The Housekeeper

by Natalie Barelli

  “Don’t worry, we’re just going upstairs to Mia.”

  “Why? What have you done to her?” I ask, panic rising.

  “I haven’t done anything to her. I tried to calm her down, but she won’t, and I’ve had enough. I want you to do it.”

  “Can I have my phone back?” I’m trying it on. A quid pro quo. Will soothe baby for cellphone.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Get in, Claire, before I lose my temper again.” Then he shoves me inside and walks in behind me. I wedge myself in the farthest corner, my arms crossed over my chest.

  In the nursery I peer over the crib, my hand over my mouth because I’m terrified he’s done something to her. But Mia sees me and her arms spring out like a wound-up toy that’s been released. I pick her up, breathing with relief. I whisper in her ear. Hey, you, you’re very noisy today. I take her to the changing table where the video monitor is—the transmitter part, with the camera. I pick it up, fiddle with it, make some room to put Mia down while Harvey watches me closely, eyes narrowed.

  “How did you know? About me?” I ask.

  “That your name isn’t Louise Martin? When your work form was returned because of your Social Security number. I asked Hannah to sort it out. She said you asked to be paid in cash. That raised a flag for me. I called the employment agency the next day and they were, how shall I put it … puzzled. ‘Mr. Carter, you didn’t even interview Louise Martin.’ Well! You can imagine my surprise. You must be mistaken, I said. Of course Louise Martin works here, she’s my housekeeper. And she said, ‘Mr. Carter, we didn’t place anyone with you. Your wife told us you found a suitable employee and no longer required our services. Louise Martin never received an interview. She secured another position, but not with you.’”

  My hands are red and swollen from where he kicked me earlier, but I’ve finally managed to remove Mia’s soiled diaper. He wrinkles his nose in disgust. “She stinks,” he says. “She’s disgusting.”

  “I’m changing her. It will only take a minute.”

  “She needs a bath.”

  I turn to him. “A bath? Now?”

  “Look at her. She’s filthy.”

  I lift her up, but I don’t see anything unusual. She’s not filthy, she just crapped in her diaper. That’s what they do. But the way he has turned his head away, his mouth twisted, you’d think she’d been dunked in a bucket of rotting blue cheese.

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Seriously?” But the looks he gives shows he is serious. “Can you hand me this towel, please? The one hanging on the corner of the crib. That’s it.”

  Christ. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s like I’m in one of those hostage movies, where the mailman comes to the door and the hostage has to pretend everything is normal while spelling out H-E-L-P with their toe but the mailman just leaves without ever looking down. Then I think, no, wait. This is exactly the situation that I’m in.

  “I really thought my wife,” he says, sneering on the word wife, “had engineered this. That for some unknown reason, she had brought an accomplice into my home under the pretense of hiring a housekeeper. Someone”—he looks at me up and down with a degree of contempt—“unvetted. Frankly, I thought you were slow, and a terrible worker. If you didn’t improve soon, I would have told Hannah to fire you. But after talking to the agency, I realized there was a lot more to this. I needed to find out who you were, and why my wife had brought you in. Was that why she fired Diane? To make room for you?”

  Is he asking me? Of course not. He just wants me to know how clever he is.

  We’re in the bathroom now; I’ve run the bath for Mia and I’ve settled her in it. Harvey puts a towel on the top of the toilet seat and sits down, watching us.

  “I drowned a kitten once,” he muses. “When I was ten years old. I found it on the terrace behind our summer house. I don’t know how it got there. It was all wet and scraggly, and its eyes were shut and full of gunk. It made these little sounds like tiny squeaks. I put my finger under its throat and I could feel its little heart drumming. I took it to the fountain and I put it in the water. It tried to swim away, but it didn’t even know how. I turned it around and put the tip of my finger on its pink belly and pressed down. Let’s face it, it was going to die anyway. I just wanted to see how hard it was to kill it. Not hard, is the answer to that question, should anyone ask.”

  I close my eyes for a moment. “You’re a very sick man, Harvey Carter.”

