The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair: A Novel Read online

  • • •

  Harry had been sitting in the same place at Clark’s for thirty-three years: table 17, which boasted a metal plaque put there by Jenny with the inscription:

  IT WAS AT THIS TABLE, IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, THAT HARRY QUEBERT WROTE HIS FAMOUS NOVEL, THE ORIGIN OF EVIL.

  I had seen this plaque so many times, but I had never really paid it much attention. It was only during this stay that I began taking a keen interest in it. Soon I was obsessed by those lines. Sitting at this ugly little wooden table, sticky with grease and maple syrup, in this small-town diner in New Hampshire, Harry had written his great masterpiece, the book that had made him a literary legend. Where had he found such inspiration? I wanted to sit at this table too, to write and be struck by genius. And, in fact, I did sit there, with pens and sheets of paper, for two afternoons straight, but it was no good. Finally I asked Jenny: “So he just sat at this table and wrote?”

  She nodded. “All day long, Marcus. The whole blessed day. He never stopped. It was the summer of 1975—I remember it well.”

  I felt a kind of fury boiling within me. I, too, wanted to write a masterpiece; I, too, wanted to write a book to which all other books would be compared. These feelings came to the fore after I had been in Somerset for almost a month and Harry discovered that I had still not written a single word. It was early March, in Harry’s office at Goose Cove, where I was waiting for divine inspiration. Harry walked in, an apron tied around his waist, bringing me some doughnuts he’d just made.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “I’m writing something amazing,” I replied, passing him a sheaf of papers similar to what the kind baggage handler might have given me three months earlier.

  He put down his plate and looked at them excitedly before realizing they were blank.

  “You haven’t written anything? You’ve been here more than three weeks and you haven’t written anything at all?”

  I lost my temper. “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing of any worth! Only scenarios for second-rate novels.”

  “But, dear God, Marcus, what do you want to write?”

  I replied without thinking: “A masterpiece! I want to write a masterpiece!”

  “A masterpiece?”

  “Yes. I want to write a great novel, with great ideas! I want to write something unforgettable.”

  Harry looked at me for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Your overambitiousness always did get on my nerves. I’ve been telling you that for years. You’re going to become a very great writer—I know it. I’ve been sure of it since I first met you. But do you want to know what your problem is? You’re in too much of a hurry! How old are you, exactly?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Twenty-eight years old! And you already expect to be a cross between Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller? Glory will come to you—don’t be in such a hurry. I’m almost sixty-seven, and I’m terrified. Time flies by, you know, and each year that passes is another year I can’t get back. What do you think’s going to happen, Marcus? That you’ll just produce another book, like a hen laying an egg? A career has to be built slowly. And as for writing a great novel, you don’t need great ideas. Just be yourself and you’ll get there, I have absolutely no doubt about that. I’ve been teaching literature for twenty-plus years—twenty-plus long years—and you’re the most brilliant student I ever had.”

  “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 height 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.

  On one of 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, 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,” I said.

  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 both of our lives.

  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 and 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. Little did I know that a dramatic event was about to change everything.

  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 your 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 TV! 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 reporter 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 at the age of fifteen disappeared from her house 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 TV, 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 TV screen they cut between live broadcasts from Somerset and from Concord, sixty miles 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 that down-to-earth Midwestern sobriety: “Absolutely not, Marcus. Don’t go there. You don’t want to get involved in this mess.”