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

“Is that all?” I said.

“That’s all, Captain Rosenberg. I’m really sorry I can’t help you more than that.”

I thanked Ostrovski for his cooperation and offered to drive him somewhere.

“That’s kind of you, Captain, but I feel like walking a little and enjoying this wonderful night.”

He stood up and said goodbye. But as he was going through the door, he turned and said:

“A critic.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your little riddle up there on the board,” Ostrovski said proudly. “I’ve been looking at it for a while. And I’ve just understood. Who would like to write, but can’t? Your answer is: a critic.”

He gave us a farewell nod of the head and left the room.

“It’s him!” I cried to Betsy and Derek, who didn’t catch on immediately. “The one who would like to write but can’t, and who was in the Grand Theater on the evening of the murders. It’s Ostrovski! He’s the man behind Stephanie’s book!”

A few moments later, Ostrovski was in the interrogation room, for a much less pleasant conversation than the previous one.

“We know everything, Ostrovski,” Derek said angrily. “For the last twenty years, you’ve been putting an ad in the fall issues of college magazines in the New York area, trying to find someone to write a book investigating the Gordon murders.”

“Why that ad?” I said.

Ostrovski looked at me as if it was blindingly obvious. “Come on now, Captain. Can you imagine a great literary critic lowering himself to write a mystery novel? Can you imagine what people would say?”

“Where’s the problem?”

“In the order of respect granted to literary genres, at the top there is the incomprehensible novel, then the intellectual novel, then the historical novel, then the straight novel, and only after that, almost at the bottom of the list, just above the romantic novel, there’s the mystery novel.”

“Is this a joke?” Derek said.

“No, of course not! No, that’s just the problem. Ever since those murders, I’ve been held captive by a brilliant mystery plot, but I can’t write it.”

* * *

Orphea, July 30, 1994

The night of the murders

When the performance of “Uncle Vanya” was over, Ostrovski left the auditorium. A decent production, good acting. Since the intermission, he had heard people in his row getting agitated. Some of the audience had not returned for the second act. He only discovered the reason for that when he walked through the lobby, which was in a state of feverish excitement. Everyone was talking about a murder that had been com-mitted in the town.

From the steps of the building, looking down at the street, he observed the crowd heading in a continuous stream in the same direction: toward the Penfield neighborhood. Everyone wanted to see what had happened there. The atmosphere was electric, with a hint of frenzy. The human torrent reminded him of the tide of rats in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. As a critic, when everyone rushed somewhere, that was precisely where he did not go. He did not like what was fashionable, jeered at what was popular, loathed anything that aroused general enthusiasm. And yet, fascinated by the atmosphere, he felt a desire to let himself be carried along with it. He realized it was morbid curiosity. He threw himself into the human river plunging down Main Street and converging from the adjacent streets into a quiet residential neighborhood. Ostrovski, walking at a good pace, soon came to Penfield Crescent. There were many police cars there. The walls of the houses were illumined by the revolving blue and red lights. Ostrovski made his way through the crowd massed against the police barriers. The air on this tropical summer night was stifling. People were excited, nervous, anxious. They were saying it was the mayor’s house. They said the mayor had been murdered. Along with his wife and son.

Ostrovski stayed in Penfield Crescent for a long time, fascinated by what he was seeing. The real spectacle of the evening had not after all taken place at the Grand Theater, but here. Who had killed the mayor, and why? He was devoured by curiosity. He started constructing theories.

Once back at his hotel, he went to the bar. Late as it was, he was too exhilarated to sleep. What was going on? Why was he so fascinated by an everyday news item? Suddenly, he understood. He asked for paper and a pen. For the first time in his life, he had the plot of a book in his head. The idea was a special one: while the whole town is busy with the opening of a theater festival, a killing occurs. It was like a magic trick: the public looks to the left while everything is happening on the right. Ostrovski even wrote in capital letters the words the conjuring trick. That was the title! First thing tomorrow, he would make haste to the bookstore and buy all the mystery novels they had in stock. That was when he suddenly stopped, grasping the terrible reality. If he published that book, everyone would say it was a work of an inferior genre: a mystery novel. His reputation would never recover.

* * *

“So I could never write the book,” Ostrovski was saying in the interrogation room of the police station. “I dreamed about it, thought about it incessantly. I wanted to read that story, but I could not write it. Not a crime story, a mystery novel. It was too risky.”

“So you decided to hire someone else?”

“Yes. I couldn’t ask an established author. Just imagine, he could have blackmailed me by threatening to reveal my secret fascination with a mystery plot. It seemed to me that hiring a student would be less risky. And that was how I came across Stephanie Mailer. I knew her from the Review. Stephanie was an exceptional writer, a pure talent. She agreed to write the book. She said she had been looking for a good subject for years. It was the