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

a police presence, the atmosphere was electric. A crowd had gathered on the street. Some were bystanders attracted by all the excitement, but others wanted to demonstrate their support for the family. Many among those present were holding candles. A makeshift altar had been set up against a lamppost, around which flowers, messages, and cuddly toys were strewn. Some people were singing, others praying, others taking photographs. There were reporters, too, and part of the sidewalk had been invaded by the vans of the local T.V. channels. Immediately Mayor Brown appeared, the reporters rushed up to him and asked him about the cancellation of the fireworks. Betsy tried to push them aside to let him get by without having to reply, but he restrained her. He wanted to speak to the media. Whereas earlier, in his office, he had seemed cornered, now he was bristling with self-confidence.

“I’ve listened to the town’s tradespeople,” he declared. “I understand their anxieties, and I’m well aware that canceling the Fourth of July celebrations could endanger the local economy, which is certainly fragile. So, having consulted my council, I have decided to go ahead with the fireworks and to dedicate them to the memory of Stephanie Mailer.” Pleased with the effect the annoucement had created, the mayor took no more questions.

That evening, after dropping Brown at his house, Betsy stopped in the marina parking lot, facing the ocean. It was eight o’clock. The delightful warmth of the evening invaded the car. She had no desire to be home on her own, still less to have dinner alone in a restaurant.

She phoned her friend Lauren, but Lauren was in New York.

“I don’t get it, Betsy,” she said. “When we have dinner together you take off at the first opportunity, and when I’m in New York you call and suggest we have dinner.”

Betsy was in no mood to get into a debate. She hung up and went and bought a take-out meal from a snack bar at the marina. Then she went to her office at the station and ate her meal while gazing at the board where the elements of the investigation were displayed. As she was staring at the name Kirk Hayward, she thought again about what Lewis Erban had said the previous day—how the former police chief had been forced to move down to the basement. She remembered the storeroom, and decided to go down there. As she opened the door, she was seized with a strange feeling of unease. She could imagine Chief Hayward, in this very place, twenty years earlier.

Since the light did not work, she had to switch on her torch. The space was cluttered with chairs, filing cabinets, rickety tables, and cardboard boxes. She made her way through this graveyard of furniture until she came to a desk in lacquered wood, dust-covered and strewn with various objects, among which she noticed a metal stand engraved with the name Chief K. Hayward. She opened the four drawers. Three were empty, the fourth resisted. It was locked. She found a narrow crowbar in the workshop next door and prised open the lock, which yielded easily. Inside, there was a single yellowing sheet of paper bearing the handwritten words:

The Darkest Night

BETSY KANNER

There’s nothing I like more than patrolling at night in Orphea.

There’s nothing I like more than the quiet streets of the town bathed in the warmth of summer nights, the navy blue sky strewn with stars. Driving slowly through peacefully sleeping neighborhoods where all the shutters are closed. Passing a lone walker who can’t sleep or happy townspeople who are taking advantage of these night hours to sit out on their porches and who give you a friendly wave as you pass.

There’s nothing I like more than the streets downtown on winter nights, when suddenly it starts snowing and the ground is soon covered in a layer of white powder. That moment when you’re the only person awake, when the snowplows have not yet gone to work, and when you’re the first to make a mark in the virgin snow. Getting out of the car, patrolling on foot in the park, hearing the snow creak beneath your boots, happily filling your lungs with that dry, invigoratingly cold air.

There’s nothing I like more than catching sight of a fox walking all the way up Main Street in the early hours of the morning.

There’s nothing I like more than sunrise, in all seasons, over the marina. Seeing the inky horizon tinged with bright pink, then orange, and seeing that ball of fire rise slowly above the waves.

I moved to Orphea just a few months after signing my divorce papers.

I got married too early, to a wonderful man who wasn’t the right one for me. I think I got married too early because of my father.

I have always had a very strong, very close relationship with my father. He and I have been like two fingers of the same hand since my early childhood. Whatever my father did, I wanted to do. Whatever my father said, I repeated. Wherever he went, I followed.

My father loves tennis. I played tennis, too, in the same club as him. On Sundays we often played each other, and, as the years passed, the closer our games became.

My father loves playing Scrabble. By the greatest of coincidences I, too, love the game. For a long time we spent our winter vacations skiing in Whistler, British Columbia. Every evening after dinner, we would settle down in the main room of our hotel and play a game of Scrabble, scrupulously noting down, game after game, who had won and by how many points.

My father is a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, and it was quite natural—I didn’t even question it—that I should also study law at Harvard. I always believed it was what I wanted.

My father was very proud of me. At tennis, at Scrabble, at Harvard. In every situation. He never wearied of being congratulated about me. More than