The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair: A Novel Page 16

  “It wasn’t Harry—it was Amy Pratt,” Tamara said casually. “I knew it wasn’t him. You should have seen yourselves scurrying off like rabbits. Ha! I knew perfectly well it wasn’t him because he’s a sophisticated man, and sophisticated people are never early. It’s even more impolite than being late. Remember that, Bobbo, the next time you’re worrying about being late for a meeting.”

  The living room clock chimed six times, and the Quinn family stood in line behind the front door.

  “Please, just be natural!” Jenny begged.

  “We are very natural,” her mother said. “Aren’t we, Bobbo?”

  “Yes, honey bunny. But I think I’ve got gas again. I feel like a bomb that’s about to explode.”

  A few minutes later, Harry rang the doorbell at the Quinns’ house. He had just dropped Nola at a street near her house so they would not be seen together. He had left her in tears.

  Jenny told me how wonderful that Fourth of July date had been for her. In a reverie, she described the carnival, their dinner, the fireworks over Concord.

  From the way she spoke about Harry, it was clear that she had never stopped loving him, and that the aversion she felt toward him now was, above all, the expression of the pain she felt at having been passed over for Nola. Before I left I asked her, “Jenny, who do you think can tell me the most about Nola?”

  “About Nola? Her father, obviously.”

  Her father. Obviously.

  23

  THOSE WHO KNEW HER WELL

  “AND THE CHARACTERS? WHERE do you get the inspi- ration for your characters?”

  “From everyone. A friend, the cleaning lady, the bank clerk. But be careful: it’s not the people themselves who provide your inspiration, but what they do. The way they act makes you think of what one of the characters in your novel might do. Writers who say they are not inspired by anyone are lying, but they are right to do so; they spare themselves a great deal of trouble that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is a writer’s privilege, Marcus, to be able to settle his scores with his friends and enemies through the intermediary of his book. The only rule is that he must not mention them by name, because that means opening the door to lawsuits and headaches. What number have we reached on the list?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “So this is the twenty-third rule, Marcus: Only write fiction. Anything else will just bring you trouble.”

  ON SUNDAY, JUNE 22, 2008, I met the Reverend David Kellergan for the first time. It was one of those grayish summer days that you find in New England, when the ocean mist is so thick that it remains stuck to the treetops and the roofs. The Kellergan house was in the center of an attractive residential area. It appeared not to have changed since their arrival in Somerset. The walls were the same color and the same bushes were planted all around. The roses that had been planted then had grown to fill the flower beds, but the cherry tree that now stood in front of the house, I learned, had ten years ago replaced an earlier one after it perished.

  Deafeningly loud music was reverberating from the house when I arrived. I rang the doorbell several times, but there was no reply. Finally a neighbor shouted to me, “If you’re looking for Mr. Kellergan, there’s no point in ringing the doorbell. He’s in the garage.” I went to knock on the door of the garage, which was, indeed, where the music was coming from. I had to keep knocking for a long time, but eventually the door opened, and I found myself standing before a fragile little old man with gray hair and gray skin, wearing overalls and goggles. It was David Kellergan, age eighty-five.

  “What is it?” he shouted politely enough above the music, which was so loud as to be almost unbearable.

  I had to cup my hands around my mouth to make myself heard.

  “My name is Marcus Goldman. You don’t know me, but I’m investigating Nola’s death.”

  “Are you from the police?”

  “No, I’m a writer. Could you turn the music off or lower the volume a little?”

  “Sorry. I never turn off the music. But we can go into the living room if you like.”

  He led me through the garage. It had been entirely transformed into a workshop, with pride of place given to a Harley-Davidson. In one corner, an old record player connected to a stereo system blasted out jazz standards.

  I had been prepared for a cold reception. I had imagined that, after being harassed by journalists, Mr. Kellergan would be desperate for some peace, but in fact he was very friendly. Despite all the time I had spent in Somerset, I had never seen him before. He clearly had no idea about my friendship with Harry, and I decided not to mention it. He made us two glasses of iced tea and we sat down together in the living room. He still had the goggles strapped to his forehead, as if he had to be ready to return to his motorcycle at any moment, and that deafening music was still audible in the background. I tried to imagine this man thirty-three years earlier, when he was the dynamic pastor at St. James’s Church.

  He stared at me curiously, and then asked, “What brings you here, Mr. Goldman? A book?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, Reverend. I really just want to know what happened to Nola.”

  “Don’t call me Reverend. I’m not a pastor anymore.”

  “I’m sorry about your daughter, sir.”

  He gave me a surprisingly warm smile.

  “Thank you. You’re the first person to offer condolences, Mr. Goldman. The whole town has been talking about my daughter for two weeks. They all rush to read the latest developments in the newspapers, but not one of them has come here to find out how I’m doing. The only people who knock at my door, apart from journalists, are neighbors complaining about the noise. But grieving fathers are allowed to listen to music, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “So you’re writing a book?”

