by Ruth Ware
“I don’t want Coco Pops. I don’t like Coco Pops. They’re for babies.”
“Well, that seems about right, given you’re behaving like a baby!” I snapped, and then regretted it when I heard her laugh.
Don’t react, I thought. Don’t give her that hold over you. You have to stay calm, or she’ll know that she’s got the power to get to you.
I thought about counting to ten, then I remembered the painful “one and a half” of a couple of nights before, and hastily revised my plans.
“Maddie, I’m getting very bored here. Unless you want me to take you to school in your nightie, then I suggest you get your uniform on.”
She said nothing, and at last I sighed.
“Okay, well, if you want to behave like a baby, I’ll have to treat you like one, and get you dressed the way I do with Petra.”
I picked up the clothes and advanced slowly towards the bed, hoping that a bit of warning might induce her to scramble up and get her clothes on, but she just lay there, making herself as limp and heavy as she possibly could so that my back screamed in protest as I began manhandling her into her clothes. She was as floppy as a rag doll, but a hundred times as heavy, and I was breathing hard when at last I stepped back. Her skirt was askew, and her hair was rumpled from where I had dragged the T-shirt over her head, but she was more or less dressed within the meaning of the act.
Finally, figuring that I might as well take advantage of her passivity, I pulled a sock on each foot and then jammed her school shoes on.
“There,” I said, trying to keep the triumph out of my voice. “You’re dressed. Well done, Maddie. Now, I’ll be downstairs eating Coco Pops with Ellie if you want to join us. Otherwise I’ll see you in the car in fifteen minutes.
“I haven’t done my teeth,” she said woodenly, nothing moving apart from her mouth. I gave a laugh.
“I don’t give a”—I stopped myself just in time, and then rephrased—“a monkey’s. But if you’re bothered . . .”
I went through to the bathroom in the hallway and put some toothpaste on the tip of the brush, intending to leave it up to her whether she brushed her teeth, but when I came back, holding the brush, she was sitting up on her bed.
“Will you brush for me?” she said, her voice almost normal after the sulky malice of a few minutes ago. I frowned. Wasn’t eight a bit old to be having her teeth brushed? What had the binder said? I couldn’t remember.
“Um . . . okay,” I said at last.
She opened her mouth like an obedient little bird, and I popped the toothbrush in, but I hadn’t been brushing for more than a few seconds when she twisted her head away from the brush and spat full in my face, a gob of minty white phlegm, sliding down my cheek and lips and onto my top.
For a minute I couldn’t speak, couldn’t say anything, and then, before I had time to think what I was doing, my hand shot out to slap her face.
She flinched, and with what felt like a superhuman effort, I stopped myself, my hand inches from her face, feeling my breath fast and ragged in my chest.
Her eyes met mine, and she began to laugh, totally without mirth, a kind of joyless, cackling glee that made me want to shake her.
My whole body was shuddering with adrenaline, and I knew how close I had come to really letting go—slapping the smirk off her knowing little face. If she had been my own child I would have done it, no questions. My rage had been white-hot and absolute.
But I had stopped myself. I had stopped.
Was that what it would look like on the monitor, though, if Sandra had been watching?
I couldn’t trust myself to speak. Instead, I got up, leaving Maddie laughing that joyless, grinding laugh on the bed, and I walked shakily through to the bathroom, still holding the toothbrush, and with hands that trembled I wiped the toothpaste from my face and chest, and rinsed the flecks of spit out of my mouth.
Then I stood over the basin, letting the tap run, one hand on either side of the ceramic rim, feeling my whole body shake with pent-up sobs.
“Rowan?” The call came from downstairs, faint over the sound of running water and my own weeping gasps. It was Jean McKenzie. “Jack Grant’s outside wi’ the car.”
“I’m—I’m coming,” I managed back, hoping my voice didn’t betray my tears. Then I splashed water over my face, dried my eyes, and walked back into the bedroom, where Maddie was waiting.
“Okay, Maddie,” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could. “Time for school. Jack’s outside with the car, let’s not keep him waiting.”
