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

with my discovery of the theater. I loved it. I would read plays avidly, even thought to write one. Tara said we could try writing it together. Because of his work on Channel 14, my father was invited to all the previews, so we went regularly to see new plays.

In the spring of 2010, my parents finally bought me the laptop I’d been dreaming about. I couldn’t have been happier. I spent all summer writing, on the porch of our house in Orphea. My parents grew worried.

“Don’t you want to go to the beach, Carolina? Or into town?” they would ask me.

“I’m writing,” I would say. “I’m very busy.”

For the first time, I was writing a play, which I had called “Mr Constantine”. It was about an old man called Mr Constantine who lives alone in a huge house in the Hamptons. His children never come to see him. One day, tired of feeling abandoned, he tells them he’s dying. The children, each hoping to inherit the house, rush to his bedside and give in to all his whims.

It was a comedy. I was passionate about it. I spent a whole year writing it. Whenever my parents looked for me, they’d find me at my computer.

“You’re working too hard!” they would say.

“I’m not working, I’m enjoying myself,”

“Then you’re enjoying yourself too much!”

I took advantage of the summer of 2011 to finish “Mr Constantine”, and when school restarted I showed it to my English teacher, whom I admired a lot. Her first reaction, when she had finished reading it, was to send for me along with my parents.

“Have you read your daughter’s play?” she asked my parents.

“No,” they replied. “She wanted you to read it first. Is there a problem?”

“A problem? Are you kidding? It’s wonderful! What an amazing play! I think your daughter has a real gift. That’s why I wanted to see you. As you may know, I’m involved with the school drama club. Every year, in June, we put on a play, and I’d like this year’s play to be Carolina’s.”

I couldn’t believe it: my play was going to be performed. Soon that was the only thing anyone talked about in the school. I’d always kept a low profile, but now my reputation went through the roof.

Rehearsals were due to start in January. I still had a few months to refine the script. That was all I did, including during the winter vacation. I really wanted it to be perfect. Tara would come over every day, and we’d shut ourselves in my room. Sitting at my desk, eyes glued to the screen, I would read the lines out loud. Tara, lying on my bed, would listen thoughtfully and give me her opinion.

Everything changed on the last Sunday of the vacation. The day before I was due to hand in my script. Tara was with me, as she had been on all the previous days. It was late afternoon. She told me she was thirsty, and I went to the kitchen to fetch her some water. When I got back to my room, she was getting ready to leave.

“Are you going already?” I said.

“Yes, I didn’t notice what time it was. I have to get home.”

She seemed strange all of a sudden.

“Is everything O.K., Tara?”

“Yes, everything’s fine. See you at school tomorrow.”

I walked her to the door. When I got back to my computer, my play was no longer on the screen. I thought there was a technical glitch, but when I tried to reopen the file I realized it had vanished. Then it occurred to me I was looking in the wrong folder. But I soon discovered that my play was nowhere to be found. When I tried looking in the computer’s trash and saw that it had been emptied, I finally understood: Tara had deleted my play, and there was no way to get it back.

I burst into tears, which became hysterics. My parents came running to my room.

“Don’t worry,” my father said. “You have a copy somewhere, don’t you?”

“No!” I screamed. “Everything was there! I’ve lost everything.”

“Carolina,” he said, starting to lecture me, “I did tell you—”

“Jerry,” my mother cut in, having understood the gravity of the situation, “I think now’s not the time.”

I told my parents what had happened: Tara asking me for water, me going out of the room for a moment, then her hurried departure and the play gone. My play could not have simply flown away. It could only have been Tara.

“But why would she have done something like that?” my mother said, trying to take it in.

She telephoned the Scalinis and told them what had happened. They defended their daughter, swore she would never have done anything like that, and rebuked my mother for making such accusations.

“Gerald,” my mother said on the telephone, “this play didn’t get deleted by itself. May I talk with Tara, please?”

But Tara did not want to talk with anyone.

My last hope was the printed copy of the play I had given my English teacher in September. But she couldn’t find it. My father took my computer to one of Channel 14’s I.T. specialists, but the man confessed himself powerless to do anything. “When the trash is emptied, it’s emptied,” he told my father. “Didn’t you make a copy of the file?”

My play had ceased to exist. A year’s work trashed. A year’s work gone up in smoke. It was an indescribable feeling. As if a light had gone out inside me.

My parents and my English teacher could only make stupid suggestions. “Try to rewrite your piece from memory. You knew it by heart.” It was obvious they had never written anything. It was impossible to bring a year’s work back to life in a few days. They suggested I should write another play for the following year. But I didn’t want to write anything more. I was too depressed.

Of the months that followed, all I remember is a feeling of bitterness. A pain deep in