Follow Me(7)

But even with Audrey’s history of making reckless decisions, I was stunned she was foolish enough to rent an apartment blind. She scoffed at my concern and insisted she’d done her due diligence: Googling her landlord, reverse image searching the pictures from the Craigslist ad, scouting the location on Google Maps street view.

I was reserving judgment on the actual unit, but I felt good about the location at least. The address she gave me was near Logan Circle, a neighborhood that was vibrant and largely safe. Most of the buildings in the area were either classic row houses or new construction, so her unit was almost certainly decent unless she was terribly unlucky. And Audrey was never unlucky.

Besides, her new home was only a few blocks from mine, and I was pleased with the idea of Audrey living so close to me. I envisioned us picking up our friendship where we had left off, getting manicures and brunch and dancing along to old Britney Spears songs in our pajamas. That night, we had opened a bottle of wine, and then another, as we caught each other up on our lives, and everything had felt so much like the old days that I thought I might burst with happiness.

In the morning, a hangover throbbing behind my eyes, I walked with Audrey to meet her new landlord. I crossed my fingers that this “Leanne” was truly who she claimed to be and that Audrey’s laissez-faire attitude to apartment shopping wouldn’t lead to trouble. We turned onto one of the neighborhood’s quiet, narrow side streets, lined with leafy green trees and colorful row houses. It was the kind of street that made you forget you were in the middle of the city.

Audrey stopped midsentence and checked the address on her phone. “Here it is. Home sweet home.”

I followed her gaze to a picturesque four-story row house, its brick painted pale beige and its shutters a crisp black. It was set slightly back from the sidewalk, a short path leading to the steps cutting through a small, grass-covered front yard. A couple of flowering bushes were crowded along the building at ground level, and window boxes dripping with flowers hung from the upper stories.

I exhaled with relief. “It looks nice. Which unit are you in?”

“B. I’m not sure which one that is. Maybe the second floor?”

I cringed, certain that “B” did not stand for second floor. I had seen enough “B” units during my own apartment search to know what it meant.

“Check out the dungeon,” Audrey said, nudging me and pointing to an iron gate underneath the front steps. Behind it, a bright blue door was partially hidden below street level.

“Um . . .” I murmured, pointing reluctantly to the letter “B” above the buzzer next to the gate.

“Oh. I guess it’s my dungeon.”

I tried to give her a sympathetic look but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Leanne said to ring the bell for Unit 1 when I arrived,” she told me, then set her jaw and marched up the front stairs, platform sandals heralding her arrival. She depressed the buzzer and then looked back at me, offering a brilliant, obviously fake smile.

Her smile dropped when the door swung open to reveal a thin, wiry man in his twenties. He had greasy dark hair looped into a bun on top of his head and a tattoo of something with wings—an eagle? a dragon?—spreading out from beneath his wifebeater, and he clutched a canned energy drink in one hand with jagged, dirty nails.

“Sorry,” Audrey said, obviously taken aback. “I must have pushed the wrong buzzer. I’m looking for Leanne Lo—”

“Grandma!” he hollered over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Audrey, running his jumpy, mud-colored eyes over her body. “You must be the new tenant.”

His feral stare sent a shiver down my spine, but Audrey remained as composed as ever.

“Good morning!” a singsong voice called as a small, smiling woman with a creased face and vibrant maroon hair appeared behind him. “You must be Audrey. Let me grab the keys and we’ll go down to the unit. This is my grandson, Ryan. He lives on the first floor here.”

As Leanne bustled away, Ryan looked at Audrey and curled his mouth into a smile, revealing small, yellowed teeth. “Hello, neighbor.”

This is why you don’t rent apartments over the internet, I thought uneasily.

“Tell your grandmother I’ll be waiting downstairs,” Audrey said brusquely. She pivoted and hopped down the stairs, ponytail bouncing, mouthing oh my God to me.

“You don’t have to do this,” I hissed to her. “I can look at your lease. I’m sure there’s an escape clause or—”

“It’s fine,” she interrupted. “Honestly, you should have seen some of my neighbors in New York. They’d make this guy look like Mr. Rogers.”

“Here we are,” Leanne trilled, hobbling down the stairs.

She unlocked the gate under the stairs and then the door, and Audrey and I followed her inside. I held my breath as I ducked through the hobbit-sized doorway, prepared to see one of the dark and dreary “English basements” that were so ubiquitous in the city. To my surprise and delight, however, we stepped into a decently sized, recently renovated apartment with an open-plan living area. The faux wooden floors gleamed, the updated appliances in the small kitchen shone, and the whole space smelled like lemon-scented cleaner. Sunlight streamed in, despite the living area’s only window being partially blocked by an overgrown bush and covered in iron bars.