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

by Joël Dicker

  “Do you think he could have killed the mayor?”

  Derek was not convinced. “It seems beyond belief that he would kill the mayor and his family, and a woman out jogging, over a play.”

  “Hayward was chief of police,” Betsy said. “Meghan would have recognized him coming out of the Gordon house and he would have had no choice but to kill her, too. It stands up.”

  “So on July 26,” Derek said, “before his play opens, Hayward is going to take the mike and say: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I was the man who slaughtered everyone.’”

  I laughed, imagining this scene. “Surely he isn’t lunatic enough to pull a stunt like that.”

  Derek studied the whiteboard. “We know now that the mayor’s money roughly corresponded to the many kickbacks paid by local businessmen, i.e., not by Ted Tennenbaum. But if his withdrawals were not intended for the mayor, I’d really like to know what Tennenbaum used that $500,000 for.”

  “There’s also the question of his van being out on the street around the time of the murders,” I said. “Our witness was in no doubt it was his van. Was Lambert able to confirm to you that Tennenbaum was absent from the Grand Theater at the time of the murders?”

  “Yes, Jesse, he did confirm it. But Tennenbaum was not the only one to have disappeared for half an hour. Believe it or not, Charlotte, who was one of the actors in the company, and who was also Hayward’s girlfriend—”

  “The beautiful girlfriend who left him?”

  “The very one. Well, according to Lambert she was gone from the theater from just before 7.00 until 7.30. And she came back with wet shoes.”

  “Wet like Mayor Gordon’s lawn?” I said.

  “Precisely,” Derek said with a smile, amused that I remembered that detail. “Wait, that’s not all. The same Charlotte left Hayward for Alan Brown. It was love at first sight and they ended up getting married. They still are.”

  “Damn!”

  I stared at the papers we had found in the self-storage facility. There was an airline ticket for Los Angeles and the words Find Kirk Hayward. Well, we’d done that. But had Hayward told her more than he told me? My gaze next came to rest on the clipping from the Chronicle, including the front-page photograph, circled in red, showing Derek and me staring down at the sheet covering Meghan Padalin, outside Mayor Gordon’s house, and, just behind us, Kirk Hayward and Alan Brown. They were looking at each other, maybe talking. I looked closer and noticed Brown’s hand. It seemed to be forming the number 3. Was it a sign for someone? For Hayward? Beneath the photograph, Stephanie’s words, in red pen: What nobody saw.

  “What is it?” Derek said.

  “What’s the link between Hayward and Brown?” I said.

  “Charlotte Carrell Brown.”

  “Charlotte Brown. I know at the time the experts said it must have been a man, but could they have been wrong? Could a woman have been the killer? Is that what we didn’t see in 1994?”

  Next we watched the video of the play. The image quality was not good, and the camera kept to the stage throughout, so the audience was not visible at all. But the recording started with the official part of the evening. We saw Deputy Mayor Alan Brown get up onstage, looking embarrassed, and approach the microphone. There’s a moment of hesitation. Brown seems to be hot. After a pause, he unfolds a sheet of paper that he has taken from his inside jacket pocket, which presumably contains hastily made notes. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “I’m speaking to you in the place of Mayor Gordon, who’s absent this evening. I admit I thought he would be among us, so unfortunately I haven’t had time to prepare a real speech. So I’ll limit myself to wishing a hearty welcome to . . .”

  “Stop!” Betsy shouted at Derek. He paused the cassette, and the image froze. “Look!” We could see Alan Brown, alone on the stage, his sheet of paper in his hands. Betsy stood up from her chair and went and took one of the images from the board, something else found in the self-storage facility. It was exactly the same scene: Brown, at the microphone, the sheet of paper in his hands, which Stephanie had circled in red felt-tip.

  “That image is from the video,” Betsy said.

  “Which means Stephanie saw this video,” I said. “Who got it for her?”

  Derek said, “Stephanie’s dead, but she’s still one step ahead of us. Why did she put a circle round that sheet of paper?”

  We listened to the speech, but it was of no interest. Had Stephanie circled the sheet of paper in Brown’s hand because of the speech or because of what was written on the paper?

