The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

  It seemed like there was nothing I could do, and my presence was only making her more furious.

  At last, with a final, guilty glance at the camera, I gave up.

  “Good night, Petra,” I said aloud, and then stood and left the room, closing the door firmly behind me, and listening as the sound of her cries diminished as I walked down the corridor.

  It was past 9:00 p.m., and I felt wrung out, exhausted by the effort of battling with the children all evening. I thought about going straight downstairs for a glass of wine, but in reality I had to check on Maddie and Ellie.

  I could hear nothing coming from behind their bedroom door, and when I peered through the keyhole, everything inside seemed to be dark. Had they turned off the lights? I thought about knocking, but decided against it. If they were falling asleep the sound of a knock would probably undo all that.

  Instead, I turned the knob very quietly, and pushed. The door opened a crack, but then met resistance.

  Puzzled, I pushed harder, and there was a toppling crash, as a pile of something—I wasn’t sure what—stacked up against the inside of the door fell with a clatter to the floor. I held my breath, waiting for wails and cries, but none came—apparently the children had slept through it.

  Gingerly now, I slid through the gap I had created and switched on the torch of my phone to survey the damage. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. They had piled up nearly all their movable furniture—cushions, teddies, books, chairs, the little table from the center of the room—into a barricade on the inside of the bedroom door. It was comic, and yet at the same time more than a little pathetic. What were they trying to protect themselves against? Me?

  I swung the torch around the room and saw one of the bedside lamps, which they had unplugged and stacked on top of the pile of stuff. It had fallen to the floor when I toppled the stack, and the shade was wonky, but fortunately the bulb was not broken. Carefully, I straightened the shade, and then plugged it back in and set it on Ellie’s bedside table. As the soft pink glow suffused the room, I saw them, curled together in Maddie’s bed, looking for all the world like two little cherubs. Maddie’s arms were firmly around her sister, almost constrictively, and I thought about trying to loosen her grip but then decided against it. I’d dodged a bullet once with that huge crash, no point in rocking the boat further.

  In the end, I moved just enough stuff away from the door to make it possible to slip in and out without causing an avalanche, and then left them, turning on Happy’s listening function on my phone so I could hear if they woke up.

  Petra was still sobbing as I tiptoed quietly past her room, but the volume had decreased, and I hardened my heart and didn’t look in. I told myself she would settle faster if I left her to it. And besides, I’d had nothing to eat or drink since noon—too busy trying to feed and bathe the girls to make supper for myself. I was suddenly ravenous, light-headed, and desperate for food.

  * * *

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, I walked over to the fridge. “You are low on milk,” said the robot voice as I touched the door, making me jump convulsively. “Shall I add it to the shopping list?”

  “Er . . . yes,” I managed. Was I going insane, talking aloud to a household appliance?

  “Adding milk to your shopping list,” said the voice brightly, and again the screen on the door lit up, showing a list of groceries. “Eat happy, Rowan!”

  I tried not to think about how it figured out who was standing in front of it. Face recognition? Proximity of my phone? Either way, it felt distinctly unsettling.

  At first sight the fridge contents looked distressingly healthy—a huge drawer full of green veg, tubs of fresh pasta, various pots of things like kimchi and harissa, and a large jar of something that looked like pond water but which I thought might be kombucha. However right at the back, behind some organic yogurts, I saw a cardboard pizza box, and with some difficulty I inveigled it out and opened it up. I was just sliding the baking tray into the oven when there was a sharp rap from the glass wall on the far side of the kitchen table.

  I jumped and swung around, scanning the room. It was getting dark, rain spattering the glass, and although the far side of the room was in shadow, I could see very little outside except the jeweled droplets running down the enormous glass pane. I was just beginning to think I might have imagined it, or that perhaps a bird had flown into the glass, when a dark shape moved against the gloaming, black against gray. Something—someone—was out there.

