The Turn of the Key

by Ruth Ware

  Nothing happened. I tried a different square, one I was sure had made the lamps come on last night. Still nothing, though an unseen fan began to hum. For a long moment I stood in the dark, trying to figure out what to do. I could smell the cold dusty air that blew through the attic keyhole, and I could hear something too—not the creak, creak of before, but a low, mechanical buzzing that puzzled me.

  And then, out of nowhere, a sudden wave of anger washed over me.

  Whatever it was, whatever was up there, I would not let myself be scared like this. Someone, something, was trying to drive me away from Heatherbrae, and I was not giving in to it.

  I don’t know if it was the remnants of the wine in my veins that gave me courage, or the knowledge that when I rang Sandra the next day, very likely I would be going home anyway, but I took my phone out of my pocket, switched on the torch, and strode across the bedroom to the attic door.

  As I did so, the buzzing sounded again. It was coming from above my head. The sound was familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It sounded like a furiously angry wasp, but there was something . . . something robotic about it, a quality that did not make me think it was a living thing.

  I felt in my jeans pocket for the key, which was still there from yesterday, hard and unyielding against my leg, and I drew it out.

  Softly, very softly, I put the key into the closet door, and turned it. It was stiff—but not as stiff as last time. The WD-40 had done its work, and although I felt resistance, it turned quietly, without the screech of metal on metal it had given when Jack forced the lock.

  Then I set my hand to the door, and opened it.

  * * *

  The smell was just as I remembered from last time—dank, musty, the smell of death and abandonment.

  But there was something up there, I could see that now, something casting a low white glow that illuminated the cobwebs the spiders had woven across the attic steps. Yet, no one had been up there since Jack and me, that was plain. It was not just the key in my pocket that told me that—but the thick unbroken webs across my path, painstakingly respun since my last passage. There was no way someone could have passed this way without disturbing them. As it was, I was forced to step cautiously, sweeping my hand in front of my face to try to keep the clinging strands out of my eyes and mouth.

  What was the light? The moon, shining through that tiny window? Perhaps, though it was so covered with grot, I would have been surprised.

  At the top of the stairs I drew a silent breath, steeling myself, and then I stepped into the attic.

  I saw two things straightaway.

  The first was that the attic was just as I had last seen it when I took a final glance back at the place before following Jack down the steps the day before. The only thing that was missing was the doll’s head that had rolled out from the pile to rest in the center of the room. That was gone.

  The second was that the moon was shining into the attic, and surprisingly brightly, for the window—the window that Jack had shut—was open again. He had evidently not latched it properly and it had blown open in the night. Striding angrily across the creaking boards, I slammed it, harder than he had, and fumbled in the darkness for a catch. At length I found one—a long tongue drilled with holes. It was covered in thick cobwebs, and I was forced to brush them aside with my hands, feeling the crunch of long-dead prey in the webs, as I wiggled it back into place, ensuring that there was no way the window could work itself open again.

  At last it was secure, and I stepped back into the room, wiping my hands. The light had dimmed instantly as I shut the window, the mildewed glass shutting out everything but a thin trickle. But as I turned back to the stairs, the thin beam from my torch illuminating a narrow path across the floor boards, I noticed something else. There was another light. A fainter, bluer one this time, and it was coming from a corner of the attic opposite the window, a corner totally in shadow, a corner where no light had a right to be.

  My heart was thudding as I crossed the floor. Was it an opening to one of the rooms downstairs? Something else? Whatever the source of the light was, it was hidden behind a trunk, and I pulled it roughly aside, no longer trying to be quiet, for I no longer cared who found me up here, I had only one instinct—to find out what was really going on.

  What I saw made me draw back, astonished, and kneel down in the dust to look closer.

  Hidden behind the old trunk was a small pile of belongings. A book. Some chocolate bar wrappers. A bracelet. A necklace. A handful of twigs and berries, wilting, yes, but by no means desiccated.

