by Riley Sager
“I think it depends on what she heard. This curse nonsense is the result of things that happened decades ago. Long before I was born. Things have been mostly quiet around here.”
I catch his word choice. Mostly.
“That’s not exactly comforting.”
“Trust me, there’s nothing here to fear,” Nick says. “The Bartholomew is generally a pretty happy place. You do like it here, don’t you?”
“Of course.” I flick my gaze to the expanse of Central Park outside the window. “There’s a lot to like.”
“Good. Now promise me something. If you get so creeped out that you feel the need to leave, at least come and talk to me first.”
“So you can talk me out of it?”
Nick’s shoulders rise and fall in a shy shrug. “Or at least get your phone number before you go.”
And it’s official: he and I really are flirting. I consider the possibility that maybe I’m not the girl I thought I was.
Maybe I’m more.
“My number,” I say with a coy smile, “is 12A.”
17
Fifteen minutes later, I’m back in my own apartment. Even though Nick showed no signs that I was overstaying my welcome, I felt it best to leave sooner rather than later. Especially once it became clear he had no intention of sharing any of the building’s deep, dark secrets. If there are indeed any to share. I got the sense from Nick that he believed the Bartholomew to be as normal—or abnormal, as the case may be—as any other building on the Upper West Side.
Which is why I now sit by the bedroom window, George only a faint outline against the night-darkened sky. With me are a mug of tea, the remainder of the chocolate bar Charlie bought for me, and my laptop, which is open to the email Chloe had sent yesterday.
“The Curse of the Bartholomew.”
If my theory about Ingrid fleeing because she was frightened is true, then I want to know all the reasons why she might have been scared—and if I, too, should be afraid.
I clink the link, which leads me to an urban-legend website. The kind Andrew used to read, with their clickbait tales of alligators in the sewers and mole people in abandoned subway tunnels. This one is a little more professional than most. Clean layout. Easy to read.
The first thing that greets me is a picture of the Bartholomew itself, taken from Central Park on a day that couldn’t be more picture perfect. Blue sky. Bright sun. Autumn leaves aflame. I even see George, the sunlight winking off his wings.
The image stands in stark contrast to the article itself, which drips with menace.
From the moment it opened its doors to residents, New York City’s Bartholomew apartment building has been touched by tragedy. Over its hundred-year history, the Gothic structure overlooking Central Park has witnessed death in many forms, including murder, suicide, and, in its first notable tragedy, plague.
The Spanish flu pandemic that spread like wildfire across the globe in 1918 had already done its worst when the Bartholomew opened to great fanfare in January the next year. Therefore it was a surprise when, five months later, the disease swept through the building, killing twenty-four residents in a span of weeks. Although a few notable names succumbed to illness, including Edith Haig, the young wife of shipping magnate Rudolph Haig, most of the victims were servants, whose close quarters allowed the illness to rapidly spread.
I look up from the screen, unnerved. Because 12A was originally servants’ quarters, some of those flu victims could have slept in this very room.
Maybe all of them.
Maybe they even died here.
A horrible thought, made worse by the photo just below that paragraph. It shows several canvas stretchers—seven, at least—resting on the sidewalk outside the Bartholomew, each one occupied by a corpse. Although blankets cover the faces and bodies of the dead, their feet are still visible. Seven sets of bare feet with dirty soles.
A chill passes through me when I think of those feet crossing the spot where I now sit. I do a little shimmy, trying to shake the feeling away. It’s no use, for another one arrives when I see the photo beneath it.
It’s the Bartholomew’s facade again, this time rendered in grainy black and white. A small crowd has gathered on the street—a cluster of parasols and bowler hats. High above them, alone on a corner of the roof, is a man in a black suit. A thin silhouette against the sky.
The building’s owner. Moments before his very public suicide.
The text under the photo confirms it.
