She hastily consults the calendar beside her. “Okay, okay. Michelle first came in on…on Wednesday afternoon. Yeah. You were still out and…she said she just had to quickly drop something off for you.”
Lucy bolts up, suddenly remembering something. “Wait, I checked with you!” she blurts and leans over to her computer, tapping furiously at the keyboard. “Yes. Here. I checked she was with you. I promise you. See? You sent that email, remember?” She looks up at me, her face a mixture of relief and indignation. “You told me she’d be coming. You said to let her up.”
“I did what?” I say, incredulous.
“Yeah,” she replies, her eyes fluttering quickly across her blue-lit screen. She nods triumphant and turns the screen to face me. “Here. Look. See. You emailed me.”
On the screen is an email. It’s from my email address to reception. It’s an email I did not write. I shiver in my silk slip dress in the air-conditioned lobby and read.
From: Eliot, Mia
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2021 1:05 PM
To: “reception” <[email protected]>
Subject: Visitor—Apartment 3108
Hi there,
Just to let you know I’m expecting a visitor to the apartment in the next half hour or so.
Her name is Michelle and she’s my personal assistant so I’d really appreciate you letting her straight up to the apartment. She needs to drop off something important. She has her own key to let herself in. Give her a quick call on the cell number below if there’s a problem as I’m just about to go into a meeting. But she should be with you shortly, she’s on her way over now.
Mia Eliot
A phone number is at the bottom. I look up at Lucy completely horrified. “I didn’t write this.”
Lucy’s features crease in disbelief before she takes in the seriousness of what I’m saying; it’s clear from my tone that I have genuinely never seen this email before.
“But that’s your email address, right?” She points to the screen.
I nod. “Yeah, it is,” I mumble, “but I didn’t write that.” Someone wrote an email from my email address. It was written just after one o’clock on Wednesday. That was the day of the audition where Emily disappeared. I must have been in my audition at that exact time. I left my bag unattended twice that day. Once outside while I fed the meter and once in the waiting room while I auditioned. All my things were there while I was in that casting room, for a full thirty minutes. Anyone could have accessed them.
My hand flies to my mouth. “Oh my God,” I hear myself pant. Someone took my phone and used it during those thirty minutes. I snatch at my clutch bag on the reception counter and desperately try to fumble out the phone. It’s passcode-protected. How could they have worked out my passcode?
Regardless, I check my SENT MESSAGES folder. It’s empty; the whole SENT box has been deleted. God knows how many emails they’ve sent and to who.
They must have worked out my code and they’ve had full access to my emails, my messages, everything since. Then they found my address from my emails, stole my apartment keycard, and came here. And I know for certain they’ve been in my apartment more than once. They took my script, deleted my emails, and left me that note. God knows what else they’ve been doing.
I turn back to Lucy. “How many times has Michelle been here?”
“I’m not sure. I can check in the logbook, we note down all deliveries and visitors.”
“Did she come a lot, Lucy?” I insist.
She hesitates, biting her lip before answering. “Yes.”
“Did she have anyone else with her?”
Lucy’s expression darkens before she answers definitively, “No.”
Thank God. Suddenly the image of Joanne springs to mind again. “Wait. Did Michelle look anything like the other girl who came to visit me? On Thursday?” It’s a crazy thought, as it would have been incredibly risky on Joanne’s part to try to get past Lucy as both Michelle and Emily.
Lucy thinks for a moment before shaking her head. “No. Well, I suppose they were both brunettes and about the same height, but they were quite different as people. Michelle was a lot more—I don’t know—she was really friendly, chatty, we spoke a lot—” She breaks off, aware of the irony of her character appraisal. She hesitates, an idea clearly coming to her.
“Here, follow me,” she says, turning and disappearing behind the reception area into an alcove housing a more functional work space. A large desk laden with paperwork is flanked by a video security system with four small screens showing constantly shifting images of the building’s lobby, lifts, car park, hallways, pool, and gym. Lucy’s going to show me footage of Michelle.
She takes a seat, tapping through the system, until she locates last night’s lobby footage and switches one of the screens to playback. We both watch the footage as residents I don’t recognize come and go at double speed. It turns out there’s actually quite a few people living in this building. It just goes to show how lonely a city can be; I’ve never seen a single one of them in the flesh before. The time code in the top right-hand corner speeds past midnight. She slows the playback as we hit 3:50 a.m. at reception.
My gaze flickers to Lucy’s screen-lit face and I can’t help but question why on earth she would let someone, even a personal assistant, up to someone’s apartment at four in the morning.
“Lucy, why did you think an assistant would be coming up to my apartment in the middle of the night?” I ask as delicately as I can.
She glances at me. “I don’t know. I mean…you’re an actor. It’s LA. I didn’t ask. Could have been emergency mineral water for all I know.”
My gaze is pulled back to the screen as a dark figure enters the lobby. She strides up to reception and gives Lucy a wave. They’re talking. The woman is wearing tight black jeans, a black Celine hoodie, and an unmarked baseball cap that her long dark ponytail swings from. I can’t see her face from this camera angle, and to give Lucy credit this woman really does look like an assistant dashing in to run a quick errand. She leans across the reception counter chatting to Lucy, who smiles and nods.
The camera angle of the footage changes and I see the front of her now, the peak of her cap still masking everything but her mouth and chin.
Lucy fast-forwards the footage. The woman is now in the lift, her baseball cap still obscuring her face, and then suddenly the woman is looking up to check the floor number. In fast forward it’s only a flash of her features and then it’s gone. My arm shoots toward the screen but Lucy is on it, already rewinding until the face is frozen on screen looking up at us.
My breath snags in my throat. I know this woman very well.
“Oh my God.”
The woman on the screen is Emily. The girl I met at that audition four days ago. The girl who has been missing ever since. The girl who was drugged and raped just over a month ago and who I had assumed might now be dead because of it. But she’s not dead; she’s there on the screen very much alive. About to break into my apartment.
Emily was here. And she was here more than once.
“Keep playing the footage, Lucy. Go to my hallway,” I tell her and blessedly she doesn’t question me. I watch as Emily rounds the corner of my corridor and approaches my door. I imagine myself sleeping soundly within. She pauses briefly outside the door, and then the green door light flashes and she slips quietly into the apartment. Lucy taps the footage into double time again and we stare at my closed apartment door as the timestamp above speeds along. There’s movement as the door reopens, the timestamp showing that eleven minutes have passed since she entered. She reemerges and in her hand is one of my old Whole Food bags, laden. Inside are her things: her laptop, her mobile, her rental documents, and the photograph I unstuck from her bedside table. She stole back the things I took from her apartment.