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

reason to worry. The girl doesn’t have to justify herself to anybody. What she does with her life is no concern of ours. Nevertheless, we did our job. So please, don’t come here and break my balls.”

“But the parents are very worried,” I said. “So, with your agreement, I’d like to check for myself that everything is fine.”

“If you have time to waste, Captain, don’t bother about me. You just have to wait for my deputy, Jasper Montagne, to come back from his patrol. He’s the one who dealt with it.”

When Deputy Jasper Montagne arrived, I was confronted with a huge wardrobe of a man, heavily muscled and formidable-looking. He told me he had accompanied Ms Mailer’s parents to her apartment. They had gone in, she wasn’t there. Nothing to report. No signs of struggle, nothing abnormal. Montagne had subsequently looked all over the neighboring streets in search of the journalist’s car, but to no avail. He had even called the hospitals and police stations in the area. Nothing. Stephanie Mailer had evidently gone away.

Since I wanted to take a look at the apartment, he offered to go with me. She lived on Bendham Road, a quiet little street close to Main Street, in a narrow three-story block. A hardware store occupied the first floor, there was a single apartment on the second floor, and Ms Mailer’s was on the third.

I rang her doorbell for a long time. I drummed on the door and called out, but it didn’t get me anywhere.

“You can see for yourself, she isn’t there,” Montagne said.

I tried the handle. The door was locked.

“Can we go in?” I said.

“Do you have the key?”

“No.”

“Nor me. Her parents opened the door the other day.”

“So we can’t go in?”

“No. And we’re not going to start breaking people’s doors down for no reason. If you want to set your mind at rest, go to the local paper and talk to the editor. He’ll show you the text he got from Ms Mailer on Monday evening.”

“What about the downstairs neighbor?” I said.

“Brad Melshaw? I talked to him yesterday. He didn’t see or hear anything unusual. There’s no point ringing his doorbell. He’s a cook at Café Athena, the hip restaurant at the top of Main Street. That’s where he’ll be right now.”

I wouldn’t give in, though. I went one floor down and rang Brad Melshaw’s bell. No response.

“I told you,” Montagne sighed, going back downstairs, while I stood a little longer on the landing in the hope that someone would open the door.

By the time I decided to follow him, Montagne had left the building. When I got to the lobby, I took advantage of the fact that I was alone to inspect Ms Mailer’s letterbox. Peering through the slit, I could see that there was a letter inside. I eased it out between my fingertips, folded it in half and slipped it into the back pocket of my pants.

Montagne drove me to the offices of the Orphea Chronicle, which were not far from Main Street, so that I could talk to Michael Bird, the editor.

The offices were in a redbrick building. The exterior was smart enough, but the interior was shabby-looking.

Michael Bird took us into his office. He had been in Orphea in 1994, but I did not remember meeting him then. He told me that, through a combination of circumstances, he had taken over the editorship of the Orphea Chronicle just three days after the murders, which was why he had spent most of that time drowning in paperwork rather than out in the field.

“How long has Stephanie Mailer been working for you?” I said.

“I hired her last December, so about seven months.”

“Is she a good reporter?”

“She’s very good. She’s raised the level of the paper. That’s important for us because it’s hard to always have quality content. The paper isn’t doing too well financially. We survive only because the premises are lent to us by the town council. People don’t read local newspapers nowadays, so the advertisers have lost interest. This used to be an important regional paper, widely read and respected. But now, why would you read the Orphea Chronicle when you can read the New York Times online? Not to mention those who don’t read anything at all, just get their information from Facebook.”

“When did you last see Stephanie?” I said.

“On Monday morning. At the weekly editorial meeting.”

“Did you notice anything unusual? Was her behavior out of the ordinary?”

“No, nothing out of the ordinary. I know Stephanie’s parents are worried, but as I told them and Deputy Montagne yesterday, she sent me a text message late on Monday, telling me she had to go away.”

He took his cell phone from his pocket and showed me the text in question, which he had received at midnight on Monday.

I have to leave Orphea for a while. It’s important. I’ll explain later.

“And you have heard nothing from her since?”

“No. But to be honest, I’m not worried. Stephanie is the kind of reporter who likes to be independent. When she has something on she takes her time. I don’t interfere too much with what she does.”

“What’s she working on right now?”

“The theater festival. Every year at the end of July, we have a theater festival here in Orphea.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, Stephanie wanted to write about the festival from the inside. She’s preparing a whole series of articles about it. Right now, she’s interviewing the volunteers who keep the festival going.”

“Is it like her to disappear like this?”

“I’d say ‘go away’. Yes, she goes away regularly. You know how it is, being a professional journalist requires you to leave your desk pretty frequently.”

“Did she say anything about another investigation that she’s conducting? She claimed she was meeting somebody about it on Monday night, somebody with information that was important to that story.”

I was deliberately vague.

The editor shook his head. “No,” he said. “She never mentioned anything like that.”

On the way out of the newspaper offices, Montagne said, “Chief Gulliver wants to