  “Right. Coming from you, that’s quite a statement. Meanwhile, if I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.” He crosses and uncrosses his legs. “I went to see Diane. She was terribly anxious at first, like a bird that had been caught, all nerves and flutter. She believed I’d come to accuse her of harassing Hannah. Now why would I do that? I asked, and I got the whole story out of her. My favorite bit was the part about Diane meeting a woman called Claire on the day she was fired, a strange woman who took her for a drink at the Pierre—”

  “The Plaza.”

  “The Plaza. Good choice. I like the cocktail bar at the Plaza. Diane explained that said strange woman was now working as my housekeeper under the name of Louise. When she became aware of that, she came here to warn Hannah about you. Funny Hannah never mentioned it to me, don’t you think?”

  It’s not funny. It’s because she’s scared of you. I should have seen it before, her reluctance to tell him anything that might provoke a reaction. Hardly ever leaving the house. Not telling him about her past. How many times did she say, please don’t say anything to Harvey? I put it down to her being a consummate liar. I’m a consummate liar. I recognize the signs. Or so I thought.

  “I went to your room,” he resumes and wags his finger at me. “You are quite the slob! If I didn’t need you, I’d have fired you just for that! It took a while—you don’t have any personal things, I noticed. But eventually I found a rent receipt in a pocket, with your real name and your address. I had my secretary make some calls. I already knew about my wife’s background. I’m not a fool. But your story is interesting, too, more of the ‘riches to rags’ variety. Sad, really. It’s no surprise you’re mentally unstable. And you really have no friends, do you? Just a roommate and some guy who sees you as—what does your generation call it? A pity fuck?” He rubs his knuckles on the side of his chin. “I could kill you and no one would miss you.” Then he slaps both hands on his knees like he’s on the move, and I flinch.

  “And that’s when I realized, Hannah has no idea. She really thinks you’re Louise Martin. You have some nerve, Claire Petersen. I’ll give you that. You do realize I could have reported you for impersonating the real Louise Martin? You could be in jail right now.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because I need you. You’re a gift. Straight from the heavens.”

  I’m about to ask him what he means by that when my cell phone rings with the sound of church bells. Dominic. Harvey taps his pocket and pulls it out, and before I have time to think I’m halfway across the bathroom floor, my hand outstretched.

  He has his hand out to stop me and I grab it with both hands and bite it so hard I can taste his skin. He cries out in pain and snatches it back. The phone is still ringing, I’m desperately trying to get it when he draws his leg back and kicks me hard in the chest. I stumble backward and lose my balance. I hit my hip bone against the tile, but in my state it’s not enough to break my fall and my head hits something hard.

  “You’re an animal,” he hisses, cradling his hand. “I swear to God if you’ve given me a disease…” The phone stops ringing. I close my eyes, then snap them open again.

  “Oh my God, Mia.”

  I scramble to get to her but he’s already there. He snatches a towel from the rack and throws it at me. I hoist myself up on the side of the bathtub. She has her eyes open under the water and I scream her name as I pull her out. But she scrunches up her face, then laughs. I wrap her up, kissing the top of her head softly. I’m finding it hard to breathe.


  Harvey is towering above me, still cradling his hand. “You shouldn’t have done that, you—” He stops and stares at the floor. “What’s this?”

  My heart does a somersault. “Baby monitor! Okay?” I snap. I scoop it up. “Jesus, Harvey, what do you care?”

  He narrows his eyes at it and for a moment I think he’s going to take it from me. He’s going to look closer.

  “The other one is charging. This one is audio only,” I add.

  “For fuck’s sake.” He mutters. “Okay, fine. Put a clean diaper on her and put her to bed.”

  My legs are wobbly as I carry Mia to the changing table, the monitor safely in my hand. “Is Hannah really ill?” I ask. My mouth doesn’t work properly and the words come out blurry.

