moved by the image she and her father conveyed: the kind pastor, a widower, and his devoted daughter, always smiling, never complaining. I remember whenever I would act willfully, my mother would say: ‘Why can’t you be more like Nola? That poor girl—the good Lord took her mother, and yet she is still pleasant and appreciative.’”
“My God, how could I not have realized that her mother was dead?” I said. “And you say you liked my book? You should have been thinking what a pathetic excuse for a writer I was!”
“No, not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. I even thought you had done it deliberately. Because I experienced the same thing with Nola.”
“Tell me about that.”
“One day something very strange happened, something that made me want to keep my distance from her.”
March 1973
Stephanie Hendorf’s parents ran the general store on the main street in Somerset. Sometimes Stephanie took Nola there after school, and the two of them would secretly stuff themselves with candy in the storeroom. That is what they were doing on this particular afternoon: Hidden behind bags of flour, they were gobbling so much candy that they got stomachaches, laughing with their hands over their mouths so no one would hear them. But suddenly Stephanie noticed that there was something wrong with Nola. Her expression had changed; she was no longer listening.
“Nola? You okay?” she asked.
No reply. Stephanie repeated her question, and finally Nola said: “I . . . I have to go home.”
“Already? Why?”
“Mom wants me to go home.”
Stephanie thought she must have misheard. “Your mother?”
Nola stood up in a panic. “I have to go home!” she repeated.
“But, Nola . . . your mother is dead!”
Nola rushed toward the storeroom door, and when Stephanie attempted to hold her back, she turned around and shoved her.
“My mother!” she screamed, terrified. “You don’t know what she’ll do to me. When I’m wicked, I get punished.”
And she ran away.
Stephanie was speechless. That evening she told her mother what had happened, but Mrs. Hendorf didn’t believe her. She stroked her hair tenderly.
“I don’t know where you come up with these stories, darling. Come on now, stop being silly and go wash your hands—it’s time for dinner. Your father’s been working all day, and he’s hungry.”
The next day in school, Nola seemed fine, as if nothing had happened. Stephanie did not dare mention anything. But she kept worrying, so about ten days later she spoke directly to Nola’s father about what had happened. She went to see him in his parish office, where he welcomed her very kindly, as always. He offered her a glass of lemonade, then listened attentively, thinking she must have come to see him as her pastor. But when she told him what she had witnessed, he did not believe her either.
“You must have misheard,” he said.
“I know it sounds crazy, Reverend. But I swear it’s true.”
“But it makes no sense. Why would Nola come out with such garbage? Don’t you know her mother is dead? Are you trying to hurt us?”
“No, but . . .”
David Kellergan wanted to end the conversation, but Stephanie persisted. Suddenly the pastor’s face changed. She had never seen him like that before. The friendly minister vanished, and a somber-faced, frightening man took his place.
“I don’t want you to mention this ever again!” he told her. “Not to me or to anyone else—do you hear me? If you say anything, I’ll tell your parents that you’re a little liar. And I will tell them that I caught you stealing from the church. I’ll tell them you stole fifty dollars from me. You don’t want to get in trouble, do you? So be a good girl.”
Stephanie went silent. She fiddled with the photographs for a moment before turning toward me.
“So I never spoke about this again,” she said. “But I never forgot it either. Over time I convinced myself that I must have misheard, misunderstood, and that it was really nothing. And then your book came out, and I found her mother alive and abusing her. I can’t tell you how that affected me. You have an incredible talent, Mr. Goldman. When the newspapers started saying that what you wrote was false, I decided I had to contact you. Because I know you’re telling the truth.”
“But how can it be the truth?” I asked. “The mother had been dead for years.”
“I know that. But I also know you’re right.”
“Do you think Nola was beaten by her father?”
“Well, that’s what everyone thought. At school people noticed her bruises. But who would accuse our pastor of such a thing? In Somerset in 1975, you didn’t get mixed up in other people’s business. That was a different time.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?” I asked. “About Nola or what you read in the book?”
She thought for a moment. “No. Except that . . . it’s almost funny to discover after all these years that it was Harry Quebert who Nola was in love with.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I was such a naive little kid, you know. I didn’t see Nola as much after that incident. But the summer she disappeared, I bumped into her quite often. That summer I spent a lot of time working in my parents’ store, which was across from the post office. And I kept seeing Nola there. She went to mail letters. I know that because I kept asking her who she was writing to, and she didn’t want to say. One day she finally spilled the beans. She told me she was madly in love with someone, and was corresponding with him. She never told me who it was, though. I thought it must be Cody, this boy from our high school who was on the basketball team. I never managed to see the name on the envelope, but one time I did notice that the address was in Somerset. I wondered why she was bothering to mail letters to someone in Somerset when she lived there herself.”
When we left Stephanie Larjinjiak’s house, Gahalowood looked at me with a puzzled expression. “What’s going on, writer?”
