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

and took out a third plastic bag containing a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book. On it was written:

Darkest Night ➝ Orphea Theater Festival

Talk to Michael Bird

“Darkest Night!” Betsy cried. “The same as we found on the note left in the empty file.”

“Let’s talk to Michael Bird,” I said. “He may know more than he was prepared to say last time.”

*

We found Bird in his office. He had prepared for us a folder containing copies of all the articles written by Stephanie for the paper. Most of it was local news—a school fair, the Columbus Day parade, a community party for people on their own, the Halloween pumpkin competition, road accidents—all fairly trivial items. As I spread the articles out on the desk, I asked the editor:

“What’s Stephanie’s salary at the paper?”

“$1,500 dollars a month. Why do you ask?”

“It may be important for the investigation. I’ll be honest with you—I’m still trying to figure out why Stephanie left New York to come to Orphea and write articles about Columbus Day and pumpkin contests. It makes no sense, as far as I’m concerned. Don’t take this the wrong way, Mr Bird, but it doesn’t fit with the ambitious picture of her I got from her parents and friends.”

“I know exactly what you mean, Captain Rosenberg. In fact, I asked myself the same thing. Stephanie told me she had become weary of life in the city. She was looking for some kind of rebirth. She’s an idealist, you know. She wants to change things. The challenge of working for a local paper doesn’t faze her—quite the opposite, in fact.”

“I think there’s something else,” I said, and showed Bird the piece of paper found in Stephanie’s car.

“What is this?” he said.

“A note written by Stephanie. She mentions the theater festival, and says she needs to talk to you about it. What do you know that you’re not telling us, Mr Bird?”

Bird sighed. “I promised her I wouldn’t say anything. I gave my word.”

“I wonder if you grasp the gravity of the situation . . .”

“You’re the one who doesn’t grasp it,” he said. “There may be a good reason why Stephanie decided to drop out of sight for a while. And you’re compromising everything by getting people worked up.”

“What would be a good reason?”

“She may have known she was in danger and decided to hide. By turning the region upside down, you may be putting her life at risk. Her investigation is more important than you might imagine, and the people who are looking for her right now may be the very people she’s hiding from.”

“You mean police officers?”

“It’s possible. She kept things very close to her chest. I kept asking her to tell me more, but she always refused.”

“That’s very much like the Stephanie I met the other day,” I sighed. “But what’s the connection with the theater festival?”

Although the editorial offices were deserted and the door of his office was closed, the editor lowered his voice again, as if fearful someone might overhear him. “Stephanie thought something was going on at the festival, and she needed to question the volunteers without anybody suspecting anything. I suggested she do a series of articles for the paper. It was the perfect cover.”

“Phony interviews?” I said in surprise.

“Not really phony, because we did publish them. I told you about the paper’s financial difficulties. Stephanie assured me that publishing the results of her investigation would make it possible to get things back on their feet. ‘When this is published, people will fight to get hold of the Chronicle,’ she told me one day.”

Back at the station, we finally reached Stephanie’s previous boss, the editor of the New York Literary Review. His name wasSteven Bergdorf and he lived in Brooklyn. It was Betsy who called him. She put the phone on loudspeaker.

“Poor Stephanie,” Bergdorf said after Betsy had informed him of the situation. “I hope nothing serious has happened to her. She’s a very intelligent woman, a promising literary journalist, a fine writer. Always friendly to everyone. Not the kind of person to attract hard feelings or problems.”

“If my information is correct, she left the magazine’s staff last fall.”

“I was very sorry to lose her. But we stayed on good terms. She told me later she was working for the Orphea Chronicle and she liked it a lot. I was pleased for her, I suppose, although I was a little surprised.”

“Why surprised?”

“A girl like Stephanie Mailer should be writing for the New York Times. She’s that good. What was she doing at a provincial paper?”

“Mr Bergdorf, has Stephanie been back to your offices since she left?”

“Not as far as I know. Why?”

“Because we’ve established that her car was parked close to your building on several occasions in the last two or three months.”

* * *

For Betsy and me the money found in Stephanie’s apartment was one of the leads we most needed to follow. $10,000 in cash. Stephanie earned $1,500 a month. Once she had paid her rent, her car insurance, and her general expenses, there could not have been much left. If these were her savings, why had she not put them in a bank?

We spent the rest of the day questioning Stephanie’s parents and friends about that money. The Mailers said that their daughter had always gotten by on her own. She had won a scholarship to pay for her college studies and had subsequently lived on her salary. Her friends assured us that Stephanie often had difficulties in making ends meet. They found it hard to accept the idea that she might have put money aside.

As I was driving down Main Street on my way out of Orphea, instead of continuing toward Route 17 so as to get onto the highway, I veered almost without thinking into the Penfield neighborhood and came to Penfield Crescent. I drove round the little park and stopped outside the house that had been Mayor Gordon’s twenty years earlier, the place where it had all started.

I