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

by Joël Dicker

  “Oh, Jesse. We all miss her. Every day. But you have to move forward. You can’t keep living in the past.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to mend this crack inside me, Darla.”

  “But Jesse, life will mend it.”

  She put her head on my shoulder. We sat like that for a long time gazing at the grave in front of us.

  NATASHA DARRINSKI

  APRIL 2, 1968 – OCTOBER 13, 1994

  DEREK SCOTT

  October 13, 1994

  Our car smashes through the guard rail of the bridge and plunges into the river. At the moment of impact, everything happens very fast. Instinctively, I unfasten my seat belt and open my window, as we were taught to do in the Police Academy. In the back seat, Natasha screams in terror. Jesse, who hasn’t got his seat belt on, is knocked forward and hits his head against the glove compartment.

  In a few seconds, the car fills with water. I yell at Natasha to unfasten her seat belt and get out through the window. I realize that her seat belt is stuck. I bend over her and try to help. I have nothing to cut through the belt, it has to be torn from its base. I pull on it like a madman, but in vain. We have water up to our shoulders.

  “See to Jesse!” Natasha yells at me. “I’ll manage.”

  I hesitate for a second. She yells again:

  “Derek! Get Jesse out!”

  The water is up to our chins now. I struggle out of the car then grab Jesse and manage to pull him with me.

  We plunge into the water, the car sinks toward the bottom of the river, I hold my breath as much as possible, I look through the window. Natasha, completely submerged, hasn’t managed to get free of her seat belt. She’s trapped in the car. I have no more air. The weight of Jesse’s body is pulling me down to the bottom. Natasha and I exchange a last look. I’ll never forget her eyes on the other side of the car window.

  Running short of oxygen, with the energy of despair, I manage to get up to the surface with Jesse. I swim laboriously to the riverbank. Police patrol cars are arriving, I see officers running down to the water’s edge. I reach them and hand Jesse over to them, lifeless. I want to go back and look for Natasha, I swim to the middle of the river. I no longer know where exactly the car went down. I can’t see anything anymore, the water is muddy. I’m in total distress. I hear sirens in the distance. I try to dive back down. I remember Natasha’s eyes, that look which will haunt me my whole life.

  And this question that would pursue me: if I had kept trying to yank at that belt and tear it from its base instead of seeing to Jesse as she had asked, could I have saved her?

  3

  The Swap

  THURSDAY, JULY 31 – FRIDAY, AUGUST 1, 2014

  JESSE ROSENBERG

  Thursday, July 31, 2014

  Five days after opening night

  Time was not on our side, and yet that morning Betsy asked us to meet her at Café Athena.

  “This really isn’t the time for a leisurely breakfast,” Derek said on the way to Orphea. We only had three days left to solve the case.

  “I don’t know what she wants,” I said.

  “Didn’t she say anything more?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “And Café Athena on top of everything else. That really is the last place I want to set foot, given the circumstances.”

  I smiled.

  “What is it?” Derek said.

  “You’re in a bad mood.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I know you like the back of my hand. You’re in a lousy mood.”

  “Come on,” he said, “drive faster, I want to know what Betsy’s up to.”

  He put on the flashing lights to make me accelerate. I burst out laughing.

  When at last we got to Café Athena, we found Betsy sitting at a large table at the back of the room. Cups of coffee were waiting for us.

  “Oh, there you are!” she said impatiently, as if we’d been dragging our feet.

  “What’s on your mind?” I said.

  “I can’t stop thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About Meghan. It’s clear the mayor wanted to get rid of her. She knew too much. Maybe Gordon was hoping he could stay in Orphea and not have to run away to Montana. I tried to get hold of this Kate Grand, Meghan’s friend. She’s on vacation. I left a message at her hotel, and I’m waiting for her to call me back. But that doesn’t matter. There’s no doubt the mayor wanted to eliminate Meghan, and he did.”