And to my unending shock, she got up calmly, picked up her schoolbag, and headed for the stairs.
“Can I have a banana in the car?” she said over her shoulder, and I found myself nodding, as if nothing had happened.
“Yes,” I said, hearing my own voice in my ears, flat and emotionless. Then I thought, I have to say something, I can’t let this go. “Maddie, about what just happened—you cannot spit at people like that; it’s disgusting.”
“What?” She turned to look at me, her face a picture of injured innocence. “What? I sneezed. I couldn’t help it.”
And then she ran down the rest of the flight of stairs and out to the waiting car, as if the bitter struggle of the last twenty minutes had been nothing but a figment of my own imagination.
I found myself wondering who had won in that encounter, as I checked Petra’s car seat and buckled myself in the front beside Jack. And then it struck me what a fucked-up dynamic this really was—that my relationship with this damaged little girl was not about caring and caregiving but about winning and dominance and war.
No. No matter what the outcome of that situation was, I hadn’t won. I had lost the moment I let Maddie make it into a battle.
But I hadn’t hit her. Which meant that, if nothing else, I had triumphed over my own worst instinct.
I hadn’t let the demons win. Not this time.
As the school gate clanged shut, I felt a kind of weak relief come over me, so that I almost sank to the pavement, my back to the iron railings, my face in my hands.
I had done it. I had done it. And now my reward was five hours of something close to relaxation. I still had Petra of course—but five hours with her was nothing compared to Ellie’s uncomfortable misery, and Maddie’s bitter campaign of vengeance.
Somehow, though, I stayed upright and walked back round the corner to the side road, where Jack was waiting in the car, with Petra.
“Success?” he asked as I opened the car door and slid in beside him, and I felt a grin crack my face wide, unable to conceal my own relief.
“Yes. They’re behind bars for the next few hours anyway.”
“See? You’re doing a great job,” he said comfortably, pressing on the accelerator so that we slid away from the curb with the unnervingly silent hum I had come to expect from the car.
“I don’t know about that,” I said, a little bitterly. “It was touch-and-go getting Maddie out to the car, to be honest. But I’ve survived another morning, which is probably the main thing.”
“Now, what do you want to do?” Jack asked practically, as we drove towards the center of the little town where the girls’ primary school was. “We can go straight back to the house if you’ve stuff to be getting on with, or we can stop off for a coffee, if you like, and I can show you a wee bit of Carn Bridge.”
“A little bit of a tour would be lovely. I’ve not really had a chance to see anything much apart from Heatherbrae yet, and Carn Bridge looked really pretty as we were coming through.”
“Aye, it’s a bonny little place. And it’s got a good coffee shop too, the Parritch Pot. It’s down at the other end of the village, but there’s not much in the way of street parking there, so I’ll park up by the kirk, and we can walk down along the high street. And I’ll show you what there is to see.”
Ten minutes later, I had wrestled Petra into her pram and we were walking down the main street of Carn Bridge, with Jack pointing out shops and pubs, and nodding at th
e occasional passerby. It was a quaint little place, somehow built on a smaller scale than you expected from afar, the granite buildings neater and narrower than they seemed from a distance. There were empty shops too; I saw one that had once been a butcher’s and another that looked like it might have been a bookshop or a stationer’s. Jack nodded when I pointed them out.
“There’s plenty of big houses round about, but the little shops still find it hard going. The tourist ones are all right, but the small places can’t compete with the supermarkets for price.”
The Parritch Pot was a neat little Victorian tea shop right at the bottom of the high street, with a brass bell that jangled as Jack opened the door and held it for me to maneuver Petra across the threshold.
Inside, a motherly looking woman came out from behind the counter to welcome us.
“Jackie Grant! Well, and it’s a good while since you were in here for a piece of cake. How are you doing, my dear?”
“I’m well, Mrs. Andrews, thank you. And how are you?”
