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Two of the people who left voicemails also texted.
Cassie:Haven’t heard from you in a while. You OK?
Marcus:Where you been?
Cassie again:Seriously. You OK?? Text me as soon as you get this.
Cassie a third time:PLEASE!
There are even two texts from Ingrid, made the day after Erica disappeared.
Um, where are you?
Are you around? I’m worried.
I swipe back to the main screen, taking inventory of her most-used apps. Missing are the usual suspects. No Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
“She didn’t—” Dylan catches his use of the past tense and stops to correct himself. “She doesn’t believe in social media. She told me it was a huge waste of time.”
I go to the gallery of photos stored in the phone, finding a trove of ones snapped inside the Bartholomew. The most recent photo, taken in a bathtub, is a close-up of her toes peeking out of a mound of frothy suds.
It’s the claw-foot tub in the master bathroom of 12A. I know because I took a bath there myself during my first night at the Bartholomew. I might have even used the same bubble bath. It makes me wonder if Erica, too, found it beneath the bathroom sink, or if she brought it with her. I hope it’s the latter. The idea of me repeating her actions gives me an uneasy chill.
I scroll through the rest of Erica’s pictures. It turns out she’s an impressive cell phone photographer. She took dozens of well-composedshots of 12A’s interior. The spiral steps. A view of the park taken from the dining room. George’s right wing kissed by the light of dawn.
It seems she’s also a fan of selfies. I find pictures of Erica in the kitchen. Erica in the study. Erica at the bedroom window.
Sitting among the selfies are two videos Erica took. I tap the oldest one first, and her beaming face fills the screen.
“Look at this place,” she says. “Seriously. Look. At. This. Place.”
The image streaks away from Erica to the bedroom window before swirling around the room itself, the visual equivalent of the dizzy euphoria she must have felt in that moment. I felt the same way. Amazed and fortunate.
After two full spins around the room, Erica returns. Looking directly into the camera, she says, “If this is a dream, don’t wake me up. I never want to leave this place.”
The video ends a second later, freezing on a shot of her face halfway filling the screen. The other half is a canted angle of the window, George and the city skyline beyond his wing.
I turn to Dylan, who’s still staring at the phone with a vacant look in his eyes. I saw that same expression on my father’s face shortly after Jane vanished. It never truly went away.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah.” Dylan then shakes his head. “Not really.”
I slide my finger to the second video. The time stamp says it was taken on October fourth.
The night Erica vanished.
Steeling myself with a deep breath, I tap it.
The video begins with blackness. There’s a rustling sound as the phone moves, giving a glimpse of darkened wall.
The sitting room.
I’m intimately familiar with those faces in the wallpaper.
The phone suddenly stops on Erica’s face, painted gray by moonlight coming through the window. Gone is the giddy, pinch-me grin she displayed in the other video. In its place is quickly building dread.Like she already knows something bad is about to happen. The image blurs as the phone shakes slightly.
Her hands. They’re trembling.