by Ruth Ware
“I tell you what,” she whispered to Ellie, though deliberately loud enough for me to hear. “Maybe you’ll get a story from me and a story from Rowan. How does that sound?”
Ellie made no reply to this, only dug her face further into Sandra’s shoulder.
Upstairs the curtains on the landing were drawn, and I could see the dim pink light of Petra’s night-light filtering across the carpet. Sandra supervised tooth brushing and the loo while I made my way down the softly carpeted hallway to Maddie and Ellie’s doorway.
There they were—two little beds, each bathed in the soft glow of a bedside light—one pink, the other a kind of dusky peach. Above each one was a collection of framed prints—a baby footprint, a scribble just recognizable as a cat, a butterfly made out of two chubby handprints—and tangled around the frames were strings of fairy lights, giving off their gentle illumination.
It was picture-perfect—like an illustration from a nursery catalog.
I sat gingerly on the foot of one of the little beds, and at last I heard feet and whining voices, swiftly hushed by Sandra.
“Shh, Maddie, you’ll wake Petra. Come on now, dressing gowns off and into bed.”
Ellie jumped into hers, but Maddie stood stonily for a moment, regarding me, and I realized it must be her bed I was sitting on.
“Do you want me to move?” I asked, but she said nothing, only folded her arms mutinously, got into bed, and turned her face towards the wall, as if pretending I wasn’t there.
“Shall I sit on the bean bag?” I asked Sandra, who gave a laugh and shook her head.
“You’re fine. Stay there. Maddie takes a bit of time to warm up to people sometimes, don’t you, sweetie?”
Maddie said nothing, and I wasn’t sure I blamed her. It must be uncomfortable hearing herself discussed with a stranger like this.
Sandra began to read a Winnie the Pooh story, her voice low and soporific, and when at last she finished the final sentence, she leaned over, checking Ellie’s face. Her eyes were closed, and she was snoring very gently. Sandra kissed her cheek, clicked off the lights, and then stood and came across to me.
“Maddie,” she said very quietly, “Maddie, do you want a story from Rowan?”
Maddie said nothing, and Sandra leaned over and peered at her face, still turned to the wall. Her eyes were shut tight.
“Out like a light!” Sandra whispered, a touch of triumph in her voice. “Oh well, your rendition will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m sorry I didn’t hear it.”
She kissed Maddie’s cheek too, drew her covers up a little, and tucked some kind of soft toy under her chin—I couldn’t see what exactly—and then clicked off her light as well, leaving just the glow of the night-light. Then she gave a last glance at her sleeping daughters and made her way to the door, with me following behind.
“Can you close the door after you?” she said, and I turned, ready to do so, glancing back at the little white beds and their occupants, both in shadow now.
The night-light was very soft and too close to the floor to show much except for shadows around the girls’ beds, but for a moment, deep in the blackness, I thought I saw the glint of two little eyes, glaring at me.
Then they snapped shut, and I pulled the door closed behind me.
I couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t the bed, which was as sumptuously comfortable as before. It wasn’t the heat. The room had been oppressively warm when I first entered, but I had managed to persuade the system to switch to cooling mode, and now the air was pleasantly temperate. It wasn’t even my worries over being left alone with the children the next day. If anything I was feeling relieved at the thought of getting rid of Bill and Sandra. Well . . . not Sandra . . . mostly Bill, if truth were told.
The uncomfortable end to the evening flashed though my head once more. We had been sitting in the kitchen, talking and chatting, and then at last Sandra had stretched and yawned and announced her intention to make an early night of it.
She’d kissed Bill and headed for the stairs, and just as I was thinking about following her, Bill had refilled both our glasses without asking me.
“Oh,” I said, half-heartedly. “I was . . . I mean I shouldn’t . . .”
“Come on.” He pushed the glass towards me. “Just one more. This is my only chance to get to know you before I entrust my kids to your care, after all! You could be anyone for all I know.”