“I was about to ask you the same question. What do you think we should do now?”
“What we should have done a long time ago: go to Jackson, Alabama. You asked the right question at the beginning: What happened in Alabama?”
4
SWEET HOME ALABAMA
“WHEN YOU GET TO the end of the book, Marcus, give your reader a last-minute twist.”
“Why?”
“Because you have to keep them on tenterhooks until the end. It’s like when you’re playing cards: you have to hold a few trump cards for the final part of the game.”
Jackson, Alabama, October 28, 2008
So we went to Alabama.
Upon arriving at the airport in Mobile, we were met by a young state trooper, Philip Thomas, whom Gahalowood had contacted a few days earlier. He was standing in the arrivals lounge, ramrod straight in his uniform, eyes shaded by his cap. He greeted Gahalowood with deference, then, seeing me, he lifted his cap slightly.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” he asked me. “On television?”
“Maybe,” I replied.
>
“I’ll help you out,” Gahalowood said. “It’s his book that’s at the center of all this fuss. Watch out for him. My life was perfectly calm and peaceful until I met him.”
At Gahalowood’s request, Officer Thomas had prepared a slim file on the Kellergans, which we looked through in a restaurant close to the airport.
“David J. Kellergan was born in Montgomery in 1923,” Thomas recited. “He studied theology before becoming a minister and moving to Jackson to take over at the Mount Pleasant parish. He married Louisa Bonneville in 1955. They lived in a quiet neighborhood in the northern part of town. In 1960 Louisa Kellergan gave birth to a daughter, Nola. There’s nothing more to say. They were just a peaceful, God-fearing Alabama family. Until the tragedy, in 1969.”
“What tragedy?” asked Gahalowood.
“There was a fire. One night the house burned down, and Louisa Kellergan died.”
Thomas’s file included newspaper clippings from the time.
FATAL FIRE ON LOWER STREET
A woman died last night in a house fire on Lower Street. Firefighters say a lighted candle may have caused the tragedy. The house was completely destroyed. The deceased was the wife of a local pastor.
An extract from the police report indicated that on the night of August 30, 1969, around one in the morning, while David Kellergan was at the bedside of a dying parishioner, Louisa and Nola slept as the house burned. Coming back to the house, the pastor noticed smoke pouring from it and rushed inside. The second floor was already on fire. Nevertheless he managed to reach his daughter’s room; he found her in bed, half conscious. He carried her out to the yard, then wanted to go back inside to find his wife, but by then the fire had reached the staircase. Neighbors rushed over, alerted by screaming, but they were powerless to intervene. When the firefighters arrived, the whole second floor was ablaze: Flames burst through the windows and consumed the roof. Louisa Kellergan was found dead, asphyxiated. The police report concluded that a lighted candle had probably set fire to the curtains, before the fire spread quickly through the rest of the house. Mr. Kellergan stated that his wife often lit a scented candle on her chest of drawers before going to bed.
“The date!” I gasped as I read the report. “Look at the date of the fire, Sergeant!”
“My God. August 30, 1969.”
“The officer in charge of the investigation had his doubts about the father for a long time,” Thomas said.
“How do you know?”
“I talked to him. His name is Edward Emerson. He’s retired now. He spends his days working on his boat, in front of his house.”
“Could we arrange to see him?” Gahalowood asked.
“I’ve already done that. He’s expecting us at three p.m.”
• • •
The retired detective Edward Emerson stood in front of his house, calmly sanding the hull of a wooden dinghy. Because the sky was threatening rain, he had raised his garage door, which opened out from the garage, so we could stand under it. He invited us to dig into the pack of beers that lay on the ground, and talked to us without interrupting his work, although he made it clear that we had his full attention. He told us about the fire, repeating what we had learned from reading the police report, without adding many more details.
“It was strange, that fire,” he said in conclusion.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“We thought for a long time that David Kellergan set it to kill his wife. There’s no evidence for his version of events: As if by a miracle, he arrives in time to save his daughter but just too late to save his wife. It was tempting to conclude that he started the fire himself. Particularly when he cleared out of town a few weeks later. The house burns down, his wife dies, and he disappears. There was something fishy about it, but we had no evidence against him at all.”
“That’s the same scenario for the disappearance of his daughter,” Gahalowood observed. “In 1975 Nola disappeared. She was probably murdered, but there was no evidence to prove it irrefutably.”
“What are you thinking, Sergeant?” I asked. “You think David Kellergan could have killed his wife and then his daughter? You think we got the wrong man?”
“If that’s true, it will be a disaster,” Gahalowood replied. “Who could we question here, Detective?”
“It’s difficult to say. You could pay a visit to Mount Pleasant Church. They might have a register of parishioners; some of them will have known David Kellergan. But thirty-nine years after the event . . . It’s going to be time-consuming to find them.”