After a thorough examination of the premises, doctors determined that the flu deaths were caused by poor ventilation in the servants’ quarters. This greatly upset the man who designed and paid for the construction of the building, Thomas Bartholomew, a doctor himself. He became so distraught by the incident that he leapt from the roof of the structure that bore his name. The ghastly act was witnessed by more than a hundred people on a beautiful July day.
There’s a link that, when I click on it, takes me to the original New York Times article about the suicide. Its headline contains a grim double meaning.
TRAGEDY STRIKES BARTHOLOMEW
I squint at the blurred-by-time newsprint, looking for key details. It was a Sunday afternoon in mid-July, and Central Park was a melting pot boiling over with New Yorkers seeking escape from the summer heat. Some people soon noticed a man standing on the roof of the Bartholomew like one of its already-famous gargoyles.
Then he jumped.
Witnesses made a point of stressing that fact. This was no accidental fall.
Dr. Bartholomew killed himself, leaving behind a young wife, Louella, and a seven-year-old son.
This is how I work for the next few hours, using the article Chloe sent as a sort of Rosetta stone of Bartholomew history. Each item is accompanied by several links to Wikipedia, news sites, online forums. I click them all, willingly tumbling down a rabbit hole of rumors, ghost stories, and urban legends.
I learn that things settled down after the building’s tumultuous start. The twenties and thirties were decades of relative quiet, marked only by a few incidents of note. A man tumbling down the stairs and breaking his neck in 1928. A starlet overdosing on laudanum in 1932.
I learn that the winding stairwell is allegedly haunted, either by the man who fell down the stairs or by one of the servants killed by the flu.
I learn that an unnamed apartment is also rumored to be haunted, presumably by the ghost of the aforementioned Edith Haig.
And I learn that on the first of November in 1944, as World War II neared its bloody end, a nineteen-year-old girl who worked at the Bartholomew was found brutally murdered in Central Park.
Her name was Ruby Smith, and she was the live-in maid of former socialite Cornelia Swanson. According to Swanson, Ruby liked to walk in the park before returning to wake her at seven o’clock each morning. When that didn’t happen, Swanson went to the park to look for the girl and found her lying in a wooded area directly across from the Bartholomew.
Ruby’s body had been cut open and several vital organs removed, including her heart.
The murder weapon was never found. Neither were Ruby’s organs.
The newspapers dubbed it the Ruby Red Killing.
Because there were no defensive wounds or signs of a struggle, the police concluded that Ruby had known her attacker. A lack of blood around the crime scene told them the ill-fated maid hadn’t been killed where she was found. But police did find blood inside Ruby’s small bedroom located in Cornelia Swanson’s apartment. A single red splotch behind the door.
Cornelia Swanson immediately became the police’s sole suspect. Their investigation uncovered an unsavory period from Swanson’s past. In the late 1920s, she lived in Paris and became enamored of a self-proclaimed mystic named Marie Damyanov, the leader of an occult group known as Le Calice D’Or.
The Golden Chalice.
This information led police to charge Cornelia Swanson for the murder of Ruby Smith. In the arrest report, police noted the date of the
murder—Halloween night.
Cornelia Swanson claimed to have known Marie Damyanov only socially. A close friend of both women stepped forward to say they were more than that. The rumor, he told police, was that the two were lovers.
The case ended up never going to trial. Cornelia Swanson died of an undisclosed illness in March 1945, leaving behind a teenage daughter.
After the Swanson scandal, the Bartholomew fell into another long period of relative quiet. In the past twenty years, there have been two murders. One, in 2004, was a crime of passion in which a woman shot her cheating husband. An option that never crossed my mind. Andrew should consider himself lucky.
The other murder, in 2008, was an alleged robbery gone wrong. The victim was a Broadway director with a thing for male escorts. The alleged perpetrator was, to no one’s surprise, one of those escorts. Although he swore he didn’t do it, the escort ended up using his shirt to hang himself in his jail cell.
Not counting the inevitable heart attacks and strokes and slow succumbings to cancer, there have been at least thirty unnatural deaths at the Bartholomew. Although that seems like a lot, I also know that bad things happen everywhere, in every building. Murders and health problems and freak accidents. It’s absurd to expect the Bartholomew to be any different.