  “Who is it?” I called out, a little more sharply than I had intended. There was no answer, and I marched past the breakfast bar, around the kitchen table, and towards the glass wall, shrouded in darkness.

  There was no panel over here—or none that I could see—but then I remembered the voice commands.

  “Lights on,” I said sharply, and somewhat to my surprise, it worked—the huge brutalist chandelier above my head illuminating suddenly into a blaze of LED bulbs. The blast of brilliance left me blinking and astonished. But as soon as my eyes adjusted, I realized my mistake. With the lights on, I could see absolutely nothing outside now apart from my own reflection in the glass. Whereas whoever was out there could see me very plainly.

  “Lights off,” I said. Every light in the entire room went out immediately, plunging the kitchen into inky darkness.

  “Shit,” I said under my breath, and began to feel my way back across the kitchen, towards the panel by the door, to try to restore the settings to something halfway between retina-burning brilliance and total darkness. My eyes were still dazzled and hurting from the blast of light from the chandelier, but as my fingers finally sought out the control panel, I looked back toward the window, and thought, though I could not be sure, that I saw something whisk away around the side of the house.

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the time while the pizza was cooking glancing nervously over my shoulder into the dark shadows at the far side of the room, and chewing my nails. I had turned the baby monitor off, the better to hear any more sounds from outside, but Petra’s sobs still filtered faintly down the stairs, not helping my stress levels.

  I was tempted to put on some music, but there was something unnerving about the idea of drowning out the sound of a potential intruder. As it was, I hadn’t seen or heard anything definite enough to call the police. A shape in the darkness and a knock that could have been anything from an acorn to a bird . . . it wasn’t exactly Friday the 13th.

  It was maybe ten or fifteen minutes later—though it felt like much more—that I heard another sound, this time from the side of the house, a knock that set the dogs barking from their baskets in the utility room.

  The noise made me jump, though there was something more homely and ordinary about it than the hollow bang of before, and when I went through to the utility room, I could see a dark shape silhouetted outside the rain-spattered glass panes in the door. The figure spoke, his voice almost drowned by the hiss of the rain.

  “It’s me. Jack.”

  Relief flooded through me.

  “Jack!” I wrenched the door open, and there he was, standing just under the threshold, hunched in a raincoat, hands in pockets. The water was streaming down his fringe and dripping from his nose.

  “Jack, was that you, before?”

  “Before when?” he asked, looking puzzled, and I opened my mouth to explain—and then thought better of it.

  “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. What can I help with?”

  “I won’t keep you,” he said, “I just wanted to check you were all right, with it being your first day and all.”

  “Thanks,” I said awkwardly, thinking of the awful afternoon and the fact that Petra was probably still sobbing into the baby monitor. Then, on an impulse I added, “Will you—I mean, do you want to come in? The kids are in bed. I was just getting myself some supper.”

  “Are you sure?” He looked at his watch. “It’s pretty late.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, standing back to let him insi
de the utility room. He stood, dripping onto the mat, and then stepped gingerly out of his boots.

  “I’m sorry it’s so late,” he said, as he followed me into the kitchen. “I was meaning to come over before, but I had to take that bloody mower over to Inverness to be serviced.”

  “You couldn’t fix it?”

  “Oh, aye, I got it running. But it clapped out again yesterday. Whatever’s the matter, I can’t seem to get to the bottom of it. But never mind about that. I didn’t come to moan at you about my troubles. How was it with the kids?”

  “It was—” I stopped, feeling, with horror, my bottom lip quiver treacherously. I wanted to put on a brave face—what if he reported back to Sandra and Bill? But I just couldn’t do it. And besides, if they looked at the security footage they would know the truth soon enough. As if to set the seal on it, Petra gave a long, bubbling wail of grief from upstairs that was loud enough to make Jack’s head turn towards the stairs.

  “Oh God, who am I kidding?” I said wretchedly. “It was awful. The girls ran away from me after Bill and Sandra left, and I went to look for them in the woods and then that woman—what’s her name? Mrs. McKinty?”

