The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair: A Novel

by Joël Dicker

  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 exorcised 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 watched him, 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 again, 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?”

  “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 is what caused the fit. It was a breakup 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 good-bye.

  From today on there will be no more “us.”

  Lovers separate and never find each other
again, and that is how love stories end.

  I will miss you, my darling. I will miss you so much.

  I am crying. Inside, I am burning.

  We will never see each other again. I will miss you so much. I hope you will be happy.

  You and me: that was a dream, I think. And now we must wake up.

  I will miss you all my life.

  Good-bye. I love you as I will never love anyone again.

  “It’s the same as the letter on the last page of The Origin of Evil,” Kellergan told us.

  I nodded. I recognized it. I was dumbfounded.

  “How long have you known that Harry and Nola were corresponding?” Gahalowood asked him.

  “I realized it only a few weeks ago. I saw The Origin of Evil in the supermarket. It had just gone back on sale. I bought a copy. I don’t know why. I needed to read that book, so I could try to understand. I quickly began to feel I’d already read some of those sentences before. Strange how memory works. I thought about it for a while, and then it suddenly came to me: These were the letters I had found hidden in Nola’s room. I had not even touched them in all these years, but somehow they had remained engraved in my memory. I took out the shoebox and reread them, and that was when I understood. That damn letter made my daughter crazy with grief, Sergeant. Luther Caleb might have killed Nola, but to my mind Quebert is just as guilty. Were it not for that fit, she might never have run away from home and bumped into Caleb.”

  “So that’s why you went to see Harry at his motel,” Gahalowood said.

  “Yes. For thirty-three years I had wondered who had written those letters. And all that time the answer had been sitting in every bookstore in America. I went to the Sea Side Motel, and we had an argument. I was so angry that I came back here to get my shotgun, but when I got back to the motel he had disappeared. I think I would have killed him. He knew how fragile she was, and he pushed her to the edge.”

  “What?” I gasped. “What do you mean, he knew?”

  “He knew everything about Nola! Everything!” shouted David Kellergan.

  “You mean Harry knew about her psychotic episodes?”

  “Yes. I knew Nola sometimes went to his house with the typewriter. I didn’t know about the rest, obviously. I even thought it was good for her that she knew a writer. It was summer vacation, and this was keeping her busy. Until that damn writer came to pick a fight with me because he thought my wife was beating Nola.”

  “Harry came to see you that summer?”

  “Yes. In the middle of August. Just before she disappeared.”

  August 15, 1975

  It was midafternoon. From his office window the Reverend David Kellergan noticed a black Chevrolet pulling into the church parking lot. He watched as Harry Quebert got out of the car and walked quickly toward the main entrance of the church. He wondered what was behind his visit: Harry had never been to church since his arrival in Somerset. He heard knocking at the front door, then footsteps in the corridor, and then he saw Harry in the office doorway.

  “Hello, Harry,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  “Hello, Reverend. Am I disturbing you?”

  “Not in the least. Please, come in.”

  Harry entered, closing the door behind him.

  “Is everything all right?” the pastor asked. “You look unhappy.”

  “I came to talk to you about Nola . . .”

  “Oh yes, I’ve been meaning to thank you. I know she often goes to see you, and she always seems very happy when she comes back. I hope she hasn’t been bothering you. Thanks to you, she hasn’t been bored at all this summer.”

  Harry’s expression did not change.

  “She came this morning,” he said. “She was in tears. She told me all about your wife . . .”

  The minister went pale.

  “My wife? What did she say?”

  “That your wife beats her! That she shoves her head in a tub of ice-cold water!”

  “Harry, I—”

  “It’s over, Reverend. I know everything.”

  “It’s more complicated than that . . . I—”

  “More complicated? Are you going to try to convince me that there’s a good reason why she is beaten like that? I’m going to call the cops, Reverend. I’m going to tell them everything.”

  “No, Harry . . . you can’t—”

  “Oh yes, I can. What do you think? That I wouldn’t dare denounce you because you’re a man of the cloth? You’re nothing as far as I’m concerned! What kind of man lets his wife beat his daughter?”

