by Riley Sager
I end the call with a queasy feeling in my gut, anxiety gnawing at my insides. Something very wrong is going on here. Something I can’t begin to comprehend.
But Dylan seems to understand exactly what’s going on.
And it freaks him the hell out.
31
I leave the Bartholomew at the same time Mr. Leonard makes his return. It’s a surprise to see him out of the hospital so soon, mostly because he looks like he could use another day there. His skin is pale and papery, and he moves with almost surreal slowness. It requires the assistance of both Jeannette and Charlie to get him out of the cab and across the sidewalk.
I hold the door, taking over Charlie’s duty for a moment.
“Thanks, Jules,” Charlie says. “I can take it from here.”
Mr. Leonard and Jeannette say nothing. Both simply glance at me the same way they did during my tour of the building.
When I get to the American Museum of Natural History, I’m further delayed by the busloads of students swarming the front steps. There are hundreds of them, clad in uniforms of plaid skirts, khaki pants, white shirts under dark blue vests. I nudge my way through them, jealous of their youth, their happiness, their drama and chatter. Life hasn’t touched them yet. Not real life.
Once inside the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, I pass beneath the skeletal arms of the massive barosaurus and head to the ticket counter. Although the museum is technically free, the woman behind the counter asks if I want to pay the suggested “donation” amount to get inside. I give her five dollars and get a judgmental look in return.
After that bit of humiliation, I enter the Akeley Hall of African Mammals. Or, as Dylan put it, the elephants.
He’s already there, waiting for me on the wooden bench surrounding the hall’s centerpiece herd of taxidermied elephants. His attempts to appear inconspicuous make him stand out all the more. Black jeans. Black hoodie. Sunglasses over his eyes. I’m surprised museum security isn’t hovering nearby.
“You’re five minutes late,” he says.
“And you look like a spy,” I reply.
Dylan removes the sunglasses and surveys the packed hall. The schoolkids have started to ooze into the area, crowding around the surrounding nature dioramas until all that can be seen of the animals are pointed ears, curved horns, giraffe faces staring lifelessly from the other side of the glass.
“Upstairs,” Dylan says, pointing to the hall’s mezzanine level. “It’s less crowded.”
It is, but only marginally. After climbing the steps to the second floor, we stand before the only empty diorama. A pair of ostriches guarding their eggs from an approaching group of warthogs. The male’s got his head down, wings puffed, beak parted.
“Did you bring Erica’s phone?” Dylan says.
I nod. It’s in the front right pocket of my jeans. My own phone is in the left. Carrying both makes me feel encumbered, weighed down.
“Let me see it.”
“Not yet,” I say. “I’m not sure I completely trust you.”
I don’t like the way he’s acting. Everything about Dylan seems jittery, from the way he jingles the keys in his pocket to his constant looking around the hall, as if someone is watching. When he returns his gaze to the diorama, he looks not at the ostriches, which are front and center, but at the encroaching predators. Even though they’ve been dead and stuffed for decades, he gives them a dark-eyed scowl. I think it’s probably intended for me.
“I feel the same about you,” he says.
I give him a wry smile. “At least we’re on even footing. Now, tell me everything you know about Erica Mitchell.”
“How much do you know?”
“That she was in 12A before me. She lived there a month before deciding to move out. Now she’s missing and you’re putting up posters looking for her. Care to fill me in on the rest?”
“We were . . . friends,” Dylan says.
I note the pause. “You sure about that?”
We walk to another diorama. This one shows a pair of leopards hidden in a copse of jungle trees. One of them keenly watches a nearby bushpig, ready to strike.
“Okay, we were more than friends,” Dylan says. “I ran into her in the lobby on her second day at the Bartholomew. We started flirting, one thing led to another, and we started hooking up on a regular basis. As far as we knew, that wasn’t against the rules. But we also didn’t broadcast it, just in case it was. So if you’re looking for a definitive relationship status, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t really know what we were.”
I get a flashback to last night with Nick and can instantly relate.
“How long did this go on?”
“About three weeks,” Dylan says. “Then she left. There was no notice. She didn’t tell me she was leaving—or even thinking about it. One day, she was just gone. At first I thought something might have happened. An emergency or something. But when I called, she never answered. When I texted, she never texted back. That’s when I started to get worried.”
“Did you ask Leslie what happened?”
“She told me Erica wasn’t comfortable with all those stupid apartment-sitter rules and decided to move out. But here’s the thing—Erica never once mentioned the rules to me. She certainly never talked about being bothered by them.”
“Do you think something changed?”
“I don’t know what could have changed overnight,” Dylan says. “I left her apartment a little before midnight. She was gone in the morning.”
I note the similarities between her departure and Ingrid’s. They’re hard to miss.
“Did Leslie say she specifically spoke to Erica?”
“I guess she left a note,” Dylan says. “A resignation letter. That’s what Leslie called it. She said she found it shoved under her office door, along with Erica’s keys.”
I stare at the diorama, unnerved by the way the leopards are posed. While one of them stalks the bushpig, the other appears to be staring out of the diorama, directly at the people watching from the other side of the glass.
