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

“Yes,” I said. “I think I’ve done the tour.”

Back in my car, I opened the envelope I had found in Stephanie Mailer’s letterbox. It was a credit card statement. I examined it carefully.

Apart from her everyday expenses (gasoline, supermarket shopping, A.T.M. withdrawals, some purchases from the bookstore in Orphea), I noticed a fair number of tollbooth charges from rides into Manhattan. It seemed that she had been going to New York on a regular basis lately. In addition, she had bought a flight to Los Angeles. A quick round trip between June 10 and June 13. Payments while there—in particular, a hotel—confirmed that she had made the journey. Maybe she had a boyfriend in California. Whatever the case, she was a young woman who moved around a lot. There was nothing exceptional in the fact that she had gone away. I could understand the local police. None of these items pointed to a disappearance. Ms Mailer was an adult, she did not have to explain herself to anybody. So, since I did not have anything concrete to go on, I was on the verge of calling it a day when I was struck by one thing, one element that seemed out of place—the offices of the Orphea Chronicle. They did not correspond in any way to the image I had built up of Stephanie Mailer. I didn’t know her, of course, but given the confidence with which she had approached me three days earlier, I could more easily imagine her at the New York Times than at a paper in a small resort town in the Hamptons. That one thing made me decide to look a little more deeply into the case. I would pay a visit to Ms Mailer’s parents, who lived in Sag Harbor, twenty minutes’ drive from where I was.

It was seven o’clock.

* * *

Around the same time, Betsy Kanner parked her car outside Café Athena on Orphea’s Main Street, where she had arranged to meet her childhood friend Lauren and Lauren’s husband Paul for dinner.

Lauren and Paul were the friends she had seen the most of since quitting New York to settle in Orphea. Paul’s parents had a vacation home in Southampton, fifteen miles away, where they regularly spent long weekends.

Before Betsy got out of her car, she saw her friends already at a table on the terrace of the restaurant. What she mainly noticed was that there was a man with them. Immediately realizing what was happening, Betsy took out her cell phone and called Lauren.

“Have you set me up with a date?” she asked as soon as Lauren picked up.

There was a moment of embarrassed silence.

“I may have,” Lauren said finally. “How did you know?”

“Instinct,” Betsy lied. “Come on, Lauren, why did you do it?”

The only thing Betsy had against her friend was that she spent her time interfering in her personal life.

“You’re going to love this one,” Lauren assured her, having moved away from the table. “Trust me, Betsy.”

“You know what, Lauren? It’s not a good time for this right now. I’m still at the office and have a whole lot of paperwork to get through.”

Betsy was amused to see Lauren becoming agitated.

“Betsy, I forbid you to stand me up! You’re thirty-three years old, you need a guy! Tell me something. How long is it since you last got laid?”

That was the line of argument Lauren invariably used as a last resort. But Betsy was not in the mood to handle a blind date.

“I’m sorry, Lauren. Apart from anything else, I’m on duty.”

“Oh, don’t start with your duty! Nothing ever happens in this town. You’re entitled to have a little fun, too!”

At that moment, a motorist sounded his horn and Lauren heard it both on the street and through the phone.

“Got you, girl!” she exclaimed, rushing out onto the sidewalk. “Where are you?”

Betsy didn’t have time to get away.

“I see you!” Lauren cried. “If you think you’re going to take off and dump me now . . . Do you realize you spend most of your evenings alone, like an old lady? You know, I wonder if you made the right choice, burying yourself here.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Lauren! I feel like I’m listening to my father!”

“If you carry on like this, Betsy, you’re going to end up completely alone.”

Betsy burst out laughing and got out of her car. If she’d been given a coin every time she heard people say that, she would be swimming in money by now. All the same, she had to admit that, given her situation, she couldn’t blame Lauren. She was indeed living alone in Orphea, newly divorced and childless.

According to Lauren, there were two reasons for Betsy’s successive failures in love. One was the fact that she did not show willing, the other her profession. “I never tell them in advance what you do for a living,” Lauren had said a few times about the dates she arranged for her. “I think it intimidates them.”

Betsy walked into the outdoor seating area of the restaurant. Today’s candidate was named Josh. He had the air of a man who was too sure of himself. He greeted Betsy by giving her the eye in a frankly embarrassing manner and exhaling stale breath. This was not going to be the night she met Prince Charming.

* * *

“We’re very worried, Captain Rosenberg,” Trudy and Dennis Mailer said to me in unison in the living room of their beautiful house in Sag Harbor.

“I telephoned Stephanie on Monday morning,” Mrs Mailer said. “She was in a meeting at the paper, she said, and would call me back. She never did.”

“Stephanie always calls back,” Mr Mailer said.

I could see from the start why the Mailers might have aggravated the police. With them, everything became a drama, even the fact that I had declined a coffee when I arrived.

“Don’t you like coffee?” Mrs Mailer had said desperately.

“Perhaps you’d prefer tea?” her husband had said.

Managing at last to capture their attention, I had