  “Harry, please, listen to me. I think there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. We need to speak about this calmly.”

  “I don’t know what Nola had told Harry,” Kellergan explained to us. “He was not the first person who had suspected that there was something strange going on. But until Harry got involved, I only had to deal with Nola’s friends, and it was easy to evade children’s questions. This was different. So I had to admit to him that Nola’s mother existed only in her head. I begged him not to talk to anyone about it, but then he started sticking his nose into what was not his business, telling me what to do with my own daughter. He wanted me to get her professional help! I told him to get lost . . . And then, two weeks later, she disappeared.”

  “And after that you avoided Harry for the next thirty-three years,” I said. “Because you were the only people who knew Nola’s secret.”

  “She was my only child—don’t you see? I wanted people to have a good memory of her; I didn’t want them to think she was crazy. And anyway she wasn’t crazy! Just fragile. And if the police had known the truth about her fits, they would never have searched so hard for her. They would just have said she was crazy and that she’d run away from home.”

  Gahalowood turned to me. “What are we to make of this, writer?”

  “It means that Harry lied to us. He wasn’t waiting for her at the motel. He wanted to break up with her. He knew all along that he was going to break up with Nola. He never intended to elope with her. On August 30, 1975, she received a final letter from Harry, telling her he had left without her.”

  • • •

  Following this meeting with David Kellergan, Gahalowood and I returned to the state police headquarters in Concord to compare the letter with the final page of the manuscript that had been buried with Nola: They were identical.

  “He planned it all!” I shouted. “He knew he was going to leave her. He knew from the beginning.”

  Gahalowood nodded. “When she suggested they run away, he knew he wouldn’t go with her. He couldn’t imagine being stuck with a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  “But she read the manuscript,” I pointed out.

  “Of course, but she thought it was a novel. She didn’t realize Harry was writing the truth about their love affair, and that the ending was already written: Harry didn’t want her. Stephanie Larjinjiak told us they were corresponding and that Nola waited for the mailman to come each day. On Saturday morning, the day she disappeared, the day she imagined she was going to leave for a happier life with the man of her dreams, she waits by the mailbox for the last time. She wants to make sure there is not one final, forgotten letter that might compromise their elopement by revealing important information. Instead she finds that note from him, telling her it’s all over.”

  Gahalowood examined the envelope that contained the final letter.

  “There’s an address on the envelope, but no stamp or postmark,” he said. “It must have been dropped directly into the mailbox.”

  “By Harry, you mean?”

  “Yes. He probably left it there at night, before going away. I would guess he did it at the last minute, on the Friday night. So that she wouldn’t come to the motel. So she would understand they wouldn’t be meeting. On Saturday, when she finds his note, she goes back into the house in
a rage, she breaks down, she has a terrible fit, and begins punishing herself. Her father panics and locks himself in his garage again. When she comes to again, Nola makes the connection with the manuscript. She wants an explanation. She takes the manuscript and starts walking to the motel. She hopes it isn’t true, she hopes Harry will be there. But on the way she runs into Luther. And it all goes wrong.”

  “But then why would Harry go back to Somerset the day after her disappearance?”

  “He finds out Nola has disappeared. He’d left her that letter: He panics. I’m sure he’s worried about her, and probably feels guilty, but more than anything I imagine he’s scared that other people will get their hands on that letter, or on the manuscript, and that he’ll get in trouble. He would rather be in Somerset so he can see how the situation develops, and perhaps also so he can recover any evidence he thinks might be compromising.”

  We had to find Harry. It was essential that I talk to him. Why had he told me that he was waiting for Nola when in reality he had written her a farewell letter? Gahalowood carried out a remote search for Harry, using credit card and telephone records. But his credit card had not been used, and his cell phone was evidently turned off. By examining the border patrol records, we discovered that he had crossed into Canada at Derby Line, Vermont.

  “So he’s gone to Canada,” Gahalowood said. “Why Canada?”

  “He thinks it’s writer’s heaven,” I said. “In the manuscript he left for me, The Seagulls of Somerset, he ends up there with Nola.”