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

by Joël Dicker

  “It’s the sign!” a woman suddenly cried out.

  “What sign?” a young man asked.

  “It’s ‘The Darkest Night’!” the woman screamed.

  Derek, Betsy and I looked at each other in astonishment, while at the mention of those words Café Athena came alive with a loud, anxious murmur. Springfield struggled to regain control of the gathering. When silence was finally restored he suggested they take a vote.

  “Who among you is in favor of an all-out strike until Stephanie’s murderer is arrested?” he said.

  A forest of hands went up. Almost all the volunteers.

  “An all-out strike has been approved,” Springfield announced, “until Stephanie Mailer’s murderer is arrested and our safety is guaranteed.”

  The session having been brought to an end, the crowd trooped noisily out of the establishment and into the hot late-afternoon sun. Derek hurried to catch up with the woman who had mentioned “The Darkest Night”.

  “What is ‘The Darkest Night’?” he asked her.

  She stared at him fearfully. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, showing her his badge. “I’m with the State Police.”

  “‘The Darkest Night’ is the worst thing that can happen. It’s already happened once and it’ll happen again.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Don’t you know anything? Summer 1994, the summer of ‘The Darkest Night’!”

  “You mean the murders?”

  She nodded nervously. “Those murders were ‘The Darkest Night’! And it’s going to happen again this summer! Get away from here, leave before it comes back and hits the town. This festival is cursed!”

  She hurried away from the restaurant and disappeared along with the last volunteers, leaving Café Athena all but empty. Derek came back to our table. The only other person left inside was Mayor Brown.

  “That woman seemed really scared about ‘The Darkest Night’,” I said to the mayor.

  He shrugged. “Don’t take any notice of her, Captain Rosenberg. ‘The Darkest Night’ is nothing but a silly legend. That woman has a screw loose.”

  Mayor Brown now also left. Massachusetts hurried to our table to pour more coffee into our cups, even though we had barely touched them. I understood that it was just an excuse to talk to us.

  “The mayor didn’t tell you the truth,” he said. “‘The Darkest Night’ is more than an urban legend. A lot of people here believe in it and see it as a prediction that came true already in 1994.”

  “What kind of prediction?” Derek said.

  “That on a certain day, because of a play, there’ll be chaos in this town for one whole night—the famous ‘Darkest Night’.”

  “Is that what happened in 1994?” I said.

  “I do remember that just after Mayor Gordon announced there was going to be a theater festival here, strange things started happening.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Massachusetts couldn’t tell us more because right then the owner of Café Athena walked in. I immediately recognized her as Ted Tennenbaum’s sister Sylvia. She must have been sixty, but she had barely changed physically since 1994. She was still the sophisticated woman I had met in the course of the investigation. When she saw us, she was unable to hold back an expression of dismay.

  “They told me you were back in town,” she said, her voice hard.

  “Hello, Ms Tennenbaum,” I said. “I didn’t know you took over this place.”

  “Somebody had to do it, after you killed my brother.”

  “We didn’t kill your brother,” Derek said.

  “You’re not welcome here. Pay and get out.”

  “Alright,” I said. “We didn’t come here looking for trouble.”

  We asked Massachusetts for the check, which he brought in no time at all. At the bottom of the receipt, he had written in ballpoint:

  Check out what happened on the night of February 11, 1994.

  *

  “I hadn’t made the connection between Sylvia and Ted Tennenbaum,” Betsy said once we were out of Café Athena. “What happened to her brother?”

  Neither Derek nor I wanted to talk about it. There was a silence, and then Derek changed the subject.

  “Let’s start by clearing up this business of ‘The Darkest Night’ and this note from Massachusetts.”

  There was one person who could certainly help us with that: Michael Bird. We went straight to the offices of the Chronicle. Seeing us walk into his office, Bird asked:

  “Have you come because of today’s front page?”

  “No,” I said, “but since you mention it I’d certainly like to know why you did that. When I told you about the note found in Stephanie’s car, it was part of a friendly conversation. I had no wish for it to end up on the front page of your newspaper.”

