The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist, Joël Dicker [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

out just before he died. The company accountant came to tell me about the imminent bankruptcy, the workers having to be laid off. Poor fool that I was, I didn’t know a thing. That evening I sat Luke down and asked him what was going on, and he told me the whole story. I told him we could fight it, and he said he couldn’t do anything against the mayor. I told him he should report it to the police. He gave me a defeated look. ‘You don’t understand, Felicity, everyone in town is involved in these kickbacks. All our friends. Your brother, too. How do you think he got all those contracts in the last two years? They’ll lose everything if we report them. They’ll go to jail. We can’t say anything, everyone has their hands tied.’ The following evening, he hanged himself.”

“Oh, my God, Felicity!” Meghan said, horrified. “And this is all Mayor Gordon’s doing?”

“You mustn’t tell anyone, Meghan.”

“People have to know that Gordon is a criminal.”

“Swear you won’t say anything, Meghan! Businesses will be shut down, the bosses will go to prison, the workers will be out of a job . . .”

“So we’re going to let the mayor go unpunished?”

“Gordon’s very strong. Much stronger than he looks.”

“He doesn’t scare me!”

“Meghan, promise me you won’t tell anyone. I have enough worries as it is.”

* * *

“But she did tell someone,” Betsy said.

“Yes,” Felicity said, “she made an anonymous phone call to Deputy Mayor Brown. I was furious.”

“Why?”

“Because people I liked might have been in big trouble if the police investigated. I knew what it meant to lose everything. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Meghan promised not to say anything more. But then, two months later, she called me and told me she’d had it out with Mayor Gordon in the bookstore. I screamed at her like I’ve never screamed at anyone. That was the last time I had any contact with Meghan. I just stopped talking to her. I was too angry with her. Real friends don’t betray your secrets.”

“I think she was trying to defend you,” Betsy said. “She wanted there to be some kind of justice. She went every day and reminded the mayor that, because of him, your husband had killed himself. She wanted justice for your husband. You say Meghan wasn’t very brave? I think she was. She wasn’t afraid to confront Gordon. She was the only person who dared to do that. She was braver than all the other people in the town combined. And she paid for that with her life.”

“You mean Meghan was the target of those murders?” Felicity said, astonished.

“We think she was,” Derek said.

“But who could have done it? Mayor Gordon? He died at the same time as her. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Mrs Daniels,” Betsy said, “can you think of any other friend of Meghan’s we could talk to about her? In her diary she mentions some-one named Kate.”

“Yes, Kate Grand. She was another member of the tennis club. I think she was quite a close friend of Meghan’s.”

As they left the shopping mall in Coram, Derek received a telephone call from the bodywork specialist at the Highway Patrol.

“I was able to analyze the car debris you gave me. You were right. It’s a piece of a right bumper, with blue paint around it, which means the car was blue, obviously. I also found on it streaks of gray paint, which, according to the police file you sent me, was the color of the motorcycle involved in that fatal accident of July 16, 1994.”

* * *

In Mount Sinai hospital, Cynthia Eden ran out of Carolina’s room and called a nurse.

“Get the doctor!” Cynthia cried. “My daughter has opened her eyes!”

* * *

In the archive room, helped by Hayward and Bird, we were studying the possible scenarios of Fold’s accident.

“According to the specialist,” Derek said, “and judging by the impact, the car probably came level with the motorbike and hit it, sending it off the road.”

“So Fold was murdered,” Bird said.

“Murdered in a way,” Betsy said. “He was left for dead. Whoever hit him was a total amateur.”

“A reluctant murderer!” Derek cried. “The very same profile that Doctor Singh drew of our killer. He doesn’t want to kill, but he has to.”

“There were surely a lot of people who wanted to kill Fold,” I said.

“What if the name of Jeremiah Fold found in that copy of ‘The Darkest Night’ was an order to kill?” Hayward suggested.

Derek pointed to a photograph from the police file showing the interior of the Gordons’ garage. There was a red car with the trunk open and suitcases inside. “Mayor Gordon had a red car.”

“That’s funny,” Hayward said. “I seem to remember he drove a blue convertible.”

At these words, a memory came back to me and I collected the case file from 1994. “We saw it at the time!” I said. “I remember a photograph of Mayor Gordon and his car.”

I went frantically through the reports, the photographs, the transcripts of witness statements, the bank statements. And then I found it. The photograph taken on the fly by the realtor in Montana, showing Mayor Gordon unloading cardboard boxes from the trunk of a blue convertible outside the house he had rented in Bozeman.

“The realtor in Montana was suspicious of Gordon,” Derek said. “He photographed him in front of his car so as to have a record of his license number and his face.”

“So the mayor did have a blue car,” Bird said.

Hayward was now peering closely at the photograph of the red car in Gordon’s garage.

“Look at the rear window,” he said. “There’s the name of the car dealership. It may still be around.”

We checked, and indeed it was. It was located on the road to Montauk and had been in business for forty years. We went straight there and were received by an elderly man in grease-marked overalls in his cluttered, insalubrious office.

“What can I do for the police?” he said amiably.

“We