  And a mobile phone.

  It was the light from the phone that I had seen from across the attic, and as I picked it up, it buzzed again, and I realized that was the source of the odd noise I had heard earlier. It had evidently updated, and was stuck in a loop of trying to turn itself back on, failing, and restarting, buzzing each time.

  It was an old model, similar to one I’d had myself a few years ago, and I tried a trick that had sometimes worked when my own phone was dying, holding the volume-up and power buttons simultaneously for a long press. It hung for a moment, the screen whirling, and then went black, and I pressed restart.

  But as I waited for it to reload, something caught my eye. A silvery glint, coming from the little pile of rubbish I had pushed aside to pick up the phone.

  And there it was, strewn innocently across the floorboards among the rest of that pathetic pile of detritus, the light from my phone torch glinting from one of its curves.

  My necklace.

  My heart was beating fast in my throat as I picked it up, unable to believe it. My necklace. My necklace. What was it doing here, in the darkness?

  I don’t know how long I sat in the kitchen, my fingers wrapped around a mug of tea, letting the thin links of my necklace chain trickle through my fingers, and trying to make sense of it all.

  I had brought the phone down too, but without a PIN I couldn’t open it to see who it belonged to. All I could tell was that it was old, and that it appeared to be connected to the Wi-Fi but didn’t seem to have a SIM card in.

  It wasn’t the phone that bothered me though. That was strange, yes, but there was something personal about finding my necklace hidden up there, amid the darkness and the rotting feathers. I should have been thinking about Rhiannon, worrying about where she was, and the argument we were bound to have when she walked through the door. I should have been thinking about Sandra, considering my options and trying to work out what to say—how to tell her the truth.

  I was thinking about both things. But above and below and around those thoughts were twined like the links of my necklace, as I tried to figure out chronologies and timings and work out how my necklace could have disappeared inside a locked room, behind a door to which the only key lay in my pocket, up a corridor sealed by a hundred unbroken spiderwebs. Had it been up there before, when Jack and I first broke in? But that explained nothing. That cupboard had been boarded up for months, years. The dust traces, the thick swags of cobwebs, no one had entered via the stairs for a long, long time. And the window was barely large enough for me to get my head and shoulders through, and it looked out onto sheer slates.

  After I found the necklace I had scoured every inch of the room looking for trapdoors, loft hatches, hidden doors—but there was nothing. The Victorian floorboards ran from side to side in an unbroken line, the walls gave onto nothing except for the roof tiles, and I had moved every stick of furniture, looked at every inch of the ceiling from below. Whatever else I was unsure of, I was absolutely certain that there was no way in or out apart from the flight of stairs leading up from my room.

  The moon was still high in the sky, but the clock above the stove had ticked through 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. when I at last heard tires on the gravel of the drive, whispered laughter outside the porch, and the sound of the front door swinging automatically open as someone activated the thumbpad lock. The door closed stealthily as the van drove off, and I heard cautious footsteps, an
d then a stumble.

  My stomach flipped, but I forced myself to stay calm.

  “Hello, Rhiannon.” I kept my voice level, and I heard the footsteps on the hallway flags freeze, and then an exclamation of disgust as Rhiannon realized she had been busted.

  “Fuck.”

  She walked unsteadily through to the kitchen. Her makeup was halfway down her face, and her tights were laddered, and she smelled strongly of some mix of sweet alcohol—there was Drambuie in there, I thought, and Malibu too, along with something else, Red Bull, perhaps?

  “You’re drunk,” I said, and she gave a nasty laugh.

  “Kettle, black. I can see the wine bottles in the recycling from here.”

  I shrugged.

  “Fair point, but you know I can’t let you get away with this, Rhiannon. I have to tell your parents. You can’t just walk out like that. You’re fourteen. What if something happened and I didn’t know where you were or who you were with?”

