Page 113 of Lock Every Door

“I don’t want anyone to hear us,” she explains.

At the shelter, that means commandeering the men’s locker room of this former YMCA. Outside, Bobbie stands guard at the door, blocking anyone who might try to enter. Inside, Ingrid and I stroll past rows of empty lockers and shower stalls that have been bone dry for years.

“I haven’t showered in three days,” Ingrid says, staring with longing at one of the stalls. “The closest thing has been a whore’s bath at Port Authority, and that was yesterday morning.”

“Is that where you’ve been all this time?”

Ingrid drops onto a bench across from the showers. “I’ve been everywhere. Port Authority. Grand Central. Penn Station. Anywhere there are crowds. Because they’re looking for me, Juju. I know they are.”

“But they’re not,” I say.

“You don’t know that for certain.”

“I do, because—”

I stop myself before the rest of the sentence emerges.

Because I’m the only one who’s been looking for you.

That’s what I was about to say. But I now know that’s a lie. They’ve been looking for her, too.

Through me.

Rather than search themselves, they had me do it. It’s why Greta Manville suggested places for me to look. Why Nick lowered me down in the dumbwaiter to search 11A, hoping I’d find something of use. It’s probably even why he slept with me. To endear himself, keep me close, learn everything I had discovered.

I assume he didn’t pretend to be Ingrid via text until after they realized I knew something was amiss. By that point, they were prepared to cut their losses as far as Ingrid was concerned.

“If you were so scared of being found, why didn’t you take a bus or train out of the city?”

“That’s kind of difficult when you don’t have any money,” Ingrid says. “And I’ve got next to nothing. My meals have been fished out of trash cans. I had to shoplift this stupid hair dye. What little money I do have came from panhandling and stealing coins from fountains. So far I have, like, twelve dollars. At this rate, maybe I’ll have enough to leave the country after a decade. Because that’s what we have to do, Juju. Go someplace where they’ll never be able to find us. It’s the only way to escape them.”

“Or we could go to the police,” I suggest.

“And tell them what? That a bunch of rich bitches at the Bartholomew are worshipping the devil? Just saying it sounds ridiculous.”

As does hearing it out loud, even though it’s exactly what I think is happening. They post discreet ads in newspapers and online, luring people to the building with the promise of money and a place to stay. People like me and Ingrid and Dylan.

Each of us entered the Bartholomew willingly. But once we were there, the rules kept us trapped.

“How did you figure it all out?”

“It was Erica who started it,” Ingrid says. “We went to the park, just like you and I did, and she told me she found out that the person who was in 12A before her wasn’t dead, which is what she’d been told. That freaked her out a little. So I did some research into the Bartholomew and learned about some of the weird stuff that happenedthere. That freaked Erica outa lot. So when she left, I assumed it was because she felt too creeped out to stay there anymore. But then Dylan came by asking if I’d heard from her. And that’s when I suspected something else was going on.”

Her story is a lot like my own. Her new friend went missing; she started to think something weird was going on and decided to look into it. The only difference was that she learned about Greta Manville’s relationship to Cornelia Swanson much sooner than I did.

“I met Greta in the lobby during my interview with Leslie,” Ingrid says. “And I thought it was cool to be in the same building as an author, you know? At first, I thought she was nice. She even gave me a signed copy of her book. But when I read about Cornelia Swanson and noticed their resemblance, I knew what was up.”

“You asked her about it,” I say. “She told me.”

“I guess she left out the part about threatening to get me kicked out if I ever talked to her again.”

That detail went unmentioned, even when Greta told me about her life at the Bartholomew. My apartment used to be her apartment, which means that at one point it belonged to Cornelia Swanson.

It’s the same apartment where she murdered her maid.

Only it wasn’t just a murder.

It was a sacrifice.

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