He gave me a grin, his tanned cheeks wrinkling, and I wondered how old he was. He could have been anything from forty to sixty; it was hard to tell. He wore rimless glasses and had one of those tanned, slightly weather-beaten faces, and his cropped hair gave him an almost ageless quality, slightly Bruce Willis–esque.
I was very tired—the long journey and the stress of packing had finally hit me like a ton of bricks. But there was enough truth in his remark for me to sigh inwardly and draw the glass towards me. He was right, after all. This was our one chance to get to know each other before he left. It would seem strange and evasive to refuse him that.
He rested his chin on one hand and watched as I picked up the glass and put it to my lips—his head tilted, his eyes following the movement of the wine to my lips and staying there.
“So, who are you, Rowan Caine?” he asked. His voice was a little slurred, and I wondered how much he’d had to drink.
Something, something in his tone, in the directness of the question, in the uncomfortably intense intimacy of his gaze, made my stomach shift uneasily.
“What do you want to know?” I said, with an attempt at lightness.
“You remind me of someone . . . but I can’t think who. A film star, maybe. You don’t have any famous relatives, do you? A sister in Hollywood?”
I gave a smile at this rather tired line.
“No, definitely not. I’m an only child, and anyway, my family’s about as ordinary as you can get.”
“Maybe it’s work . . . anyone in the family work in architecture?”
I thought of my stepfather’s insurance sales business and only just stopped myself from rolling my eyes. Instead, I shook my head, firmly, and he looked at me over his wineglass, frowning so that a deep furrow appeared at the bridge of his nose.
“Maybe it’s that . . . what’s her name. That Devil Wears Prada woman.”
“What, Meryl Streep?” I said, startled out of my nervousness enough to give a short laugh. He shook his head impatiently.
“No, the other one. The young one. Anne Hathaway, that’s it. You’ve got a look of her.”
“Anne Hathaway?” I tried not to look as skeptical as I felt. Anne Hathaway maybe if she gained forty to sixty pounds and had acne scars and a haircut by the salon trainee. “I have to say, Bill, you’re very kind, but that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that comparison.”
“It’s not that though.” He got up and came around the breakfast bar to my side of it, sitting on the gleaming chrome stool facing me, his legs spread wide so that I couldn’t easily move without rubbing his thigh. “No, it’s not that. I definitely feel like we’ve met. Who did you say you worked for before this?”
I rattled off the list again, and he shook his head, dissatisfied.
“I don’t know any of them. Maybe I’m imagining it. I feel like I’d remember a face . . . well, a face like yours.”
Fuck. Something twisted in the pit of my stomach. I had been in this situation too often not to recognize where this was heading. My first job out of school, a young waitress with a boss who dangled a pay raise and complimented me on my fuchsia-pink bra. Countless creeps on countless nights out, putting themselves between me and the door. Randy dads at the nursery, angling for sympathy about their postpartum wives who didn’t understand them . . .
Bill was one of them.
He was my employer. He was my boss’s husband. And worst of all, he was . . .
Jesus. I can’t bring myself to say it.
My hands had begun to shake, and I clenched my fingers more tightly around the stem of my win
eglass to try to hide it.
I cleared my throat and tried to push my stool back, but it was wedged against the edge of the breakfast bar. Bill’s meaty denim-clad thighs blocked my way, effectively preventing me from getting down.
“Well, I’d better be heading up.” My voice fluted slightly with nerves. “Early start tomorrow, right?”
“There’s no hurry,” he said, and he reached out and took the wineglass from my fingers, filled it up, and then put out his hand towards my face. “You’ve just . . . you’ve got a little bit . . .”
His smooth, slightly sweaty thumb stroked the corner of my bottom lip, and I felt one knee nudge, very gently, between mine.
For a second I froze, and a fluttering panicked nausea rose up, choking me. Then something inside me seemed to snap, and I slid abruptly down off the stool, barging past him so fast that the wine slopped and spilled onto the concrete.
