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

by Joël Dicker

  “‘The Darkest Night’ is my play,” Hayward said. “Are you dumb or something?”

  “I’m talking about 1994. What did ‘The Darkest Night’ mean then?”

  “In 1994 it was also my play. Well, not the same play. I had to rewrite everything because of that idiot Gordon. But I kept the same title because I thought it was a good one.”

  “Don’t bullshit us,” I said, losing it. “There are a whole bunch of things connected with ‘The Darkest Night’, which you know full well because you were police chief at the time. There was the graffiti that appeared all across town, then the fire at what was going to be Café Athena. It was like a countdown to Gordon’s death.”

  “You’re crazy!” Hayward cried in exasperation. “That was all me! It was a way of drawing attention to my play! When all those things started, I was sure I’d be able to put on ‘The Darkest Night’ as the opening event of the festival. I thought that when people made a connection between the graffiti and the announcement of my play, it would generate interest.”

  “So you set fire to the Café Athena site?” Derek said.

  “Of course not! I was called to the fire scene and I stayed there until the middle of the night, until the firefighters managed to put out the fire. I took advantage of a time when people were busy elsewhere to go into the ruins and write ‘The Darkest Night’ on the walls. It was a heaven-sent opportunity. When morning came and the firefighters saw it, it made quite an impression. It wasn’t a countdown to Gordon’s death, it was a countdown to the opening night of the festival. I was absolutely sure I’d be chosen as the opening night attraction and that July 30 would mark the coming of ‘The Darkest Night’, the sensational play by the dramatist Kirk Hayward.”

  Just then, we heard a noise coming from the auditorium. The latest batch of auditioners was arriving. I let him go.

  “You never saw us here, Kirk,” Derek said. “Is that clear? It had better be.”

  Hayward did not reply. He straightened his shirt and went back onstage, and we went out through the emergency exit.

  In the auditorium the first person to come forward was none other than Samuel Padalin, who had come to exorcise his ghosts and pay tribute to his dead wife. Hayward chose him immediately, because he felt sorry for him.

  “Oh, my poor friend, if only you knew. I picked your poor wife from the sidewalk, all smashed up. A little piece here, a little piece there!”

  “I know,” Padalin said. “I was there, too.”

  Then, to Hayward’s amazement, Charlotte Brown walked up onstage. He was really touched to see her. He had long dreamed of this moment. He would have liked to act hard, to put her down in front of everyone as she had humiliated him by dumping him for Brown, but he could not. It took just one glance to see the magnetism that emanated from her. She was a born actress.

  “You haven’t changed,” he said.

  She smiled. “Thank you, Kirk. Neither have you.”

  He shrugged. “Oh, I’ve turned into a crazy old man. You really want to go back on the stage?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Then you’re hired.”

  He added her name to his list.

  * * *

  The fact that Hayward was behind the whole “Darkest Night” business made him in our eyes even more of a fanatic. But it was Brown who intrigued us. Why had Stephanie stuck up on the wall of her cubicle at the self-storage facility an image of him making his speech on the opening night of the 1994 festival?

  In Betsy’s office, we looked at the video extract again. What Brown had to say was quite banal. What else could there be? Derek suggested sending the cassette to the police experts to have the sequence analyzed. Then he stood up and looked at the whiteboard. He erased the words The Darkest Night. That mystery had been solved.

  “I still can’t believe it was just the title of the play that Hayward wanted to drum up publicity for,” Betsy sighed. “When I think of all the theories we concocted!”

  “Sometimes the solution is right there in front of our eyes,” Derek said, smiling.

  Just then, my phone rang. It was Connors, from the gas station.

  “I know who he is,” he said.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The guy who was doing his own investigation the year after the murders. I just saw his photograph in today’s Chronicle. He’s going to act in the play. His name’s Ostrovski.”

  * * *

  At the Grand Theater, Jerry and Carolina Eden got up onstage to audition.

  Hayward looked Eden up and down.

