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wanted to show me that he was not guilty of killing his wife. And I said, ‘You don’t need to explain anything to me. It’s between you and God.’”

      “He said, ‘I’m still interested in what I told you,’” meaning the time in every man’s life when he sees what he wants.

      “I said, ‘I can’t understand how you can be a reverend and say those things about somebody who isn’t your wife.’”

      And the Reverend replied, “I consult God about everything I do.”

      The story would have surely entranced Harper Lee, convincing her even more that she had found her subject, along with an invaluable source. But all Levelma Simmons recalls her saying is “I need to tape this. Can I come back tomorrow?”

      Of course she could. Lee would speak with Simmons many times after that, until she’d been in Alexander City for six months. Her sessions with the schoolteacher moved from the classroom to the Simmons home and dinner table, where Lee would join Levelma and Otis for chicken, cornbread, turnip greens, and conversation.

      Only later did evidence of her months in Alexander City emerge, usually in the unlikeliest of places. Sheralyn Belyeu received an “entire set” of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the Alexander City Salvation Army thrift shop as a gift from her husband, she says. The volume containing the H’s held a surprise: a thank-you letter from Harper Lee to a mother and daughter who had held a cocktail party for her in their home. The letter was dated July 11, 1978.

      “You simply can’t beat the people in Alex City for their warmth, kindness and hospitality,” she wrote in the letter, later unearthed by the writer Casey Cep, who has written about Harper Lee for The New Yorker, including in a March 17, 2015, story titled “Harper Lee’s Abandoned True-Crime Novel.” “If I fall flat on my face with this book, I won’t be terribly disappointed because of knowing that the time I spent with you was not time lost, but friends gained,” Lee wrote. “This is not remotely goodbye, because I’ll be coming back until doomsday, so until next Fall, love to you both, Harper Lee.”

      • • •

      “I probably know more about the Reverend Maxwell’s activities than does any other individual,” she would write to the Alabama novelist Madison Jones in another letter discovered by Casey Cep.

      To see the fruits of her labor, you have to go to a nice house on a suburban street in Alexander City, where the last known work of Harper Lee has come to rest.

      There are only four pages.

      Written across the top of the first page, in what appears to be Lee’s handwriting, is the title: THE REVEREND.

      Ellen Radney Price, daughter of the late attorney Tom Radney, dead since 2011, shows the pages in her dining room: a long table surrounded by chairs for “company,” as dinner guests are called in the South. In a room nearby, shelves hold a dozen or more binders containing documents from the life of Tom Radney.

      And there, in the center of the dining room table, are the pages.

      Four typed pages by the immortal Harper Lee.

      It is August 2017, the end of another hot Alabama summer. Ellen Price carefully turns the pages, which are encased in plastic and bound in a three-ring binder kept in a big leather scrapbook, one of many that hold her father’s papers.

      Price is both proud and protective of Tom Radney’s papers. He gave Lee his files, correspondence, and other documentation related to cases involving the Reverend. He never got them back.

      “Big Tom gave it to her with the understanding that she was going to write the book,” says Price. And then the illustrious novelist left with the files—part of his legacy! Lee not only didn’t return the files, but she kept stringing him along with hope that the book would soon be finished. “Saying, ‘Oh, I’ve done that much, I’ve done this much,’” says Price. “Big Tom certainly held on to hope that it would eventually be written.”

      “Gave everything to her,” she continues. “Big Tom went to New York once to get it back, maybe twice.”

      He was left with just these four pages.

      If you want to see the pages, you have to come here, to Ellen Price’s home. You have to earn your way through the door. You must promise not to quote a word from the pages—you may describe them, summarize them, but direct quotes are strictly forbidden.

      These four pages are proof that Harper Lee wrote something during her months spent researching the Reverend. They are also proof that she was close enough with Tom Radney, whom everyone here still calls Big Tom, to give him some of her priceless prose.

      The pages are impressive. Just four of them, and yet her intelligence, sophistication, and sheer towering love for Alabama and its history radiate from every page. The hero, it seems, at least from this sample, was the attorney.

      “This did not happen over a six-month time frame,” says Ellen Price about the relationship between Harper Lee and her father. “This happened over decades. Their friendship, her interest in writing the story, their admiration for each other. They talked about this book for years and years and years.”

      The pages look mottled with time and stained with what might be sweat or tears—or maybe even Scotch, Lee’s drink of choice. She begins with a 3:00 a.m. phone call that jolts a lawyer from his sleep and changes his life forever. The lawyer is presumably Tom Radney but renamed Larkin. Like Radney’s ancestors, Larkin is originally from Ireland.

      After her father’s death, Price found the pages in a box crammed with what she calls “keepsakes.” Radney had shown them to her while he was still alive.

      “That is one of the things that kept him going, kept him hanging on,” Price says. “That she was writing more and more and more.”

      According to Price, there is no question about their authenticity.

      Additional proof is right there on every page, she says: The letter B is missing.

      Sure enough, in place of every B, lowercase and capital, there is a mark.

      Casualties of a broken typewriter, which only a famous spendthrift like Harper Lee would use. Also a famous perfectionist, she wrote in every broken B by hand.

      Another woman enters the dining room: Tom Radney’s charming widow, Madolyn. “Just amazing to see them, it’s just wonderful!” she says of the sacred pages. “First draft of maybe the Great American Novel!”

      Of course, the book would have led to a movie, and there was discussion about who might best portray Big Tom.

      “We used to throw that around and laugh about that,” says Madolyn Radney. “I think Harper Lee said something one time about maybe Gregory Peck. Pipe dreams.”

      Then, after page four, the writing stops and the mystery begins. Tom Radney often said that Harper Lee had told him there were more pages. Maybe a lot more.

      “A writer of her magnitude did not work on something for that length of time and visit and have a relationship and only write four pages,” says Price. Maybe there is more—maybe even a whole book—hidden away somewhere, in a drawer, an attic, a safety deposit box, yet to be discovered.

      For now, there are just the four pages. A portal into a lost world.

      • • •

      August 1970, one morning at 3:00 a.m.

      “Mr. Radney?” asks the voice at the other end of the line. “They’re down here at my house, accusing me of killing my wife. Would you come down here and help me?”

      The voice on the other end of the phone is a slow, rumbling baritone. There is no panic, no rush, just the facts.

       Police. Accusing me of killing my wife. Will you help me?

      Music to the ears of any attorney, but especially to Tom Radney. Big Tom has never heard

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