by Joël Dicker
“If there’s no firework display on Friday night, I might as well close down,” protested a bald little man who ran a Mexican food stand. “It’s my biggest night of the season.”
“I spent a lot of money renting a spot at the marina and hiring staff,” another said. “Will the council reimburse me if the fireworks are canceled?”
“What happened to the Mailer girl is terrible, but why should that affect the Fourth of July? Thousands of people come to the marina to see the fireworks. They get there early, they go shopping on Main Street, then eat in the town’s restaurants. If it doesn’t go ahead, people won’t come at all!”
The demonstration was peaceful. Betsy decided to see Mayor Brown in his office on the third floor. She found him standing looking out of the window. He waved to her, still looking out at the demonstrators.
“The joys of politics, Betsy,” he said. “With this murder shaking the town, if I let the celebrations go ahead I’m heartless, and if I cancel them, I’m reckless and driving everyone to ruin.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“People here really like you, Alan,” Betsy said.
“Unfortunately, there’s a good chance I won’t be re-elected in September. Orphea isn’t the town it used to be and the inhabitants are demanding change. I need a coffee. You want a coffee?”
“I’d love one,” she said. She thought the mayor was going to ask his assistant to bring them two coffees, but he drew her out into the corridor, at the end of which stood a hot drinks dispenser. He put a coin in the machine and a blackish liquid ran down into a paper cup.
Brown was a fine figure of a man, with deep eyes and an actor’s good looks. He was always dressed to the nines, and his salt-and-pepper hair was impeccably groomed. When the first coffee was ready, he handed it to Betsy, then repeated the operation.
“And if you aren’t re-elected,” Betsy said after taking a sip of the awful coffee, “would that be so terrible?”
“Betsy, you know what I liked most about you the first time I saw you at the marina last summer?”
“No . . .”
“We share strong ideals, similar ambitions for our society. You could have made a terrific career for yourself in the N.Y.P.D. I could long ago have yielded to the siren call of politics and stood for the Senate or the House. But when it comes down to it, that’s not what we’re interested in, because what we can achieve here in Orphea we’d never be able to achieve in New York, Washington, or L.A., in other words, the idea of a fair town, a society that works, without too many inequalities. When Mayor Gordon asked me to become his deputy, in 1992, there was a lot that needed doing. This town was like a blank page. I’ve been able to mold it more or less to my beliefs, always trying to think of what was right, what was the best for the good of our community. Since I’ve been mayor, people’s standard of living has improved, they’ve seen their daily lives get better thanks to top-quality services, better social services, and all that without any tax hikes.”
“So why do you think the citizens of Orphea won’t re-elect you this year?”
“Because time has passed and they’ve forgotten. Almost a whole generation has been and gone since my first term. Today, people’s demands have changed because they take everything for granted. Now that Orphea is prosperous, people’s appetites are keener, and there’s a whole bunch of ambitious young people greedy for a little power who can easily see themselves as mayor. The next election may mark the end of this town. My successor’s selfish hunger for power could well ruin it.”
“Your successor? Who will that be?”
“I have no idea yet. He’ll come out of the woodwork, you’ll see. People have until the end of the month to announce their candidacy.”
Mayor Brown had an impressive ability to get back in the saddle. Betsy realized that when the two of them went to see Stephanie’s parents in Sag Harbor late that afternoon.
Outside the Mailers’ house, protected by a police presence, the atmosphere was electric. A crowd had gathered on the street. Some were bystanders attracted by all the excitement, but others wanted to demonstrate their support for the family. Many among those present were holding candles. A makeshift altar had been set up against a lamppost, around which flowers, messages, and cuddly toys were strewn. Some people were singing, others praying, others taking photographs. There were reporters, too, and part of the sidewalk had been invaded by the vans of the local T.V. channels. Immediately Mayor Brown appeared, the reporters rushed up to him and asked him about the cancellation of the fireworks. Betsy tried to push them aside to let him get by without having to reply, but he restrained her. He wanted to speak to the media. Whereas earlier, in his office, he had seemed cornered, now he was bristling with self-confidence.
“I’ve listened to the town’s tradespeople,” he declared. “I understand their anxieties, and I’m well aware that canceling the Fourth of July celebrations could endanger the local economy, which is certainly fragile. So, having consulted my council, I have decided to go ahead with the fireworks and to dedicate them to the memory of Stephanie Mailer.” Pleased with the effect the annoucement had created, the mayor took no more questions.
That evening, after dropping Brown at his house, Betsy stopped in the marina parking lot, facing the ocean. It was eight o’clock. The delightful warmth of the evening invaded the car. She had no desire to be home on her own, still less to have dinner alone in a restaurant.
She phoned her friend Lauren, but Lauren was in New York.
“I don’t get it, Betsy,” she said. “When we have dinner together you take off at the first opportunity, and when I’m in New York you call and suggest we have dinner.”
