The Disappearing Act(64)

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.

I feel a sudden flush of shame. She came to take back the things I stole from her. I can hardly accuse her of theft.

But then she didn’t just enter my apartment once, did she? I think of my broken security monitor. She’s been breaking in for four days. I’ve been missing emails; she’s been sending emails, moving things, taking things, and that message. God knows what else might have gone missing that I haven’t even noticed yet.

My mind scrambles for an explanation for all of this. She must have seen me tap in my iPhone passcode while I was sitting next to her in the waiting room and then she rifled through it, found my address, took my key, and emailed Lucy her lie. All while I fed her meter and auditioned. But why? Why use my phone that day, why take my key, why keep coming back? I have nothing to steal.

I take a breath and try to make sense of this tangle of facts. Emily didn’t disappear, she was coming here as Michelle. She must have hired Joanne to collect her things from me and play out those scenes. Perhaps she knew she couldn’t get past reception as both Michelle and herself. So she wrote those strange character breakdowns and scenes that Joanne showed me and texted Joanne instructions on where to go next in her place.

Emily came straight here after emailing Lucy from my phone. That’s why I couldn’t find her after my audition. She kept me busy looking for her while she searched my apartment. But what was she looking for on that first day?

Lucy’s voice breaks my concentration. “Do you recognize her?” she asks. “Michelle?”

I nod. “Yes. That’s—” I catch myself in a lie. I can’t tell Lucy this is Emily because she still thinks the woman she let in three nights ago to collect her keys is Emily. I could explain the whole story but I’m not sure that would do me any favors. She misreads my pained expression for concern and shoots out a hand for the desk phone.

“I’ll call the cops,” she offers, lifting the receiver, fingers poised to dial.

“No,” I blurt out. My mind is racing to put everything together without misstepping. Emily isn’t missing but she’s certainly pretending to be. The recording I listened to was real. Her emails were real. The Zoom call from Moon Finch seems to be the thing that set all of this in motion. Perhaps she really did mean to disappear that day but I had her wallet and keys. Perhaps that’s why she went into my bag. I should have dumped them back in there before I went into my audition, but for some reason I pocketed them. She couldn’t find them so, perhaps in the hope of getting them back later, she stole my apartment keycard.

But she wouldn’t have been able to take back her car keys and wallet from my apartment that first day because I was still at the casting. So she must have wanted to check out how possible it would be to gain access. And then the next day she wouldn’t have been able to take them back either as I took her things out with me all day. Emily knew if she wanted her things back she’d need to collect them from me directly, as I kept leaving the building with them on me. But that would have meant showing up here as Emily Bryant, so she sent Joanne instead. Emily Bryant is hiding.