  “I don’t know if I’m capable of writing anymore. It’s so difficult to write well. My publisher wants me to write a book about Nola. He says it will relaunch my career. Would you be opposed to the idea of a book about your daughter?”

  He shrugged. “No. It might help other parents. You know, my daughter was in her bedroom the day she disappeared. I was working in the garage, with my music on. I didn’t hear a thing. When I went to see her, she was no longer in the house. Her bedroom window was open. It was as if she had vanished into thin air. I didn’t watch over my daughter properly. Write a book for parents, Mr. Goldman. Parents should take better care of their children.”

  “What were you doing in the garage that day?”

  “I was working on that motorcycle. The Harley you saw.”

  “It’s a beautiful machine.”

  “Thank you. I got it from an auto-body mechanic in Montburry who told me he’d stripped everything he could from it. He gave it to me for a song. So that’s what I’ve been doing since my daughter disappeared: working on that lousy motorcycle.”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “Yes. My wife died a long time ago . . .”

  He got up and brought me a photo album. He showed me little Nola and his wife, Louisa. They looked happy. I was surprised by how easily he trusted me, when he really didn’t know me at all. I think, deep down, he wanted to bring his daughter back to life a little bit. He told me that they had arrived in Somerset in the summer of 1969 from Jackson, Alabama. He had had a growing congregation there, but the call of the sea had been too strong: St. James’s congregation was looking for a new pastor, and he was hired. The main reason for leaving Alabama was to find a peaceful place to raise Nola. The country was on fire back then with political conflicts, racial segregation, and the Vietnam war. The events of the 1960s in the South—police brutality, Klan malevolence, the burning of black churches, rioting after the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy—pushed them to begin searching for a place that was sheltered from all this unrest. S
o when his broken-down little car, before beginning the descent toward Somerset and worn out by the weight of the trailer it pulled, arrived on the outskirts of Montburry, with its large ponds covered with water lilies, David Kellergan congratulated himself on his choice when he saw the beautiful, peaceful little town from the distance. How could he have imagined that it would be here, six years later, that his only child would disappear?

  “I drove past your former church,” I said. “It’s been turned into a McDonald’s.”

  “The whole world is being turned into a McDonald’s, Mr. Goldman.”

  “But what happened?”

  “It all went so well for years. Then my Nola disappeared, and everything changed. Well, one thing changed: I stopped believing in God. If God really existed, children would not disappear. I started acting strangely, but nobody dared show me the door. Little by little the community broke up. Fifteen years ago the congregation of Somerset merged with that of Montburry, for financial reasons. They sold the building. Nowadays the faithful go to Montburry on Sundays. I was never able to work after the disappearance, even though it was not until six years later that I officially resigned. The parish still pays me a pension. And it sold me the house for a nominal sum.”

  David Kellergan then told me about his earlier, carefree, happy years in Somerset—the best years of his life, according to him. He reminisced about those summer evenings when he would allow Nola to stay up so she could read on the porch—how he wished those summers could have gone on forever. He also told me how his daughter conscientiously put aside the money she earned at Clark’s every Saturday; she said she was going to use it to travel to California and become an actress. He was so proud when he went to Clark’s and heard how pleased the customers and Mrs. Quinn were with her. For a long time after her disappearance, he wondered if she had gone to California.

  “You mean if she had run away?”

  “Run away?” he said indignantly. “Why would she run away?”

  “What about Harry Quebert? How well do you know him?”

  “Hardly at all. I met him a few times.”

  “You hardly know him?” I said, surprised. “But you’ve been living in the same town for more than thirty years.”

  “I don’t know everyone, Mr. Goldman. And, you know, I live a fairly solitary life. Is it true, about Harry Quebert and Nola? Did he really write that book for her? What does that book mean, Mr. Goldman?”

  “I’ll be honest with you—I think your daughter loved Harry, and that her feelings were reciprocated. That book tells the story of an impossible love affair between two people who are not from the same social class.”

  “I know,” he shouted. “I know! So what did Quebert do, replace perversion with social class to give himself a little dignity, and sell millions of books? A book that describes the obscene things he did with Nola—with my little Nola—which the whole country read and glorified for thirty years!”

  The former pastor had lost his temper, and these last words had been spoken with a violent anger I would never have suspected possible in such an apparently frail man. He was silent for a moment, pacing furiously around the room. I could still hear music howling in the background.

  “Harry Quebert did not kill Nola,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “We can never be sure of anything. That’s why life is so complicated sometimes.”

  He frowned. “What do you want to know, Mr. Goldman? If you’ve come here, it must be because you have questions to ask me.”

  “I’m trying to understand what could have happened. You didn’t hear anything the evening your daughter disappeared?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Some of the neighbors said at the time that they heard shouting.”