  “Stephanie was a very brave woman and an exceptional reporter,” Bird said. “I’d hate to think she might have died in vain. Everyone should know what work she was doing.”

  “Which means the best way to pay tribute to her is to finish her investigation, not spread panic in the town by revealing the leads she was following.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain. I feel like I should have protected Stephanie and I failed. I wish I could turn the clock back. And to think I believed that damned text message! That was why I told you a week ago that there was no reason to worry.”

  “You weren’t to know. Don’t torture yourself needlessly. In any case, she was already dead by then. There was nothing more we could have done.”

  Bird collapsed onto his chair.

  “But you can still help us find whoever did it,” I said.

  “I’m at your disposal.”

  “Stephanie was intrigued by a phrase we’re finding it hard to make sense of: ‘The Darkest Night’.”

  He gave an amused smile. “I saw those words on the note you showed me, and I, too, was intrigued. So I did a bit of research in the archives.”

  He took a file from his drawer and passed it over his desk. Inside was a series of articles that had appeared between the fall of 1993 and the summer of 1994, reporting the appearance of graffiti as disturbing as it was mysterious. First on the wall of the post office—Coming soon: The Darkest Night—then all across town.

  One night in November 1993, a note was slipped inside the windshield wipers of some hundreds of cars, saying: The Darkest Night is coming.

  In January 1994, on the front door of the town hall, the start of a countdown: In six months: The Darkest Night.

  In February 1994, after someone had set fire to a disused building on Main Street, the firefighters discovered more graffiti: The Darkest Night will be here soon.

  And so on until the beginning of June 1994, when it was the turn of the Grand Theater to have its facade vandalized: The theater festival will be starting soon. So will The Darkest Night.

  “So ‘The Darkest Night’ did have a connection with the festival,” Derek said.

  “The police never did find out who was responsible for the graffiti,” Bird said.

  I resumed: “Betsy found those same words in police records where the file on the 1994 murders should have been, and also in a drawer of Chief Hayward’s desk at the station.”

  Did Chief Hayward know something? Could this have had a con-nection with his disappearance? We were also anxious to know what happened in Orphea on the night of February 11, 1994. In the news-paper’s archives, we found, in the February 13 issue, an article about a building on Main Street being burned down, a building belonging to Ted Tennenbaum, who was trying to turn it into a restaurant against the wishes of Mayor Gordon.

  Derek and I had known of this episode during the 1994 investigation. But for Betsy, this information was news.

  “This was before Café Athena,” Derek told her. “Actually it was because of the fire that it was possible to alter the legal use of the building, allow it to become a restaurant.”

  �
��Could Ted Tennenbaum have set fire to it himself?” Betsy said.

  “We never did get to the bottom of that,” Derek said. “But the story’s common knowledge. There must be another reason why the waiter in Café Athena told us to look into it.”

  “What if this thing about ‘The Darkest Night’ has substance?” Betsy said. “What if, because of a play, there really is going to be chaos in the town for one whole night? What if, on July 26, on the opening night of the festival, there’s going to be another murder or murders similar to the ones in 1994? What if the murder of Stephanie is only the prelude to something even more catastrophic?”

  DEREK SCOTT

  On the evening after we had been humiliated by Tennenbaum’s lawyer, in mid-August 1994, Jesse and I drove to Queens at the invitation of Darla and Natasha, who were determined to take our minds off things. They had given us an address in Rego Park. It was a single-story building still under construction, its sign covered with a sheet. Darla and Natasha were waiting for us outside. They were radiant.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  Darla smiled. “Outside our future restaurant.”

  Jesse and I stood there amazed, immediately forgetting all about Orphea, the murders, and Ted Tennenbaum. Their plans for a restaurant were about to come to fruition. All those hours of unrelenting work were going to pay off. They would soon be able to leave the Blue Lagoon and live their dream.