  “Except that he didn’t kill Meghan, he killed Fold,” Derek said, not sure what Betsy was getting at.

  “He set up a swap,” Betsy said. “He killed Fold for someone else. And this someone else killed Meghan for him. They swapped murders. And in whose interest was it to kill Fold? Tennenbaum’s, who had had enough of the pressure Jeremiah was putting on him.”

  “But we’ve only just established that Tennenbaum wasn’t guilty,” Derek said, irritably. “The D.A.’s office has started the official process to exonerate him.”

  Betsy was not to be deterred. “In her diary, Meghan says that on July 1, 1994, Mayor Gordon, who had stopped coming to the bookstore, dropped in to buy a play, a play we know he had already read and disliked. He wasn’t the one who chose that script, it was whoever ordered the murder of Jeremiah Fold and put the victim’s name in it, using a simple code.”

  “Why do that? They could just as easily have met.”

  “Maybe because they didn’t know each other. Or they wanted never to have been seen together. They didn’t want the police to be able to track them down later. Don’t forget, Tennenbaum and the mayor hated each other, which makes for a perfect alibi. Nobody would have suspected them of being in cahoots.”

  “Even if you were right, Betsy,” Derek said, “how could the mayor have known which book contained the code?”

  Betsy had thought of this. “He must have gone through all the books there. Or maybe he had dog-eared it to mark the place.”

  “You mean dog-eared it the way Mayor Gordon did that day to Steven Bergdorf’s book?” I said, remembering something that Meghan had mentioned in her diary.

  “Right,” Betsy said.

  “Then we absolutely have to find that book.”

  “That’s why I asked you to meet me here.”

  Just then, the door of Café Athena opened and Sylvia Tennenbaum appeared. She glared at Derek and me.

  “What’s going on?” she said to Betsy. “You didn’t tell me they’d be here.”

  “Sylvia,” Betsy said in a soft voice, “we have to talk.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” Sylvia Tennenbaum retorted. “My lawyer is about to sue the State Police.”

  “Sylvia,” Betsy said, “I think your brother was involved in the murder of Meghan and the Gordon family. And I think the truth is in your house.”

  Sylvia was appalled by what she had heard. “You’re not going to start, too, are you?”

  “Can we discuss this calmly, Sylvia? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  Troubled as she was, Sylvia agreed to sit with us. I brought her up to date with the situation and showed her the extracts from Meghan Padalin’s diary.

  “I know you live in your brother’s house, Sylvia. If Ted was involved, that book could still be there and we need to get our hands on it.”

  “I did a lot of renovation work,” Sylvia said in a thin voice. “But I left his bookshelves as they were.”

  “Could we take a look?” Betsy said. “If we find that book, we’ll have the answer to the question that’s troubling all of us.”

  After a hesitation that lasted as long as it took her to smoke a cigarette out on the sidewalk, Sylvia agreed. We went to her house. This was the first time Derek and I had been back there since we had searched it twenty years ago. Back then, we hadn’t found anything. Yet the evidence was there in front of our eyes. And we hadn’t seen it. The book about the festival. The cover was still dog-eared. It was there on a shelf, among the works of the great
American authors. It had not been moved in all that time.

  It was Betsy who took it down. We gathered around her as she leafed through the pages, revealing a number of words underlined in ink. As with the script of Hayward’s play, which had been found in the mayor’s safe deposit box, the first letters of each of the underlined words, when put end to end, made a name:

  MEGHAN PADALIN

  * * *

  In Mount Sinai Hospital, Carolina, who had been awake since the day before, was showing surprising signs of recovery. The doctor, who had come to check on her condition, found her devouring a hamburger her father had brought in.

  “Hey, slow down,” he said with a smile, “take time to chew.”

  “I’m so hungry,” Carolina said, her mouth full.

  “I’m pleased to see you like this.”

  “Thank you, doctor. It seems you’re the one I owe it to that I’m still alive.”

