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

Our first thought was that it was only possible to access this area on foot if you came along the shore, as we had done. But carefully examining the surroundings, we noticed that a swathe of tall grass on the forest side had recently been flattened. With difficulty we reached the spot and found that the soil was soft and mushy. We then discovered a flat expanse emerging from the forest, where the mud had been shifted. It was impossible to say for certain, but we thought there were footprints.

“Something happened here,” Derek said. “But I doubt that Stephanie came the same way we did. It’s much too steep. I think the only way to reach this place . . .”

“Is to come through the forest?” Betsy said.

“Precisely.”

Assisted by a handful of police officers from Orphea, we undertook a search of the strip of forest. There were clear indications that someone had been this way: broken branches, a piece of cloth hanging from a bush.

“This could be from the T-shirt Stephanie was wearing on Monday,” I said, lifting the cloth with latex gloves.

When I had seen her in the water, Stephanie had been wearing only one shoe, on her right foot. We found the left shoe in the forest, behind a stump.

“She was running through the forest, trying to escape from someone,” Derek said. “Otherwise, she would have taken the time to put her shoe back on.”

“And her pursuer caught up with her by the lake and drowned her,” Betsy said.

“That sounds right. But could she have run all the way here from the beach?”

It was more than five miles.

Going back through the forest, following the traces, we came out onto the road, some two hundred yards from the police barriers.

“She must have come in this way,” Derek said.

It was around here that we spotted tire tracks at the roadside. Most likely her pursuer had been in a car.

* * *

Meanwhile, in New York

In the offices of the New York Literary Review, Meta Ostrovski was gazing through the window of his office at a squirrel bounding across the lawn of a park. In almost perfect French, he was giving an interview by telephone to an obscure Parisian intellectual magazine curious to know what he thought was the perception of European literature in the United States.

Ostrovski was in an expansive mood. “The reason I’m one of the most eminent critics in the world today, of course, is that for the past thirty years,” he was saying, “I have never compromised my standards. Discipline and steadfastness of mind, that’s my secret. Above all, never love. To love is to be weak!”

“All the same,” the journalist at the other end objected, “some people claim that literary critics are generally failed writers.”

Ostrovski replied with a laugh. “That’s utter nonsense, madame. I’ve never, and I mean never, met a critic who dreamed of being a writer. Critics are above that. Writing is a minor art. Writing is putting together words that then form sentences. Even a monkey can do that with a little training!”

“So what is the role of the critic?”

“To establish the truth. To make it possible for the masses to distinguish what is good from what is worthless. You know, only a small part of the population has the ability to judge for itself what is good. Unfortunately, since these days everybody wants to give his opinion about everything and we’ve seen utter nonentities praised to the skies, we critics are obliged to put a little order into this chaos. We’re the intellectual truth police. That’s all.”

The interview was over. A secretary opened the door to Ostrovski’s untidy office without knocking.

“Today’s mail,” she said, putting an envelope down on a pile of books waiting to be read.

Ostrovski was disappointed. “One letter, is that all?”

“That’s all,” the secretary said, and left.

How dismal that his mail had become so meager! In the days when he worked for the New York Times, he would receive bundles of impassioned letters from readers who seemed never to miss any of his reviews or columns. But that was before. The days when he had been all-powerful—a bygone time. These days nobody wrote to him, he was no longer recognized in the street, in theaters there was no longer a murmur when he passed along a row, authors no longer hung around outside his building to give him their books. The number of careers he had launched with his reviews! The number of would-be writers he had destroyed. But today he was no longer feared the way he had been. What he wrote now was followed only by readers of the Review, which was highly regarded, of course, but much less widely read.

Waking up that morning, Ostrovski had had a premonition. Something was going to happen, something that would relaunch his career. He realized that it was this letter. His instinct never betrayed him. What could be in this letter? He did not want to open it too quickly. Why a letter and not a telephone call? Having gazed again at the envelope, he cut it open and took out the sheet of paper it contained. He looked first to see who was the sender: Alan Brown, Mayor of Orphea.

Dear Mr Ostrovski,

We would be delighted if you could this year attend the 21st National Theater Festival in Orphea, New York State. Your reputation as a critic is so well established that your presence at the festival would be an honor for us. You graced us with your presence at the very first festival. It would give us great pleasure if you would celebrate our twentieth birthday with us. We would take care of all your expenses during your stay and would provide you with the best accommodation.

What a disappointment! He threw the letter into the wastepaper basket.

To clear his mind, he took up the latest list of bestsellers in New York, confirmed which was now the number one bestseller, and then set about writing a devastating