  “Okay,” she said, slumping down at the kitchen island and pulling the biscuit tin towards her. “You do that, Rachel. And good luck with the fallout.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  As she picked out a biscuit and pushed the tin away, I took a biscuit too, dunking it calmly in my tea, though my hands were shaking a little beneath my careful control. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to tell your mum. If I lose my job, so be it.”

  “If you lose your job?” She snorted derisively. “If? You’re delusional. You’re here under a fake name, probably with fake qualifications, for all I know. You’ll be lucky if you don’t end up getting sued.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I’ll take that risk. Now get upstairs and wipe that stuff off your face.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, through a mouthful of biscuit, her words accompanied by an explosion of crumbs that spattered across my face, making me recoil, blinking and brushing fragments out of my eyes.

  “You little bitch!” My temper, so carefully held, was suddenly fraying fast. “What is wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Yes, you. All of you, actually. Why do you hate me so much? What have I ever done to any of you? Do you actually want to be left here alone? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you keep being such a fucking bitch to the staff.”

  “What the fuck do you know about it?” she spat, and suddenly she was as angry as me, pushing back her metal stool so that it toppled and fell with a ringing clang onto the concrete floor. “You can fuck off as far as I’m concerned, we don’t want you, we don’t need you.”

  There was a biting retort on the tip of my tongue, but somehow, as she stood there, the kitchen spotlights making her tousled, tangled blond hair glow like fire, with her face twisted into a grimace of rage and pain, she looked so like Maddie, so like me, that my heart gave a little skip.

  I remembered myself, age fifteen, coming in after curfew, standing in the kitchen with my hands on my hips, shouting at my mum, “I don’t care if you were worried. I never asked you to stay up; I don’t need you looking out for me!”

  It was a lie, of course. A total lie.

  Because everything I did, every test I aced, every curfew I broke, every time I tidied my room and every time I didn’t—all of it was aimed at one thing. Making my mother notice me. Making her care.

  For fourteen years, I had tried so hard to be the perfect daughter, but it was never enough. No matter how neat my handwriting, no matter how high I scored in the spelling test, or how good my art project was, it was never enough. I could spend a whole afternoon coloring a picture for her, and she would notice the one place I had sneezed and jerked my pen across the line.

  I could spend my Saturday tidying my room to perfection—and she would grumble that I had left my shoes in the hall.

  Whatever I did was wrong. I grew too fast, my clothes were too expensive, my friends were too noisy. I was too chubby, or conversely, I picked at my food. My hair was too messy—too thick, too hard to tame into the neat plaits and ponytails she favored.

  And so as I crossed the line from child to teenager, I began to do the opposite. I had tried being perfect—so then I tried being imperfect. I stayed out. I drank. I let my grades slip. I went from total compliance to serial defiance.

  It made no difference. No matter what I did, I was not the daughter I should have been. All I was doing now was confirming that fact to both of us.

  I had ruined her life. That was always the unspoken message—the thing that hung between us, making me clutch at her even harder as she pulled away. And at last, I couldn’t deal with seeing that truth in her face anymore.

  I left home at eighteen, with nothing but a handful of mediocre A levels and the offer of an au pair job in Clapham. By that time I was old enough not to have a curfew, or someone sitting up for me past their bedtime, reproach in their eyes when I came home.

  But I was very, very far from not needing anyone to look out for me.

  Maybe Rhiannon was too.

  “Rhiannon.” I stepped forward, trying to keep the pity out of my voice. “Rhiannon, I know that since Holly—”

  “Don’t you dare say her name,” she growled. She took a step backwards, stumbling on her high heels, and suddenly she looked like what she was—a little girl, teetering in clothes too old for her that she had barely learned how to wear. Her lips were curled in a way that could have been anger but I suspected meant she was trying not to cry. “Don’t you dare talk about that slut-faced hell witch here.”

  “Who—Holly?” I was taken aback. There was something here, something different from the generalized world-hating hostility I had felt emanating from Rhiannon up until now. This was pointed, vicious, personal, and Rhiannon’s voice shook with it.