  The doctor shrugged. “You owe it only to yourself, Carolina. You’re a fighter. You wanted to live.”

  She lowered her eyes. The doctor checked the bandage on her chest. She had been given a dozen stitches.

  “Don’t worry,” the doctor said. “We should be able to fix it and hide the scar.”

  “Definitely not,” Carolina said in a low voice. “This scar is my way of fixing my life.”

  * * *

  In Orphea, we went over to Springfield’s bookstore to reconstruct what might have happened there on July 1, 1994, according to Meghan’s diary. We had suggested to Bird and Hayward that they join us. They might help us to get a better idea.

  Betsy placed herself behind the counter, as if she were Meghan. Hayward, Bird and I played the roles of customers. Derek took up position in front of the display of local books, which was in a section slightly removed from the rest of the store. Betsy had brought with her the article from the Chronicle from the end of June 1994, which she had found the day before Springfield was killed. She studied the photograph of Springfield standing by the display and said:

  “At the time, the display was in a small space separated from the store by a partition. Springfield called it the Local Writers’ Room. It was only later that he took down the partition to make more space.”

  “So at the time,” Derek said, “nobody at the counter could see what was happening in that room.”

  “Exactly,” Betsy said. “Nobody would have noticed what was being plotted in that room on July 1, 1994. But Meghan had been watching the mayor. She must have been suspicious of his presence here, given that he had not set foot in the store for months, and she kept an eye on him and noticed his little game.”

  “So that day,” Hayward said, “there in the back room Tennenbaum and Mayor Gordon each conveyed the name of the person they wanted to get rid of.”

  “Two death sentences,” Bird murmured.

  “That’s why Cody Springfield was killed,” Betsy said. “He must have seen the murderer in the store and had finally put two and two together. The murderer might have been afraid that Meghan had spoken to her boss back then about the strange scene she had witnessed.”

  As far as I was concerned, this hypothesis stood up. But Derek was not convinced.

  “Continue with your theory, Betsy,” he said.

  “The swap takes place on July 1. Jeremiah is killed on July 16. For two weeks, Gordon has been watching his every move. He has observed that Fold takes the same route every night to get home from Ridge’s Club. Finally, he goes ahead with it. But he’s not very good at this job. He doesn’t kill him outright, he knocks his man off the road and leaves him at the side of the road when he isn’t even dead. He picks up what broken bits he can, runs away, panics, and sells his car first thing the next day, taking the risk of being reported to the police by the car dealer. All total improvisation. Mayor Gordon only kills Fold because he wants to get rid of Meghan before she can report him to the police and bring him down. He’s a reluctant murderer.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Maybe,” Derek said. “Let’s assume all this holds up and that Mayor Gordon did kill Fold. What about Meghan?”

  “Tennenbaum has been coming to the bookstore to watch her,” Betsy went on. “She mentions his visits in her diary. He’s a regular customer. On one of his visits, he must have heard her say that she won’t be going to the opening night of the festival and he decides to kill her while she’s out jogging, when the whole town will be on Main Street and there’ll be no witnesses.”

  “There’s one problem with your hypothesis,” Derek said. “Tennenbaum didn’t kill Meghan Padalin. Not to mention that he drowned in the river after we chased him and the murder weapon was never found, until it was used again last Saturday in the Grand Theater.”

  “Which means there is a third man,” Betsy said. “Tennenbaum made sure the message was passed on for Fold to be killed, but it was also in someone else’s interest. And today that person is covering his tracks.”

  “The man with the tear gas canister and the eagle tattoo,” I said, and seeing Hayward’s blank expression, I related what Miranda Bird had told us about the incident with Costico in the motel.

  “What would his motive be?” Hayward said when I was done.

  “Costico tracks him down thanks to the wallet he left in Mylla’s room. And he puts pressure on him. Just imagine: Costico must have been furious to have been made to look ridiculous like that in the parking lot, in front of all the hookers. He would have wanted to take his revenge on the man, by threatening his family and turning him into one of Fold’s lackeys. But the man with the tattoo wasn’t the kind to let these things be done to him, and he knew that in order to regain his freedom he had to eliminate not Costico but Fold.”