Betsy was in no mood to get into a debate. She hung up and went and bought a take-out meal from a snack bar at the marina. Then she went to her office at the station and ate her meal while gazing at the board where the elements of the investigation were displayed. As she was staring at the name Kirk Hayward, she thought again about what Lewis Erban had said the previous day—how the former police chief had been forced to move down to the basement. She remembered the storeroom, and decided to go down there. As she opened the door, she was seized with a strange feeling of unease. She could imagine Chief Hayward, in this very place, twenty years earlier.
Since the light did not work, she had to switch on her torch. The space was cluttered with chairs, filing cabinets, rickety tables, and cardboard boxes. She made her way through this graveyard of furniture until she came to a desk in lacquered wood, dust-covered and strewn with various objects, among which she noticed a metal stand engraved with the name Chief K. Hayward. She opened the four drawers. Three were empty, the fourth resisted. It was locked. She found a narrow crowbar in the workshop next door and prised open the lock, which yielded easily. Inside, there was a single yellowing sheet of paper bearing the handwritten words:
The Darkest Night
BETSY KANNER
There’s nothing I like more than patrolling at night in Orphea.
There’s nothing I like more than the quiet streets of the town bathed in the warmth of summer nights, the navy blue sky strewn with stars. Driving slowly through peacefully sleeping neighborhoods where all the shutters are closed. Passing a lone walker who can’t sleep or happy townspeople who are taking advantage of these night hours to sit out on their porches and who give you a friendly wave as you pass.
There’s nothing I like more than the streets downtown on winter nights, when suddenly it starts snowing and the ground is soon covered in a layer of white powder. That moment when you’re the only person awake, when the snowplows have not yet gone to work, and when you’re the first to make a mark in the virgin snow. Getting out of the car, patrolling on foot in the park, hearing the snow creak beneath your boots, happily filling your lungs with that dry, invigoratingly cold air.
There’s nothing I like more than catching sight of a fox walking all the way up Main Street in the early hours of the morning.
There’s
nothing I like more than sunrise, in all seasons, over the marina. Seeing the inky horizon tinged with bright pink, then orange, and seeing that ball of fire rise slowly above the waves.
I moved to Orphea just a few months after signing my divorce papers.
I got married too early, to a wonderful man who wasn’t the right one for me. I think I got married too early because of my father.
I have always had a very strong, very close relationship with my father. He and I have been like two fingers of the same hand since my early childhood. Whatever my father did, I wanted to do. Whatever my father said, I repeated. Wherever he went, I followed.
My father loves tennis. I played tennis, too, in the same club as him. On Sundays we often played each other, and, as the years passed, the closer our games became.
My father loves playing Scrabble. By the greatest of coincidences I, too, love the game. For a long time we spent our winter vacations skiing in Whistler, British Columbia. Every evening after dinner, we would settle down in the main room of our hotel and play a game of Scrabble, scrupulously noting down, game after game, who had won and by how many points.
My father is a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, and it was quite natural—I didn’t even question it—that I should also study law at Harvard. I always believed it was what I wanted.
My father was very proud of me. At tennis, at Scrabble, at Harvard. In every situation. He never wearied of being congratulated about me. More than anything he loved it when people told him how beautiful and intelligent I was. I know how proud he was to see all eyes turn toward me whenever I arrived somewhere, at a party we went to together, on the tennis courts, or in the public rooms of our hotel in Whistler. But at the same time, my father could never stand any of my boyfriends. Not one of the boys I date from the age of sixteen or seventeen was, as far as my father was concerned, respectable enough, good enough, handsome enough, or intelligent enough for me.
“Come on now, Betsy,” he would say, “you can do better than that!”
“I like him, Daddy, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?”
“But can you imagine yourself married to him?”
“Daddy, I’m seventeen! I’m not thinking about that yet!”
The longer the relationship lasted, the more impatient my father’s campaign of obstruction. It was never head-on, but it was insidious. Whenever he could, through a detail he mentioned, an observation he slipped in, he would demolish, slowly but surely, the image I had of my boyfriend of the moment. I would invariably break up with him in the end, sure that the breakup was initiated by me—at least that’s what I wanted to think. And the worst of it was that, with each of these new relationships, my father would say: “You know, the last one was a really nice boy—it’s a pity you broke up—but this one, well, I really don’t know what you see in him.” And each time, I was taken in. But was I really taken in to the point that my father could cause my breakups without my knowing it? Or wasn’t it rather that I was the one who broke up, not for specific reasons, but simply because I couldn’t make up my mind to love a man my father disapproved of?
After graduating from Harvard and passing the New York bar exams, I became a lawyer in my father’s firm. That lasted a year, at the end of which I discovered that the law, sublime as it might be in principle, was a machine that took a lot of time and money to keep going, over-burdened with rules and procedures, from which, when it came down to it, even the victors did not emerge unscathed. I soon acquired the belief that justice might be better served if I could apply it earlier in the process and that working on the streets would have more impact. I enrolled in the N.Y.P.D.’s Police Academy, to the dismay of my parents, especially my father, who wasn’t pleased about my leaving his firm, but liked to believe that this was just a passing fancy, that I wasn’t giving up on the law and might drop out of my course halfway. I left the Academy a year later, valedictorian of my year, praised by all my instructors, and I became a detective in the 55th precinct.
