The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist

by Joël Dicker

“Not as much as I would have liked,” she told them. “But I know she came to the Grand Theater a lot. I even met her here a few times.”

  “Yes,” said a short man who was in charge of the box office, “it was for her articles about the volunteers. Didn’t she ask you any questions, Betsy?”

  “No,” Betsy said. It had not even occurred to her.

  “Me neither,” said a man who had only recently arrived in Orphea.

  “That must be because you’re both new here,” someone said.

  “That’s right,” someone else piped up. “And you weren’t here in 1994.”

  “1994?” Betsy said in surprise. “Stephanie asked you about 1994?”

  “Yes. She was mainly interested in the very first festival.”

  “What kind of thing did she ask?”

  To this question, Betsy obtained a variety of answers, but one cropped up frequently: Stephanie had systematically asked questions about the fire officer on duty in the theater on opening night. In gathering the volunteers’ testimonies, she appeared to have been trying to reconstruct in detail what had happened in the theater that evening.

  Betsy finally went to see Springfield in the tiny room that served as his office. He was sitting behind a makeshift table, on which were an old computer and untidy piles of paper.

  “Have you finished disturbing my volunteers, Betsy?” he said good-humoredly.

  “Cody, do you by any chance remember who was on duty as fire officer on the opening night of the festival in 1994 and if he’s still living in Orphea?”

  Springfield’s eyes opened wide. “Do I remember? Hell, Betsy, this is really a day for ghosts. It was Ted Tennenbaum, the man who committed all those murders. And you won’t be able to find him, because he’s dead.”

  BETSY KANNER

  The friendly atmosphere there had been in the station when I arrived lasted barely two days before the difficulties started. The first one involved a question of organization: what to do about the toilets. In the part of the station where the public didn’t go, there were toilets on every floor, all designed for men, with rows of urinals and individual cubicles.

  “One of the toilets will have to be for women only,” one of the officers suggested.

  “Yes, but that gets complicated if you have to change floors to take a leak,” someone else retorted.

  “We could make all the toilets unisex,” I proposed, trying not to complicate matters. “Unless anyone has a problem with that.”

  “I’d find it tricky to be taking a leak with a woman doing whatever she’d be doing in the cubicle behind me,” said another of my new colleagues, putting his hand up like an elementary school pupil.

  “Wouldn’t you be able to get it out?” someone said, and everybody laughed.

  It so happened that in the visitors’ section, just beside the front desk, there were separate toilets for men and women. It was decided that I would use the female visitors’ toilet, and that suited me perfectly. The fact that I had to cross the reception area of the station every time I wanted to go to the toilet would not have bothered me if I hadn’t one day heard the desk sergeant sniggering as he counted my comings and goings.

  “My God, she certainly takes a lot of leaks,” he said to the officer he was talking to.

  “Or else she’s thinking about Gulliver and touching herself up,” the other man said.

  The next difficulty brought about by the new mixed-sex situation was the locker room. The station had one large locker room, with adjoining showers, where the officers could change at the beginning and end of their shift. As a consequence of my arrival, and without my asking anyone for anything, access to the locker room was forbidden to all male staff. On the door, beneath the metal plate bearing the words LOCKER ROOM, Chief Gulliver put a piece of paper with the word WOMAN, in the singular. “The two sexes have to have separate locker rooms, that’s the law,” Gulliver told his men as they stood watching him do this, dumbfounded. “Mayor Brown has insisted on Betsy having a locker room to get changed in. So, gentlemen, from now on you have to change in your offices.” The officers present started grumbling. We finally decided on a compromise. I would change at home and come to the station in my uniform. Everyone was happy. But the next day, seeing me get out of my car in the station’s parking lot, Chief Gulliver summoned me to his office.

  “Betsy,” he said, “I don’t like you driving your own car in your uniform.”

  “But I don’t have anywhere to change in the station,” I said.

