The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair Read online

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. It’s the simple truth. But don’t come to me like a crybaby because you haven’t received the Nobel Prize yet! For God’s sake, you’re twenty-eight years old! Jesus … stick your great novels up your ass! The Nobel Prize in Stupidity, that’s what you deserve.”

  “But how did you do it, Harry? The Origin of Evil. That’s a masterpiece! And it was only your second book. How did you do it? How do you write a masterpiece?”

  He smiled sadly. “You don’t write a masterpiece. It writes itself. And, you know, for lots of people, that is the only book I’ve ever written … I mean, none of the novels that came afterward had the same success. Whenever anyone mentions my name, the first thing they think about—almost the only thing they think about—is The Origin of Evil. And that’s sad, because I think if I’d been told at your age that I’d already reached the summit of my career, I’d have drowned myself in the ocean. Don’t be in so much of a hurry.”

  “Do you regret that book?”

  “Maybe … a little bit … I don’t know … I don’t like to dwell on regrets. They tell you that you have not come to terms with what you’ve done.”

  “But what should I do, then?”

  “Do what you’ve always done best: write. And if I can give you some advice, don’t be like me. You and I are very similar in many ways, so I’m begging you: Don’t repeat the mistakes I made.”

  “Like what?”

  “In the summer I came here, in 1975, I too wanted desperately to write a great novel. I was obsessed by the desire to become a great writer.”

  “And you succeeded.”

  “You don’t understand. Sure, I’m now a so-called ‘great writer,’ but I’m living on my own in this enormous house. My life is empty, Marcus. Don’t be like me. Don’t let yourself be eaten up by ambition. Otherwise, you’ll be left with a lonely heart and a bunch of sad words. Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  “I haven’t found anyone I really like.”

  “I think the problem is you fuck like you write: It’s ecstasy or it’s nothing. Find someone good, and give her a chance. Do the same with your book: Give yourself a chance too. Give your life a chance! You know what my main occupation is? Feeding the seagulls. I collect stale bread—in that tin in the kitchen with SOUVENIR OF ROCKLAND, maine written on it—and I throw it to the seagulls. You shouldn’t spend all your time writing.”

  Despite the wisdom Harry was lavishing upon me, I remained obsessed by this idea: How had he, at my age, found the key to unlocking the genius that had enabled him to write The Origin of Evil? This question circled my brain ever faster, and because Harry had let me have the run of his office, I decided I had the right to rummage around a bit. I had no idea what I was about to discover. It all began when I opened a drawer in search of a pen and found a notebook and some pages of working notes. I was very excited—it was an opportunity I hadn’t dared hope for, a chance to understand how Harry worked, to find out if his papers were covered in cross-outs or if his genius flowed naturally from him. Insatiable, I began searching his library for other papers, hoping to find the manuscript of The Origin of Evil. I had to wait for Harry to leave the house, but as it happens, Thursday was the day he taught at Burrows, leaving early in the morning and generally not returning until evening. And on the afternoon of Thursday, March 6, 2008, I discovered something that I decided to forget immediately: In 1975 Harry had had an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl.

  I uncovered his secret while rummaging furiously and shamelessly through the shelves of his office. Concealed behind the books, I found a large varnished wooden box with a hinged lid. This, I sensed, could be the Holy Grail: the manuscript of The Origin of Evil. I grabbed the box and opened it, but to my dismay there was no manuscript inside, just a series of photographs and newspaper articles. The photographs showed a young Harry—thirty-something, magnificent, elegant, proud—and by his side, a teenage girl. There were four or five pictures, and she was in all of them. In one of them, Harry was lying shirtless—tanned and muscular—on a beach, next to the smiling young girl, who wore sunglasses tucked into her long blond hair to hold them in place; he was holding her tightly to him and kissing her on the cheek. On the back of the photograph was an annotation: Nola and me, Martha’s Vineyard, late July. At that moment I was too caught up in my discovery to hear Harry return from campus much earlier than expected. I heard neither the crunch of his Corvette’s tires on Goose Cove’s gravel driveway, nor the sound of his voice as he entered the house. I didn’t hear anything, because inside the box, underneath the photographs, I found a letter, undated. In a child’s hand, on pretty writing paper, were these words:

  Don’t worry, Harry. Don’t you worry about me. I’ll find a way to meet you. Wait for me in Room 8. I like that number, it’s my favorite. Wait for me there at 7 p.m. And then we’ll go away forever.

  I love you so much.

  Hugs and kisses,

  Nola

  So who was this Nola? My heart pounding, I began skimming the newspaper clippings: articles that described the mysterious disappearance of a certain Nola Kellergan one August evening in 1975. And the Nola in the newspaper photographs was the same as the Nola in Harry’s photographs. It was at that precise moment that Harry entered the office, carrying a tray with cups of coffee and a plate of cookies. Having pushed open the door with his foot, he dropped the tray, because he had found me crouched on the carpet with the contents of his secret box scattered before me.

  “But … what are you doing?” he shouted. “Are you … spying on me, Marcus? I invite you to my home and you betray my trust by going through my private things? And you call yourself a friend!”