“Och, well, I cannae complain. And who’s your lady friend?” She gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. There was something . . . well, arch was the closest word I could find to describe it, as if there was something more she could have said but was holding back. Perhaps it was just good old-fashioned curiosity. I wanted to roll my eyes. It wasn’t the 1950s anymore. Surely men and women were allowed to have a cup of tea without setting tongues wagging, even in a little place like Carn Bridge.
“Oh, this is Rowan,” Jack said easily. “Rowan, this is Mrs. Andrews, who runs the tea shop. Rowan is the new nanny up at Heatherbrae, Mrs. Andrews.”
“Oh, so you are, my dear,” Mrs. Andrews said, her brow clearing, and she smiled. “Jean McKenzie did tell me, and it slipped clean out my head. Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Let’s hope you’ve more staying power than the other lassies.”
“I hear they didn’t last long?” I ventured. Mrs. Andrews laughed and shook her head.
“No, indeed. But you don’t look like the type to be easily scared.”
I pondered her words as I unclipped Petra from her pram and slid her into the high chair Jack had fetched from the back of the tea shop. Was it true? A few days ago I would have said so. But now, as I remembered myself lying there stiff and trembling in bed, listening to the creak . . . creak . . . of footsteps above me, I was not so sure.
“Jack,” I said at last, after we’d placed our order and were waiting for our drinks to appear. “Do you know what’s above my bedroom?”
“Above your bedroom?” He looked surprised. “No, I didn’t know there was another floor up there. Is it a storage loft, or a proper attic?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been up there. But there’s a locked door in my room that I’m assuming leads up there, and, well . . .” I swallowed, unsure how to phrase this. “I thought . . . well, I heard some odd noises up there a couple of nights ago.”
“Rats?” he asked, one eyebrow cocked, and I shrugged, too embarrassed to tell the truth.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not though. It sounded . . .” I swallowed again, trying not to say the word that hovered on the tip of my tongue—human. “Bigger.”
“They make an awful racket in the night, or at least they can do. I’ve a bunch of keys somewhere, do you want me to have a try this afternoon?”
“Thanks.” There was a kind of comfort in sharing my fear, however guardedly, though I felt like something of a fool now the words had left my lips. After all, what was I going to find up there, other than dust and old furniture? But it couldn’t hurt, and maybe there was some simple explanation—a window left open, an old chair rocking in the draught, a lamp swinging in the breeze. “That’s really kind.”
“There you go, now.” The voice came from behind us, and I turned to see Mrs. Andrews holding two coffees—proper cappuccinos, made by a human being, rather than a bloody app. I set mine to my lips and took a long, hot gulp, feeling it scald the inside of my throat, heating me from within, and for the first time in a few days, I felt my confidence return.
“This is great, thank you,” I said to Mrs. Andrews, and she smiled comfortably.
“Och, you’re welcome. I don’t suppose it’s a patch on Mr. and Mrs. Elincourt’s fancy machine up at Heatherbrae, but we do our best.”
“Not at all,” I said with a laugh, thinking of my relief at dealing with a real person for once. “Actually, their coffeemaker is a bit too fancy for me, I can’t get to grips with it.”
“From what Jean McKenzie says, the whole house is a bit like that, no? She says that you take your life in your hands trying to turn on the light.”
I smiled, exchanging a quick glance with Jack, but said nothing.
“Well, it wouldn’t be my taste, what they’ve done to it, but it’s nice that they took the place on at least,” Mrs. Andrews said at last. She wiped her hands on her apron. “There’s not many round here that would have, with that history.”
“What history?” I looked up, startled, and she made a shooing motion with her hand.
“Och, don’t listen to me. I’m just a gossipy auld woman. But there’s something about that house, you know. It’s claimed more than one child. The doctor’s little girl wasn’t the first, by all accounts.”
“What do you mean?” I took another gulp of coffee, trying to quell the unease rising inside me.
“Back when it was Struan House,” Mrs. Andrews said. She lowered her voice. “The Struans were a very old family and not quite”—she pursed her lips, primly—“well, not quite right in the head, by the end. One of them killed his wife and child, drowned them both in the bath, and another came back from the war and shot himself with his own rifle.”