  “When are you planning to open?” Jesse said.

  “By the end of the year,” Natasha said. “There’s a lot to do inside.”

  We knew they would be a great success. People would queue around the block waiting for a table.

  “By the way,” Jesse asked, “what’s your restaurant going to be called?”

  “That’s why we wanted you here,” Darla said. “We’ve just had the sign put up. We were sure of the name and we told ourselves that, this way, people in the neighborhood would already be talking about it.”

  “Isn’t it bad luck to reveal a restaurant’s sign before it opens?” I said.

  Natasha laughed. “Don’t talk bullshit, Derek.”

  She took a bottle of vodka and four small glasses from a bag, handed them around, and filled them to the brim. Darla grabbed a small rope tied to the sheet covering the sign and, after agreeing on a signal, they both yanked on it. The sheet floated to the ground like a parachute, and the name of the restaurant glowed in the dark:

  LITTLE RUSSIA

  We raised our glasses to Little Russia. We drank a few more vodkas, then took a tour of the premises. Darla and Natasha showed us the plan so that we could imagine the place as it would be. There was a cramped little mezzanine, where they planned to set up an office. A ladder gave access to the roof, and it was there that we spent most of that burning hot summer night, drinking vodka and dining by candlelight from a picnic hamper the girls had prepared, gazing at the Manhattan skyline in the distance.

  I looked at Jesse and Natasha embracing. They were so beautiful together, they looked so happy. They were the kind of couple who made you believe that nothing would ever separate them. It was when I saw them as they were then that I knew I needed something very similar in my life. Darla was beside me. I looked into her eyes. She moved her hand forward to lightly touch mine. And I kissed her.

  The following day, we were back in business, on a stakeout outside Café Athena. We were heavily hungover.

  “So,” Jesse said, “did you sleep over at Darla’s?”

  My only response was to smile. He burst out laughing. But we weren’t in a laughing mood. We had to start our investigation all over again.

  We were certain that it was Tennenbaum’s van that Lena Bellamy had seen out on the street just before the murders. The Café Athena logo was a unique creation, which Tennenbaum had put on the rear window of his vehicle to advertise his restaurant. But it was Mrs Bellamy’s word against his. We needed more.

  We were going round in circles. At the town hall, we were told that Mayor Gordon had been furious about the fire in Tennenbaum’s building and was convinced that Tennenbaum had started the fire himself. So did the Orphea police. But there was nothing to prove it. Tennenbaum clearly had a gift for covering his tracks. Our only hope was to refute his alibi by proving that he had left the Grand Theater at a particular time on the evening of the murders. His shift had lasted from 5.00 to 11.00. He would have needed only twenty minutes to drive to the mayor’s house and back. Twenty short minutes. We questioned all the volunteers who had been in the backstage area on opening night. They all stated that they had seen Tennenbaum several times that evening. But had he been there between 5.40 and 6.00? And, of course, nobody could confirm that. He had been seen near the dressing rooms, in the workshop, even in the bar, grabbing a sandwich. He had been seen everywhere and nowhere.

  We were bogged down, almost losing hope, when one morning we received a call from a woman working at a bank in Hicksville that would change the course of the investigation.

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Friday, July 4 and Saturday, July 5, 2014

  Twenty-two days to opening night

  Every year, Derek and Darla had a big barbecue in their garden to celebrate the Fourth of July. This year they invited Betsy and me. I declined the invitation, saying I’d been invited somewhere else. In fact, I spent the day alone, shut up in my kitchen, trying desperately to reproduce a hamburger sauce that had been a secret of Natasha’s in the old days. But none of my many attempts succeeded. I didn’t have all the ingredients, and I had no way of distinguishing which ones were missing. Natasha had created the sauce for roast beef sandwiches. I had suggested using it on hamburgers, too, which had proved to be a great idea. But none of the dozens of versions I put together that day were anything like the one that Natasha made.

  As for Betsy, she went to her parents’ house in Worcester, a comfortable suburb located not far from New York City, for a traditional family celebration. She was almost there when she received a panicky call from her sister.