  I muttered some pitiful excuses: “I just happened upon it, Harry. I found the box by chance. I shouldn’t have opened it. I’m sorry.”

  “Damn right you shouldn’t have opened it! How dare you! What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  He snatched the photographs from my hands, quickly gathered up all the newspaper clippings, and shoved everything back haphazardly into the box. He then carried the box to his bedroom and closed the door. I had never seen him like this, and I couldn’t tell whether the emotion that gripped him was panic or rage. Through the door, I repeated my excuses and thought up new ones, telling him that I hadn’t meant to hurt him, that I’d found the box by chance, but nothing made any difference. It was two hours before he came out of his room again: He went downstairs to the living room and downed several whiskeys. When he seemed to have calmed down a bit, I finally dared approach him.

  “Harry … who is that girl?” I asked gently.

  He lowered his eyes. “Nola.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Don’t ask me who she is. Please.”

  “Harry, who is she?” I repeated.

  He shook his head. “I loved her, Marcus. I loved her so much.”

  “But how come you never mentioned her to me?”

  “It’s complicated …”

  “Nothing is complicated between friends.”

  He shrugged. “I guess I may as well tell you, now that you’ve seen those photographs. In 1975, when I arrived in Somerset, I fell in love with this fifteen-year-old girl. Her name was Nola and she was the love of my life.”

  There was a brief silence.

  I finally asked: “What happened to her?”

  “It’s a sordid business. She disappeared. One night in late August, someone who lived nearby saw her, bleeding, and she was never seen again. I’m sure you saw the newspaper articles. She’s never been found. No-one knows what happened to her.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  He nodded. There was a long silence.

  “Nola changed my life, you know. And I would have given up becoming the great Harry Quebert, the famous writer; I would have given up all the glory and the money and the fame if it meant I could have kept her. Nothing I’ve been able to do since she disappeared has given as much meaning to my
life as the summer we spent together.”

  I had never seen Harry look so shaken before. After staring hard at me for a moment, he added: “Marcus, no-one knows about this. You are now the only one who does. And you must keep the secret.”

  “Of course.”

  “Give me your word!”

  “I promise, Harry.”

  “If anyone in Somerset were to find out that I’d had an affair with Nola Kellergan, it could ruin me.”

  “You can trust me, Harry.”

  *

  That was all I knew about Nola Kellergan. We did not speak about her again, nor about the box, and I decided to bury this episode forever in the caverns of my memory. It never crossed my mind that a few months later Nola’s ghost would return to haunt us both.

  I went back to New York at the end of March, after six weeks in Somerset. I was three months from Barnaski’s deadline and knew I had no chance of saving my career. I had burned my wings, and now I was in free fall. I was the sorriest and least productive famous writer in New York. The weeks passed, and I spent most of my time fervently preparing for my defeat. I found a new job for Denise, contacted a legal firm that might prove useful when the time came for Schmid & Hanson to take me to court, and I made a list of objects to which I was most attached and needed to hide at my parents’ place before the sheriffs started banging on my door. At the beginning of June—that fateful month, the month they would build my scaffold—I started marking off the days until my artistic death: There were thirty days left, then I would be summoned to Barnaski’s office and executed. The countdown had begun.

  30

  Marcus the Magnificent

  “Your second chapter is very important, Marcus. It has to be incisive, hard-hitting.”

  “Hard-hitting?”

  “Yeah, like boxing. You’re right-handed, but when you’re in the guard position it’s your left hand that hits first. A good, hard jab stuns your opponent, and you follow it with a powerful cross from your right to knock him out. That’s what your second chapter has to be: a right-handed punch to the reader’s jaw.”

  It was Thursday, June 12. I had spent the morning at home, reading in my living room. Outside, it was hot but wet: New York had been under a warm drizzle for the past three days. About one in the afternoon, my telephone rang. At first, it seemed there was no-one at the other end. Then I made out a stifled sob.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  “She … she’s dead.”

  I recognized his voice immediately, though it was barely audible.

  “Harry? Is that you?”

  “She’s dead, Marcus.”

  “Who?”

  “Nola.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “She’s dead, and it’s all my fault. What did I do? What did I do, for God’s sake?”

  He was crying.

  “Harry, what are you talking about? What are you trying to tell me?”

  He hung up. I called back right away, but there was no answer. I tried his cell phone without success. I tried again many times, leaving several messages on his answering machine. But I didn’t hear back. At that point, I had no idea that Harry had called me from the state police headquarters in Concord. I understood nothing of what was going on until about 4 p.m., when Douglas called me.

  “Jesus, Marc, have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “My God, turn on the T.V.! It’s about Harry Quebert! It’s Quebert!”

  I put on the news. To my amazement I saw the house at Goose Cove on the screen and heard the presenter say: “It was here, in his home in Somerset, New Hampshire, that author Harry Quebert was arrested today after police discovered human remains on his property. Initial inquiries suggest this may be the body of Nola Kellergan, a local girl who disappeared from her house at the age of fifteen in August 1975 and has never been seen since.” The room began spinning around me, and I collapsed onto the couch in a daze. I couldn’t hear anything clearly anymore—not the T.V., nor Douglas, at the other end of the line, bellowing, “Marcus? Are you there? Hello? He killed a girl? Quebert killed a girl?” In my head, everything blurred together like a bad dream.

