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

turned into a genuinely romantic relationship in the best sense of the word. We turned a first real corner when we had dinner with my parents. And for the first time, in contrast to the last fifteen years, my father was radiant, affable and considerate with a man I was with. Having dismissed all the previous ones, now he was in a state of awe.

“What a guy!” my father said to me on the telephone the day after the dinner.

“He’s amazing!” my mother said in the background.

My father had the nerve to add, “Try not to scare him away, like you did with the others!”

“Yes, this one’s precious,” my mother said.

The celebration of our first year together coincided with the traditional skiing vacation. My father suggested we go to Whistler together and Mark gladly accepted.

“If you can survive five evenings in a row with my father, especially the Scrabble contests, you’ll deserve a medal.”

Not only did he survive, he won three times. Added to that, he skied like a god. The last evening, as we were having dinner in a restaurant, a customer at the next table suddenly had a heart attack. Mark called Emergency, then gave first aid to the victim.

The man’s life was saved and he was taken to the hospital. While the paramedics were taking him away on a stretcher, the doctor who was with them shook Mark’s hand admiringly. “You saved that man, sir. You’re a hero.” The whole restaurant applauded him and the owner wouldn’t allow us to pay for our dinner.

My father mentioned this in his speech at our wedding, a year and a half later, as an example of how exceptional Mark was. I was radiant, unable to take my eyes off my husband.

Our marriage would last less than a year.

JESSE ROSENBERG

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Twenty-three days to opening night

Front page of the Orphea Chronicle:

IS THERE A CONNECTION BETWEEN

THE MURDER OF STEPHANIE MAILER

AND THE THEATER FESTIVAL?

The murder of Stephanie Mailer, a young reporter on the Orphea Chronicle whose body was found in Stag Lake, has left the town reeling. There is a great deal of anxiety among townspeople, putting the council under pressure just as the summer season is getting underway. Is a killer at large among us?

A note found in Ms Mailer’s car mentioning the Orphea Theater Festival suggests she may have paid with her life for the investigation she was conducting for this newspaper into the murder in 1994 of Mayor Gordon, founder of the festival.

Betsy showed the newspaper to Derek and me when we met up that morning at troop headquarters.

“That was all we needed!” Derek said.

“It was stupid of me to mention that note to Bird,” I said. “I saw him at Café Athenabefore coming here, I think he’s taking Stephanie’s death quite badly. He says he feels partly responsible. So what does the forensic analysis show?”

“Unfortunately, the tire tracks at the side of Route 17 are going to yield nothing. But the shoe is definitely Stephanie’s and the piece of cloth comes from the T-shirt she was wearing. They also found a print of her shoe at the side of the road.”

“Which confirms that she went into the forest at that point,” Betsy said.

We were interrupted by the arrival of Dr Ranjit Singh who had come with the first results of the postmortem.

“Thanks for working so fast,” Derek said.

“I wanted you to get ahead before the Fourth of July break.”

Dr Singh was an elegant, affable man. He put his glasses on to read us the main points of his report.

“I found a few fairly unusual things. Stephanie Mailer died by drowning. There was a great deal of water in her lungs and in her stomach, as well as silt in her trachea. There are major signs of cyanosis and respiratory distress, which suggests that she struggled with her attacker. I discovered bruises on the back of her neck, left by a broad hand, which would mean that her neck was gripped firmly in order to push her head into the water. In addition to the traces of silt in the trachea, there are also some on her lips and teeth as well as on the top of her hair, which suggests that her head was kept under the water, at a shallow depth.”

“Was she physically assaulted before she was drowned?” Derek said.

“There is no trace of violent blows, by which I mean that Stephanie was not knocked out or beaten. Nor was there any sexual assault. I think Stephanie was running away from her killer and that he caught up with her.”

“He?” Derek said. “You think it was a man?”

“Judging by the strength necessary to keep someone under the water, I’d say a man, yes. But it could have been a strong woman.”

“So she was running through the forest?” Betsy said.

Singh nodded. “I found a large number of contusions and marks on the face and arms, caused by scratches from branches. There were marks on the underside of the bare foot. She must have been running fast through the forest and grazed the sole of her foot with branches and stones. There were traces of earth under her nails. I think she probably fell on the shore of the lake and the killer only had to push her head into the water.”

“Which might make it an unpremeditated crime,” I said. “Whoever did that had not planned to kill her.”

“I was getting to that, Captain,” Singh said, showing us close-up photographs of Stephanie’s shoulders, elbows, hands, and knees.

Dirty, reddish wounds were visible.

“They look like burns,” Betsy said.

“Indeed,” Singh said. “They’re relatively superficial abrasions in which I found pieces of asphalt and gravel.”

“Asphalt?” Derek said. “I’m not sure I follow you, doctor.”

“Well, judging by the location of the wounds, they’re due to a forward roll on asphalt, in other words, on a road. Which might mean that Stephanie threw herself from a moving car before escaping into the forest.”

Singh’s conclusions would be backed up by two crucial testimonies. The first