  “I know. That’s why I’m going to let you have one of our unmarked cars. I want you to use it to move around between your house and the station when you’re in uniform.”

  And so I found myself with a vehicle from the motor pool, a black S.U.V. with tinted windows. The revolving lights were hidden at the top of the windshield and the radiator grille.

  What I did not at first know was that there were only two unmarked cars in the pool. Chief Gulliver had allocated himself one for his personal use. The second one, which had been sitting there in the parking lot, was a treasure coveted by all my colleagues and now it had been given to me, and that inevitably aroused a certain indignation in the other officers.

  “That’s a privilege!” they complained during a hastily called meeting. “She just got here and already she’s getting privileges.”

  “You have to choose, guys,” I said to them when they opened up to me. “Share the car between yourselves and leave me the locker room if you prefer. I’d be fine with that, too.”

  The episode of the car was the first unwitting insult to Montagne on my part. He’d had his eyes on that unmarked car for a long time.

  “It should have been me,” he moaned to Gulliver. “I am the deputy, after all! How does this make me look?”

  But Gulliver turned him down point-blank. “Listen, Jasper,” he said, “I know the situation is complicated. It’s complicated for everyone, especially me. Believe me, I’d happily have done without it. Women always create tension in a team. They have too much to prove. And of course when she gets pregnant, we’ll all have to do overtime!”

  One drama followed another. Once the logistics had been fixed, the next questions that came up concerned my legitimacy and my competence. I had arrived with the rank of second deputy, a rank created specially for me. The official reason was that over the years, as the town had developed, the Orphea police department had seen a significant increase in its workload and its manpower, and the arrival of a third command-ing officer was meant to allow Chief Gulliver and Deputy Montagne to breathe more easily.

  First I was asked, “Why did they need to create a position for you? Is it because you’re a woman?”

  “No,” I said, “the post was created first, and then they tried to fill it.”

  The next question was:

  “What happens if you have to fight a man? I mean, you’re just a woman alone in a car. Can you arrest a guy all on your own?”

  “Can you?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “So why not me?”

  Finally, trying to take my measure:

  “Do you have experience in the field?”

  “I have experience of the streets of New York.”

  “It’s not the same. What kind of thing did you do in New York?”

  I hoped that my résumé would impress them. “I was a crisis negotiator. I was constantly on call. I dealt with hostage situations, domestic incidents, suicide threats.”

  My colleagues shrugged. “It’s not the same.”

  *

  I spent the first month partnered up with Lewis Erban, an old, worn-out officer. He was on the verge of retirement, and I would be replacing him. I soon learned the ropes: night-time patrols on the beach and in the municipal park, taking down statements on traffic violations, breaking up fights when the bars were closing.

  While I may have proved myself in the field, both as a superior officer and when I was on call, everyday relations remained tense. The established
hierarchy had been shaken up. For years, Chief Ron Gulliver and Deputy Montagne had laid down the law, two wolves at the head of their pack. Gulliver was due to retire on October 1 the following year and it was taken for granted that Montagne would succeed him. In any case, it was Montagne who already ruled the roost in the station, with Gulliver only pretending to give the orders. When it came down to it, Gulliver was quite a pleasant man but not a good chief. He was manipulated by Montagne who had long taken over as head of the chain of command. But this had changed. With my arrival in the post of second deputy, there were now three of us in command.

  It did not take much more for Montagne to launch a ferocious smear campaign. He made it clear to all the other officers that it was best for them if they didn’t team up with me. Nobody in the station wanted to be in Montagne’s bad books and my colleagues avoided contact with me outside our professional exchanges. I knew that in the locker room, when the guys at the end of their shift mentioned going for a beer, he would lecture them: “Don’t even think of asking that bimbo to go with you. Unless you want to scour the toilets for the next ten years.”