“We don’t have any time,” Gahalowood said bleakly.
“I know David Kellergan was quite close to some religious nuts who live on a commune an hour from here,” Emerson said. “That’s where he and his daughter stayed after the fire. I know that because I had to go there when I needed to talk to him for my investigation. He lived there until he left the state. Ask to speak to Pastor Lewis, if he’s still there. He’s their guru-type guy.”
• • •
The Pastor Lewis mentioned by Emerson was the leader of the Community of the New Church of the Savior. We went to see him the next morning. Officer Thomas came to fetch us from the local Holiday Inn, where we had taken two rooms—one paid for by the state of New Hampshire, the other by me—and took us to a vast property, most of which consisted of farmland. Having gotten lost on a road bordered by cornfields, we came across a guy on a tractor who led us to a group of houses and pointed out where the pastor lived.
We were given a friendly welcome by an overweight woman. She left us in an office where, a few minutes later, Pastor Lewis joined us. I knew he had to be in his nineties, but he looked about twenty years younger than that. He seemed like a nice enough guy—very different from Emerson’s description.
“Police?” he asked, shaking hands with each of us.
“State police of New Hampshire and Alabama,” Gahalowood replied. “We’re investigating the death of Nola Kellergan.”
“Seems like that’s all anyone talks about lately.”
While he shook my hand, he stared at me for a moment and said, “Hang on, aren’t you . . .”
“Yes, it’s him,” replied a clearly irritated Gahalowood.
“So . . . what can I do for you, gentlemen?”
Gahalowood began the interrogation.
“Pastor Lewis, unless I’m mistaken, you knew Nola Kellergan.”
“Yes. Well, it was really her parents I knew. Lovely people. Very close to our community.”
“What is your ‘community’?”
“We’re Pentecostals, Sergeant. Nothing more than that. We have Christian ideals, and we share them. Yes, I know some people say we’re a sect. We’re visited by welfare services twice a year so they can check that our children are properly educated, well fed, and not mistreated. They also come to see if we have weapons or if we’re white supremacists. It’s becoming ridiculous. All our children go to the local high school; I have never held a rifle in my life; and I am actively involved in Barack Obama’s election campaign. So what would you like to know?”
“What happened in 1969,” Gahalowood said.
“Apollo 11 landed on the moon,” Lewis replied. “An important victory for America in its standoff with the Soviets.”
“You know perfectly well what we’re talking about. The fire at the Kellergans’ house. What really happened? How did Louisa Kellergan die?”
Although I had not spoken a single word, Lewis stared at me for a long time and then spoke directly to me.
“I’ve seen you on TV a lot lately, Mr. Goldman. I think you’re a good writer, but how did you mess up so badly about Louisa? I imagine that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Your book’s been discredited, and—let’s call a spade a spade—I imagine you’re shitting your pants. Am I right? What are you looking for here? Something to back up your lies?”
“The truth,” I said.
He smiled sadly.
“The truth? But which one, Mr. Goldman? God’s truth or man’s truth?”
“Yours. What is your truth about the death of Louisa Kellergan? Did David Kellergan kill his wife?”
Pastor Lewis got up from his chair and went to close the door to his office, which had been left ajar. He then stood by the window and looked outside. This scene immediately reminded me of our visit to Chief Pratt. Gahalowood indicated to me that he would take over the interrogation.
“David was such a good man,” Lewis finally said with a sigh.
“Was?” said Gahalowood.
“I haven’t seen him in thirty-nine years.”
“Did he beat his daughter?”
“No! No, he was a man with a pure heart. A man of faith. When he arrived in Jackson, Mount Pleasant Church was always empty. Six months later it was full every Sunday morning. He could never have caused the slightest harm to his wife or to his daughter.”
“So who were they?” Gahalowood asked gently. “Who were the Kellergans?”
Pastor Lewis called his wife. He asked her to make tea with honey for everyone. He came back and sat in his chair, then looked at each of us in turn. His expression was tender and his voice warm.
“Close your eyes, gentlemen,” he told us. “Close your eyes. It is 1953, and we are in Jackson, Alabama.”
Jackson, Alabama, January 1953
One day in early 1953, a young pastor from Montgomery entered run-down Mount Pleasant Church, in the center of Jackson. It was a stormy day. Rain was pouring from the sky, and a violent wind was uprooting trees. A newspaper vendor cowered beneath a store window’s canopy as his wares flew through the air; passersby ran for cover.
The pastor pushed open the church door, which banged shut behind him. Inside, it was dark and extremely cold. He walked slowly up the aisle. Rain came in through holes in the roof, forming puddles on the floor. The place was deserted; there were no believers there, not the slightest sign of habitation. There were no altar candles, only a few wax stubs. He moved toward the altar. Then, seeing the pulpit, he placed his foot on the first step of the wooden staircase, ready to climb it.