by Riley Sager
“It’s a job,” I remind her. “Not a prison. And don’t worry about me. Go to Vermont. Have fun. Go moose watching or whatever it is people do there.”
“Call me if you need anything,” Chloe says. “I’ll have my phone with me the whole time, even though our B-and-B is, like, in the middle of nowhere. Literally in the woods on top of a mountain. Paul already warned me there might not be cell service.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?” Chloe says.
“Positive.”
When the call ends, I remain in the sitting room, staring at those faces in the wallpaper. They stare right back, eyes unblinking, mouths open but silent, almost as if they want to tell me something but can’t.
Maybe they’re not allowed, just as I’m not allowed to have visitors or spend a night away from 12A.
Or maybe they’re too afraid speak.
Or maybe—and this is the most likely scenario—they’re just flowers on wallpaper and, like Ingrid’s departure, the Bartholomew is starting to get to me.
22
At twelve thirty, there’s a knock on my door.
Greta Manville.
A surprise, although not an unpleasant one. It’s a nice break from looking for jobs that don’t exist and checking my phone every five minutes for a response from Ingrid. Even more surprising is that Greta’s dressed for an outing. Black capris and an oversize shirt. Sweater preppily tied around her neck. Slung over her shoulder is a worn tote bag from the Strand.
“To thank you for your assistance last night, you may escort me to lunch.”
She says it with benevolent pomp, as if she’s bestowing upon me one of life’s greatest honors. Yet I detect another emotion lurking in the back of her throat—loneliness. Whether she wanted it or not, I’ve dragged her out of her cocoon of books and sudden sleeps. I also suspect that, deep down, Greta likes my company.
I loop my arm through hers. “I would be happy to escort you.”
We end up at a bistro a block away from the Bartholomew. A red awning covers the door, and fairy lights twinkle in the windows. Inside, the place is bustling with so many locals on their lunch breaks that I fear we won’t get a table. But upon seeing Greta, the hostess leads us to a corner booth that’s remained conspicuously empty.
“I called ahead,” Greta says as she picks up one of the menus left for us on the table. “Also, the owner values loyalty. And I’ve been coming here for years, since the first time I lived at the Bartholomew.”
“How long has it been since you moved back?” I ask.
Greta gives me a stern look across the table. “We’re here to have lunch. Not play twenty questions.”
“How about two questions?”
“I’ll allow it,” Greta says as she snaps her menu shut and beckons the nearest waitress. “But let me order first. If I’m going to be interrogated, I’d like to make sure sustenance is on the way.”
She orders grilled salmon with a side of steamed vegetables. Even though I assume she’s treating, I get the house salad and a water. Frugal habits die hard.
“The answer to your first question,” Greta says once the waitress departs, “is almost a year. I returned last November.”
“Why did you come back?”
Greta sniffs, as if the answer is obvious. “Why not? It’s a comfortable place within close proximity to everything I need. When an apartment opened up, I jumped at the chance.”
“I heard it was difficult finding an open apartment there,” I say. “Isn’t the waiting list huge?”
“That’s your third question, by the way.”
“But you’ll allow it.”
“I’m not amused,” Greta says, even though she is. There’s a noticeable upturn to her lips that she tries to hide by taking a sip of water. “The answer is yes, there is a waiting list. And before you ask the predictable follow-up, there are ways around it if one knows the right people. I do.”
When the food arrives, it’s a study in contrasts. Greta’s meal looks scrumptious, the salmon steaming and smelling of lemon and garlic. My salad, on the other hand, is a bowl of disappointment. Nothing but limp romaine lettuce smattered with tomato slices and croutons.
Greta takes a bite of fish before saying, “Has there been any news regarding your recently departed apartment-sitter friend? What was her name again?”
“Ingrid.”
“That’s right. Ingrid with the abominable hair. There’s still no indication where she went?”
I shrug. Such an ineffectual gesture, when it comes right down to it. All that tiny rise and fall of my shoulders against the booth’s vinyl does is remind me how little I really know.
“At first, I thought it was because she was afraid to stay in the Bartholomew any longer.”
Greta reacts the same way Nick did—with muted shock. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“You have to admit something feels off,” I say. “There are websites, entire websites, devoted to all the bad things that have happened there.”
“That’s why I avoid the internet,” Greta says. “It’s a cesspool of misinformation.”
“But a lot of it’s true. The servants killed by Spanish flu. And Dr. Bartholomew jumping from the roof. That doesn’t happen at average apartment buildings.”
“The Bartholomew isn’t an average apartment building. And because of its notoriety, things that happen there become exaggerated to the point of myth.”
“Is Cornelia Swanson a myth?”
Greta, who had been lifting a forkful of salmon to her mouth, halts mid-bite. She lowers her fork, folds her hands on the table, and says, “A word of advice, my dear. Don’t mention that name inside the Bartholomew. Cornelia Swanson is a topic no one there wants to discuss.”
“So what I’ve read about her is true?”