  “What—what happened?” I asked. “Is this because she abandoned you?”

  “Abandoned us?” Rhiannon gave a kind of derisive, hooting laugh. “Fuck no. She didn’t abandon us.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then what?” she imitated, cruelly mocking my south London accent, blurring her cut-glass consonants, swallowing the final t into an estuary drawl. “She stole my fucking father, if you must know.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, my dear darling daddy. Shagged him for the best part of two years and had Maddie and Ellie wound round her little finger covering up for them both, telling my mother lies. And do you know what the worst part of it was, I didn’t even realize what was going on until my friend came to stay and pointed it out. I didn’t believe her at first—so I set them up to find out the truth. My dad doesn’t have cameras in his study—did you ever notice that?” She gave a bitter, staccato laugh. “Funny that. He can spy on the rest of us—but his privacy is sacrosanct. I got Petra’s baby monitor, and I plugged it in under his desk and I heard them—I heard him telling Holly that he loved her, that he was going to leave my mum, that she just had to be patient, that they were going to be together in London, just like he’d promised.”

  Oh fuck. I wanted to put my arms around her, hug her, tell it was okay, that it was not her fault, but I couldn’t move.

  “And I heard her too, begging, wheedling, telling him she just couldn’t wait, that she wanted them to be together—I heard it, all the stuff that she wanted to do to him—it was—” She stopped, choking with disgust for a moment, and then seemed to pull herself together, folding her arms, her face set in a mask of grief too old for her. “So, I framed the bitch.”

  “What—?” But I couldn’t finish. I could barely even form the word.

  Rhiannon smiled, but her face was twisted like she was holding back tears.

  “I got her in front of the cameras, and I wound her up until she hit me.”

  Oh God. So this was where Maddie had learned it.

  “And then I told her to get out, or I’d put the footage on YouTube and ensure she never worked in this country ever again, and ever since then—”

  She stopped, gulping, and then tried again. />
  “And ever since—”

  But she couldn’t finish. She didn’t need to. I knew the truth, what she was trying to say.

  “Rhiannon.” I stepped towards her, my hand outstretched like I was trying to tame and gentle a wild animal, my own voice shaking now. “Rhiannon, I swear to you, there is no way in a thousand—no, a million years, I’d ever have sex with your father.”

  “You can’t promise that.” Her face was swollen, there were tears running down her cheeks now. “That’s what they all think, when they come here. But he keeps on, and on, and on, and they can’t afford to lose their jobs, and he’s got money, and he can even be kind of charming, when he wants to be, you know?”

  “No.” I was shaking my head. “No, no, no. Rhiannon, listen, I—I can’t explain, but just—no. There’s no way. There’s just no way I’d ever do that.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. The words came out like sobs. “He’s done it before, you know. Before Holly. And that time he did leave. He had another family. Another child, a baby. I heard my m-mother t-t-talking one day. And he l-left them—it’s who he is, and if I hadn’t stopped him—he j-just—”

  But she couldn’t finish. Her voice dissolved into sobs. I felt an awful kind of realization wash over me, and I put my hands on her arms, trying to steady us both, linking us both, trying to communicate everything I could not say with the certainty of my voice.

  “Rhiannon, listen, I can promise you this—this is absolutely cast-iron. I swear on—on my grave, I am never, never going to sleep with your father.”

  Because.

  It was on the tip of my tongue.

  I am never, never going to sleep with your father because—

  I wish I had finished the sentence, Mr. Wrexham. I wish I had just said it, told her, explained. But I was still clinging to the idea of explaining the reason for my deception to Sandra the next day, and I couldn’t tell Rhiannon the truth before I confessed to her mother. I had to confess that I wasn’t Rowan, and Sandra’s pity and understanding about why I had come to her house under a false name was my only chance of making it out of the situation without being at minimum sacked, and very possibly sued.