“Sorry,” I stammered. “So sorry, let me, I’ll get a cloth—”
“It’s fine,” he said. He was not one iota discomfited, only amused at my reaction. He stayed in place, half sitting, half leaning comfortably against the barstool, as I grabbed a dishcloth and mopped at the floor between his legs.
For one second I looked up at him, and he looked down, and the quip I’d heard a thousand times, always accompanied by ribald laughter, flashed through the back of my mind. While you’re down there, love . . .
I stood up, my face burning, and dumped the wine-stained cloth into the sink.
“Good night, Bill,” I said abruptly, and I turned on my heel.
“Good night, Rowan.”
And I walked up the two flights of stairs to bed, not looking back.
As I shut the door of my new room behind me, I felt a sense of overwhelming relief. I’d unpacked earlier, and even though the room didn’t feel like home yet, it did have a sense of being a little corner of the house that was my own territory, somewhere I could spread out, stop acting a part, stop being Rowan the Perfect Nanny and just be . . . me.
I pulled the elastic band out of my tight, perky ponytail and felt my thick wiry hair spring out into a crown around my head and the polite, people-pleasing smile that I’d had plastered on my face since I’d arrived relax into a weary neutrality. As I stripped off the buttoned-up cardigan, blouse, and tweed skirt I felt like I was shedding layers of pretense, back to the girl I was behind the facade—the one who wore pajamas until bedtime at the weekends, who lay on the sofa not reading a self-help book, but mainlining Judge Judy. The one who would have called Bill a fucking pig instead of standing there, paralyzed into politeness, before offering to wipe up after herself.
The intricacies of the control panels were a welcome distraction from having to think about that part of things, and by the time I’d wrested control of the temperature down to something more reasonable and remembered how to work the shower, my heart was thumping less and I was talking myself round into an acceptance of the situation.
Okay, so Bill was a creep. He wasn’t the first I’d encountered. Why was I so disappointed to find him here?
I knew the answer, of course. But it wasn’t just who he was. It was everything he represented—all the hard work and careful planning that had brought me here, all the hopes and dreams bound up with my decision to apply. That feeling that for once in my life something was going right, falling into place. The whole situation had seemed perfect—too perfect, perhaps. There had to be a fly in the ointment, and maybe Bill was it.
Suddenly the supernatural stuff didn’t seem so mysterious after all. Not a poltergeist. Just your average fiftysomething man who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. The same old, boring, depressing story.
Still, it felt like a kick in the guts.
It wasn’t until I had finished showering and had done my teeth, and was lying in bed, that I looked up at the ceiling. At the recessed light fittings, and the little blinking smoke alarm by the door, and . . . something else in the corner over there. What was that? A burglar alarm sensor? A second smoke detector?
Or was it . . .
I thought of Sandra’s remark at my interview: The whole house is wired up . . .
It couldn’t be a camera . . . could it?
But no. That would be more than creepy. That would be illegal surveillance. I was an employee—and I had a reasonable expectation of privacy, or whatever the legal terminology was.
All the same, I got up, wrapped my dressing gown around myself, and dragged a chair over to the carpet beneath the egg-shaped thing in the corner. One of my socks was lying on the floor where I’d stripped it off before getting in the shower, and I picked it up, climbed onto the chair, and stood on tiptoes to fit it over the sensor. I could just reach. It fit perfectly, and the empty toe of the sock hung there, flaccid and slightly disconsolate.
Only then, comforted, though with a feeling of slight ridiculousness, did I get back into bed and finally let myself fall asleep.
* * *
I awoke in the night with a start, and the vague feeling of something wrong—without being able to put my finger on it. I lay there, my heart pounding, wondering what it was that had woken me. I had no memory of having been dreaming—only a sudden jerk into consciousness.
It took a minute, and then it came again—a noise. Footsteps. Creak . . . creak . . . creak . . . slow and measured, as though someone was pacing on a wooden floor, which made no sense at all, since all the floors up here were thickly carpeted.
Creak . . . creak . . . creeeeak . . . The sound was hollow, heavy, resonant . . . a slow tread like a man’s, not the scamper of a child. It sounded as though it was coming from above, which was ridiculous, as I was on the top floor.
