The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist Joël Dicker (booksvooks TXT) 📖

a pack that she put into her bag. She moved back farther and veered off the sidewalk to a little blue car, in which she took her seat.

“A three-door blue Mazda. I saw her get into it on Monday, in the parking lot at troop headquarters.”

I asked the security officer to play the sequence again, forward this time, and we watched Stephanie get out of the car, light a cigarette, smoke it as she took a few steps along the sidewalk, and head for the Kodiak Grill.

We moved the recording forward to 9.55, the time when Stephanie had paid for her dinner with her credit card. Two minutes later, we saw her come back out. She seemed nervous as she walked to her car. As she was about to get in, she took her cell phone from her bag. Someone had called her. The call was brief. She did not seem to be speaking, only listening. After hanging up, she got into the car and sat there motionless for a while. We could see her distinctly through the car window. She searched for a number in the phone’s contacts and called it, but hung up again immediately, as if she had not been able to get through. She waited another five minutes, sitting behind the wheel. Then she made a second call. This time we saw her speaking. The exchange lasted perhaps twenty seconds. Finally, she started the car and drove away.

“That may be the last image of Stephanie Mailer,” I said.

We spent half the afternoon questioning Stephanie’s friends. Most lived in Sag Harbor, her hometown.

None of them had heard from Stephanie since Monday and they were all worried, especially since her parents had called them. They had tried to reach her by telephone, by e-mail, through social media, they had gone to her apartment and knocked at her door. But no-one had gotten hold of her.

It emerged from our conversations that Stephanie was a terrific young woman. She didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink to excess, and got along well with everyone. Her friends knew more than her parents did about her private life. One of them told us she knew Stephanie had had a boyfriend recently.

“Yes, there was a guy, his name was Sean. She came with him to a party. It was weird.”

“In what way weird?”

“The chemistry between them. Something wasn’t right.”

Another friend told us that Stephanie had been up to her ears in work.

“We’ve hardly seen her lately. She said she had a lot going on.”

“What was she working on?”

“I don’t know.”

A third friend told us about her trip to Los Angeles. “Yes, she did go to L.A. two weeks ago, but she told me not to talk about it.”

“What was the purpose of the trip?”

“I don’t know.”

The last of her friends to have talked to her was Timothy Volt. He and Stephanie had seen each other the previous Sunday evening. “She came to my place,” he said. “I was on my own, and we had a few drinks.”

“Did she seem worried?” I said.

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“What kind of woman is Stephanie?”

“She’s brilliant, but she’s a tough cookie. She can be really stubborn. When she gets hold of something, she won’t let go.”

“Did she tell you what she was working on?”

“She said she was working on a really major project, but wouldn’t go into any details.”

“What kind of project?”

“A book. In fact that’s why she came back to the area.”

“How do you mean?”

“Stephanie’s very ambitious. Her dream is to be a famous writer, and she’ll make it. She was earning a living working for a literary magazine until last September. The name escapes me.”

“The New York Literary Review.”

“That’s it. But it was really only a sideline to pay her bills. When she was fired, she said she wanted to come back to the Hamptons so she could write in peace. I remember her saying to me one day, ‘The only reason I’m here is to write a book.’ I think she needed time, and she needed peace and quiet. She certainly found it here. Why else would she have accepted a job as a freelance reporter for a local paper? Like I said, she’s ambitious. She aims for the moon. She must have had a good reason for settling in Orphea. Maybe she couldn’t concentrate in all the excitement of the city. It’s quite common to see writers moving out to the country, isn’t it?”

“Where did she write?”

“At home, I guess.”

“On a computer?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

As we left Volt’s place, I mentioned to Betsy that I had seen no computer in Stephanie’s apartment.

We took advantage of being in Sag Harbor to go see Stephanie’s parents. They had never heard of a boyfriend named Sean, and Stephanie had not left a laptop in their house. To set our minds at rest, we asked if we could take a look at Stephanie’s room. She hadn’t been in it since the end of high school and it had remained intact—the posters on the wall, the sporting trophies, the fluffy toys on the bed, the school books.

“It’s years since Stephanie last slept here,” Mrs Mailer said. “After high school, she went to college, and then she lived in Manhattan until she left the New York Literary Review.”

“Was there a specific reason for Stephanie to move to Orphea?” I asked her, without revealing what Volt had told me.

“As I said yesterday, she’d left her job at the Review and wanted to come back to the Hamptons.”

“But why Orphea?”

“Because it’s the biggest town in the region, I guess.”

“And in the city, Mrs Mailer,” I ventured, “did Stephanie have enemies? Had she quarreled with anyone?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Did she live alone?”

“She had a roommate, a young woman who worked in publishing. We met her once when we helped Stephanie collect her few pieces of furniture after she’d decided to leave the city. She really had only a few things, we took everything straight to her apartment in Orphea.”

Not having discovered anything in her apartment,