  “What’s your name and where are you from?” he asked sternly.

  “My name is Jerry Eden, and I’m from New York. It was Judge Cooperstein who—”

  Hayward interrupted him. “You came from New York to be in my play?”

  “I need to spend time with my daughter Carolina, to experience something new with her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I feel I’m losing her, and I’d like to find her again, since you ask.”

  There was a silence. Hayward considered Eden for a moment and decreed, “I like that. The father’s hired. Let’s see how good the daughter is. Come into the light, please.”

  Carolina stepped into the spotlight. Hayward gave a start. There was an extraordinary strength emanating from her. She threw him an intense look, almost too strong to be sustained. Hayward grabbed the script of the scene from the table and stood up to take it to Carolina, but she said:

  “No need, I’ve been listening to this scene for the last three hours, I know it by heart.”

  She closed her eyes and stayed like that for a moment. All the other auditionees could not take their eyes off her, struck by her magnetism. Hayward was speechless.

  Carolina opened her eyes and declaimed:

  It is a gloomy morning. Rain is falling. On a country road, the traffic is paralyzed. A vast bottleneck has formed. The motorists, at the ends of their tethers, blow their horns angrily. A young woman walks along the side of the road, past the line of motionless cars. She approaches the police cordon and questions the officer on duty.

  Then she lifted the collar of the coat she wasn’t wearing, jumped to avoid an imaginary puddle, and ran toward Hayward as if to avoid the drops of rain falling on her.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  Hayward gazed at her spellbound and said nothing. She repeated, “Well, officer, what’s going on here?”

  Hayward, getting a grip on himself, gave her the next line:

  “A man is dead. There’s been a terrible motorcycle accident.”

  He stared for a moment at Carolina, then, with a triumphant look on his face, cried:

  “We have all the actors we need! Tomorrow, first thing, rehearsals can begin.”

  The audience applauded. Mayor Brown heaved a deep sigh of relief.

  “You’re amazing,” Hayward said to Carolina. “Have you ever had acting classes?”

  “No, never, Mr Hayward.”

  “You’re going to play the main role!”

  They looked at each other again with fierce intensity.

  “Have you ever killed anyone, child?” Hayward said.

  She turned pale and started shaking. “How . . . How did you know?” she stammered.

  “It’s written in your eyes. I’ve never seen such a dark soul. It’s fascinating.”

  Carolina was unable to hold back the tears.

  “It’s alright, my dear,” Hayward said gently. “You’re going to be a great star.”

  * * *

  It was almost 10.30. Sitting in her car outside Café Athena, Betsy was watching the interior of the restaurant. Ostrovski had just paid his check. As he stood up, she said into her radio:

  “Ostrovski’s on his way out.”

  Derek and I, waiting in the outdoor seating area, intercepted the critic as he was leaving the establishment.

  “Mr Ostrovski,” I said, pointing to the police car parked below, “if you wouldn’t mind coming wi
th us, we have some questions to ask you.”

  Ten minutes later, Ostrovski was sitting in Betsy’s office in the station, drinking coffee.

  “It’s true,” he admitted, “I was fascinated by the case. I’d covered theater festivals before, but never had a series of murders take place on opening night. Like any slightly curious human being, I was eager to get to the bottom of the story.”

  “According to the gas station attendant,” Derek said, “you returned to Orphea several times the following year. But by then, the case was over and done with.”

  “From what I gathered, the murderer had died before he could confess, although the police were persuaded of his guilt. I admit at the time it excited me. And without a confession, I felt there was something missing.”

  Derek gave me a circumspect look.

  “So,” Ostrovski went on, “taking advantage of the fact that I regularly come to this wonderful region of the Hamptons to relax, I passed through Orphea from time to time and asked one or two questions here and there.”

  “How did you know the gas station attendant had seen something?”

  “Pure chance. I stopped for gas one day. We had a chat. He told me what he had seen and that he had informed the police, but that his testimony had apparently not been considered relevant. As for me, over time, my curiosity faded.”

