…WINDOW. Under it, smaller: “He’s back. Don’t use the stairs.” I didn’t think. I grabbed my phone and my passport, pushed the bedroom window up, and climbed out onto the porch roof in my socks. I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me as I dropped into the flower bed.
I ran to the gas station at the end of the road and called 911 from behind the ice machine. My hands were shaking so badly the dispatcher had to ask me the address three times. While I waited, I kept the app open. In Room 2, the woman had lain down on the mattress and pulled a blanket over her face, like she’d been taught to do when he came.
The police were there in nine minutes. I watched on my phone as the host walked into my empty bedroom, looked at the open window, and ran. He got as far as his car. Two officers went down into the basement. On my screen, I saw Room 2’s door open, and a flashlight beam, and the woman sit up and raise both hands to her face.
Her name was Dana. She was twenty-six. She’d booked the same house eight months earlier for a work trip. The host had told her family she’d checked out early and left no forwarding address. Her mother had been posting her photo on missing-persons pages every week since February.
Detectives found three other camera systems in his other rentals. No one else in a basement, thank God. Just hundreds of hours of guests who never knew.
I met Dana in the hospital two days later. She held my hand and didn’t let go. “Everybody who stayed in that room found the camera eventually,” she said. “Some of them just screwed it back in. You were the first one who scanned it.” I still don’t know why I did. I’ve stopped trying to explain it. Dana and her mother send me a card every year on the anniversary. It always says the same thing: “Thank you for looking.”
