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

the screen, he did not notice that Carolina had left her room. She looked at him, saw he was engrossed in his call, and left the suite. She walked up and down the corridor, not knowing what to do with herself. She passed Room 310, in which Ostrovski was preparing to go to the audition by reciting classics of the theater. She made up her mind to leave the Palace. She asked the parking valet for her father’s Porsche, and set off for Orphea. When she got to Ocean Road, she drove past the beachfront houses. She was nervous. She soon came to what had been their vacation home, the house where they had been so happy together. She parked by the gate and sat there gazing at the wrought-iron inscription: the garden of eden.

She could not hold back for much longer. Clutching the wheel, she burst into tears.

* * *

“Jesse,” Bird said to me with a smile when he saw me put my head around the door of his office, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Back at the station Betsy and Derek were still looking through the issues of the Notre Dame college magazine, and I had gone to the offices of the Chronicle to collect the articles about the Gordon murders that the editor had put together for us.

“I need access to the newspaper’s archives,” I told him. “Would you be able to help me with that without it appearing in tomorrow’s issue?”

“Of course, Jesse. I still feel bad about betraying your trust. It wasn’t professional of me. You know, I can’t stop playing it in my head—could I have protected Stephanie?”

I saw him stare at Stephanie’s desk, which faced his and had stayed as it was. He looked sad.

“There’s nothing you could have done,” I said, hoping to comfort him.

He shrugged and took me down to the basement, where the archives were kept.

Bird was proving to be a valuable support. He helped me to sort through the issues of the Orphea Chronicle, find the articles that seemed pertinent, and photocopy them. I also took advantage of the immense knowledge that he had of the community to question him about Jeremiah Fold.

“Never heard of him. Who is he?”

“A gangster from Ridgesport. He was extorting money from Ted Tennenbaum by threatening to prevent the opening of Café Athena.”

Bird was astonished. “Tennenbaum had pressure put on him by a gangster?”

“Yes. We missed that in 1994.”

Thanks to Bird, I was also able to do some more checking about “The Darkest Night”. He called other newspapers in the area, in particular the Ridgesport Evening Star, and asked if they had in their archives any article containing the keywords “Darkest” with “Night”. But there was nothing. The only reference to it was the graffiti that had appeared in Orphea between the fall of 1993 and the summer of 1994.

I took all the photocopies back to the station and plunged in. I started reading, cutting out, underlining, discarding, classifying, while Betsy and Derek continued their search in the copies of the Notre Dame magazine. Betsy’s desk was starting to resemble a newspaper distribution center. Suddenly, Derek cried, “Bingo!” He had found the ad. On page 21 of the Fall 2013 issue, there it was:

DO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BESTSELLER?

MAN OF LETTERS SEEKS AMBITIOUS WRITER

FOR SERIOUS WORK. REFERENCES ESSENTIAL.

All we had to do now was contact the person at the magazine who dealt with classified ads.

* * *

Carolina was still outside the gate of The Garden of Eden. Her father had not called her. He must hate her, she thought, like everyone else. Because of what had happened in the house. Because of what she had done to Tara Scalini. And she would never forgive herself.

She burst into tears again. Things would never get better, she thought. She no longer wanted to live. Through misty eyes, she searched in her bag for a vial of ketamine. She needed to feel better. As she searched, she found the little plastic box she had been given by her friend Leyla. It was heroin, to be snorted. Carolina had not tried it yet. She laid a line of white powder on the dashboard and twisted to move her nose closer.

Inside the house, Gerald Scalini, who had been told by his wife that a car had been parked outside the gate for quite a while now, decided to call the police.

Several police cars were outside The Garden of Eden. In the back of Montagne’s car, Carolina, her hands cuffed behind her back, was crying. Montagne was questioning her through the open door.

“What were you doing here? Waiting for a customer? Do you sell this shit here?”

“No, I swear,” Carolina said, weeping, half-conscious.

“You’re too high to answer, you idiot! And don’t go throwing up on my seats, got that? Fucking junkie!”

“I’d like to talk to my father.”

“Sure, what else? With what we found in the car, you’ll be hauled up in front of a judge. The next stop for you, girl, is a prison cell.”

The afternoon was coming to its end, and in the quiet residential neighborhood where the Browns lived, Charlotte, who had just gotten back from her day at the clinic, was daydreaming on the porch. Her husband, returning from the Grand Theater, sat down next to her. He seemed exhausted.

She lit a cigarette. “Alan . . .”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to take part in the play.”

He smiled. “You should,” he said encouragingly.

“I don’t know . . . I haven’t been on a stage in twenty years.”

“You’ll be a hit.”

By way of reply, Charlotte gave a long sigh.

“What’s going on?” Alan said, seeing that something wasn’t right.

“I’ve been telling myself it may be better to keep a low profile, and stay away from Hayward.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“You know perfectly well, Alan.”

A few miles away, at the Lake Palace, Eden was in a state. Carolina had disappeared. He had looked for her all over the hotel, in the bar, around the pool, in the fitness room. She