Jesus. I had a sudden flash of the luxuriously appointed family bathroom at Heatherbrae, with the outsize tub and Moroccan tiles. It couldn’t be the same bathtub, but it might conceivably be the same room.
“I heard there was . . . a poisoning,” I said uncomfortably, and she nodded.
“Aye, that was the doctor, Dr. Grant. He came to the house in the fifties, after the last Struan sold up and moved over the border. He poisoned his little girl, or so they say. Some’ll tell you by accident, others—”
But she broke off. Another customer had come in, setting the bell above the door jangling, and Mrs. Andrews smoothed her apron and turned away with a smile.
“But listen to me rattling on. It’s just idle gossip and superstition. You shouldn’t pay any heed. Well, hello, Caroline. And what can I get for you this morning?”
As she moved away to serve her other customer, I watched her go, wondering what she had meant. But then I shook myself. She was right. It was just superstition. All houses above a certain age had experienced deaths and tragedies, and the fact that a child had died at Heatherbrae didn’t mean anything.
Still though, Ellie’s words rang in my head as I tied Petra’s bib more firmly under her chin and dug out the pot of rice cakes.
There was another little girl.
* * *
We took the long way round back to Heatherbrae House, driving slowly along past peat-dark burns and through sun-dappled pine forests. Petra snoozed in the back as Jack pointed out local landmarks—a ruined castle, an abandoned fort, a Victorian station decommissioned long ago. In the distance the mountains loomed, and I tried to keep track of the peaks that Jack named.
“Do you like hill walking?” he asked, as we waited at a junction with the main road for a lorry to pass, and I realized that I didn’t know the answer to his question.
“I— Well, I’m not really sure. I’ve never done it. I like walking, I guess. Why?”
“Oh . . . well . . .” There was a sudden hesitation in his voice, and when I looked sideways at him, there was a flush of red across his cheekbones. “I just thought . . . you know . . . when Sandra and Bill are back and your weekends are your own again, perhaps we might . . . I could take you up one of the Munros. If you liked the idea.”
“I . . . do,” I said, and then it was my turn to blush. “I do like the idea. I mean, if you don’t mind me being slow . . . I suppose I’d have to get boots and stuff.”
“You’d need good shoes. And waterproofs. The weather can turn very fast up on the mountain. But—”
His phone gave a little chirrup, and he glanced down at it, and then frowned, and handed it across to me.
“Sorry, Rowan, that’s from Bill. D’you mind telling me what he says? I don’t want to read it while I’m driving, but he doesn’t normally text unless it’s urgent.”
I pressed the text on the home screen and a preview flashed up, all I could see without unlocking the phone, but it was enough.
“ ‘Jack, urgently need the hard copies of the Pemberton files by tonight. Please drop everything and bring them—’ And that’s where it cuts off.”
“Fuck,” Jack said, and then glanced guiltily in the rearview mirror to where Petra was sleeping. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear, but that’s my afternoon and evening gone, and most of tomorrow too. I had plans.”
I didn’t ask what his plans were. I felt only a sudden swoop of . . . not quite loss . . . not quite fear either . . . but a sort of unease at the realization that he would be gone and I would be quite alone with the children for the best part of twenty-four hours, by the time Jack had driven down, rested, and then driven back.
It meant something else, too, I realized, as we came out of the dark tunnel of pine trees into the June sunlight: no possibility of trying the attic door until he got back.
* * *
Jack left almost as soon as we got back, and although I had gratefully accepted his offer to take the dogs with him, and relieve me of the responsibility to feed and walk them on top of everything else, the house had an unfamiliar, quiet feeling to it after they had all gone. I fed Petra and put her down for her nap, and then I sat for a while in the cavernous kitchen, drumming my fingers on the concrete tabletop and watching the changing sky out of the tall windows. It really was an incredible view, and in daylight like this, I could see why Sandra and Bill had hewn the house in half the way they had, sacrificing Victorian architecture for this all-encompassing expanse of hill and moor.