  “Is that all?” I said.

  “That’s all, Captain Rosenberg. I’m really sorry I can’t help you more than that.”

  I thanked Ostrovski for his cooperation and offered to drive him somewhere.

  “That’s kind of you, Captain, but I feel like walking a little and enjoying this wonderful night.”

  He stood up and said goodbye. But as he was going through the door, he turned and said:

  “A critic.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your little riddle up there on the board,” Ostrovski said proudly. “I’ve been looking at it for a while. And I’ve just understood. Who would like to write, but can’t? Your answer is: a critic.”

  He gave us a farewell nod of the head and left the room.

  “It’s him!” I cried to Betsy and Derek, who didn’t catch on immediately. “The one who would like to write but can’t, and who was in the Grand Theater on the evening of the murders. It’s Ostrovski! He’s the man behind Stephanie’s book!”

  A few moments later, Ostrovski was in the interrogation room, for a much less pleasant conversation than the previous one.

  “We know everything, Ostrovski,” Derek said angrily. “For the last twenty years, you’ve been putting an ad in the fall issues of college magazines in the New York area, trying to find someone to write a book investigating the Gordon murders.”

  “Why that ad?” I said.

  Ostrovski looked at me as if it was blindingly obvious. “Come on now, Captain. Can you imagine a great literary critic lowering himself to write a mystery novel? Can you imagine what people would say?”

  “Where’s the problem?”

  “In the order of respect granted to literary genres, at the top there is the incomprehensible novel, then the intellectual novel, then the historical novel, then the straight novel, and only after that, almost at the bottom of the list, just above the romantic novel, there’s the mystery novel.”

  “Is this a joke?” Derek said.

  “No, of course not! No, that’s just the problem. Ever since those murders, I’ve been held captive by a brilliant mystery plot, but I can’t write it.”

  * * *

  Orphea, July 30, 1994

  The night of the murders

  When the performance of “Uncle Vanya” was over, Ostrovski left the auditorium. A decent production, good acting. Since the intermission, he had heard people in his row getting agitated. Some of the audience had not returned for the second act. He only discovered the reason for that when he walked through the lobby, which was in a state of feverish excitement. Everyone was talking about a murder that had been com-mitted in the town.

  From the steps of the building, looking down at the street, he observed the crowd heading in a continuous stream in the same direction: toward the Penfield neighborhood. Everyone wanted to see what had happened there. The atmosphere was electric, with a hint of frenzy. The human torrent reminded him of the tide of rats in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. As a critic, when everyone rushed somewhere, that was precisely where he did not go. He did not like what was fashionable, jeered at what was popular, loathed anything that aroused general enthusiasm. And yet, fascinated by the atmosphere, he felt a desire to let himself be carried along with it. He realized it was morbid curiosity. He threw himself into the human river plunging down Main Street and converging from the adjacent streets into a quiet residential neighborhood. Ostrovski, walking at a good pace, soon came to Penfield Crescent. There were many police cars there. The walls of the houses were illumined by the revolving blue and red lights. Ostrovski made his way through the crowd massed against the police barriers. The air on this tropical summer night was stifling. People were excited, nervous, anxious. They were saying it was the mayor’s house. They said the mayor had been murdered. Along with his wife and son.

  Ostrovski stayed in Penfield Crescent for a long time, fascinated by what he was seeing. The real spectacle of the evening had not after all taken place at the Grand Theater, but here. Who had killed the mayor, and why? He was devoured by curiosity. He started constructing theories.

  Once back at his hotel, he went to the bar. Late as it was, he was too exhilarated to sleep. What was going on? Why was he so fascinated by an everyday news item? Suddenly, he understood. He asked for paper and a pen. For the first time in his life, he had the plot of a book in his head. The idea was a special one: while the whole town is busy with the opening of a theater festival, a killing occurs. It was like a magic trick: the public looks to the left while everything is happening on the right. Ostrovski even wrote in capital letters the words the conjuring trick. That was the title! First thing tomorrow, he would make haste to the bookstore and buy all the mystery novels they had in stock. That was when he suddenly stopped, grasping the terrible reality. If he published that book, everyone would say it was a work of an inferior genre: a mystery novel. His reputation would never recover.