  * * *

  Ostrovski was walking along Bendham Road. He could not reach Stephanie—her phone was still off. Had she changed numbers? Why wasn’t she answering?

  He decided to visit her at home. He counted the numbers of the houses, again checked the address, which he had written in a leather-bound notebook he always kept with him. He finally reached the building and stopped, aghast. It had been burned down and access was barred by police tape.

  At that moment, he spotted a police patrol car coming slowly up the street and he signaled to the officer at the wheel.

  Deputy Chief Montagne pulled up and lowered his window. “How can I help you, sir?”

  “What happened here?”

  “There was a fire. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m looking for someone who lives here. Her name’s Stephanie Mailer.”

  “Stephanie Mailer? She was murdered and her apartment was burned.”

  Ostrovski was struck dumb. Montagne got a radio call about an argument between a couple in the parking lot of the marina. He told the switchboard operator he would go straight there and switched on his flashing lights. A minute later, he got to the parking lot. In the middle of it, a black Porsche was parked, with both doors open, and a young girl was running toward the jetty, sluggishly pursued by a tall man old enough to be her father. Montagne sounded his siren. A flock of seagulls flew up and the couple froze. The girl looked amused.

  “Oh, terrific, Carolina!” Eden cried. “Now the police are here! This has got off to a good start!”

  “Orphea Police, don’t move,” Montagne said. “We got a call about a couple having an argument.”

  “A couple?” the man repeated as if astonished. “That’s just terrific! This is my daughter!”

  “Is this your father?” Montagne asked the girl.

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Manhattan.”

  Montagne checked their identities, then asked Carolina, “And why were you running like that?”

  “I was trying to run away.”

  “Run away from what?”

  “Life.”

  “Did your father assault you?”

  “Me, assault her?” Eden cried.

  “Please be quiet, sir,” Montagne said curtly. “I am talking to the young lady.”

  He took Carolina aside and asked her the question again. She started crying.

  “No, of course not. My father didn’t touch me,” she said between sobs.

  “Then why are you in this state?”

  “I’ve been in this state for a year.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, it’d take too long to explain.”

  Montagne did not insist and let them go.

  “Stop messing around!” Eden yelled as he slammed the door of his car. A few minutes later, they were at the Lake Palace, where Eden had booked a suite, and a procession of porters installed them in room 308.

  In the next suite, 310, Ostrovski sat on his bed, holding a picture frame in his hands. It was a photograph of a radiant young woman: Meghan Padalin. He gazed for a long time at the image, then whispered, “I’m going to discover who did that to you. I promise.” He kissed the glass.

  Meanwhile, in his hotel, Steven Bergdorf was deep in thought, a new gleam in his eyes. His instinct told him to stay a while in Orphea. He went out onto the balcony to telephone Skip Nalan, his deputy at the Review.

  “I’ll be away a
day or so longer,” he told him, and went on to describe what he had just witnessed. A former police chief who had become a theater director putting on his play in return for revelations about a twenty-year-old criminal case that everyone had assumed was over and done with. “I’m going to write an article from inside, everyone will be talking about it, I think we may even boost our sales.”

  “You think it’s for real?” Nalan said. “Take all the time you need.”

  “For real? It’s huge.”

  Bergdorf next called his wife and told her he would be away for a few more days for the reasons he had just given Nalan. After a moment’s silence, Tracy asked, in a worried voice:

  “Steven, what’s going on?”

  “This weird play, darling. I think we might just give the subscriptions a shot in the arm. God knows we need one.”

  “But a woman was murdered, Steven. I don’t want you getting mixed up in anything dangerous.”

  “I promise I’ll be careful. But I can’t let this opportunity pass by.”

  She sighed. “Do what you have to do. But keep in touch. I need to know you’re safe.”

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Saturday, July 12, 2014

  Fourteen days to opening night

  We had decided to give ourselves a break for the weekend. We needed to step back and take a breather. For the second week in succession, I spent Saturday in my kitchen, working on my sauce and my hamburgers.

  Derek took the opportunity to spend time with his family.