Slowly I sat up and groped for the light, but when I turned the switch, nothing happened. I flicked it again and then realized with a curse that I must have overridden the lamp at the main panel. I couldn’t face grappling with the control panel in the middle of the night and risking turning on the sound system or something, so I grabbed my phone from where it was charging and switched on the torch.
My chest was tight, and as I took a pull at my inhaler I realized suddenly that the room was extremely cold. No doubt when I had changed the temperature settings I had overdone it. Now, outside of the warm cocoon of bedclothes, the chill was uncomfortable. But my dressing gown was on the foot of the bed, so I pulled it on and stood there, trying not to let my teeth chatter, the thin beam of torchlight illuminating a narrow sliver of wheat-colored carpet and not much else.
The footsteps had stopped, and I hesitated for a moment, holding my breath, listening, wondering if they would start up again. Nothing. I took another puff at my inhaler, waiting, considering. Still nothing.
The bed was warm, and it was tempting to crawl back under the duvet and pretend I hadn’t heard anything, but I knew that I wouldn’t sleep well unless I at least tried to check out the source. Pulling my dressing gown belt tighter, I opened the door of my room a crack.
There was no one outside, but nevertheless I peered into the broom cupboard. It was, of course, totally empty except for the brushes, and the winking charge light of the Hoover. No possibility of anything bigger than a mouse hiding in here.
I shut the cupboard and then, feeling a little like a trespasser, I tried Rhiannon’s door, resolutely ignoring the scrawled KEEP OUT OR YOU DIE. I had thought it might be locked, but the handle turned without resistance, and the heavy door swung wide, shushing across the thick carpet.
Inside it was pitch-black, the blackout curtains firmly drawn, but it had the indefinable feel of an empty room. Still, I held up my phone and swung the narrow torch beam from wall to wall. There was no one there.
That was it. There were no other rooms on this floor. And the ceiling above was smooth and unbroken by so much as an attic hatch. For although my memory of the sounds was fading fast, my impression had been that the sounds were coming from above. Something on the roof maybe? A bird? It wasn’t a person prowling around at any rate, that much wa
s clear.
Shivering again, I returned to my own room, where I stood for a moment, irresolute, in the middle of the carpet, listening and waiting for the sounds to come again, but they did not.
I turned off the torch, climbed back into bed, and drew the covers up. But it was a long time before I slept.
“Mummy!”
The Tesla wound its way along the driveway and towards the main road, with Ellie running in its wake, the tears streaming down her face as Jack’s driving speed outpaced her short legs.
“Mummy, come back!”
“Bye, darlings!” Sandra’s head leaned out the rear window, her honey-colored hair whipping in the breeze as the car picked up speed. There was a cheerful smile on her face, but I could see the distress in her eyes, and I knew that she was keeping up a happy facade for the sake of the children. Bill did not turn around. He was bent over his phone in the back seat beside her.
“Mummy!” Ellie shouted, desperation in her voice. “Mummy, please don’t go!”
“Bye, sweeties! You’ll have a wonderful time with Rowan, and I’ll be back very soon. Goodbye! I love you all!”
And then the car rounded the bend in the drive and disappeared from sight among the trees.
Ellie’s legs slowed, and she stumbled to a halt, letting out a wail of grief before she threw herself dramatically to the ground.
“Oh, Ellie!” I hitched Petra higher on my hip and jogged down the drive to where Ellie lay, face-first on the gravel. “Ellie, darling, come on, let’s go and get some ice cream.”
I knew from Sandra’s instructions that this was a big treat, something not allowed every day, because it made both girls rather hyper, but Ellie only shook her head and wailed louder.
“Come on, sweetheart.” I bent down, with some difficulty—as I was holding Petra—and took her wrist, trying to pull her up, but she only let out a scream and wrenched her arm out of my hand, slamming her little fist onto the gravel.
“Ow!” she screamed, redoubling her sobs and looking up at me with angry, red, tear-filled eyes. “You hurt me!”