Samuel dug his hands into his pockets. “Must have fallen or something.”
“Clumsy, is she?”
Samuel ignored the question and instead raised the promise of shortbread and hot chocolate, once they were washed up. It worked like a charm and moments later the boys were in a race to the bathroom.
11
Planes and soldiers were scattered across the room like the remnants of a bloody skirmish. Each boy sat cross-legged on the bed with a plate in his lap containing two shortbreads.
“Careful, it’s hot.” Ruth set the cups of hot chocolate down on the bedside table. “And not a crumb on that bed or there will be a fuss made.”
“Yes, Ruth,” said Samuel.
“We’ll be careful,” promised Joseph, unable to resist the biscuits a moment longer.
Ruth patted down her hair and looked only at Samuel. “Mind you are.”
As she walked from the bedroom, she reminded Joseph that his mother expected him home by four thirty and that the poor woman had enough to contend with—Samuel didn’t know what—without the boy being tardy.
When her footsteps were safely fading down the corridor, Joseph felt it was the perfect moment to say, “She’s a dragon, that one.”
But Samuel didn’t care about that or biscuits or crumbs. Joseph had a story and for reasons he couldn’t explain, even to himself, Samuel wanted to hear it. “Tell me what you were going to say.”
Joseph’s mouth was full at the time and all he managed to say was, “Hold on.”
He put down his plate and got up, walking across the room and peering down the hall. Then he closed the door, picking up a cup of hot chocolate on his way back. “When we were talking before—about your mum being away and how she went in the night while you were sleeping and all—I remembered something.”
Samuel hoped it was some news about his mother, though he couldn’t imagine how Joseph could have any. Still, he leaned forward. “What did you remember?”
“Well...” Joseph glanced at the door for good effect, his voice falling to a hush. “My mum was talking with Lady Margaret from the hall and she told her about this housekeeper who worked for a family in Germany.” He scrunched up his freckled nose. “Or was it Italy?”
“Is it important?” said Samuel.
“Suppose not. Anyway, this housekeeper was pleasant enough and kept the house sparkling clean, but underneath all that she was bonkers. Mad as a hatter. But the nice family she worked for didn’t know it, did they?”
Samuel was listening so intently the plate had slipped from his lap.
“One night,” continued Joseph, sipping his hot chocolate, “while the family was sleeping, all peaceful in their beds, the housekeeper crept into their rooms. Now you’ve got to understand something—this housekeeper was a great fat thing, but she didn’t make one little sound she was so quiet.”
Samuel’s eyebrows had lifted. “What did she do?”
Joseph set down the hot chocolate and moved closer to Samuel. “She crept into their bedrooms, just like I said, quiet as a mouse, and she walked right up to where they were sleeping and then she...”
The pause was intolerable. “What? What did she do?”
Joseph lunged, grabbing Samuel by the shoulders. “She cut their throats!”
Samuel jumped when Joseph grabbed him, which was shameful. “You’re lying,” he said, wriggling free. “I know you’re lying, Joseph.”
The grin faded from the boy’s lips. “It’s no lie, Samuel. It happened just like I said—that’s how Lady Margaret told it to my mum, anyway.” He took a bite of shortbread. “And that’s not all, either. After the housekeeper murdered the whole family, she dragged their bodies down to the cellar, then she burned all the blood-soaked sheets to get rid of the evidence and the next day she told the neighbors that the family had gone abroad all of a sudden.”
“Why...why would the housekeeper do that?”
“Why do you think?” Joseph wiped his nose. “She got to live like Lady Muck in their fine house, not having to pick up after them, make their dinners, wash their clothes. For six months she carried on like nothing was wrong, like the family were having a great old time in South America or somewhere.”
“And then?” said Samuel.
Joseph shrugged. “Then some friends of the family got all suspicious and called the coppers and they searched the house and found the mother and father and all the little ones rotting in the cellar.”
“I don’t understand.” Samuel spoke softly. “She must have known she’d get found out eventually. She must have known she would hang for it.”
“Like I said, she was bonkers.” Joseph was firm on this. “Some people just are—no one knows why.”
The threads of this story had begun to fix themselves around Samuel, as the right story will often do, and the harder he willed himself to resist it, the tighter the yarn pulled. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with me. It’s just a stupid story.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Joseph was now hard at work on the second shortbread. “But think about it, Samuel. Your mum goes away in the dead of night, all of a sudden, no warning, no goodbyes. And the only person to see her go was Ruth.”
“It was late... I was asleep.”
“That’s another thing—who decides to travel across the world late one night?” Joseph burped. “Sounds fishy to me.”
The threads twisted and Samuel swallowed hard. “Why wouldn’t Ruth have killed me, too?”
“That’s easy. She needed to keep you around so no one would get suspicious.”
“Ruth loves Mother—they are great friends.”