  “Shouting? There wasn’t any shouting. There was never any shouting in this house. Why would there have been? I was busy in the garage that day. For the whole afternoon. At seven p.m., I began making dinner. I went to get Nola from her bedroom so she could help me, but she wasn’t there. At first I thought she’d maybe gone for a walk. I waited for a while and then, as I was beginning to worry, I walked around the neighborhood. I had not gone a hundred yards when I came upon a crowd of people. The neighbors were all talking about how a young woman had been seen at Side Creek, covered in blood, and that police cars from all over the area were coming into town and sealing off the exits. I ran to the nearest house to call the police, to warn them that it might be Nola. Her bedroom was on the ground floor. I have spent more than thirty years wondering what could have happened to my daughter. And I have often thought that if I’d had other children, I would have made them sleep in the attic. But there were no other children.”

  “Did you notice your daughter behaving strangely the summer she disappeared?”

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. That’s another question I often ask myself, and I have no answer.”

  He did recall, however, that when the summer vacation began that year, Nola had sometimes seemed sad. He’d put that down to adolescence. I asked him if I could see his daughter’s bedroom; he led me there like a museum guard, warning me sternly not to touch anything. He had left the room exactly as it was, he said. Everything was there: the bed, the shelf filled with dolls, the little bookcase, and the desk scattered with pens, a long metal ruler, and sheets of yellowed paper. It was writing paper—the very same paper on which the note to Harry had been written.

  “She found that paper in a stationery store in Montburry,” her father explained to me when he saw I was interested in it. “She adored it. She always had some on her. She used it for writing letters, leaving notes. That paper was Nola. She always had several spare pads.”

  There was also a portable Remington typewriter in a corner of the room.

  “Was this hers?” I asked.

  “Mine. But she used it too. The summer she disappeared, she used it a lot. She said she had important documents to type. In fact, she often took it with her away from the house. I offered to give her a ride, but she never accepted. She went on foot, carrying the typewriter in her arms.”

  “So this room is just as it was the day your daughter disappeared?”

  “Everything was exactly where it is now. When I came to get her for dinner, the window was open and the curtains were moving in the breeze.”

  “Do you think someone came into her room that evening and took her away by force?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. I never heard anything. And the police never found any sign of struggle.”

  “The police found a bag with her. A bag with her name embossed inside it.”

  “Yes, they even asked me to identify it. It was the present I gave her for her fifteenth birthday. She saw that bag in Montburry one day when we were there together. I still remember the store, on the main street. I went back the next day to buy it. And I paid the store to put her name inside it.”

  I was trying to back up a theory. “But if it was her bag, that means she took it with her. And if she took it, that means she was going somewhere, doesn’t it? Mr. Kellergan, I know this is hard to imagine, but do you think Nola could have been running away?”

  “I don’t know anymore. The police asked me that question thirty-three years ago, and they asked me again a few days ago. But she never lacked for anything here. Clothes, money—she had what she wanted. Look, her money box is there, on her shelf, still full.” He took a metal box from one of the higher shelves. “Look, there’s a hundred and twenty dollars here! A hundred and twenty dollars! Why would she have left that here if she was running away? The police said that damn book was in her bag. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  Questions continued to buzz around my head: Why would Nola run away without taking any clothes or money? Why would she have taken nothing but that manuscript?

  In the garage the record had finishe
d playing its final track, and Nola’s father rushed off to reset the needle. I did not want to disturb him any longer, so I said good-bye and left, taking a photograph of the Harley-Davidson on my way out.

  • • •

  When I got back to Goose Cove, I went down to the beach to do some boxing. To my great surprise, I was soon joined by Sergeant Gahalowood, who had come to the house. I was wearing earphones and did not notice him until he tapped me on the shoulder.

  “You’re a fit guy,” he said, looking at my bare chest and wiping his hand, covered in my sweat, on his pant leg.

  “I try to stay in shape.”

  I took the recorder from my pocket to turn it off.

  “A minidisc player?” he said in his usual unpleasant tone. “Did you somehow miss the fact that Apple revolutionized the world and that you can now store an almost unlimited amount of music on a portable hard drive called an iPod?”

  “I’m not listening to music, Sergeant.”

  “So what do you listen to while you’re exercising?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Why don’t you tell me instead to what I owe the honor of your visit? And on a Sunday too.”

  “I received a call from Chief Dawn about the fire on Friday evening. He’s worried, and I have to admit I think he has a point. I don’t like it when things take this kind of turn.”

  “Are you telling me you’re worried for my safety?”

  “Not in the slightest. I simply want to make sure this doesn’t degenerate any further. We know that crimes against children always cause a big stir among the public. I can assure you that every time the dead girl is mentioned on TV, there are thousands of perfectly civilized fathers out there who are ready to cut off Quebert’s balls.”

  “Except that, in this case, I was the one who was targeted.”