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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 thefurnace, 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.”