The outer door of Harold’s building was slightly ajar when I reached it, and the doorman was away from his desk. The combination made me falter for a moment, which was stupid because there are a million and one cameras trained on the lobby and front sidewalk, and you can’t use the elevator—a private one that goes straight to Harold’s apartment—without a hollow key you insert below the panel.
My skin felt keyed up and nervy. And there was something else: the pressure-shift feeling of bad luck on the move, as familiar to me as the smell of Ella’s skin. Think of a hand running over the hairs on your arm, setting all of them to rising. Think of every room you walk into being filled with the sense of someone having just left it.
Maybe Ella was already packing our stuff. I pictured her paint-spattered suitcase splayed out across Harold’s high bed. Maybe we’d be out of New York by nightfall, and soon, all of this—Audrey, Harold, Finch, the Salty Dog and serving biscotti and living in an apartment that smelled like a department store—would melt together like colors going to gray on a palette. I’d remember the six a.m. feeling of opening the café, eating Chinese takeout in bed in Brooklyn, reading Tam Lin in Prospect Park. The highway would carry everything else away.
The elevator doors slid open onto the foyer of Harold’s apartment, and I stepped out.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. A wet, almost rotten scent, with something wild curling beneath it—something green. It crawled under my skin and set my heart to hammering.
“Hello?” The apartment was oppressively silent, a quiet that pressed against my eardrums. It swallowed my voice like black water. I took a few slow steps through the entryway, all cream-colored walls and marble floor. It was spotless.
But that stink. Where was it coming from? I pulled out my phone and called my mom. It went straight to voicemail. I called Harold—same thing. After a minute, with misgivings, I called Audrey.
A bright string of candy-colored pop broke the quiet. Audrey’s ring tone, but I had never seen that girl without her phone. Then I remembered I hadn’t seen Audrey, period, since that morning. My mind flipped through horrible possibilities—was she dead? Was that what the smell was? Had the bad luck finally followed us up to the thirty-fifth floor? The old dread settled in my limbs.
I walked carefully through the apartment, like moving quietly would save me if someone was already inside. The rooms had an eerie, recently occupied feeling I recognized from the time a house we were staying in got burglarized. That intruder had taken all the books from the shelves and replaced them with food from the fridge. The beds had been filled with dead leaves, the mirrors cracked. Nothing valuable was gone, but a fur coat was pinned to the wall above Ella’s and my bed like a dead animal, stabbed through with a carving knife.
The woman hosting us kept saying how lucky she was nothing got taken, in a bright, false voice nobody believed. The worst part was the way I couldn’t stop seeing the house through the eyes of someone who shouldn’t have been there. I kept imagining how it might feel to walk through someone else’s space, tasting all the strange things you could do there. It made me hungry. I was less in control of myself then.
But nothing here was out of place. No meat sweating on the bookshelves, no fur coat slung up on the wall.
Except: on the kitchen island, a glass of wine fallen on its side. I moved close enough to see Ella’s lipstick smudge on its rim. For a horrible, suspended moment I thought I’d find her lying on the tile floor alongside it, but there was only the wine, pooled and staining. The kitchen was the clean white heart of Harold’s neurotically kept home—the wine looked like carnage.
I ran to my mom and Harold’s room. I hated going in there, hated seeing the high antique bed and Ella’s shape in it.
Now I threw open the door, so sure of what I’d find it took me a moment to recognize the bed was empty. Harold’s bedside table was neatly stacked with copies of The Economist and a Kindle I knew from snooping was stocked with multivolume space epics. On Ella’s side was a sweater set and slacks, laid out like mourning clothes. I ducked down quickly to check beneath the dust ruffle. Nothing.
Audrey’s room looked like Sephora and Barney’s had a brawl, but that was normal. No psychopath crouched in front of her underwear drawer, no rotting, leftover BluePrint juice explained the smell. Her gum-pink phone lay abandoned on the bed, its screen bristling with texts and missed calls. Where u at bitch.
I saved my room for last. The smell was strongest there, a sickly braid of green and rot that felt like someone facepalming my brain. I dropped stealthily to the floor, ready to run out the nearest window if I saw anyone under the bed, but there was just a stretch of vacuumed carpet. My closet door was open, thank God, with nothing more sinister inside it than the primrose bridesmaid gown I’d worn at Ella and Harold’s wedding.
Then I saw it: an envelope lying on my pillow. I made myself take tiny steps toward it, till I could see what it said: Alice Proserpine, in spindly letters across the back. No address.
My stomach broke into pieces and spun like a kaleidoscope. Dimly I saw my hand reaching toward it, lifting it to my nose. Cheap ink and old paper. I felt hot, but my arms prickled with goosebumps. I ripped it open.
The page inside it was soft with use, folded in on itself. I had a sharp flare of déjà vu as I eased it open.
It was a title page I’d seen just once, years ago. “Alice-Three-Times,” it said in a dense script. Inked around it was a geode pattern that made me think of ice. There was a raw edge along one side where it had been ripped from the book.
OceanofPDF.com
7
I was gripping the page so tightly I tore it. Gingerly I sat down on the bed.
“Alice-Three-Times,” the story I’d never finished. It sounded like a children’s game, like something girls at a slumber party said into a mirror with the lights turned off. Years ago, when I’d held my grandmother’s book for the first and only time, I hoped I’d been named for her Alice, that she had something to do with me. Now I prayed she hadn’t.
My mouth was dry as dirt. The redheaded man must’ve been here—must’ve done this. He had a copy of the book. He’d come back from god knows where to find me.
I had to get out of the apartment. Its walls were too close; they were curling in over me, watchful. I tucked the title page into my bag and ran for the elevator.
The doorman was still missing from the lobby, so I couldn’t ask if he’d seen Ella leaving. He tended to look at me like I’d come to deliver a pizza one night and never left, so I might not have asked him anyway.
I paced in tight circles around the lobby, keeping one eye on the street. Ella didn’t answer any of my next three calls. I cursed myself for not having the numbers of anyone she might be with—her coworkers from the catering job, maybe, though they’d fallen out of touch—and tried and failed to reach Harold one more time.
When I was little I became obsessed with the idea of my mom leaving me behind when she moved. When the fear got so bad I couldn’t sleep, I’d strap myself into the passenger seat of our car, so she’d be sure to remember me if she left before morning. Now I felt the sudden urge to make sure our car was still in Harold’s parking garage.