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

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 Athenaopened 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