“I didn’t say that,” Greta snaps. “Cornelia Swanson was a lunatic who should have been living in an asylum, not at the Bartholomew. As for all that utter nonsense—that she consorted with that Frenchwoman and sacrificed her maid to honor Satan—it’s nothing more than conjecture. What I told you just now is the same thing I said to your friend.”
“Ingrid specifically asked about Cornelia Swanson?”
“She did. I suspect she was disappointed by my answer. I think she came looking for all the gory details. But, as I’ve said, there aren’t any to give. In fact, the strangest thing I’ve seen at the Bartholomew lately is the behavior of a certain young woman who helped escort me from the building last night.”
I stab my fork into the salad, saying nothing.
“When the elevator was stopped on the seventh floor, you acted … unusual. Would you care to explain what happened?”
I noticed the way she watched me once I returned to the elevator with Rufus. I should have seen this lunch for what it really is—an attempt to understand what she had witnessed. Although I don’t necessarily need to talk about it, I find myself wanting to. Maybe because Greta wrote Heart of a Dreamer, I feel the need to repay her somehow. A story for a story. Only mine doesn’t have a happy ending.
“When I was a freshman in college, my father got laid off from the place he had worked for twenty-five years,” I begin. “After months of searching, the only job he could get was a night shift stocking shelves at an Ace Hardware three towns away. My mother worked part-time at a real estate office. To make ends meet she got another job waiting tables at a local diner on weekends. I tried to lighten their load by getting two jobs myself. Plus additional student loans. Plus a credit card I never told them about so they wouldn’t have to worry about sending me money. That kept us afloat for the better part of a year.”
But then, at the start of my sophomore year, my mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which spread like wildfire to her kidneys, her heart, her lungs. My mother had to quit her jobs. My father cared for her during the day while still going to work at night. I offered to leave college for a semester to help. My father refused, telling me I needed
a good education to get a good job. That if I quit, I’d likely never return and end up just like them—two broken people in a broken town.
My mother’s medical expenses soared, even though there was no hope of remission. Everything was about keeping her comfortable until the end came. And my father’s meager health insurance plan covered only so much. The rest was up to them. So my father took out a second mortgage on the home he had just finished paying off a few years earlier.
I came home every weekend, my mother slightly smaller every visit, as if she were shrinking right before my eyes. My father was the same way. The stress sapped his appetite until shirts hung like laundry from his clothesline arms. In the evenings, when he was getting ready for work, I’d hear him crying alone in the bathroom. Deep, guttural sobs that couldn’t be drowned out by the running sink.
We lived like that for six months. Then the final blow came. The Ace Hardware my father worked at closed its doors. There went his job and health insurance. I was at school when it happened. A junior on the verge of flunking out because I was too frazzled with worry and bone-deep exhaustion to focus on my studies.
“Not long after that, my parents died,” I say.
Greta gasps. A shocked, sorrowful sound.
I keep talking, too far into the tale to stop now. “There was a fire. It was the middle of the fall semester. The phone rang at five in the morning. The police. They told me there had been an accident and that both of my parents were dead.”
Later that day, Chloe drove me home, although there was nothing left of it. Our side of the duplex was a charred ruin. Smoke still rose from the wreckage. An acrid, throat-coating smoke I thought I’d never smell again.
“Until I did,” I tell Greta. “Last night at the Bartholomew.”
The only thing that survived was my parents’ Toyota Camry, which had been parked as far from the house as the driveway would allow. Sitting in the driver’s seat was a ring with three keys on it. The instant I saw those keys, I knew the fire hadn’t been an accident.
One key was for the Camry itself.
The other two opened storage units at a facility a mile outside of town.
One unit contained all my belongings.
The other held all of Jane’s.
My father had emptied both of our bedrooms, which told me that even in their darkest hours, my parents still clung to a faint sliver of hope. That Jane would be found. That the two of us could muddle forward together. That things would turn out okay for us in the end.
The storage units would have been enough to tip off investigators, if the insurance policies hadn’t already. My father had purchased two in the months before the blaze.
Life insurance for him.
Fire insurance for the house.
So began the investigation that confirmed what I already knew. On the night of the fire, my father and mother shared a bottle of wine, even though she shouldn’t have been drinking with her kidneys on the verge of failure.
They also shared a pizza ordered from the very same place they went on their first date.
And a slice of chocolate cake.
And a bottle of my mother’s strongest painkillers.
Arson experts concluded the fire began in the hallway just outside my parents’ room, spurred on by lighter fluid and some balled-up newspapers. The bedroom door was closed, meaning it took some time for the fire to reach the bed where my parents were found.
They knew this because only my mother died from the overdose.
My father was killed by the smoke.
“I tried to be mad at them,” I say. “I wanted to hate them for what they did. But I couldn’t. Because even then I knew they did what they thought was right.”
The only thing I don’t tell Greta is how when I’m feeling happy, I sometimes get the need to flirt with fire. To feel its heat on my skin. To have the flame singe me just enough to know what it feels like, so that I can understand what my parents went through.
For me.
For my future.
For the sister who has yet to return.
Greta slips her hand over mine, her palm hot, as if she, too, has held it to an open flame.