  “Hannah? Of course she is. She may even be dead by now.” He chuckles. “You should know, you’re the one who tried to kill her.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  He brings me back to my room, his fingers digging into my elbow, and I think he’s going to leave me there and lock the door again, but instead he shoves me inside and crosses his arms over his chest.

  “Put your uniform on, Claire.”

  He is standing at the open door. His body is in shadow with the light from the hallway behind him. It’s dark outside. “I want my phone.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he says. “I turned it off. Any more calls will go straight to voicemail. Now put on your uniform.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the place is filthy, that’s why. You’ve never done any cleaning, but you still took my money. You’ve taken me for a fool all this time. You think I wouldn’t notice? Well, I did. Party’s over. Put on your uniform and get to work.”

  For a moment I consider arguing because I have done some cleaning. Just lately, in fact. But he’s very unstable, so the best thing for me right now is to play his game, one move at a time. I look around the room, finally spot my uniform on the floor in a bundle and pick it up. Harvey is standing at the door, watching me. No. Surely…

  “I can’t get changed if you’re going to just stand there.”

  He closes the door, and I turn around, pull my T-shirt off over my head and, with some difficulty, put the uniform on. Only when I have buttoned it up do I take off my jeans. I look around the room for something I can use as a weapon, because it’s occurred to me, right now, that the video on my phone may have aroused him, and he’d like a repeat performance.

  He opens the door again. “Come on,” he says. “Get your cleaning trolley and start with the foyer.”

  I push the cleaning trolley into the elevator. It’s too tight for the both of us and the trolley, so he presses the button but doesn’t come in with me. When the elevator opens one floor up, he’s still walking up the stairs. My eyes fly to the console table where one of the house phones usually is, but it’s not there. The wall socket is bare.

  He’s almost here now, and before he has reached the landing, I’ve opened the front door wide.

  “I will kill her,” he says calmly, behind me. “I will kill Mia and tell them it was you. They’ll believe me, you know. It’s unlikely Hannah will survive. The police will find the diary my wife wrote, they’ll read all about her growing unease about you, her eventual conviction that you were a danger to her, to my child, my family. I think I was quite convincing, don’t you?”

  I close my eyes and ball my hands into tight fists. “You wrote it.”

  “Obviously.”

  “They’ll know, they’ll check it against her handwriting. They’ll be able to tell.”

  “They won’t check. Why would they? And if they do, they’ll find it’s the same. It might not withstand forensic examination, but they won’t take it that far. It’s more than close enough for our purposes.” Then he adds, “It’s a bit of a hobby of mine, calligraphy, have I told you? I find it very relaxing.”

  I am staring out to the street, where people are rushing past. It’s dark, but not that late. I could scream right now, and ten people would hear me. I could run, shout, yell out for a cop.

  Then his voice again, so close I can feel his breath on the back of my neck.

  “The police will figure out all by themselves that your name is Claire Petersen, and that you have held a grudge against my wife for the past ten years. That you have tracked her down and inserted yourself into this house under false pretenses in order to hurt her. By the time I’m done, they’ll bring back the electric chair, just for you.”

  I lower my head and close the door.

  * * *

  I am on my hands and knees polishing the tiles while Harvey watches from a side chair, a straight-backed walnut antique that looks unbelievably uncomfortable, so that’s something. He’s smoking a cigarette, which I find completely confusing, because it’s Hannah who smokes, Hannah who says, Don’t tell Harvey, he’ll kill me if he knew, and yet here he is, picking up a speck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue and flicking ash straight onto the floor I’ve just cleaned. I’m so tired I could go to sleep right here on the shiny tiles, and we’ve only just started. But I need to keep him talking. That is the most important thing right now.

  “Hannah didn’t really have a heart attack, did she? What did you do to her?” I ask.

  “You mean, what did you do to her.”

  I sit back on my heels. “Fuck you, Harvey! I didn’t do anything to her, and you know it!”

  He leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, and very calmly, he says, “Don’t use that tone with me. I won’t ask you again.”

  I’m still feeling the ring in my ears from earlier, and I grit my teeth.