It certainly doesn’t feel cursed. Or haunted. Or any other menacing label you could put on an apartment building. It’s comfortable, spacious and, other than the wallpaper, nicely decorated. It’s easy to see why Nick and Greta choose to live here. I would certainly stay longer than three months if I could afford to. Which makes it all the stranger that Ingrid chose to leave.
I close the laptop and check my phone. Still nothing from her end.
What bothers me most about Ingrid’s silence is that she’s the one who threatened to send pestering texts if I was a no-show. Even our first encounter—that messy and humiliating collision in the lobby—happened because she was looking at her phone.
Only now that I think about it, that wasn’t our first encounter. Technically, we had met an hour earlier, in a most unusual way.
I rush from the bedroom and twist down the stairs, on my way to the kitchen. Since the dumbwaiter is how Ingrid introduced herself, I can easily see her saying goodbye the same way. And sure enough, when I fling open the door to the dumbwaiter, I find another poem.
Edgar Allan Poe. “The Bells.”
Sitting on top of it is a single key.
I pick it up to examine in the glow of the overhead kitchen light. It’s smaller than a regular house key. Just a fraction of the size. Yet I know exactly what it opens. I have a similar key hooked to the ring that currently occupies the bowl in the foyer.
It’s for the storage unit.
The very key Leslie said was missing from the others Ingrid had discarded on the lobby floor.
Why she put it in the dumbwaiter eludes me. My only guess is that she left something behind in the storage unit for 10A, possibly with the hope I’d retrieve it and give it to her at a later date.
I shove the key into my pocket, my mind quickly easing. This suggests not a rushed escape from the Bartholomew but a planned departure. All my worry, it seems, has been for nothing. I grab the poem, certain that when I flip it over I’ll find an explanation, instructions, maybe plans to meet soon.
The back of the poem contains none of those things.
In fact, one look at what Ingrid wrote sends me plummeting in a deep well of worry.
I read it again, staring at the two words Ingrid had scrawled in a shaky hand.
BE CAREFUL
18
To get to the basement, I have to take the elevator past the lobby and into the depths of the Bartholomew. Compared with the rest of the building, the basement is downright primitive, with walls of bare stone and support beams of concrete. It’s cold down here, too. A rush of cold air hits me as soon as I step out of the elevator. It feels like a warning. Or maybe that’s just a side effect of Ingrid’s message scraping at my nerves like sandpaper.
BE CAREFUL
It doesn’t help that the basement bears a cryptlike quality. Dank and dark. Like it’s gone untouched since the Bartholomew rose on top of it a hundred years ago. Yet here I am, palming the key Ingrid left behind and hoping whatever’s in that storage unit tells me where she’s gone.
Hanging from the support column opposite the elevator is a security camera. The one Leslie said wasn’t working when Ingrid left last night. I peer up at it and wonder if I’m being watched. Although I’ve noticed the bank of monitors in the alcove just off the lobby, I haven’t seen anyone looking at them.
I move deeper into the basement. Everywhere I look are cages of steel mesh. One behind the elevator that contains its ancient equipment. Greasy wheels and cables and cogs. Inside another are the furnace, water heater, and air-conditioning unit. All of them hum—a ghostly sound that gives the entire basement an air of unwanted menace.
Another sound joins them. A ragged swish that quickly gets louder. I spin toward the noise and see a bulging trash bag plummet into a dumpster the size of a double-wide trailer. Near it is a door of retractable steel so it can be moved outside for emptying. The entire area is surrounded by a chain-link barrier.
I’m not surprised. Down here, even the lightbulbs are caged.
I round the dumpster, startling Mr. Leonard’s aide, who stands on the other side. She startles me right back. We both suck in air—simultaneous gasps that echo off the stone walls.
“You scared the shit out of me,” she says. “For a second, I thought you were Mrs. Evelyn.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m Jules.”
