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

the elevator doors opened, there was Ted, ashen-faced, barely able to stand. She settled him in the living room and made him tea.

“Café Athena has burned down,” Ted said. “I had everything in my constrction cabin there, the plans, my files, months of work gone up in smoke.”

“Surely the architects have copies?” Sylvia said, anxious to calm her brother.

“No, you don’t understand!” Ted said. “This is really serious.”

He took a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. It was the typed note he had found behind the windshield wiper of his car when he had rushed out of his house after being called about the fire.

Next time it’ll be your house that burns down.

“It was arson?” Sylvia said, horrified.

Ted nodded.

“Who did it?”

“A man called Jeremiah Fold.”

“Who is he?”

Her brother told her how he had forbidden Fold to come back to the Palace, the fight they had, and what had happened subsequently.

“Jeremiah wants money,” Ted said. “He wants a lot of money.”

“You have to go to the police.”

“That’s impossible right now. Knowing Fold, he will have paid a guy to do this. The police will never be able to pin it on him. At least not now. The only thing it’ll get me is more reprisals. He’s a psycho, and it’ll only get worse. Best-case scenario, he’ll burn down everything I own. Worst-case, someone will end up killed.”

“And you think that if you pay, he’ll leave you alone?”

“I’m sure of it. He loves money.”

“Then pay him for now. We have enough money. Pay him, wait for things to calm down, and then go to the police.”

* * *

“So my brother decided to pay, at least for the time being, to resolve the situation,” Sylvia told Betsy. “His restaurant meant so much to him. It was his pride and joy, the mark of his success. He hired the companies Mayor Gordon told him to, and regularly transferred large sums of money to Fold to stop him sabotaging the work. That way, Café Athenawas able to open on time.”

Betsy was more than intrigued.

“Did you tell all this to the police at the time?”

Sylvia sighed. “No.”

“Why not?”

“My brother came under suspicion for the Gordon family murders. Then one day he disappeared, and eventually he was killed in a car chase with the police. I didn’t want to blacken his name any more than it was blackened already.”

* * *

While Betsy and Sylvia Tennenbaum were at Café Athena, Kirk Hayward was making his slow way down Main Street. Seeing a suitable patch of bare wall, he stopped and from a shoulder bag he took a pot of glue and a brush and stuck up one of the posters he had just had printed.

CASTING CALL

In preparation for the performance of

THE ORPHEA FESTIVAL PLAY

“The Darkest Night”

THE DIRECTOR SEEKS ACTORS –

WITH OR WITHOUT EXPERIENCE

Auditions Monday, July 14, 10 a.m. at the Grand Theater

A few hundred yards away, Jerry and Carolina Eden came across one of these posters as they strolled on Main Street.

“An audition for a play,” Eden read. “How about going along? When you were little, you had ambitions to be an actress.”

“But not in some small-town play,” Carolina said.

“Let’s try our luck,” Eden said, making an effort to stay enthusiastic. “You never know.”

“It says here the auditions are on Monday. How long are we staying?”

“I don’t know, Carolina. As long as we have to. Please don’t start, we only just got here. Do you have other plans? Going to college, maybe? Oh no, I forgot, you’re not enrolled anywhere.”

Carolina pouted and resumed walking ahead of her father. They came to Cody Springfield’s bookstore. Carolina went in, and stared fascinated at the shelves. On a table, she spotted a dictionary. She picked it up and leafed through it. One word led to another, she let the definitions parade in front of her eyes. She felt her father’s presence behind her.

“It’s been so long since I last saw a dictionary,” she said.

She put the dictionary under her arm and started searching in fiction.

Springfield came up to her. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“A good novel,” she said. “I haven’t read anything in a while.”

He noticed the dictionary under her arm. “That’s not a novel,” he said with a smile.

“It’s much better. I’ll take it. I can’t remember the last time I looked through a paper dictionary. I usually use spellcheck when I write on my laptop.”

He sighed. “A strange century we live in.”

Carolina nodded. “When I was little, I went in for spelling competitions. My father trained me. We’d spend all our time spelling words. It drove my mother crazy. There was a time when I could be hours reading the dictionary, memorizing the spelling of the most complicated words. Go on, choose a word.”

She handed the dictionary to an amused Springfield, who took it and opened it at random. He looked down the page and said:

“Holosystolic.”

“Easy: h-o-l-o-s-y-s-t-o-l-i-c.”

He gave a mischievous smile. “Did you really use to read the dictionary?”

“Oh, yes, all day long.”

She laughed and her eyes gleamed.

“Where are you from?” Springfield said.

“Manhattan. My name’s Carolina.”

“I’m Cody.”

“I love your bookstore, Cody. I would have liked to be a writer.” Her face clouded over.

“Would have? What’s stopping you? I’m sure you’re not even twenty yet.”

“I can’t write anymore.”

“Anymore? What does that mean?”

“Not since I did something very serious.”

“What did you do?”

“It’s too serious to talk about.”

“You could write about it.”

“I know, that’s what my shrink says. But it won’t come. Nothing comes. I’m all empty inside.”

That evening, Eden and Carolina had dinner at Café Athena. Eden knew that Carolina had previously liked the place and had hoped to please her by taking her there. But she sulked all the way through the meal.

“Why did you drag us here?” she said, putting aside her seafood pasta.

“I thought you liked it,” her father said.

“I mean Orphea. Why did you drag me here?”

“I thought it would do you good.”

“You thought it would do me good? Or did you want to show me how much I disappoint you and to remind