  * * *

  “So I could never write the book,” Ostrovski was saying in the interrogation room of the police station. “I dreamed about it, thought about it incessantly. I wanted to read that story, but I could not write it. Not a crime story, a mystery novel. It was too risky.”

  “So you decided to hire someone else?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t ask an established author. Just imagine, he could have blackmailed me by threatening to reveal my secret fascination with a mystery plot. It seemed to me that hiring a student would be less risky. And that was how I came across Stephanie Mailer. I knew her from the Review. Stephanie was an exceptional writer, a pure talent. She agreed to write the book. She said she had been looking for a good subject for years. It was the happiest meeting of minds.”

  “Did you keep in contact with Stephanie?”

  “At first, yes. She came regularly to the city. We’d meet in the coffee shop near the Review. She’d keep me up to date with her progress and sometimes read me passages. But when she was busy with her research, she would not get in touch for a while. That’s why I wasn’t worried last week when I couldn’t reach her. I had given her free rein, and $30,000 in cash for her expenses. I was glad to let her have the money and the fame, I only wanted to know how the story worked out.”

  “Because you had reason to think Tennenbaum did not commit the murders?”

  “I followed the developments in the case closely. I knew a witness had stated that Tennenbaum’s van had been outside the mayor’s house. From the description I was given of it, I knew I had seen that same van pass the Grand Theater just before seven on the evening of the murders. I had arrived at the theater much too early, and it was boiling hot inside. I went outside for a smoke.
To avoid the crowd, I went into the street at the side of the theater, which is a dead-end street leading to the stage door. That was when I saw that black vehicle drive by. It attracted my attention because there was a strange drawing on the rear window. It was Tennenbaum’s van, the one everybody talked about afterward.”

  “But that night you saw who the driver was, and it wasn’t Tennenbaum?”

  “Yes,” Ostrovski said.

  “Who was it, Mr Ostrovski?” Derek said.

  “It was Charlotte Brown, the mayor’s wife. She was the one driving Tennenbaum’s van.”

  -2

  Rehearsals

  THURSDAY, JULY 17 – SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2014

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Thursday, July 17, 2014

  Nine days to opening night

  Charlotte Brown’s veterinary clinic was located in the industrial quarter of Orphea, close to two large shopping malls. As she did every morning, she got to the almost deserted parking lot at 7.30 and parked in the place reserved for her in front of the clinic. She got out of the car, a coffee in her hand. She seemed to be in a good mood. She was so lost in thought that, even though I was only a few paces from her, she did not notice me until I said:

  “Good morning, Mrs Brown. I’m Captain Rosenberg, State Police.”

  She gave a start and rolled her eyes. “You scared me,” she said with a smile. “But yes, I know who you are.”

  Then she saw Betsy, who was standing behind me, leaning against her patrol car.

  “Betsy?” Charlotte said in surprise, and suddenly panicked. “Oh, my God, has Alan . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs Brown,” I said, “your husband’s fine. But we need to ask you a few questions.”

  Betsy opened the rear door of her car.

  “I don’t understand,” Charlotte Brown said.

  “You will soon,” I said.

  We drove her to the police station, where we allowed her to telephone her clinic to cancel her appointments for the morning, then a lawyer as she was allowed by right. Rather than a lawyer, she preferred to call her husband, who came in a great hurry. But even though he was mayor of the town, Alan Brown could not sit in on his wife’s interrogation. He caused a scene until Chief Gulliver said, “Alan, they’re doing you a favor by questioning Charlotte here, quickly and discreetly, rather than dragging her to the troop headquarters of the State Police.”