  “Jean McKenzie,” Jack said. He pulled his raincoat off and sat at the long table, and I found myself sinking into a chair opposite. I wanted to put my head in my hands and cry, but I forced myself to give a shaky laugh.

  “Well she turned up to clean and found the girls sitting on the doorstep claiming I’d locked them out, which I absolutely didn’t, I’d deliberately left the door open for them. They hate me, Jack, and Petra’s been screaming for like an hour and—”

  The wail came again, and I felt my stress level rise in tandem with its pitch.

  “Sit down,” Jack said firmly, as I made to rise. He pushed me back into the chair opposite his. “I’ll see if I can settle her. She’s probably just not used to your face, it’ll be better tomorrow.”

  It was in defiance of every safeguarding rule I’d ever been taught, but I was too tired and desperate to care—and besides, I told myself, Sandra and Bill would hardly have kept him on the premises if they thought he was a danger to their kids.

  As the sound of his steps receded up the stairs, I switched on the baby monitor and listened to the door of Petra’s room swish gently open and her choking, gasping cries subside as her body was lifted from the crib.

  “There, there, my little love,” I heard, a low, intimate croon that made my cheeks flush as if I were eavesdropping, though Jack must surely know the baby monitor was plugged in. “There, there, ma poor wee lassie.” Upstairs, away from me, his accent was somehow stronger. “Shh . . . shh now, Petra . . . there, there . . . what a fuss over nothing.”

  Petra’s cries were lower now, more hiccups and grumbling than real distress, and I could hear the creak of the boards as Jack paced softly up and down, holding her, soothing and gentling the fretful baby with a surprisingly practiced touch.

  At last she fell silent, and I heard his feet stop, and the rattle of the cot bars as he leaned over, lowering her gently to the mattress.

  There was a long pause, and then the shush of the door against the carpet, and Jack’s feet on the stairs again.

  “Success?” I said, hardly daring to believe it, as he entered the kitchen, and he nodded and gave a little wry smile.

  “Aye, I think the poor wee thing was knackered, she was just looking for an excuse to put her head down. She fell asleep almost as soon as I picked her up.”

  “God, Jack, you must think I’m a complete—” I stopped, not sure what to say. “I mean, I’m the nanny. I’m supposed to be good at this kind of stuff.”

  “Don’t be silly.” He sat again at the table, opposite me. “They’ll be fine when they get to know you. You’re a stranger to them; that’s all. And they’re testing you. They’ve had enough nannies this past year to make them a bit mistrustful of a new one waltzing in and taking over. You know what kids are like—once they see you’re here to stay and won’t be off abandoning them again, it’ll get better.”

  “Jack . . .” It was the opening I’d been waiting for, and yet now that it was here, I wasn’t sure how to phrase my question. “Jack, what did happen with those other nannies? Sandra said they left because they thought the house was haunted, but I can’t believe . . . I don’t know, it just seems preposterous. Have you ever seen anything?”

  As I said it I thought of the shadow I’d seen outside the glass wall of the kitchen and pushed the image away. It was probably just a fox, or a tree moving in the wind.

  “Well . . . ,” Jack said, rather slowly. He reached out one of his big, work-roughened hands—the nails still a little gray with oil in spite of what must have been repeated scrubbing—and picked up the baby monitor I had laid down on the table, turning it thoughtfully. “Well . . . I wouldn’t say—”

  But whatever he had been about to say was cut short by a loud, rather peremptory voice saying, “Rowan?”

  Jack broke off, but I jumped so hard I bit my tongue and swung round, looking wildly for the source of the voice. It was that of an adult female, not one of the children, and it was very human, quite distinct from the robotic drone of the Happy app. Was someone in the house?

  “Rowan,” the voice repeated, “are you there?”

  “He-hello?” I managed.