  “Betsy, where are you?”

  “Almost there. What’s going on?”

  “The barbecue’s been organized by Mommy and Daddy’s new neighbor.”

  “So the house next door was finally sold?”

  “Yes, Betsy. And you’ll never guess who bought it. Mark. Mark, your ex-husband.”

  Aghast, Betsy stepped hard on the brake. She could hear her sister over the phone: “Betsy? Are you there?” As luck would have it, she had stopped just outside the house in question. She had always thought it was quite pretty, but now it struck her as horribly flashy. She looked at the ridiculous Fourth of July decorations hanging from the windows. Anyone would have thought it was the White House. Mark was over-doing it, as usual. Not sure anymore if she would stay or simply drive away, Betsy decided to lock herself in her car. On a neighboring lawn, she saw children playing, happy parents. Of all her ambitions, her most cherished was to start a family. She envied her happy friends who were in couples. She envied her friends who were contented mothers.

  A knocking on her car window made her jump. It was her mother.

  “Betsy, I beg you, don’t embarrass me, please come out. Everyone knows you’re here.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” Betsy said. “I wouldn’t have come all this way.”

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  “Have you both gone crazy? You’re celebrating the Fourth of July in my ex-husband’s house?”

  “We’re celebrating the Fourth of July with our neighbor.”

  “Oh, please, don’t play with words!”

  Gradually, the guests gathered on the lawn to observe the scene. Among them was Mark, sporting his best hangdog look.

  “It’s my fault,” he said. “I should have talked to Betsy first. We ought to cancel.”

  “We’re not canceling anything, Mark!” Betsy’s mother said. “You don’t have to justify yourself to my daughter!”

  Betsy heard someone murmur: “Poor Mark, being humil
iated like this when he was kind enough to invite us.”

  Betsy felt all eyes on her, heavy with disapproval. She didn’t want to give Mark a reason to unite her own family against her. She got out of the car and joined the party, which was taking place in the rear part of the garden, by the swimming pool.

  Mark and Betsy’s father, wearing identical aprons, were bustling around the barbecue. Everyone was in ecstasy over Mark’s new house and the quality of his hamburgers. Betsy grabbed a bottle of white wine and sat down in a corner, resolved to remain polite and not cause a scandal.

  *

  A few dozen miles away, in Manhattan, in the study of his apartment on Central Park West, Meta Ostrovski was looking sadly through the window. He had thought at first that his dismissal from the New York Literary Review was merely a passing whim and that Bergdorf would call him back the next day to tell him how indispensable he was. But Bergdorf had not called back. Ostrovski had gone to the offices and discovered that his desk had been emptied, his books piled up in cardboard boxes, ready, presumably, to be shipped to his home.

  What was to become of him?

  His cleaning woman came into the room, bringing him a cup of tea.

  “I’ll be off now, Mr Ostrovski,” she said softly. “I’m going to my son’s for the Fourth of July.”

  “That’s fine, Erika,” Ostrovski said.

  “Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”

  “Would you be so kind as to take a cushion and stifle me with it?”

  “No, sir, I can’t do that.”

  Ostrovski sighed. “Then you may as well go.”

  On the other side of the park, in their apartment on Fifth Avenue, Jerry and Cynthia Eden were getting ready to celebrate the Fourth of July with friends.

  Carolina said she preferred to stay home because she had a migraine. They raised no objection. They preferred to know she was at home. When they left, she was in the living room, watching T.V. A few hours went by. Weary and alone in that vast apartment, she eventually rolled a joint, took a bottle of vodka from her father’s bar—she knew where he hid the key—and sat down under the fan in the kitchen to drink and smoke. Once she had finished her joint, slightly high and a little drunk, she went to her room. She took out her high school yearbook, found the page she was looking for, and went back into the kitchen. She rolled another joint, drank some more, and ran her fingertip over one of the photographs. Tara Scalini.