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

My salary doubled, trebled, and our quality of life went up with it. Cynthia was able to stop working and enjoy Carolina, who was still quite young. She devoted part of her time to working for free for a theater company. Our vacations in Orphea grew longer: they lasted three weeks, then a whole month, then the whole summer, in rented houses that were ever larger and more luxurious, with a cleaning woman once a week, then twice a week, then every day, who took care of the house, made the beds, cooked for us, and picked up whatever we left lying around.

It was a good life, rather different from what I had imagined in the days when we spent our week’s vacation in the boarding house. I was completely disconnected from work. With my new responsibilities, I couldn’t take more than a few days at a time. While Cynthia and Carolina enjoyed two months by the pool without having to worry about a thing, I would go back to Manhattan at regular intervals to deal with business. Cynthia was upset that I could not stay longer, but everything was going well. What did we have to complain about?

My rise continued. Maybe even despite myself, I don’t know. My salary, which I thought was already astronomical, continued to increase, as did the amount of work. Media groups were buying one another to form all-powerful conglomerates. I found myself in a big office in a glass skyscraper. I could measure my professional ascent by the size and height of the offices I moved to. My remuneration followed my progress up the floors. My bonus grew tenfold, a hundredfold. Ten years after being director of a small radio station, I found myself the C.E.O. of Channel 14, the most watched and most lucrative T.V. channel in the country, which I ran from the 53rd and final floor of the glass tower, for a salary, including bonuses, of $9 million a year. In other words, $750,000 a month. I earned more money than I could ever spend.

Everything I wanted to give Cynthia and Carolina, I was able to. Luxury clothes, sports cars, a fabulous apartment, a private school, dream vacations. If the New York winter depressed us, we would leave in a private plane for a revitalizing week in St Barts. As for Orphea, I built the house of our dreams there, for a vast amount of money, a house by the ocean. I called it The Garden of Eden and put the name in wrought-iron letters on the gate.

Everything had become so simple, so easy. So extraordinary. But it had a cost, not only a financial one. I had to devote myself even more to my work. The more I wanted to give to my two lovely women, the more I had to give to Channel 14, in time, energy, and concentration.

Cynthia and Carolina spent the summers and every weekend when the weather was good in our house in the Hamptons. I would join them as soon as I could. I had set up an office there, from which I could deal with business and hold telephone conferences.

But the easier our existence appeared to be, the more complicated it actually became. Cynthia wanted me to spend more time with her and Carolina, without my being constantly concerned with my work, but without my work there could not be a house. It was like a snake biting its own tail. Our vacations were a succession of reproaches and quarrels: “What’s the point in your coming here if all you do is shut yourself up in your office?” “But we’re together!” “No, Jerry, you’re here, but you’re not with us.” And this would continue on the beach or at a restaurant. Sometimes, during my walks, I would go as far as the old family board-ing house, which had closed when its owner had died. I would look at the pretty plank house and dream of what our vacations had been, so modest, so short, so wonderful. I wished I could turn the clock back. But I didn’t know how.

If you ask me, I’ll tell you that I did all this for my wife and daughter.

If you ask Cynthia or Carolina the same question, they’ll tell you that I did it for myself, for my ego, my workaholic nature.

But it doesn’t really matter whose fault it was. Over the course of time, the magic of Orphea stopped working. Our marriage, our family, no longer mended itself or came back together during our stays there. On the contrary, those stays helped to tear us farther apart.

And then everything changed dramatically.

Things happened in the spring of 2013 that forced us to sell the house in Orphea.

JESSE ROSENBERG

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Eleven days to opening night

Finding the ad in the Notre Dame student magazine did not help us to trace the person who had placed it. At the editorial offices, the person in charge of advertising had no information. The ad had apparently been placed in reception and paid for in cash. A dead-end mystery. On the other hand, the student was able to find the same ad in the archive, published exactly a year earlier. And the year before that. The ad had appeared every year in the fall issue.

“What’s special about the fall issue?” I said.

“It’s the most widely read. It’s when people come back to college or come for their first year.”

The return to college, Derek pointed out, marked the arrival of new students and therefore of potential candidates to write this book. “If I was the person wanting that book to be written,” he said, “I wouldn’t limit myself to one magazine, I’d place the ad more widely.”

We called the editorial offices of the magazines of literature faculties in several colleges in New York to check out this hypothesis. A similar ad had indeed appeared in a number of other fall issues for years. But whoever had placed them had left no