I checked into the Cecil on a Thursday in January of 2013. I was in Los Angeles for a week of meetings, and my company had booked me there because it was cheap and central and, they said, "fine." The lobby was large and slightly dim. The desk clerk was professional and quick. My room was clean in the way hotel rooms are clean — thoroughly, impersonally.
I want to be honest about my experience there. Most of it was ordinary. The mattress was firm. The shower pressure was good. The window faced downtown and the light in the evenings was pleasant in the way city light can be pleasant when you're tired.
But the water bothered me.
I noticed it the first morning. The water from the tap had a taste I couldn't identify. Not unpleasant exactly — not the metallic taste of old pipes or the chemical taste of heavy chlorination. Something organic. Faint. Like something that had been in still water for a long time. I drank bottled water after that and showered quickly, and I told myself I was imagining things.
On my third evening, something happened in the elevator.
I pressed the button for my floor and the doors opened on an intermediate floor — six, I think — and a young woman stepped in. She was wearing a yellow cardigan. She was carrying a stack of books against her chest. She pressed a button. The button she pressed was for my floor.
She said nothing for the first few seconds, and then she turned to look at the elevator panel. She pressed the button for her floor again. The elevator continued upward without stopping on six. She pressed it again. The elevator went to my floor and stopped, and the doors opened. She didn't move.
I got out. I held the door and said: "This is mine, but —"
She looked at me. Her expression was not distressed. It was something closer to confused, the way you look when something around you isn't behaving according to rules you thought you understood. She said: "I keep pressing it."
I said: "I know. Do you want to take the stairs?"
She stepped out. She smiled at me, a polite, brief smile, and went toward the stairwell. I went to my room. I spent four seconds deciding whether this had been unusual and decided it had not.
I checked out on Saturday, a day early. I don't have a good reason for this. I told my company that my meetings had wrapped. This was technically true.
I was on a flight home when I saw the news alert on my phone. A young woman had been found in the hotel's rooftop water tank. She had been reported missing a week before she was found. Her name was Elisa Lam. She had been a guest at the hotel.
I looked at the photographs the news ran. I looked at them for a long time.
The yellow cardigan.
I went back through my phone. I had taken a photograph from my room window on Thursday evening — the downtown lights, a habit of mine, I photograph city lights from hotel rooms. The timestamp was 7:14 PM.
In the lower left corner of the photograph, in the portion of the frame that included the hotel's rooftop, there is a figure. The resolution is not good enough to be certain of anything. The figure is very small. They appear to be standing near the rooftop water tanks.
I have not shown this photograph to anyone. I don't know what it would change. I don't know what help it would be. She was already gone, and the water had already been what it was, and the elevator had already brought her to the wrong floor, and whatever was happening to her in those last days happened whether or not I held the door.
But I think about the elevator. I think about how she kept pressing the button for her floor. I think about how the elevator kept going up.
I checked out of that hotel on Saturday. I don't know why. I just couldn't sleep there. The water tasted wrong and I couldn't sleep and something in me wanted very badly to be somewhere else.
Sometimes I think that instinct was the only thing that separated us. Her, still pressing the button. Me, already on the stairs.
I hope she found a way up that she wanted. I hope wherever the elevator took her, eventually, was somewhere better than the tank.