  He sits back. “Foxglove,” he says, then takes a long drag, blows smoke toward the ceiling.

  Foxglove. I know that word. I repeat it in my head, visualize it—foxglove. Of course. I read it in one of Hannah’s—or should I say Harvey’s—diary entries. Something about Hannah showing it to me or something. A very toxic plant, lethal. Except it wasn’t me she pointed it out to. It was Harvey.

  “You’ve lost weight,” he says, tilting his head as if to see me better. I give him a sly look over my shoulder then go back to wiping the last of the tiles, sweat running down my neck.

  “She told you about foxglove,” I say.

  “Quite amazing, really. It says something about mankind’s survival instinct, that children can live happily among toxic poisonous plants such as that and instinctively know not to put it in their mouths. But, yes, you’re right, she told me. It causes cardiac glycoside poisoning. It slows the heart right down until it stops completely. We stopped for a picnic on the way to East Hampton, very nice spot, near the golf course. I sent Hannah off to buy a bottle of water—I’d drunk it all you see, silly me—and while she was out of sight, I put the leaves in Hannah’s sandwich, and in the tub of puree for Mia. I considered ingesting a little myself, not enough to make me very sick but enough to make it look like you were after all of us, but I’ll be honest with you, Claire, I didn’t have the courage.” He sighs. “Unfortunately, Mia decided to have a tantrum and knocked her puree right out of my hand and onto the grass. Most of it fell out. I would have fed it to her anyway, but there were people nearby who noticed and laughed. Hannah didn’t even finish her sandwich because of it. That’s why she’s still alive.”

  I stand up, take off my rubber gloves and wipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. My legs are wobbly, and I have to rest against the wall. “Why are you telling me all this? If I’m supposed to have done it? Aren’t you worried I’ll tell someone?”

  He buries his cigarette butt in the potted green plant. “It doesn’t matter. After this is all over, and I’m hoping it will be soon, you will kill yourself. Shall we go upstairs? The furniture needs polishing.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  He’s waiting for Hannah to die. That’s what he said. And when she does, he’ll smother Mia. He admits it like it’s no big deal. Just stating the facts. He wishes she’d hurry up.

  “What i
f she doesn’t die?” I ask.

  “Oh, she will. The only way she lives is if she gets the antidote.”

  “There’s an antidote?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “But why do you want them dead?” I ask.

  “She was going to leave me.”

  I wait for more, but there is none. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. At the very least I thought his justification would involve some kind of blackmail attempt on Hannah’s part.

  “Nobody leaves me, Claire. Nobody.” He says this forcefully, like it’s a really important point and I better remember it. He goes to the bar, pours himself a drink. “I picked up that girl from nowhere and brought her here. I chose her. She should have been grateful. And she was, for a while. She was sweet, she adored me. You should have seen her in her tiny apartment baking a gourmet dinner for me…” He stops, like he’s lost in his happy memories of Hannah circa 1950s.

  Keep him talking.

  “What about Mia?”

  “What about her? I’m not going to be left with the child after Hannah dies. What would be the point of that? They both have to go.”

  I close my eyes. He’s insane. A dangerous psychopath. There is no trace of emotion in his tone, except for some mild annoyance at the trouble he’s being put through.

  “You said before I was a gift. What did you mean?” I ask the question like I don’t really care, like I’m just making conversation while concentrating on polishing a chest of drawers.

  Apparently, until I showed up, his plan was to make it look like Hannah had killed her child, then herself. That was the purpose of the journal entries he wrote before I came along, the ones where she complains of postpartum depression, of confusion, of not coping. “I’ve been drugging her with Zolpidem.”

  Which were hidden in the back of my dresser. Nice touch. Then something comes to me, a dream I had, not long ago. I dreamed my father had come to see me; he was in my room and he was holding my hand. It was so strange that when I woke up, for a moment I thought it had really happened. God. I think it really did happen, but it wasn’t my father—it was Harvey. I think he’d given me a sleeping pill or two, and he was pressing that bottle of Ambien into my hand so that my fingerprints would be on it.