  “Ah, hi, Rowan! It’s Sandra.”

  With a rush of mingled relief and fury, I realized—the voice was coming out of the speakers. Sandra had somehow dialed in to the house system and was using the app to talk to us. The sense of intrusion was indescribable. Why the hell couldn’t she have just phoned?

  “Sandra.” I swallowed back my anger, trying to restore my voice to the cheerful, upbeat tone I’d mastered at the interview. “Hi. Gosh, how are you?”

  “Good!” Her voice echoed around the kitchen, magnified by the surround-sound system, bouncing off the high glass ceiling. “Tired! But more to the point, how are you? How’s everything on the home front?”

  I felt my eyes flicker to Jack, sitting at the table, thinking of how he had been the one to get Petra down. Had Sandra seen? Should I say something? I willed him not to cut in, and he didn’t.

  “Well . . . calm, right now,” I said at last. “They’re all in bed and safely asleep. Though I have to admit, Petra was a bit of a struggle. She went down like a lamb at lunchtime but maybe I let her sleep too long, I don’t know. She was really hard to get down this evening.”

  “But she’s asleep now? Well done.”

  “Yes, she’s asleep now. And the other two went down quiet as mice.”

  Scared, defensive, angry mice—but they had at least been quiet. And they were asleep.

  “I let them have supper in their room as they seemed really tired. I hope that was okay.”

  “Fine, fine,” Sandra said, as though dismissing the question. “And they behaved okay the rest of the day?”

  “They—” I pursed my lips, wondering how truthful to be. “They were a bit upset after you left, to be honest, especially Ellie. But they calmed down in the afternoon. I offered to let them watch Frozen, but they didn’t want to. They ended up playing in their room.” Well, that part was true enough. The problem was that they hadn’t come out of their room. “Listen, Sandra, are there rules about the grounds?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, are they really allowed to just roam around, or should I be keeping them in? I know you and Bill are relaxed about it, but there’s that pond—I’m just—it’s making me a bit nervous.”

  “Oh that,” Sandra said. She laughed, the sound echoing around the space in a way that made me wish I knew how to control the volume on the speakers. “It’s barely six inches deep. Honestly, it’s the reason Bill and I bought a place with big grounds, to give the children a bit of freedom to run wild. You don’t need to helicopter them every second. They know they’re not allowed to do anything silly.”

  “I—I’m—” I stopped, struggling with how to put my conc
erns without sounding like I was criticizing her parenting. I was horribly conscious of Jack sitting across the table from me, his eyes politely averted, trying to pretend he wasn’t listening. “Look, you know them better than I do, of course, Sandra, and if you’re happy that they’re okay with that I’ll take your word on it, but I’m just—I’m used to a closer level of supervision, if you know what I mean. Particularly around water. I know the water isn’t that deep, but the mud—”

  “Well, look,” Sandra said. She sounded a little defensive now, and I cursed myself. I had tried so hard not to sound critical . . . “Look, you must use your common sense, of course you must. If you see them doing something stupid, step in. It’s your job to supervise them, that goes without saying. But I don’t see the point of having children stuck in front of the TV all afternoon when there’s a big beautiful sunny garden outside.”

  I was taken aback. Was this a dig about the fact that I had tried to bribe them with a film?

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause while I tried to figure out what to say. I wanted to snap the truth—the fact that it was impossible for one person to adequately supervise a five-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a baby who could barely toddle when they were scattered across several acres of wooded grounds. But I had a feeling that doing so would get me fired. It was plain that Sandra didn’t want to discuss the risks involved in letting the girls roam.

  “Well,” I said at last. “I totally take that point, Sandra, and obviously I’m very keen to take advantage of the beautiful grounds for myself as well. I’ll—” I stopped, groping for what to say. “I’ll use my common sense, as you suggest. Anyway, we had a pretty good day, considering, and the girls seem—they seem to have settled well. Would you like me to check in with you tomorrow?”