  As for Betsy, she could not get our case out of her mind. I think she was particularly troubled by Lambert’s revelations about Charlotte Brown. Where had Charlotte gone on opening night in 1994? And why? What was she hiding? Alan and Charlotte Brown had both been very friendly to Betsy when she had moved to Orphea. She had lost count of the number of times they had invited her to dinner, asked her out for long walks or boat rides. She had regularly had dinner with Charlotte, mostly at Café Athena, where they had spent hours chatting. Betsy had let her in on her problems with Chief Gulliver, and Charlotte had told her about her move to Orphea. At the time, she had just finished her studies. She had found a job with a grumpy vet who confined her to secretarial tasks and would put his hands on her buttocks and laugh.

  Betsy could absolutely not imagine Charlotte breaking into a house and shooting anyone dead.

  The previous day, after viewing the video, we had telephoned Lambert and asked him two questions: Did the members of the theater company have cars? And who else owned a copy of the video recording of the play?

  On the matter of cars, he was categorical: the whole company had come on the bus. Nobody had a car. As for the video, six hundred copies had been sold to the town’s inhabitants, from various outlets. “There were some in the stores on Main Street, groceries, gas stations. People thought it was a nice souvenir. Between the fall of 1994 and the following summer, they sold out.”

  So, Stephanie could easily have come by a secondhand copy—there was even a copy in the town’s public library. And the fact that Charlotte did not have a car meant that in the time she was absent on the night of the murders—approximately half an hour—she could not have gone far, only somewhere that was a thirty-minute round trip on foot from the Grand Theater. Derek, Betsy and I had concluded that if she had taken one of the town’s few taxis, or if she had asked someone to drive her to Penfield, the driver would surely have come forward after the tragic events.

  That morning, Betsy decided to take the opportunity of going for her usual jog to see how long it took her to get from the theater to Mayor Gordon’s house and back on foot. It turned out to be nearly forty-five minutes at normal walking pace. Charlotte had been absent for approximately half an hour. What was the margin of interpretation of the word approximately? Running, it took just twenty-five minutes. A fit runner could do it in twenty. For someone with unsuitable footwear, it would have to have been closer to thirty, thirty-five. So it was feasible. Charlotte would theoretically have had time to run to the Gordons’, kill them, and get back to the Grand Theater.

  As Betsy was thinking, sitting on a bench in the little park facing what had been Mayor Gordon’s house, she received a call from Michael Bird.

  “Betsy,” he said in a worried voice, “could you come over to the office right away? Something very strange has happened.”

  In his office, Bird told Betsy about the visit he had just had.

  “Meta Ostrovski, the literary critic, came here. He wanted to know what had happened to Stephanie. When I told him about the murder, he got into a terrible state. ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me?’ he shouted at me.”

  “What’s his connection with Stephanie?” Betsy said.

  “I don’t know. That’s why I called you. He started asking me all kinds of questions. He wanted to know everything. How she had died, why, what leads the police were following.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Just what everyone knows, what he can find in the papers.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he asked me for old issues of the Chronicle that mentioned Stephanie’s disappearance. I gave him what copies we still had. He insisted on paying for them. Then he left.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “He said he was going back to his hotel to study them. He’s staying at the Lake Palace.”

  After quickly going home and taking a shower, Betsy set off for the Lake Palace. She put a call through to Ostrovski’s room and he agreed to join her in the hotel bar.

  “I knew Stephanie from the New York Literary Review,” Ostrovski said. “She was a brilliant young woman, with an immense talent. Potentially a great writer.”

  “How did you know she’d moved to Orphea?”

  “After she left the paper, we kept in touch. A few exchanges.”

  “Weren’t you surprised that she had taken a job in a small town in the Hamptons?”

  “Now that I’m back here, I’d say it was an excellent choice. She said she wanted to write and this town was perfect for that, being so quiet.”

  “Quiet,” Betsy said. “Well, it’s hardly that right now. Tell me, this isn’t the first time you’ve been here, is it, Mr Ostrovski?”

  “You’re well informed, officer. I came here twenty years ago for the very first festival. There was an exceptional production of ‘Uncle Vanya’ and I liked the town.”

  “And you haven’t been back to the festival since 1994?”

  “No, never.”

  “Why come back now after twenty years?”

  “Mayor Brown was kind enough to invite me, and I thought: why not?”

  “Was this the first time you’ve been invited back since 1994?”

  “No. But this year I really felt like coming.”

