by Ruth Ware
“Bill?” It was not the answer I had been expecting. “In—in what way?”
But the words were no sooner out of my mouth than I knew. I remembered his behavior on my own first night, the spread thighs, the persistent offerings of wine, his knee insinuating itself, unwanted, between my own . . .
“Shit,” I said. “No, you don’t need to say. I can imagine.”
“Maja . . . she was on the young side,” Jack said reluctantly. “And very pretty. And it crossed my mind that maybe he’d . . . well . . . come on to her, and she’d not known what to do. I’d wondered before . . . Bill had a black eye one time, when Lauren was here, and I did think maybe she’d . . . you know . . .”
“Belted him one?”
“Aye. And if she did, he must have deserved it or she’d have been sacked, you know?”
“I guess. Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Bit hard to say, Oh, aye, by the by, ma boss is a wee bit o’ a perve, you know? Difficult to bring it up on a first day.”
“I can see that. Fuck.” My cheeks felt as flushed as Jack’s, though in my case it was more than half wine. “God. Ugh. Oh yuck.”
The sense of betrayal was all out of proportion, I knew that. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known. He’d tried it on me, after all. But somehow the idea that he’d been systematically preying on his daughters’ carers, time after time, careless of the fact that he was helping to drive them away . . . I suddenly felt a desperate urge to wash myself, scrub all traces of him off my skin, even though I’d not seen him for days, and when I had, he’d barely touched me.
Ellie’s voice filtered through my head, her reedy little treble. I like it better when he’s gone. He makes them do things they don’t want to do.
Was it possible she had been talking about her own father, predating the young women and girls his wife had picked out to look after his children?
“Jesus.” I put my face in my hands. “The absolute fucker.”
“Listen.” Jack sounded uncomfortable. “I could be wrong, I don’t have any proof of this, it’s just—”
“You don’t need proof,” I said wretchedly. “He tried it on with me the first night.”
“What?”
“Yup. Nothing—” I swallowed, gritting my teeth. “Nothing I’d get very far with at an employment tribunal. All vague remarks and ‘accidentally’ blocking my way. But I know when I’m being harassed.”
“Jesus, God, Rowan, I’m so— I’m so sorry— I’m just—”
“It’s not your fault, don’t apologize.”
“I should have bloody said something! No wonder you’ve been a bag of nerves, hearing blokes creeping about in—”
“No,” I said forcefully. “That’s nothing to do with it. Jack, I’m a grown woman, I’ve been hit on before; it’s nothing I couldn’t handle. The attic stuff is completely unrelated. This is—it’s something else.”
“It’s fucking disgusting, is what it is.” His cheeks were flushed, and he stood, as if unable to contain his anger while sitting still. He paced to the window, then back, his fists clenched. “I’d like to—”
“Jack, leave it,” I said, urgently. I stood up too, and put my hand on his arms, pulling him round to face me, and then— God, I don’t even know how it happened.
I don’t have the words for it, without writing it like a trashy novel. Melting into each others’ arms. Lips coming together like a crash of waves. All those stupid clichés.
Except there was no melting. No softness. It was hard, and fast, and urgent, and more than a little painful in its intensity. I was kissing and being kissed, and then I was biting, my own skin between his teeth too, and then my fingers were in his hair, and his hands were fumbling my buttons, and then it was skin against skin and lips against lips and—I can’t write this to you. I can’t write this but I can’t stop remembering it. I don’t know how to stop.
* * *
Afterwards, we lay in each others’ arms in front of the wood fire, our skin slicked with sweat and stickiness, and he fell asleep, his head on my breast, rising and falling gently with every breath I took. For a while, I just watched him, the way his skin paled to milk white below his hips, the brush of freckles on the bridge of his nose, the dark sweep of his lashes on his cheeks, the curl of his hand around my shoulder. And then I looked up, to the mantelpiece above us both, where the baby monitor sat, silently waiting.
I could not go back. And yet I had to.
At last, when I could feel I was beginning to slip into sleep myself, I knew that I had to get up or risk lying here all night, and waking to find the girls making their own breakfast, while I conducted a chilly walk of shame back to the main house in the dawn light.
And there was Rhiannon too. I couldn’t take the chance of her finding me here when she did come back from wherever she was. I had enough explaining to Sandra to do already, without adding nighttime walks to the agenda.
Because I had to fess up to her. That was the only possibility, I had realized that as I lay in Jack’s arms . . . maybe I had even known before. I had to fess up to everything, and risk losing the job. If she sacked me—well, I couldn’t blame her. And in spite of everything, in spite of the financial hole I would find myself in, with no job, and no money, and no references, in spite of all that, I would just have to suck it up, because I deserved it.
But if I explained, if I really explained why I had done what I’d done, then maybe, just maybe . . .
I had my jeans almost on when I heard the noise. It was not over the baby monitor but coming from somewhere outside the house, a noise halfway between a crack and a thud, as if a branch had fallen from a tree. I stopped, holding my breath, listening, but there were no more sounds, and no squawking wail from the baby monitor to indicate that whatever it was had woken Petra and the others.
