by Riley Sager
“I didn’t have much of a choice,” he says. “It’s what was expected of me.”
“But what would you really like to be doing?”
Nick cracks a smile. “Touché.”
“Turnabout is fair play,” I say.
“Then I’ll rephrase my answer. I wanted to be a surgeon because that’s what I was exposed to from a very early age. I come from a long line of surgeons, beginning with my great-grandfather. All my life, I knew how proud they were of their work. They helped people. They saved people on the verge of being lost. It’s like they were mystics—bringing people back from the dead. Looking at it that way, I was all too happy to join the family business.”
“And business must have been booming if they could afford an apartment in the Bartholomew.”
“I’m very fortunate,” Nick says. “But honestly, this place never felt special. It is. I know that now. But growing up, it was just home, you know? When you’re a kid, you don’t realize your situation is different from everyone else’s. It wasn’t until I went away to college that I realized how unusual it was to grow up here. That’s when I finally understood that most people don’t get to live in a place like the Bartholomew.”
I pick a slice of pepperoni off my pizza and pop it into my mouth. “That’s why I can’t understand why someone like Ingrid would want to leave.”
“I’m surprised you went to Greta,” Nick says. “I didn’t think they knew each other. Come to think of it, I didn’t realize you knew Ingrid.”
“Only slightly,” I say. “You didn’t know her at all, did you?”
“We met briefly. Just a quick hello the day she moved in. I might have seen her around the building once or twice after that, but it was nothing substantial.”
“She and I made plans to hang out. And now . . .”
“Her sudden departure has you concerned.”
“A little,” I admit. “The way she left strikes me as weird.”
“I don’t think it’s weird, necessarily,” Nick says before taking another sip of his beer. “Apartment sitters have left before, you know.”
“Without notice in the middle of the night?”
“Not quite like that. But, for one reason or another, they don’t think it’s the right thing for them to be doing. The person who was in 12A before you did that.”
“Erica Mitchell?”
Nick looks at me, surprised. “How do you know about her?”
“Ingrid mentioned her,” I say. “She said she left two months early.”
“That sounds about right. She was here about a month before telling Leslie she wasn’t comfortable with the rules. Leslie wished her well, and Erica moved out. I suspect it was the same with Ingrid. Clearly, she didn’t like it here and wanted to leave. Which I understand. The Bartholomew’s not for everyone. It can be—”
“Creepy?”
He arches a brow. “Interesting word choice. I was going to say this place can be unusual. Do you really think it’s creepy?”
Only the wallpaper, I think.
“Slightly,” I say, adding, “I’ve heard things.”
“Let me guess,” Nick says. “That it’s cursed.”
It reminds me of the article, still unread, that Chloe sent me. “The Curse of the Bartholomew.” Only Ingrid used a different word to describe this place.
Haunted.
That’s how she put it. That the Bartholomew was haunted by its history. Although one could argue the two terms are interchangeable. Both involve dark forces clinging to a place, refusing to leave its residents in peace.
“That and other things,” I say. “When I talked about it with Ingrid, she seemed frightened.”
“Of the Bartholomew?” Nick says, his voice thick with disbelief.
“I don’t know if it was the building itself or something inside it,” I say. “But she was definitely afraid. And it’s why I think she left. Now I’m trying to find out where she went.”
“I wish Ingrid had come to me about this.” Nick runs a hand through his hair, more exasperated than annoyed, although I sense some of that as well. Annoyance that anyone could fear the place he’s always called home. “I think I could have put her mind at ease.”
“So I’m guessing that’s a no on the whole curse thing.”
“Definitely,” Nick says, cracking the faintest of smiles. “Yes, bad things have happened here. But bad things have occurred in every building in this neighborhood. The difference is that when something happens here, it gets conflated by the media and the internet. It’s a very private building. That’s how the residents like it. But some people mistake privacy for secrecy and fill in the blanks with all kinds of nonsense.”
“So you think Ingrid was mistaken?” I say.
“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 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 click 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 photo 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 bui
lding, 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 and examine it 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 11A, 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 into 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 frigid 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.