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

Padalin could contain himself no longer. He exploded. He told her that he knew everything, that he had been to the Northern Rose, that she had joined a man there in a room. Meghan did not deny it.

“Get out!” Padalin screamed. “You disgust me!”

She burst into tears. “Forgive me, Samuel!” she begged him, ashen-faced.

“Get out of here! Get out of this house! Take your things and get out, I never want to see you again!”

“Samuel, don’t do this to me, I beg you! I don’t want to lose you. You’re the only man I love.”

“You should have thought of that before sleeping with this man you met.”

“It was the biggest mistake of my life, Samuel! I don’t feel anything for him!”

“You make me sick. I read your diaries, I saw what you wrote about him. I saw all the times you met with him at the Northern Rose!”

“You’ve stopped caring about me, Samuel! I don’t feel important! I don’t feel looked at. When he tried his charms on me, I liked it. Yes, we’ve met regularly. Yes, we’ve flirted. But I’ve never slept with him!”

“Oh, so it’s my fault now?”

“No, I’m just saying that sometimes when I’m with you I feel alone.”

“I read that you met him at the New Year’s Eve party. So you did it right under my eyes! Does that mean I know the guy? Who is he?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Meghan sobbed, no longer sure if she should talk or keep quiet.

“It doesn’t matter? I can’t believe this!”

“Samuel, don’t leave me, I beg you!”

The tone became more heated. Meghan reproached her husband for not being romantic, for neglecting her, and Padalin, exasperated, finally said to her:

“I don’t excite you? Do you think you excite me? You have no life, you have nothing to tell, apart from your dull little stories about the bookstore and all those things you imagine in your head.”

At these words, deeply hurt, Meghan spat in her husband’s face, and he instinctively gave her a violent slap. Shocked, Meghan bit into her tongue. She felt blood fill her mouth. She was stunned. She grabbed her car keys and ran off in her nightdress.

* * *

“Meghan returned home the next day,” Padalin told us in his office. “She begged me not to leave her, she swore to me that this guy had been a terrible mistake, and because of him she’d realized how much she loved me. I decided to give my marriage a second chance. And you know what? It did us the world of good. I started paying her much more attention, she said she was happier. It transformed our relationship. We were more in tune than ever. We had two wonderful months, we were full of plans . . .”

“What about her lover?” Betsy said. “What became of him?”

“I have no idea. Meghan swore to me she had broken with him completely.”

“How did he take it?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you never found out who he was?”

“No, never.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“So that’s the real reason you never looked at her diaries again,” Betsy said, “and why you kept them hidden away in your basement. Because they reminded you of that painful episode.”

Padalin nodded, unable to speak. His throat was too knotted for him to utter another word.

“One last question, Mr Padalin,” Derek asked. “Do you have a tattoo on your body?”

“No,” he said.

“Can I ask you to lift your shirt? It’s only a routine check.”

In silence, Padalin removed his shirt. No tattoo.

What if the jilted lover, unable to bear losing Meghan, had killed her?

We could not rule that out. After our visit to Padalin, we drove to the Northern Rose Hotel in Bridgehampton. Obviously, when we told the receptionist that we were trying to identify a man who had booked a room in 1994, he laughed in our faces.

“We would like to see a record of all the reservations from 5 to 7 June and we’ll study the names ourselves,” I said.

“You don’t seem to understand,” he said. “You’re talking about 1994. We still had handwritten registration in those days. There’s no database I can use to help you.”

As I was negotiating with the receptionist, Derek was walking up and down the lobby of the hotel. His gaze came to rest on the wall of honor, on which hung photographs of famous guests: actors, writers, directors. Suddenly, he took down one of them.

“Sir, what are you doing?” the receptionist said. “You can’t—”

“Jesse! Betsy!” Derek cried. “Look at this!”

What he was holding was a photograph of Meta Ostrovski, twenty years younger, in a tuxedo, posing, all smiles, beside Meghan Padalin.

“When was this photograph taken?” I asked the receptionist.

“At the New Year’s Eve party in December 1993. That man’s the critic Ostrovski and—”

“Ostrovski was Meghan Padalin’s lover!” Betsy said in an undertone.

We went straight to the Lake Palace. We ran into the manager as we entered the lobby.

“Already?” he said in surprise. “But I only just called.”

“Called whom?” Derek asked.

“Why, the police. It’s about Mr Ostrovski. He’s just left the hotel, apparently called back urgently to the city. It was a chambermaid who informed me.”

“Informed you of what, dammit?”

“Follow me.”

The manager took us up to Suite 310, where Ostrovski had been staying, and opened the door with his passkey. We entered the room and discovered, stuck to the wall, a multitude of articles on the 1994 killings, Stephanie’s disappearance, our investigation, and photographs of Meghan Padalin everywhere.

4

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer

SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 – MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 2014

JESSE ROSENBERG

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Seven days after opening night

Was Ostrovski the third man?

We had lost track of him since the day before. We knew only that he had gone back to the city. N.Y.P.D. surveillance cameras had filmed him as he drove his car across the bridge into Manhattan. But he had not gone home. His apartment was empty. His cell phone was off. His only family was an elderly sister, who likewise could not