Still, I pulled out my phone and checked the app. The camera icon marked Petra’s room showed her flung on her back with her usual abandon; the picture was pixelated and ill-defined in the soft glow from the night-light, but the shape was clear. As I watched, she sighed and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
The camera in the girls’ room showed nothing at all, I’d forgotten to switch their night-light on when I tucked them in, and the resolution was too poor to show anything except grainy black, punctuated by the occasional gray speckle of interference. But if they’d woken up they would have switched on the bedside light, so the absence was good news.
Shaking my head, I buttoned up my jeans, pulled my T-shirt over my head, and then bent and very softly kissed Jack on the cheek. He said nothing, just rolled over and murmured something indistinct that might have been, “ ’Night, Lynn.”
For a moment my heart stilled, but then I shook myself. It could have been anything. ’Night, love. ’Night then. And even if it was ’Night, Lynn or Liz, or any other name, so what? I had a past. Maybe Jack did too. And God only knew, I had too many secrets of my own to hold someone else’s up to the light to condemn them.
I should have just left.
I should have picked up the baby monitor, walked to the door, and let myself out.
But before I returned to the house, I could not resist one final look back at Jack, lying there, his skin golden in the firelight, his eyes closed, his lips parted in a way that made me want to kiss him one last time.
And as I glanced back, I saw something else.
It was a purple flower, lying on the countertop. For a minute I couldn’t work out why it looked familiar, nor why my gaze had snagged on it. And then I realized—it was the same as the flower I had found the other morning in the kitchen and put into the coffee cup to revive. Had Jack left the flower on the kitchen floor? But no—he had been away that night, running errands for Bill . . . hadn’t he? Or was that a different night? Lack of sleep was making the days blur, run into each other, and it was becoming hard to remember which of the long, nightmarish stretches of darkness belonged to which morning.
As I stood there, frowning, trying
to remember, I noticed something else. Something even more mundane. But something that made me stop in my tracks, my stomach lurching with unease. It was a little coil of string. Totally innocuous—so why had it unnerved me so?
I walked back across the room and picked it up.
It was a hank of white caterers’ string, doubled and tripled up, and tied with a granny knot that was suddenly horribly familiar. And it had been cleanly severed—snipped in half by a very sharp knife, or perhaps the very pair of pruning shears I had rescued from the poison garden.
Whichever it was, it didn’t really matter now.
What mattered was that it was the hank of string I had wound around the poison garden gate, too high for little hands to reach—the string I had put there to keep the girls safe. But what was it doing in Jack’s kitchen? And why was it lying next to that innocent-looking flower?
As I pulled out my phone and opened up Google, there was a sick fluttering feeling in my chest, as if I already knew what I was going to find. Purple flower poisonous I typed into the search bar, and then clicked on Google Images, and there it was, the second image, its strange drooping shape and bright purple color totally unmistakable. Aconitum napellus (monkshood), I read, the feeling of sickness growing inside me with every line. One of the most toxic flowers native to the UK. Aconitine is a potent heart and nerve toxin, and any part of the plant, including stems, leaves, petals, or roots, can be deadly. Most deaths result from ingesting A. napellus, but gardeners are advised to use extreme caution in handling cuttings, as even skin contact can cause symptoms.
Underneath it was a list of deaths and murders associated with the plant.
I shut down the phone, and turned to look at Jack, unable to believe it. Had it really been him, all along?
Him in the locked garden, pruning the poisonous plants, keeping that horrible place alive.
Him undoing the safety measures I had set up to try to protect the children.
Him, carefully selecting the most poisonous blossom he could find and leaving it lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. All I had done was handle it—but it could so easily have been found by the children, or even one of the dogs.
And I had just fucked him.
But why? Why would he do it? And what else was he responsible for?
Had he been the person who hacked into the system to jolt us all out of our beds in the middle of the night with deafening music and terrified screams?
Was he the one who had been setting off the doorbell, jerking me from sleep, and keeping me awake with the terrifying creak, creak of stealthy footsteps?
And worst of all, had he been the one who wrote those horrible things in the locked attic room, and then boarded up after himself, only to “rediscover” it when the time was right?
I found that my breath was coming quick and short, my hands shaking as I shoved the phone back into my pocket, and suddenly I had to get out, get away from him at all costs.
Not troubling now to be silent, I flung open the door to the flat, and stepped out into the night, slamming it behind me. It had started to rain again, and I ran, feeling the rain on my cheeks, the tightness in my throat, and the blurring of my eyes.
The utility room door was still unlocked, and I let myself in, leaning back against the door and using my T-shirt to wipe my eyes, trying to get a hold of myself.
Fuck. Fuck. What was it about me and the men in my life? Why were they such shits, all of them?
As I stood there, trying to calm my gulping breath, I remembered the faint sound I’d heard before, as I was dressing. The house was just as I’d left it: no sign of Rhiannon’s high heels kicked off in the hallway, or handbag abandoned on the bottom step of the stairs. But I hadn’t really expected that. I would have heard a car pulling up. It had probably been one of the dogs.
