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

though, was that when the hair dryer caught fire, he was nowhere to be seen. Fortunately, one of the actors found a fire extinguisher and got the fire under control before the whole dressing room could go up in smoke. It could easily have been a disaster.”

“According to the report at the time, the fire officer didn’t come back until 7.30.”

“That’s what I remember, but if you’ve read my testimony, why come see me now? It was twenty years ago. Are you hoping I can tell you anything more?”

“In the report, you say you were in the corridor, you saw smoke coming out from under the door of a dressing room, and you called the fire officer, but he wasn’t to be found.”

“I remember opening the door, saw the hair dryer smoking and about to catch fire. It all happened very quickly.”

“That’s understandable,” Derek said. “But what struck me when I looked again at your testimony is why the person in the dressing room didn’t do anything about the fire.”

“Because the dressing room was empty,” Lambert said, as if only just realizing this. “There was nobody there.”

“But the hair dryer was on?”

“Yes,” Lambert said, a troubled look on his face. “I don’t know why that never struck me before. I was pretty much focused on the threat of a full-blown fire.

“Sometimes, we have something right in front of our eyes and we don’t see it,” Betsy said, half recalling those fateful words of Stephanie Mailer’s.

“Tell me, Mr Lambert,” Derek said, “whose dressing room was it?”

“Charlotte’s,” Lambert said immediately.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because that faulty hair dryer was hers. She used to say that if she used it too much, it would overheat and start to smoke.”

“Would she have left it to get too hot? And why?”

“Oh, no,” Lambert said, summoning his memories. “There was a big power outage that night. There was a problem with the fuses, which couldn’t support all the power necessary. It was around seven o’clock. I remember that because we were one hour from the beginning of the show and I was panicking because the technicians couldn’t restore the power. It took quite a while, but finally they managed it, and, soon afterward, there was that little fire.”

“That means Charlotte left her dressing room during the outage,” Betsy said. “The hair dryer was plugged in, and started working again while she was absent.”

“But if she wasn’t in her dressing room, where was she?” Derek said. “Somewhere else in the theater?”

“If she’d been in the backstage area,” Lambert said, “she would definitely have come running because of all the commotion. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of movement. But I do remember she came and complained to me at least half an hour later that her hair dryer had disappeared. I’m quite clear about that because by then I was terrified at the thought that we might not be ready in time for the start of the show. The official part of the evening had already started, and we couldn’t afford to be late. Charlotte came into my dressing room and told me that someone had taken her hair dryer. I got angry and said to her, ‘Your hair dryer got burned, it’s in the garbage! Isn’t your hair ready yet, and why are your shoes wet?’ The shoes she was to wear on stage were soaked. As if she’d been walking through water. Thirty minutes before going on stage! You can imagine the state I was in.”

“Her shoes were wet?” Derek said.

“Yes. I remember all these things because at the time I thought the show was going to be a disaster. What with the fuses blowing, that little fire, and my leading lady not yet ready and showing up with wet shoes, I could never have imagined the show would turn out to be such a huge success.”

“And after that, everything went on smoothly?”

“Absolutely.”

“When did you find out that Mayor Gordon and his family had been murdered?”

“There was some talk during the intermission, but we didn’t really pay attention. I wanted my actors to concentrate on the play. When we started again, I noticed that some people in the audience had left, including Mayor Brown, which I particularly noticed because he’d been sitting in the front row.”

“When exactly did he leave?”

“That I couldn’t tell you. But if it might help in any way, I do have a videocassette of the play.”

Lambert went and rummaged through a heap of relics on a bookcase and came back with an old V.H.S. cassette.

“We made a recording of the opening night as a souvenir. The quality isn’t good, because of the technical limitations of the time, but it does capture some of the atmosphere. Just promise me I’ll get it back. It means a lot to me.”

“Of course,” Derek said. “Thank you for your invaluable help, Mr Lambert.”

Leaving Buzz Lambert’s, Derek seemed preoccupied.

“What’s the matter, Derek?” Betsy said as they got in the car.

“It’s that thing about the shoes,” he said. “On the night of the murders, the pipe in the Gordons’ automatic sprinkler system was broken and the lawn in front of their house was soaked.”

“Do you think Charlotte might have been involved?”

“We know now she wasn’t in the theater around the time of the murders. If she was gone for half an hour, that would have given her plenty of time to get to Penfield and back while everybody thought she was in her dressing room. And I’m thinking again about those words of Stephanie Mailer’s: something in front of our eyes that we didn’t see. What if that night, when the Penfield neighborhood was cordoned off and roadblocks had been put up all around the region, the person who had committed those murders was actually on the stage of the Grand Theater in front of hundreds of people, using them as her alibi?”

“Do you think this video might help us get a better idea?”

“I dare hope so, Betsy. If it shows us the audience,