I look away, resting my gaze on Dylan. “Is that when you started looking for Erica?”
“You mean the missing posters? That was a few days after she left. When two days went by and I didn’t hear from her, I started to get worried. I went to the police first. That was useless. They told me—”
“That you needed more information,” I say. “I got the same thing about Ingrid.”
“But they’re not wrong,” Dylan says. “I don’t know enough about Erica. Her birthday. Her address before she got to the Bartholomew. For the poster, I guessed her height and weight. My hope was that someone would recognize her picture and call to tell me they’d seen her. I just want to know she’s okay.”
We move to another diorama. A pack of wild dogs hunting on the savannah, their eyes and ears alert for prey.
“Have you tried tracking down her family?” I ask Dylan.
“She doesn’t have any.”
My heart skips a single, surprised beat. “None at all?”
“She was an only child. Her parents died in a car accident when she was a baby. Her only aunt raised her, but she died a couple years ago.”
“What about you? You have any family left?”
“None,” Dylan says quietly, looking not at me but at the pack of dogs. There are six of them. Their own tight-knit unit. “My mom’s dead, and my dad might be. I don’t fucking know. I had a brother, but he was killed in Iraq.”
Dylan is yet another apartment sitter who doesn’t have parents or family nearby. Between him, Erica, Ingrid, and myself, I’m sensing a trend. Either Leslie chooses orphans as some weird act of charity, or she does it because she knows we’re more likely to be desperate.
“How much are you getting paid?” I ask Dylan.
“Twelve thousand dollars for three months.”
“Same,” I say.
“But don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, who pays that much money to let someone stay in their fancy apartment? Especially when most people would do it for free.”
“Leslie told me it was—”
“An insurance policy? Yeah, I was told that, too. But when you add in that, plus all those rules, something about the situation just seems off.”
“Then why haven’t you left?”
“Because I need the money,” Dylan says. “I’ve got four weeks to go until I collect the whole twelve grand. Once I do that, then I’m out of there, even though I have nowhere else to go. It was the same thing with Erica.”
“And Ingrid,” I say. “And me.”
“One of the things Erica did talk about was the Bartholomew and how, well, fucked-up it seems. Have you heard about some of the shit that’s gone down there?”
I give a solemn nod, remembering those dead servants lined up on the sidewalk, Cornelia Swanson and her slaughtered maid, Dr. Thomas Bartholomew leaping from the roof.
“I thought Erica was exaggerating.” Dylan shakes his head and lets out a quick, bitter chuckle. “That she was being overly worried about the place. Now I think she wasn’t worried enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something weird is going on at the Bartholomew,” Dylan says. “I’m sure of it.”
The groups of schoolkids have finally found their way upstairs. They ooze into the space around us, chattering and touching the diorama glass, leaving it riddled with sticky handprints. Dylan pushes away from them, moving to the other side of the room. I join him in front of another diorama.
Cheetahs stalking the tall grass.
More predators.
“Look, will you just tell me what’s going on?” I say.
“A few days after Erica disappeared, I found this.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a ring, which he drops into my palm. It’s a typical Jostens class ring. Gold and gaudy. Just like the ones all my high school classmates had. I never bothered to get one, because even then I thought it was a waste of money. The stone is purple, surrounded by etched letters proclaiming the owner to be a member of Danville High School’s class of 2014. Engraved on the inside of the band is a name.
Megan Pulaski.
“I found it behind a couch cushion,” Dylan says. “I thought it might have belonged to someone who lived there. Or maybe another apartment sitter. I asked Leslie, who confirmed there was an apartment sitter named Megan Pulaski in 11B. She was there last year. Sounds normal, right?”
“I’m assuming it doesn’t stay that way,” I say.
Dylan nods. “I Googled the name, hoping maybe I could locate her and mail the ring back to her. I found a Megan Pulaski who graduated from a high school in Danville, Pennsylvania, in 2014. She’s been missing since last year.”
I hand the ring back to Dylan, no longer wanting to touch it.
“I tracked down a friend of hers,” Dylan says. “She created a missing poster just like the one I made for Erica and circulated it online. She told me Megan was an orphan who hasn’t been seen or heard from in over a year. The last time they spoke, Megan was living in an apartment building in Manhattan. She never told her the name. She just mentioned it was covered in gargoyles.”
“Sounds like the Bartholomew to me,” I say.
“It gets weirder,” Dylan warns. “A few days ago, I went for a jog in the park. When I got back to the Bartholomew, I saw Ingrid in the lobby. She didn’t seem to be coming or going. She just stood at the mailboxes, watching the door. I got the feeling she was waiting for me.”
“So you were lying when you told me you didn’t really know each other.”
“That’s the thing; I wasn’t. We’d only spoken a few times before that, and one of them was to ask her if she’d heard anything from Erica, because I knew they had hung out a few times.”
“What did she say that day in the lobby?”
“She told me she might have learned what happened to Erica,” Dylan says. “She said she couldn’t talk about it right then. She wanted to go somewhere private, where no one else could hear us. I suggested we meet that night.”
