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“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.Howshe 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.”