I charged it and guessed his passcode—1612, our address in McKees Rocks—and scoured his messages and notes for any clues. There wasnothing. No texts out of the ordinary, no unusual pictures, no secret apps or locked folders.
And in fact, it was thatnothingthat made me most suspicious.
Wilder had been in love with Ryan. That had been clear to me. Yet there was no mention of her anywhere on his phone, no messages to her, no photos or memories or voice recordings.
Either he had deleted everything after their breakup, or she’d been so paranoid about their relationship being discovered that she gave him whatever burner phone he was probably using now.
I hated her in that moment, I have to admit. I couldn’t comprehendwhy, why Ryan was so afraid of a normal relationship, why she closed herself off, why she needed to have my brother so badly, out of all people. Because I couldn’t shake the feeling that wherever they were, they were together.
So I set out to understand Ryan Holding.
I took my brother’s phone home with me and scrolled through it most nights, trying to find something I had missed. I googled many different variations of his name, of names he might use as aliases, of music news across the globe to see if anything about him would come up. All of it was old information, published well before he had disappeared.
Work on the book got sidelined when the pandemic kept me inside and temporarily reduced my photojournalism career to long-range shots of architecture and landscapes. As I set up interviews and scheduled trips once it was okay to travel again, I learned about Ryan and her life, her mind, her behavior, from those who knew her best. I traveled to the places where she’d been and where my brother had gone too. Rent kept deducting automatically from Wilder’s accounts, and I took that as a sign that he was still alive and well somewhere, at least alive enough to move money into checking.
Until one day, in late summer of 2022, it stopped.
Wilder’s landlord called me just after I’d finished interviewing Serge and before I was to speak with Kylie the following week.
“It seems the well has run dry,” he said. His name was Dale. He was a generally grouchy man with whom I’d developed a tentativefriendship, once he got over his initial exasperation at my endless questions about Wilder’s comings and goings.
“Can you try to run it again?” I asked him. “Maybe it’s an error.”
“No error. I’ve already tried.” He sighed. “Sorry, Elyse, but I think the apartment is a dead end.”
I don’t know what I expected. I guess I thought that as long as his apartment was still paid for, he’d be coming back. I thought that at any moment I might get a text from an unknown number or a call from Dale and the long, bewildering wait would be over.
Instead, I found myself packing up Wilder’s things for him and staring down the empty apartment alone.
“Good luck, kiddo,” Dale had said, shaking my hand after helping me load the last box into a friend’s pickup. “He’s out there somewhere.”
“I hope so, Dale,” I said, and then I went home and poured myself a little too much wine.
I spent that evening scrolling through Wilder’s phone one more time.
And then I saw something.
Buried way back in his photos, eleven years old, was a selfie of Wilder on the “White Lace” set. He was making a goofy face as he stared into the prop crystal ball on the fortune teller’s table. I enlarged the photo and saw, at last, the person in the background: It was Ryan, laughing, almost invisible in the dark contrasted light.
It was the only picture of Ryan on his phone.
I sat up, theories pinballing around my head like I was on the Ryde-or-Die conspiracy subreddit. Didn’t Ryan place great importance on the crystal ball in “Hear Me Now”? Didn’t Wilder himself mention it in his final email to me?
I didn’t wait until the next morning. I called Serge and talked around the tipsiness that had made my mouth feel like cotton.
“Serge,” I said. “The crystal ball, the prop from ‘White Lace’—where is it? Do you still have it?”
“Elyse, didn’t expect to hear from you so late,” he said. It sounded like I had woken him up. “The crystal ball ... let’s see. We rented props for a lot of the videos. But since we used that one multiple times, itcouldbe in storage.”
“Where?” I asked. “Where’s the storage?”
“Madcap’s got a locker in south LA. Skip might be able to let you in.”
I emailed Skip that night and, after rereading the message the next morning and regretting its slightly manic tone, I called him and explained myself.
“I don’t know, Elyse,” he said. “I think it’s a long shot. I’m not even sure if we have any video props in the locker—Serge would know better than me, but I personally have no clue where that thing is.”
“Can I look anyway? Please, Skip.” I didn’t tell him that I would break into that storage locker if I had to.