  We badly needed to get our hands on Costico, but he had disappeared without a trace. The missing persons bulletins brought no results. Colleagues from the State Police had questioned those with any known connection to him, but nobody could explain why he had vanished into thin air, leaving behind his money, his cell phone, all his things.

  “I think this Costico is dead,” Hayward said. “Like Stephanie, like Springfield, like everyone who could have led us to the murderer.”

  “Then Costico’s disappearance is proof that he’s in league with the murderer. It’s definitely the man with the eagle tattoo we’re looking for.”

  “It’s pretty vague as a description,” Bird said. “What else do we know about him?”

  “He’s a customer of the bookstore,” Derek said.

  “Someone who lives in Orphea,” I said. “Or at least he lived here back then.”

  “He was connected to Tennenbaum,” Betsy said.

  “If he was as connected to Tennenbaum as Tennenbaum was to the mayor,” Hayward said, “then we need to cast our net wide. At the time, everyone knew everyone in Orphea.”

  “And he was in the Grand Theater on Saturday evening,” I said. “That’s what’ll allow us to track him down. We thought it might be a cast member, but it could be someone else with special access.”

  “Then let’s make a new list,” Betsy suggested, taking up a fresh piece of paper.

  She wrote down the names of the cast members.

  Charlotte Brown

  Carolina Eden

  Steven Bergdorf

  Jerry Eden

  Meta Ostrovski

  Samuel Padalin

  “You should add me,” Bird said, “and Kirk. We were there, too. Although speaking for myself, I don’t have an eagle tattoo.”

  He lifted his T-shirt and showed us his back.

  “I don’t have a tattoo either, dammit!” Hayward said, taking off his shirt.

  “We’ve already eliminated Charlotte from the list of suspects because we’re looking for a man,” Derek said. “And Jerry Eden, too.”

  This left three names on the list:

  Meta Ostrovski

  Samuel Padalin

  Steven Bergdorf

  “We can rule out Ostrovski,” Betsy said. “He had
no connection with Orphea, he only came here for the festival.”

  “That leaves Padalin and Bergdorf,” Derek said.

  The vise was tightening inexorably.

  That afternoon, Betsy was contacted by Meghan’s friend Kate Grand, calling from her hotel in North Carolina.

  Betsy explained why she urgently needed her help, and then said to her, “I discovered from her diary that Meghan Padalin had an affair with a man at the beginning of 1994. She says she spoke to you about it. Do you remember anything?”

  “Yes, it’s true, Meghan did tell me. I never met the man, but I remember how it ended—badly.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Her husband Samuel found out and gave her a beating. That day, she came to me in her nightdress, with bruises on her cheeks, her mouth still bleeding. I let her crash at my place for the night.”

  “Samuel Padalin was violent toward Meghan?”

  “Well, he certainly was that day. She told me she feared for her life. I advised her to report him to the police, but she didn’t. She left her lover and went back to her husband.”

  “In other words, Samuel forced her to end it and stay with him?”

  “It’s possible. After that episode, she became quite distant toward me. She said Samuel didn’t want her to see me anymore.”

  “And did she obey him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs Grand, forgive me for asking you this question straight out, but do you think Samuel Padalin might have killed his wife?”

  Kate Grand was silent for a moment, then said:

  “I was always surprised that the police didn’t take a look at his life insurance.”

  “His life insurance?”

  “One month before his wife died, Samuel took out a big life insurance policy for the two of them. It was for a million dollars. I know that because my husband dealt with it all. He’s an underwriter.”

  “And did Padalin get the money?”

  “Of course. How do you think he was able to pay for his house in Southampton?”

  DEREK SCOTT

  Early December 1994, at troop headquarters.