I wiped my eyes again, peeled off my shoes, and walked slowly through to the kitchen, feeling the faint warmth of the underfloor heating striking up through the concrete. Hero and Claude were curled sleepily in their baskets, snoring quietly. They looked up as I came in, and then laid their heads wearily back down as I sat at the breakfast bar, put my head in my hands, and tried to decide what to do.
I could not go to bed. No matter what Jack had said, Rhiannon was still missing, and I couldn’t just forget that fact. What I should do—what I needed to do, in fact—was write an email to Sandra. A proper one, explaining everything that had happened.
But there was something else I had to do first.
For the more I thought about it, the more Jack’s behavior did not add up. It wasn’t just the poison garden—it was everything. The way he was always hanging around when things went wrong. The fact that he seemed to have keys to every room in the house and access to parts of the home-management system that he shouldn’t. How had he known how to override the app that night when the music came screaming out of the speakers? How had he just happened to have a key to the locked attic door?
And whatever he said, he was, after all, a Grant. What if there was some connection I was missing? Could he be some long-lost relative of Dr. Kenwick Grant, come back to drive the Elincourts out from his ancestral home?
But no—that last what-if was too much. This wasn’t some nineteenth-century peasant’s revenge drama. What would Jack gain from driving the Elincourts out of their own home? Nothing. All he’d get would be another English couple in their place. And besides, it wasn’t the Elincourts who seemed to be targeted. It was me.
Because the fact was that four nannies—five if you counted Holly—had left the Elincourts. No, not left; they had been systematically driven away, one by one. And I might have believed that Bill’s roving hands were responsible, if it hadn’t been for my own experiences in Heatherbrae House. Someone in this house, someone or something, was driving the nannies away, in a deliberate and sustained campaign of persecution.
I just didn’t know who.
Somewhere behind my eyes, a dull throbbing ache had begun, echoing the pain in my hand—the light-headedness from the wine I’d drunk earlier was already morphing into the beginnings of a shocking hangover. But I couldn’t give way to that now. Slowly, unsteadily, I slid from the breakfast barstool, walked over to the sink, and splashed my face, trying to wake myself up, clear my head for what I was about to do.
But as I stood, water dripping from my loose hair, hands braced either side of the sink, I saw something. Something that had not been there when I left, I was sure of it—or at least, as sure as I could be, for now nothing seemed certain anymore.
To the right of the sink was my almost-empty wine bottle. Only now it was totally empty. What should have had a glass left in it was now completely drained. And in the groove around the edge of the waste-disposal unit was a single crushed berry.
It could have been the remnants of a blueberry or a raspberry, mashed out of all recognition, but somehow, I knew it was not.
My heart was thumping as I reached, very slowly, into the waste-disposal unit.
Deep, deep into the metal mouth I reached, until my fingers touched something at the bottom. Something soft and hard by turns, into which my fingers sank as I clawed up the mass.
It was a mush of berries. Yew. Holly. Cherry laurel.
And in spite of the water I’d sluiced down the drain, I could smell, quite clearly, the dregs of wine still clinging to them.
It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. Those berries had not been in the wine when I left—how could they have been? I had opened the bottle myself.
Which meant someone had put them in there when I was not looking. Someone who had been in this kitchen tonight, after the children were in bed.
But then . . . but then someone else had tipped them out.
It was like there were two forces in the house, one fighting to drive me away, another to protect me. But who—who was doing this?
I didn’t know. But if there were answers to be found, I knew where I had to look.
My chest was tight as I straighten
ed up, and I groped in my jeans pocket for my inhaler and took a puff, but the tension didn’t loosen, and I found my breath was coming quick and shallow as I made my way to the stairs, and began to climb into the darkness.
* * *
As I got closer and closer to the top landing, I couldn’t help remembering the last time I had stood there, hand on the rounded knob, simply unable to go any further—unable to face whatever watchful darkness lay behind that door.
Now, though, I was beginning to suspect that whatever haunted Heatherbrae was very human. And I was determined that this time, I would turn the knob, open the door, and find evidence to that effect—evidence that I could show Sandra when I told her about tonight’s events.
But when I got to the landing, I found I didn’t need to open it at all. For my door . . . the door to my room, was open. And I had left it closed.
I had a clear, a crystal clear memory of standing in front of it, looking at the crack beneath it, totally unable to turn the handle.
And now it stood open.
It was very cold again, even colder than it had been that time I woke in the night, shivering, to find the thermostat turned down and the air conditioning blasting out. But this time I could feel it was more than just the chill of the room; it was an actual breeze.
For a moment I felt every part of that firm resolution shrivel down like plastic in a flame, disappearing into the core of me, melting and curling into a hard blackened core.
Where was the breeze coming from? Was it the attic door? If it was open again—in spite of the lock and the key in my pocket, and in spite of Jack lying asleep in his flat across the courtyard—I thought I would scream.
Then I got a hold of myself.
This was insane. There was no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as haunting. There was nothing in that attic but dust and the relics of bored children, fifty years dead.
I walked into the room and pressed the button on the panel.