I immediately loved the job, especially for all those tiny everyday victories that made me aware that, faced with the fury of life, a good police officer could actually fix things.
The place I had left free in my father’s firm was offered to an experienced lawyer, Mark, who was a few years older than me.
The first time I heard about Mark was at a family dinner. My father was in awe of him. “A brilliant, gifted, handsome man,” he said. “He has it all. He even plays tennis.” Then suddenly he said something else—words I heard uttered for the first time in my life: “I’m sure you’d like him. I’d like you to meet him.”
I was at a time in my life when I really did want to meet someone. But the encounters that I had never ended up being anything serious. After police academy, my relationships lasted no longer than a first dinner or a first excursion with third parties. Learning I was with the police—a detective, no less—people became fascinated and bombarded me with questions. I monopolized all the attention despite myself, captured all the light. And often the relationship ended with words along the lines of: “It’s hard to be with you, Betsy, people are only interested in you, I have the feeling I don’t exist. I think I need to be with someone who leaves me more space.”
I met the famous Mark one afternoon when I went to see my father in his office, and I was pleased to discover that he didn’t suffer from those complexes. With his natural charm, he was always the center of attention and had no problem engaging in conversation. He knew everything about everything, could do almost everything, and when he couldn’t, he admired those who could. I looked at him as I had never looked at anybody before, perhaps because my father looked at him with such obvious admiration. Mark was his blue-eyed boy, and they even started playing tennis together. My father went into ecstasies every time he talked to me about him.
Mark invited me for a coffee. The chemistry was immediate, perfect, a swift current of mad energy. After the third coffee, we went to bed together. Neither he nor I mentioned our meetups to my father, but one evening, when we were having dinner, he said to me:
“I’d really like things to become more serious between us . . .”
“But . . . ?” I said apprehensively.
“I know how much your father admires you, Betsy. He’s placed the bar very high. I don’t know if he likes me enough.”
When I reported these words to my father, he loved Mark even more, if that was possible. He called him to his office and opened a bottle of champagne.
When Mark told me about this, I couldn’t stop giggling for several minutes. I grabbed a glass, raised it in the air and, imitating my father’s deep voice and paternalistic gestures, declared, “To the man who’s fucking my daughter!”
That was the beginning of a passionate affair between Mark and me, which turned into a genuinely romantic relationship in the best sense of the word. We turned a first real corner when we had dinner with my parents. And for the first time, in contrast to the last fifteen years, my father was radiant, affable and considerate with a man I was with. Having dismissed all the previous ones, now he was in a state of awe.
“What a guy!” my father said to me on the telephone the day after the dinner.
“He’s amazing!” my mother said in the background.
My father had the nerve to add, “Try not to scare him away, like you did with the others!”
“Yes, this one’s precious,” my mother said.
The celebration of our first year together coincided with the traditional skiing vacation. My father suggested we go to Whistler together and Mark gladly accepted.
“If you can survive five evenings in a row with my father, especially the Scrabble contests, you’ll deserve a medal.”
Not only did he survive, he won three times. Added to that, he skied like a god. The last evening, as we were having dinner in a restaurant, a customer at the next table suddenly had a heart attack. Mark called Emergency, then gave first aid to the victim.
The man’s life was saved and he was ta
ken to the hospital. While the paramedics were taking him away on a stretcher, the doctor who was with them shook Mark’s hand admiringly. “You saved that man, sir. You’re a hero.” The whole restaurant applauded him and the owner wouldn’t allow us to pay for our dinner.
My father mentioned this in his speech at our wedding, a year and a half later, as an example of how exceptional Mark was. I was radiant, unable to take my eyes off my husband.
Our marriage would last less than a year.
JESSE ROSENBERG
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Twenty-three days to opening night
Front page of the Orphea Chronicle:
IS THERE A CONNECTION BETWEEN
THE MURDER OF STEPHANIE MAILER
AND THE THEATER FESTIVAL?
The murder of Stephanie Mailer, a young reporter on the Orphea Chronicle whose body was found in Stag Lake, has left the town reeling. There is a great deal of anxiety among townspeople, putting the council under pressure just as the summer season is getting underway. Is a killer at large among us?
A note found in Ms Mailer’s car mentioning the Orphea Theater Festival suggests she may have paid with her life for the investigation she was conducting for this newspaper into the murder in 1994 of Mayor Gordon, founder of the festival.
Betsy showed the newspaper to Derek and me when we met up that morning at troop headquarters.
“That was all we needed!” Derek said.
“It was stupid of me to mention that note to Bird,” I said. “I saw him at Café Athena before coming here, I think he’s taking Stephanie’s death quite badly. He says he feels partly responsible. So what does the forensic analysis show?”