  So it was that I found out, at the same time as a stupefied America, what had happened a few hours earlier: That morning a landscaping company had arrived at Goose Cove, at Harry’s request, to plant hydrangea bushes. When they dug up the earth, the gardeners found human bones buried three feet deep and had immediately informed the police. A whole skeleton had quickly been uncovered, and Harry had been arrested.

  On the T.V. screen, it was all moving very fast. They cut between live broadcasts from the scene of the crime in Somerset and from Concord, the New Hampshire capital, located sixty miles to the northwest, where Harry was in police custody. Apparently a clue found close to the body strongly suggested that here were the remains of Nola Kellergan; a police spokesman had already indicated that if this information was confirmed, Harry Quebert would also be named as a suspect in the murder of one Deborah Cooper, the last person to have seen Nola alive on August 30, 1975. Cooper had been found murdered the same day, after calling the police. It was appalling. The rumble grew ever louder as the news crossed the country in real time, relayed by television, radio, the Internet, and social networks: Harry Quebert, sixty-seven, one of the greatest authors of the second half of the twentieth century, was a child predator.

  It took me a long time to realize what was happening. Several hours, perhaps. At 8 p.m., when a worried Douglas came by to see how I was holding up, I was still convinced that the whole thing was a mistake.

  “How can they accuse him of two murders when they’re not even sure it’s the body of this Nola?” I said.

  “Well, there was a corpse buried in his yard, however you look at it.”

  “But why would he have brought people in to dig up the place where he’d supposedly buried a body? It makes no sense! I have to go there.”

  “Go where?”

  “New Hampshire. I have to defend Harry.”

  Douglas replied with typical down-to-earth Midwestern sobriety: “Absolutely not, Marcus. Don’t go there. You don’t want to get involved in this mess.”

  “Harry called me …”

  “When? Today?”

  “About one this afternoon. I must have been the one telephone call he was allowed I have to go there and support him! It’s very important.”

  “Important? What’s important is your second book. I hope you haven’t been taking me for a ride and that you really will have a manuscript ready by the end of the month. Barnaski is shitting bricks. Do you realize what’s going to happen to Harry? Don’t get mixed up in this, Marc. Don’t screw up your career.”

  On the T.V., the state attorney general was giving a press conference. He listed the charges against Harry: kidnapping and two counts of murder. Harry was formally accused of having murdered Deborah Cooper and Nola Kellergan. And the punishment for these crimes, taken together, was death.

  Harry’s fall was only just beginning. Footage of the preliminary hearing, which was held the next day, was broadcast on T.V. We saw him arrive in the courtroom, tracked by dozens of cameras and illuminated by photographers’ flashbulbs, handcuffed and surrounded by policemen. He looked as if he had been through hell: somber faced, unshaven, hair disheveled, shirt unbuttoned, eyes swollen. His lawyer, Benjamin Roth, stood next to him. Roth was a renowned attorney in Concord who had often advised Harry in the past. I knew him slightly, having met him a few times at Goose Cove.

  The whole country was able to watch the hearing live, as Harry pleaded not guilty, and the judge ordered him remanded into custody in New Hampshire’s State Prison for Men. But this was only the start of the storm. At that moment, I still had the naive hope that it would all be over soon, but one hour after the hearing, I received a call from Harry’s lawyer.

  “Harry gave me your number,” Roth said. “He insisted I call. He wants you to know that he’s innocent, that he didn’t kill anybod
y.”

  “I know he’s innocent,” I said. “Tell me how he’s doing?”

  “Not too great, as you can imagine. The cops have been giving him a hard time. He admitted to having a fling with Nola the summer she disappeared.”

  “I knew about Nola. What about the rest?”

  Roth hesitated a second before answering. “He denies it. But …”

  “But what?” I demanded.

  “Marcus, I’m not going to hide it from you. This is going to be difficult. The evidence is …”

  “The evidence is what? Tell me, for God’s sake!”

  “This has to stay a secret. No-one can know.”

  “I won’t say a word. You can trust me.”

  “Along with the girl’s remains, the investigators found the manuscript of The Origin of Evil.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you, the manuscript of that damn book was buried with her. Harry is in deep shit.”

  “What does Harry say?”

  “He says he wrote that book for her. That she was always snooping around his home in Goose Cove, and that sometimes she would borrow his pages to read. He says that a few days before she disappeared, she took the manuscript home with her.”

  “What? He wrote that book for her?”

  “Yes. But that can’t get out, under any circumstances. You can imagine the scandal there’d be if the media found out that one of the bestselling books of the last fifty years is not a simple love story, like everyone thinks, but the fruit of an illicit affair between a guy of thirty-four and a girl of fifteen …”

  “Can you get him released on bail?”

  “Bail? You don’t understand how serious this is. There’s no question of bail when it comes to capital crimes. The punishment he risks is lethal injection. Ten days from now his case will be presented to a grand jury, which will decide whether to pursue charges and hold a trial. It’s just a formality. There’s no doubt there will be a trial.”