“When was this?”
“Three days ago.”
My stomach clenches. That’s the same night Ingrid vanished.
“When and where were you supposed to meet?”
“A little before one. In the basement.”
“The security camera,” I say. “You’re the one who disconnected it.”
Dylan gives me a terse nod. “I thought it was a good idea, seeing how Ingrid was being so secretive. Turns out it didn’t matter because she never showed. I didn’t find out she was gone until you told me the next day.”
Now I know why Dylan had acted so surprised that afternoon. It also explains why he was in such a hurry to get away from me. No one likes to be around a messenger bearing bad news.
“And now I can’t stop thinking that Ingrid’s missing because she knew what happened to Erica,” Dylan says. “When she vanished. How she vanished. It’s too similar to Erica to be a coincidence. It’s almost like someone else learned that Ingrid knew something and silenced her before she could tell me.”
“You think they’re both . . .”
I don’t want to say aloud the word I’m thinking for fear it’ll make it be true. I did the same after Jane vanished. We all did, my family tiptoeing around her disappearance with euphemisms. She hasn’t come home. We don’t know where she is. It was finally broken by my father’s midnight pronouncement a week later.
Jane is gone.
“Dead?” Dylan says. “That’s exactly what I think.”
My legs wobble as we move to another diorama. The most brutal of the bunch. A dead zebra being swarmed by vultures. A dozen at least, with more swooping in to snatch whatever scraps are left. Close by are a hyena and a pair of jackals, sneaking into the fray to grab their share.
The frenzied violence of the scene churns my stomach. Or maybe it’s Dylan’s suggestion that someone in the Bartholomew is killing young women who agree to watch apartments there.
Megan and Erica and now Ingrid.
I stare at the two vultures closest to the glass. They’re locked in battle—one bird on its back, taloned feet kicking, the other looming close, wings spread wide.
“Let’s say you’re right. You honestly believe there’s a serial killer in the Bartholomew?”
“I know, it sounds crazy,” Dylan says. “But that’s what it seems like to me. All three of them were apartment sitters. Then all three disappeared in pretty much the same way.”
It makes me think of something my father used to say.
One time is an anomaly. Two times is a coincidence. Three times is proof.
But proof of what? That someone at the Bartholomew is preying on apartment sitters? It’s still too preposterous to wrap my head around. Yet so is the coincidence of three young women without families moving out of the building and never contacting their friends again.
“But who could be doing such a thing? And why hasn’t anyone else at the Bartholomew picked up on it?”
“Who says they haven’t?”
“People there would care if they thought someone had killed apartment sitters.”
“They’re rich,” Dylan says. “All of them. And rich people don’t give a damn about the hired help. They’re vultures.”
“And what are we?”
He gives the diorama one last disdainful look. “That zebra.”
“It’s insane to—”
On the other side of the hall, one of the schoolgirls lets out a shriek. Not a scared one. A notice-me shriek, designed to get the attention of a nearby group of boys. Still, the sound is so jolting that it takes me a second to regain my composure.
“It’s insane to think an entire building would turn a blind eye to kidnapping or murder.”
“But you agree that something strange is going on, right?” Dylan says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have listened to me for this long. You wouldn’t even be here in the first place.”
I continue to stare at the diorama, not blinking, until the whole scene becomes wavy, as if life were slowly returning to those creatures behind the glass. Feathers tremble. Beady eyes move. The zebra takes a single breath.
“I’m here because I found Erica’s phone,” I remind him.
“And have you seen what’s on it?” Dylan asks. “Maybe Erica was in contact with whoever caused her disappearance.”
I remove the phone and hold it up for Dylan to see. “It’s locked. Do you have any idea what Erica’s passcode was?”
“We weren’t exactly at the password-sharing stage of our relationship,” Dylan says. “Do you know of another way to unlock it?”
I turn Erica’s phone over in my hand, thinking. Although I don’t know the first thing about hacking into a cell phone, I might know someone who does. Grabbing my own phone, I scroll through the call history until I find the number I’m looking for. I hit the dial button, and a laid-back voice soon answers.
“This is Zeke.”
“Hi, Zeke. This is Jules. Ingrid’s friend.”
“Hey,” Zeke says. “Have you heard from her yet?”
“Not yet. But I’m wondering if you could help me. Do you know someone who can hack into a phone?”
There’s a cautious pause from Zeke, during which all I can hear are the rowdy schoolkids spilling all around us. Finally, Zeke says, “I do. But it will cost you.”
“How much?”
“One thousand. That includes two hundred fifty for me, as a finder’s fee. The rest goes to my associate.”
I go numb. That’s an insane amount of money. Too much for me to afford on my own. Hearing the price almost makes me end the call. My thumb twitches against the screen, ready to hang up on Zeke and not answer if he attempts to call back.
But then I think about Dylan’s so-crazy-it-might-be-true theory that a serial killer is living within the Bartholomew’s walls. I think about how the apartment sitters who suddenly vanished—Megan, Erica, Ingrid—might have been his victims.