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

her mind. I think she was particularly troubled by Lambert’s revelations about Charlotte Brown. Where had Charlotte gone on opening night in 1994? And why? What was she hiding? Alan and Charlotte Brown had both been very friendly to Betsy when she had moved to Orphea. She had lost count of the number of times they had invited her to dinner, asked her out for long walks or boat rides. She had regularly had dinner with Charlotte, mostly at Café Athena, where they had spent hours chatting. Betsy had let her in on her problems with Chief Gulliver, and Charlotte had told her about her move to Orphea. At the time, she had just finished her studies. She had found a job with a grumpy vet who confined her to secretarial tasks and would put his hands on her buttocks and laugh.

Betsy could absolutely not imagine Charlotte breaking into a house and shooting anyone dead.

The previous day, after viewing the video, we had telephoned Lambert and asked him two questions: Did the members of the theater company have cars? And who else owned a copy of the video recording of the play?

On the matter of cars, he was categorical: the whole company had come on the bus. Nobody had a car. As for the video, six hundred copies had been sold to the town’s inhabitants, from various outlets. “There were some in the stores on Main Street, groceries, gas stations. People thought it was a nice souvenir. Between the fall of 1994 and the following summer, they sold out.”

So, Stephanie could easily have come by a secondhand copy—there was even a copy in the town’s public library. And the fact that Charlotte did not have a car meant that in the time she was absent on the night of the murders—approximately half an hour—she could not have gone far, only somewhere that was a thirty-minute round trip on foot from the Grand Theater. Derek, Betsy and I had concluded that if she had taken one of the town’s few taxis, or if she had asked someone to drive her to Penfield, the driver would surely have come forward after the tragic events.

That morning, Betsy decided to take the opportunity of going for her usual jog to see how long it took her to get from the theater to Mayor Gordon’s house and back on foot. It turned out to be nearly forty-five minutes at normal walking pace. Charlotte had been absent for approximately half an hour. What was the margin of interpretation of the word approximately? Running, it took just twenty-five minutes. A fit runner could do it in twenty. For someone with unsuitable footwear, it would have to have been closer to thirty, thirty-five. So it was feasible. Charlotte would theoretically have had time to run to the Gordons’, kill them, and get back to the Grand Theater.

As Betsy was thinking, sitting on a bench in the little park facing what had been Mayor Gordon’s house, she received a call from Michael Bird.

“Betsy,” he said in a worried voice, “could you come over to the office right away? Something very strange has happened.”

In his office, Bird told Betsy about the visit he had just had.

“Meta Ostrovski, the literary critic, came here. He wanted to know what had happened to Stephanie. When I told him about the murder, he got into a terrible state. ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me?’ he shouted at me.”

“What’s his connection with Stephanie?” Betsy said.

“I don’t know. That’s why I called you. He started asking me all kinds of questions. He wanted to know everything. How she had died, why, what leads the police were following.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just what everyone knows, what he can find in the papers.”

“And then?”

“Then he asked me for old issues of the Chronicle that mentioned Stephanie’s disappearance. I gave him what copies we still had. He insisted on paying for them. Then he left.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“He said he was going back to his hotel to study them. He’s staying at the Lake Palace.”

After quickly going home and taking a shower, Betsy set off for the Lake Palace. She put a call through to Ostrovski’s room and he agreed to join her in the hotel bar.

“I knew Stephanie from the New York Literary Review,”Ostrovski said. “She was a brilliant young woman, with an immense talent. Potentially a great writer.”

“How did you know she’d moved to Orphea?”

“After she left the paper, we kept in touch. A few exchanges.”

“Weren’t you surprised that she had taken a job in a small town in the Hamptons?”

“Now that I’m back here, I’d say it was an excellent choice. She said she wanted to write and this town was perfect for that, being so quiet.”

“Quiet,” Betsy said. “Well, it’s hardly that right now. Tell me, this isn’t the first time you’ve been here, is it, Mr Ostrovski?”

“You’re well informed, officer. I came here twenty years ago for the very first festival. There was an exceptional production of ‘Uncle Vanya’ and I liked the town.”

“And you haven’t been back to the festival since 1994?”

“No, never.”

“Why come back now after twenty years?”

“Mayor Brown was kind enough to invite me, and I thought: why not?”

“Was this the first time you’ve been invited back since 1994?”

“No. But this year I really felt like coming.”

Betsy sensed that Ostrovski was not telling her the whole truth. “Mr Ostrovski, how about you stop treating me like a simpleton? I know you went to the offices of the Chronicle today and asked questions about Stephanie. The editor told me that you did not seem in a calm, normal state. What’s going on?”

Ostrovski took offense at this. “What’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on, dammit. A young woman I had a great deal of respect for has been murdered! Forgive me if I find it hard to conceal my emotions when hearing of this tragedy.”

His voice cracked. It was obvious he was at the end of his tether.

“How come