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

the very next day, he summoned her like a dog. “Mylla! Mylla, go take this package to X!” She got scared. She decided to run away. She took the package, as he had asked, but didn’t go where she was supposed to go. She threw the package in a garbage can, then took the train. She wanted to go back to her parents in New York. She wanted to be back in the warm feeling of home. With the money she still had, she finished her journey by taxi. When the taxi dropped her outside her parents’ building, she felt a deep happiness come over her. It was midnight on a fine autumn night. The street was deserted, asleep. Suddenly, she saw him, sitting on the front steps of the building. Fold. He glared at her. She wanted to scream, to run away, but Costico, his henchman, came up behind her. Fold made a sign to Miranda to be quiet. They drove her back to Ridge’s Club. For the first time, they took her to the room they called “the office”. Fold asked her where the package was. Miranda was crying. She immediately admitted that she had thrown it away. She was sorry, she promised not to do it again. Fold kept saying, “You’re not going to leave me, Mylla, do you understand that? You belong to me!” Still crying and terrified, she got down on her knees. Fold finally said, “I’m going to punish you, but I’m not going to mess you up.” Miranda didn’t understand at first. Then Jeremiah grabbed her by the hair and dragged her over to a large bowl of water. He plunged her head into it, for several seconds. She thought she was going to die. When he had finished, as she was lying on the ground, crying and shaking, Costico threw photographs of her parents in her face. “If you disobey,” he said, “if you do anything stupid, I’ll kill both of them.”

* * *

Miranda interrupted her account for a long while.

“I’m really sorry I’m making you relive all this,” Betsy said gently, placing her hand on hers. “What happened after that?”

“It was the start of a new life. I was at Fold’s beck and call. He set me up in a room in a motel by the side of Route 16, mainly used by hookers.”

* * *

September 1992

“This is your new home,” Jeremiah told Miranda as they walked into the motel room. “It’ll be better for you here, you can come and go as you like.”

Miranda sat down on the bed. “I want to go home, Jeremiah,” she said.

“Don’t you like it here?”

He had spoken in a gentle voice. That was how perverse he was: one day he would mistreat her, the next day he would take her shopping and be as nice to her as he had been at the beginning.

“I’d like to leave,” Miranda said.

“You can go if you like. The door is wide open. But I wouldn’t want anything to happen to your parents.”

With these words, Fold left. For a long time Miranda looked at the door of the room. She just had to walk through it and take a bus to New York. But that was impossible. She was Fold’s prisoner.

Fold forced her to resume her deliveries. Then he tightened his grip on her by involving her in the recruiting of his “slaves”. One day, he summoned her to his office. She entered it shaking, thinking she was going again to the bowl. But Fold seemed in a good mood.

“I need a new director of human resources,” he said. “The last one just took an overdose.”

Miranda felt her heart pounding. What did Fold want of her?

“We’re going to trap a few perverts who are looking for an underage girl to fuck. And the underage girl is going to be you. Don’t worry, nobody will do anything to you.”

The plan was simple: Miranda was to hustle in the parking lot of the motel, and when a client approached her she would lead him to her room. There she would ask him to undress, she would do the same, and only then admit to the man that she was underage. The man would probably say that that wasn’t a problem, on the contrary, and at that moment Costico would come out of his hiding place and handle the rest.

And that was what happened. Miranda agreed to it, not only because she had no choice, but because Fold promised her that once she had helped him trap three “slaves” for him she would be free to leave.

Having fulfilled her side of the contract, Miranda went to see him and demanded that he let her leave. She ended up with her head in the bowl of water. “You’re a criminal, Mylla,” he said as she tried to catch her breath. “You’re trapping guys and blackmailing them. They’ve all seen you and they even know your real name. You’re not going anywhere, Mylla, you’re staying with me.”

Miranda’s life became hell. When she wasn’t delivering packages, she was being used as bait in the parking lot, and every night she was at the reception in the club, where she was much appreciated by the customers.

* * *

“How many guys did you trap like that?” Betsy said.

“I don’t know. In the two years it lasted, maybe dozens. Fold would often renew his stock of slaves. He didn’t want to use them for too long, for fear they might be identified by the police. He liked to cover his tracks. I was scared, depressed, unhappy. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. The girls in the parking lot said that those who had been the bait before me had ended up either killing themselves or dying of an overdose.”

“A girl in the motel told us about an argument between Costico and a guy who wouldn’t let them get one over on him.”

“Yes, I remember something like that,” Miranda said.

“We’d like to track