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“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 Ericadidtalk 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.