  Betsy sensed that Ostrovski was not telling her the whole truth. “Mr Ostrovski, how about you stop treating me like a simpleton? I know you went to the offices of the Chronicle today and asked questions about Stephanie. The editor told me that you did not seem in a calm, normal state. What’s going on?”

  Ostrovski took offense at this. “What’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on, dammit. A young woman I had a great deal of respect for has been murdered! Forgive me if I find it hard to conceal my emotions when hearing of this tragedy.”

  His voice cracked. It was obvious he was at the end of his tether.

  “How come you didn’t know what had happened to Stephanie? Did no-one mention it at the Review? Surely that’s the kind of thing people talk about at the coffee machine?”

  “Maybe,” Ostrovski said, his voice almost breaking. “But I didn’t know, because I was fired from the Review. Thrown out! Humiliated! Treated like a nobody! Overnight that scoundrel Bergdorf fires me, chases me out with my things in cardboard boxes, I’m not allowed back into the office, my phone calls go unanswered. Me, the great Ostrovski, treated as if I were nothing. Just imagine, officer, there was only one person in this country who still treated me with kindne
ss, and that woman was Stephanie Mailer. Being on the verge of depression in New York, and unable to reach her, I decided to come see her in Orphea, thinking the mayor’s invitation was a blessed coincidence, maybe even a sign from fate. But once I got here and still couldn’t reach my friend, I decided to go to her apartment, and there a policeman informed me she had been murdered. Drowned in a muddy lake, it turns out, her body left to the insects, the worms, the birds, the leeches. That’s why I’m so upset and angry, officer.”

  There was a moment’s silence. He blew his nose, wiped away a tear, and breathed deeply to regain his composure.

  “I’m truly sorry for the death of your friend, Mr Ostrovski,” Betsy said.

  “Thank you, officer, for sharing my grief.”

  After her conversation with Ostrovski, Betsy went to Café Athena to have lunch. As she was about to sit down at a table, a voice hailed her:

  “You look good in plain clothes, Betsy.”

  Betsy turned. It was Sylvia Tennenbaum, who was smiling at her, apparently well disposed.

  “I didn’t know about your brother,” Betsy said. “I didn’t know what had happened to him.”

  “What difference does that make now?” Sylvia said. “Are you going to look at me any differently?”

  “I meant, I’m sorry. It must have been terrible for you. I like you and I feel sorry for you. That’s all.”

  Sylvia smiled sadly. “That’s kind of you. Will you allow me to join you for lunch, Betsy? It’s on me.”

  They sat at a table in the outside dining area, some distance from the other customers.

  “For a long time, I was the monster’s sister,” Sylvia said. “People here would have liked to see the back of me. They just wanted me to sell his restaurant and get out.”

  “Tell me about your brother.”

  “He was kind and generous, with a heart of gold. But too impulsive, too quarrelsome. That was his undoing. All his life, he spoiled things by being too quick with his fists. Even at school. As soon as there was a problem with another kid, he couldn’t avoid getting into a fight. He was forever getting expelled. Our father’s business was doing well, and he’d put us down for the best private schools in Manhattan, where we lived. My brother went through one school after another, and in the end had to have a tutor at home. Then he was accepted at Stanford. And he was expelled from there after a year because he got into a fight with a professor. A professor, can you imagine? When he got back to New York, he found a job. It lasted eight months, then he had a fight with one of his colleagues and was fired. We had a vacation home in Ridgesport, not very far from here, and my brother moved there. He found a job managing a restaurant. He really liked it, the restaurant was coming along well, but he got into bad company. After work, he’d hang around a disreputable bar. He was arrested for being drunk, for possessing marijuana. And then there was a really violent fight in a parking lot. Ted was sent to prison for six months. When he got out, he wanted to go back to the Hamptons, but not to Ridgesport. He said he wanted to draw a line under his past and start over again. That’s how he ended up in Orphea. Because he’d done time—even though it was a short sentence—he had a lot of trouble finding a job. Finally, the owner of the Lake Palace hired him as a bellboy. He was a model employee, he quickly climbed the ladder. He became concierge, then assistant manager. He played a part in local activities. He became a volunteer firefighter. Everything was going fine.”