  This campaign of Montagne’s did not make my integration into the town of Orphea any easier. My colleagues were not inclined to see me when we were off duty, and my dinner invitations to them and their wives resulted either in refusals, last-minute cancellations, or even no-shows. I lost count of the number of Sunday brunches I spent alone at a table set for five or more with a kitchen full of food. My social activities were very limited. I sometimes went out with the mayor’s wife, Charlotte Brown, and since I was particularly fond of Café Athena on Main Street, I hit it off with the owner, Sylvia Tennenbaum. We would regularly chat, though I could not say we were friends. The person I saw most of was my neighbor, Cody Springfield. Whenever I felt bored, I would drop by his bookstore. Sometimes I would even help out there. I finally joined his volunteers’ organization that handled the theater festival at the beginning of summer, which gave me at least one evening a week when I was busy, preparing for the festival that was due to open at the end of July.

  At the station, as soon as I had the impression I was beginning to be accepted, Montagne struck back. He moved up a gear, searching in my past and starting to give me suggestive nicknames like “Betsy the trigger-happy” or “the killer,” or saying to my colleagues: “Better be careful, guys. Betsy’s quick on the draw.” He would laugh like an idiot, then say, “Betsy, does everyone know why you left New York?”

  One morning I found a press clipping stuck to the door of my office, with the headline:

  MANHATTAN: HOSTAGE KILLED BY POLICE

  IN JEWELRY STORE

  I went straight to Gulliver’s office, brandishing the clipping. “Did you tell him, Chief? Was it you who told Montagne?”

  “It was nothing to do with me, Betsy,” he said.

  “Then how the hell did he find out?”

  “It’s in your file. He could have had access to it one way or another.”

  Determined to get rid of me, Montagne made sure I was sent out on the most most boring or thankless assignments. When I was alone on patrol in the town or its surroundings, I would frequently receive a radio call from the station: “Kanner, switchboard here. I need you to answer an emergency call.” I would go to the address indicated, with sirens blaring and lights flashing, not realizing until I arrived that it was a minor incident.

  Wild geese blocking Route 17? That was for me.

  A cat stuck up a tree? That was for me.

  An old, slightly senile lady who frequently heard suspicious noises and called three times in one night? That would be for me, too.

  I even got my photograph in the Chronicle in an item about cows that had escaped from a pen. There I was, looking ridiculous, covered in mud and trying to retrieve a cow by pulling its tail. The headline read:

  THE POLICE IN ACTION

  That article earned me a lot of teasing from my colleagues, some of it funny, some of it less so. I found a clipping under the windshield wiper of my car, on which an anonymous fan had written with a black Sharpie: Two Cows in Orphea. And as if that wasn’t enough, my parents came from New York to visit me that weekend.

  “Is that why you moved here?” my father asked as soon as he arrived, waving a copy of the Chronicle in front of me. “You screwed up your marriage to become a cowherd?”

  “Daddy, are we going to start arguing?”

  “I just think you would have made a good lawyer.”

  “I know, Daddy, you’ve been telling me that for the last fifteen years.”

  “When I think you studied law for so long only to end up a police officer in a little town! What a waste!”

  “I’m doing what I like, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”

  “I’m taking Mark as my partner,” he announced.

  “Dammit, do you really need to work with my ex-husband?”

  “He’s a good man, you know.”

  “Don’t start, please!”

  “He’s prepared to forgive you. You could get back together again, and you could come back to the firm.”

  “I’m proud of working for the police.”

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Tuesday, July 1, 2014

  Twenty-five days to opening night

  Stephanie had been missing for a week.

  In the area, it was the only topic of conversation. A handful of people were convinced she had orchestrated her escape. Most thought that something had happened to her and were worried about who would be the next victim. A housewife out shopping? A girl on her way to the beach?

  That morning, July 1, Derek and I joined Betsy at Café Athena for breakfast. She told us about the strange disappearance of Kirk Hayward, something neither Derek nor I had known about at the time, which meant it had happened after we had solved the Gordon killings.

  “I had a look at the archives of the Chronicle,” Betsy said. “And this is what I found, searching for articles about the first festival in 1994 . . .”