“I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sure you miss them greatly.”
“I do,” I say. “I miss them. I miss Jane.”
“Jane?”
“My sister. She vanished two years before the fire. There’s been no trace of her since. She might have run away. She might have been murdered. At this point, I doubt I’ll ever know.”
I’ve slumped noticeably in the booth, my arms at my sides, my body numb. My version of one of Greta’s sudden sleeps. If I feel sadness, it’s the same simmering grief I always experience. The kind of pain I long ago learned to live with. Talking about my parents and Jane doesn’t make that grief feel better or worse. It simply remains.
“Thank you for entrusting me with your story,” Greta says.
“Now you know why I prefer fantasy over reality.”
“I can’t blame you,” Greta says. “I also see why you’re so keen to find Ingrid.”
“I’m doing a terrible job of it.”
“If I were a betting woman, which I’m not, I’d wager she went off somewhere with a young man,” Greta says. “Or woman. I don’t judge when it comes to matters of the heart.”
Spoken like the woman who wrote a romance beloved by generations of teenage girls. And even though I want to believe Ingrid is off somewhere enjoying a happily-ever-after, everything I know so far suggests the opposite.
“I just can’t shake the feeling she’s in trouble,” I say. “She specifically told me she had nowhere else to go.”
“If you suspect something bad happened, why don’t you go to the police?”
“I called them. It didn’t go well. They said there wasn’t enough information to get involved.”
This elicits a sympathetic sigh from Greta. “If I were you, I’d call some of the hospitals in the area. Maybe there was an accident and she required medical treatment. If that doesn’t work, I’d look around the neighborhood. If she has no place to go, then there’s a chance she’s out on the streets. I know it’s hard to think someone we know might be homeless, but have you checked any of the city’s shelters?”
“You think I should?”
“It certainly couldn’t hurt,” Greta says with a firm nod. “Ingrid Gallagher might be there, hiding in plain sight.”
23
The nearest homeless shelter for women is twenty blocks south and two blocks west of the restaurant. After making sure Greta can get back to the Bartholomew on her own, I go there on the slim chance that she’s right and Ingrid is living on the streets.
The shelter is housed in a building that’s seen better days. The exterior is brown brick. The windows are tinted. It used to be a former YMCA, as evidenced by the ghost of those letters hovering to the right of the main entrance. Also hovering there is a group of women smoking in a semicircle. All of them eye me with suspicion as I approach. A silent message telling me what I already know.
Just like at the Bartholomew, I do not belong here.
I’m starting to think I don’t belong anywhere. That it’s my lot in life to occupy a limbo all my own. Still, I approach them and smile, trying not to act frightened, even though I am. Which then makes me feel guilty. I have more in common with these women than anyone at the Bartholomew.
I remove my phone from my pocket and hold it up so they can see the selfie of Ingrid and me in Central Park. “Have any of you seen this girl in the past few days?”
Only one woman in the smoking circle bothers to look. She stares at the photo with hard eyes while biting the inside of her razor-sharp cheeks. When she speaks, her voice is surprisingly soft. I thought she’d sound as weathered as she looks.
“No, ma’am, I haven’t seen her. Not around here.”
I assume she’s the ringleader of this ragtag group, because she nudges the others, compelling them to take a look. They shake their heads, m
urmur, look away.
“Thanks,” I say. “I appreciate it.”
Under the watchful gaze of the smokers, I make my way into the building. Just inside the door is an empty waiting area and a registration desk behind a shield of scuffed reinforced glass. On the other side sits a plump woman who studies me with the same disdain as the women outside.
“Excuse me,” I say. “I was wondering if you could help me.”
“Are you in need of shelter?”
“No,” I say. “I’m looking for someone. A friend.”
“Has she entered herself into the shelter system?” the woman asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Is she under the age of twenty-one? Because that means she’d be at a different facility.”
“She’s over twenty-one,” I say.
“If she has children or is currently pregnant, she’d be at one of our PATH shelters,” the woman adds. “There are also separate facilities for victims of domestic violence. If she’s been on the street a while, you might find her at a drop-in center.”
I lean back, overwhelmed not just by the sheer number of locations and designations but the fact that there’s a need for all of them. Once more, it makes me feel fortunate that I found the Bartholomew. It also makes me fear what will happen once I leave.
“No kids,” I tell the woman. “Single. No abuse.”
That I know of.
The realization blasts into my thoughts like a radio at full volume. Just because Ingrid didn’t mention abuse doesn’t mean there wasn’t any. I again think of the many places she’s lived, the endless moving, the gun she bought—possibly when she assumed running was no longer an option.
“Then she’d have come here,” the woman says.
I press my phone against the glass so she can see the photo I showed the smokers outside. After a moment’s contemplation, she says, “She doesn’t look familiar, sweetie. But I’m only here during the day. This place fills up at night, so there’s a chance she’s here then and I just missed her.”
“Is it possible to talk to someone who is here at night? Maybe they’d recognize her.”
She gestures to a pair of double doors opposite the desk. “There’s a few of them still in there. You’re welcome to take a look.”