The woman nods coolly. “Jeannette.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Jeannette’s dressed for the basement’s chill, her purple scrubs covered by a ratty gray cardigan with gaping pockets. One hand rests just above her ample bosom. Her way of silently telling me just how much I scared her. She keeps her other hand behind her back in an attempt to hide the lit cigarette she’s holding.
When it becomes clear that I’ve seen it, she lifts the cigarette to her lips and says, “You’re one of those apartment sitters, aren’t you? The newest one?”
I wonder if she knows this because Leslie told her or if I just look the part. Maybe the former. Probably the latter.
“I am.”
“How long are you in for?” Jeannette asks, making it sound like a prison sentence.
“Three months.”
“Like it here?”
“I do,” I say. “It’s nice, but there are a lot of rules to follow.”
Jeannette stares at me a moment. Her hair’s pulled back, which tightens her forehead into an impassive look. “You’re not going to narc on me, are you? Smoking’s not allowed in the Bartholomew.”
“Not anywhere?”
“Nope.” She takes another drag. “Mrs. Evelyn’s orders.”
“I won’t tell,” I say.
“I appreciate that.”
Jeannette takes one last puff before stubbing out the cigarette on the concrete floor. When she bends down to pick it up, a lighter falls from a pocket of her cardigan. I grab it while she drops the butt into a coffee can at her feet and slides it into a corner, where it blends in with the shadows.
“You dropped this,” I say, handing her the lighter.
Jeannette stuffs it back into her cardigan. “Thanks. This damn sweater. Stuff’s always falling out.”
“Before you go, I was wondering if you could help me. One of the other apartment sitters left last night and I’m trying to reach her. Her name is Ingrid Gallagher. She was in 11A.”
“Never heard the name.”
Jeannette shuffles to the elevator. I follow, pulling out my phone and swiping to the picture of Ingrid and me in Central Park. I hold it in front of her. “This is her.”
Jeannette presses the button for the elevator and gives the photo a brief glance. “Yeah, I saw her once or twice.”
“Ever talk to her?�
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“The only person I talk to lately is Mr. Leonard. Why do you need to find her?”
“I haven’t heard from her since she left,” I say. “I’m worried.”
“Sorry I can’t help you,” Jeannette says. “But I’ve got enough to deal with. Sick husband at home. Mr. Leonard convinced he’s going to keel over every damn minute of the day.”
“I understand. But if you remember anything—or hear something about her from someone else in the building—I’d really appreciate it if you told me. I’m in 12A.”
The elevator arrives. Jeannette steps inside.
“Listen, Julie—”
“Jules,” I remind her.
“Jules. Right. I don’t want to tell you what to do. It’s not my place. But it’s better to hear it from me and not someone like Mrs. Evelyn.” Jeannette brings the grate across the elevator door and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. “In the Bartholomew, it’s best to mind your own business. I don’t go around asking a lot of questions. I suggest you follow my lead.”
She hits a button, and the elevator takes off, lifting her out of the basement and out of view.
I follow the string of exposed bulbs inside their red-wire confines to the storage units, which line both sides of a mazelike corridor. Each chain-link door bears the number of its corresponding apartment, beginning with 2A.
It reminds me of a dog kennel. A creepy, too-quiet one.
That silence is broken by my phone, which blares suddenly from deep in my pocket. Thinking it might be Ingrid, I grab it and check the number. Even though it’s one I don’t recognize, I answer with a distracted “Hello?”
“Is this Jules?”
It’s a man calling, his voice lazy and light, with a noticeable stoner drawl.
“It is.”
“Hey, Jules. This is Zeke?”
He says his name like it’s a question. Like he doesn’t quite know who he is. But I do. He’s Zeke, Ingrid’s friend from Instagram, calling me at last.
“Zeke, yes. Is Ingrid with you?”
I start my way down the corridor, sneaking glances into passing units. Most of them are too tidy to be interesting. Just boxes stacked in orderly rows, their contents announced in scrawled marker. Dishes. Clothes. Books.