  She showed us a photocopy of an article with the headline:

  THE GREAT CRITIC OSTROVSKI

  ON THE FESTIVAL

  I skimmed the beginning of the article, an interview with Meta Ostrovski, a famous New York critic, about that first festival. My eyes were drawn to a particular section.

  “Listen to this,” I said to Derek. “The interviewer asks Ostrovski about his highlights and disappointments from the festival, and Ostrovski replies: ‘The highlight—and I think everyone will agree—was definitely the wonderful production of “Uncle Vanya”, above all Charlotte Carrell’s superb performance as Yelena. As for the disappointments, I was surprised to find there was no play by Kirk Hayward on the program, as I had been led to believe. I had heard good things about his recent production in Albany.’”

  “Did he say Kirk Hayward?” Derek said, incredulous.

  “That’s right, Kirk Hayward,” Betsy said, proud of her discovery.

  “What’s that all about?” I said in astonishment. “Orphea’s police chief had a connection with the festival?”

  “What’s more,” Derek added, “Hayward investigated the Gordon murders. So he was linked both to the murders and to the festival.”

  “That must be why Stephanie wanted to find him.” I said. “We must absolutely track him down.”

  One man could help us in our search: Lewis Erban, the officer Betsy had replaced in Orphea. He had spent his whole career in the Orphea police department, which meant he had definitely been around at the same time as Chief Hayward.

  Betsy, Derek and I paid him a visit. We found him tending a flower bed in front of his house. Seeing Betsy, his face lit up with a friendly smile.

  “Betsy,” he said, “what a pleasure! You’re the first of my colleagues to come calling.”

  “I’m sorry that this is more than a social visit,” Betsy said. “These two officers are from the State Police. You may remember them from the 1994 investigation. We’d like to talk to you about C
hief Hayward.”

  Sitting in his kitchen, where he insisted on offering us a homemade cookie, Erban told us he had no idea what had become of Kirk Hayward.

  “Could he be dead?” Betsy said.

  “I doubt it. How old would he be today? Around fifty-five.”

  “He disappeared in October 1994, soon after the murders of Mayor Gordon and his family were solved, is that right?”

  “That’s right. One day he was there, the next day he was gone. He left a strange letter of resignation. We never could figure it out.”

  “Was there an investigation?”

  “Not really,” Lewis said with a slightly shamefaced air.

  “How do you mean? Your police chief walks out on you and no-one tries to find out why?”

  “The truth of it is, everyone disliked him,” Erban said. “By the time he disappeared, he wasn’t really in control anymore. His deputy, Ron Gulliver, had taken over, more or less. We’d lost all patience with Hayward. We called him Chief Loner.”

  “Then why was he ever appointed chief?” Derek said.

  “Well, we liked him at first. He was charismatic and highly intelli-gent. A good commander, too. Crazy about the theater. You know what he did during his spare time? He wrote plays! He’d spend his vacations in New York, seeing all the plays that were on. He even put on a play with a student company from the University of Albany, and it was quite successful. Got talked about in the paper and everything. He had found himself a girlfriend, a student who was in the cast, a really pretty girl. He had the works. The guy had everything going for him.”

  “What went wrong?” Derek said.

  “His sudden fame didn’t last more than a year, if that. He wrote a second play. When the theater festival was created, he moved heaven and earth to get his play put on as the opening show, but Mayor Gordon said no. They had arguments about it. And, at about that time Hayward’s girlfriend left him, so his life took a turn for the worse . . .”

  “Was it because of his play that Hayward’s colleagues in the force turned against him?”

  “Yes and no,” Erban replied. “As I said, after his girlfriend broke up with him, he lost his way. In short, he was falling apart. There were rumors that he was spending his time following her around town rather than doing his job. You’re police officers, you know what it’s like. When there’s something wrong at the top it affects everyone. Hayward was still coming into the station, but for all intents and purposes we had no chief.”