The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist by Joël Dicker (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

Saturdays at Leyla’s became a ritual. Several girls from the school would be there, we’d shut ourselves in her room, drink alcohol she stole from her father, smoke cigarettes in the bathroom, and send Tara insulting messages on Facebook. Bitch, whore, muff diver. Everything got thrown in. We told her we hated her and called her every name under the sun. We reveled in it. We’re going to kill you, you bitch. You slut. You whore.

That was the kind of girl I had become. A year earlier, my parents had been urging me to go out and make friends, but I preferred to spend my weekends writing. Now I was spending my evenings in Leyla’s room, insulting Tara. The more I attacked her, the smaller she became in my eyes. I had once admired her so much, now I enjoyed dominating her. In the corridors at school, I started jostling her. One day, Leyla and I dragged her into the toilets and beat her up. I had never hit anyone before. When I landed the first blow, I was afraid of her reaction, afraid she would defend herself and overcome me. But she let herself be beaten. I felt strong, seeing her cry, seeing her begging me to stop hitting her. I liked that. That feeling of power. Seeing her reduced to nothing. The punishments resumed every time we had the opportunity. One day, while I was hitting her, she pissed herself. And that evening on Facebook, I bombarded her with more insults. The best thing you can do is die, you bitch. That’s the best thing that could happen to you.

This lasted three months.

One morning in mid-February, there were police cars outside the school. Tara had hanged herself in her room.

*

It didn’t take long for the police to get to me.

A few days after the tragedy, as I was getting ready for school, some detectives came looking for me at home. They showed me dozens of pages containing the messages I had sent to Tara. Daddy contacted his lawyer, Benjamin Graff. When the police officers left, he said we could rest easy: the police wouldn’t be able to prove a direct causal link between my messages on Facebook and Tara’s suicide. I remember he said something like:

“It’s a good thing the Scalini girl didn’t leave a farewell note explaining why she was doing what she did, or Carolina would be in real trouble.”

“A good thing?” my mother screamed. “Do you realize what you’re saying, Benjamin? You all make me want to throw up!”

“I’m just trying to do my job,” Graff said, “and stop Carolina from ending up in jail.”

But she had left a letter. Her parents found it a few days later in her room. In it, Tara explained at length that she preferred to die rather than continue to be humiliated by me every day.

The Scalinis lodged a complaint.

The police came again. It was then that I really became aware of what I had done. I had killed Tara. The handcuffs. The police station. The interrogation.

Graff, when he arrived, was not as arrogant as the first time. He was even worried. He said the D.A. wanted to make an example of me and send a strong signal to those who harassed their friends on the Internet. Depending on how it was done, incitement to suicide could even be considered a kind of homicide.

“You could be tried like an adult,” Graff told me. “If that happens, you face seven to fifteen years in prison. Unless we can come to some arrangement with Tara’s family and get them to withdraw their complaint.”

“An arrangement?” my mother said.

“Money,” Graff said. “In return for which they would give up on the idea of taking Carolina to court. There’d be no trial.”

My father instructed Graff to approach the Scalinis’ lawyer. Graff returned with their demand.

“They want your house in Orphea,” he told my parents.

“Our house?” my father repeated, incredulous.

“Yes,” Graff confirmed.

“Then it’s theirs,” my father said. “Call their lawyer immediately and assure him that, if the Scalinis drop their charges, I’ll see to the paperwork.”

JESSE ROSENBERG

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Two days to opening night

Former Special Agent Grace of the A.T.F., now seventy-two, was retired and living in Portland, Maine. When I had contacted him by telephone, he had expressed interest in our case. “Could we meet?” he had asked. “I need to show you something.”

To avoid my having to drive all the way to Maine, we agreed to meet halfway, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Grace gave us the address of a little restaurant he liked a lot, where we would be left in peace. When we got there, he was already at a table with a pile of pancakes. He was thinner than before, his face was lined.

“Rosenberg and Scott, the two terrors of 1994,” he said with a smile when he saw us. “I always thought our paths would cross again.”

We sat down facing him. On seeing him again, I had the impression I had taken a leap into the past. He had aged, but he had not changed much.

“So you’re interested in Jeremiah Fold?” he said.

I gave him a detailed update.

“Fold was like an eel, Captain Rosenberg,” Grace said. “Slippery, untouchable, quick, electric. Everything a detective could hate.”

“Why was the A.T.F. interested in him then?”

“To be honest, we were only indirectly interested in him. For us, the real big deal was the stolen army weapons being sold in the Ridgesport area. Before we cottoned on that it was all happening in that bar where our paths crossed in 1994, it took us months of investigation. One of the leads we followed was Fold. We knew from our informers that he had his fingers in all kinds of pies. I soon grasped that he wasn’t our man, but the few weeks of observation we did on him really knocked me back. The guy was a maniac, incredibly organized. In the end, we lost interest in him. And then, one morning in July