“Even great friends come to blows, Samuel,” said Joseph, picking up a World War II bomber from the bed. “What if your mum was going to have to let Ruth go, just like Olive, because she’d run out of money and she couldn’t pay her wages.” Joseph’s voice lifted as he fell under the spell of his own gruesome theory. “She tells Ruth, ‘You’re fired, you have to go,’ and they argue because Ruth doesn’t have anywhere to go and she’s wasted all her good years working for you lot. Things get heated and she hits your mum. Maybe she didn’t mean to do it so hard, but she does and then it’s too late. So she cleans everything up, blood and all, and puts Mrs. Clay down in the cellar before you wake up.”
“No.” Samuel was shaking his head. “Ruth wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“What proof do you have that your mum is really in America?” Joseph crashed the plane into the pillow, simulating an explosion. “You said she hasn’t sent any telegrams.”
“She sends postcards. She writes to me.”
“Ruth might have a friend in America who’s sending them,” suggested Joseph with a shrug.
“I know her handwriting. It’s Mother.”
Joseph leaned back against the iron bed frame with his hands behind his head. “You’re probably right.” He said this cheerfully. “A person would need an awful bad temper to kill someone in cold blood. I know she’s tough as old boots, but Ruth doesn’t seem the violent type. Too prim and proper.”
Samuel didn’t say anything. His heart was a drumbeat in his chest.
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Samuel.” Joseph had a talent for upsetting people, usually just by opening his mouth and letting whatever he was thinking spill out, but he knew he had taken things too far. “That story... I was just trying to scare you.” Joseph nudged the boy playfully. “It’s like you said—your mum will be home any day now. She’ll probably have a trunk full of presents and all.”
Samuel nodded.
“It’s just a story, Samuel. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Samuel shifted his gaze, finding his friend and offering him the smile he was waiting on. “I know.”
12
The flashlight peeled away the darkness clinging to the kitchen. The narrow beam
moved quickly, flying up the wall and down the cupboards, finally spotlighting the stone floor in an apricot haze. Samuel stood in the doorway, dressed in his pajamas, his feet bare, letting the flashlight do the traveling for him. He didn’t dare turn on the light. For the longest time he didn’t even move.
The boy had always been afraid of the dark—it seemed a perfectly sensible thing to be. How could you not be afraid of a great veil of shadows that could hide anything in its embrace? But the darkness didn’t explain why he was rooted to the spot. This time it was the light that scared him most.
So he stood there peering into the empty kitchen, willing his legs to move. He had to know, that’s all. He hadn’t thought of anything else since Joseph went home. The story about the housekeeper who had murdered the family she worked for and hid their bodies in the cellar was fixed in his thoughts, crowding out everything else. Yes, Joseph said it was just a story and didn’t mean anything, but sometimes a person hears a thing and it binds itself around you so tightly that there’s no ignoring it.
The worst part was that it made sense. The family vanishing in the night. The only witness, the trusted housekeeper. Didn’t it all fit?
Ruth was the only one to see his mother leave. She told everyone his mother was abroad while she ran the house as if it were her own. Yes, there were loose threads—the postcards, for one. And the fact that she hadn’t killed him, as well. But Ruth had done something bad, he was sure of that. She had done something to his mother, his beautiful mother, who wanted nothing more than to be with him and take care of him and love him like only a mother can. He was her little man and it made a horrible kind of sense that it would take something beastly, something awful that Ruth had done, to keep her away from him for one hundred and seventeen days.
All afternoon, doing his homework at the kitchen table and then eating dinner that night, he had thought on it as Ruth rushed about, picking things up and putting them down, telling him what to do and talking on about school and his hair needing a wash and his nails being in a sorry state. His eyes followed her every time she went into the larder to fetch something, knowing the door to the cellar was in there.
When Ruth complained that she had only two potatoes to boil for dinner, Samuel had jumped up. “I’ll fetch you some.”
He was nearly at the larder when Ruth stopped him. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
“To fetch you some more potatoes,” said Samuel. “From the cellar.”
“I’ve never seen you so eager to help.”
The boy had no answer for that, but he tried. “I’m starving and you know how I like lots of potatoes when you roast a chicken.” He turned toward the larder. “It will only take a second.”
“Don’t bother.” Ruth was wiping her hands on a tea towel. “You won’t find any down there. I’ll pick some up when I take the shortbread to the market on Saturday.” She gave Samuel a look then, like he wasn’t making sense to her. “Back to your homework, please.”
* * *
Once Ruth had sent him off to bed, he had stayed awake, listening for the sound of her coming up the stairs. She usually retired around nine o’clock, though he knew she never went straight to sleep. Sometimes Samuel would hear her moving about in her room long into the night, doing what he didn’t know. Just a few minutes after nine, Samuel heard Ruth in the hall and then the sound of her bedroom door opening and closing. The boy waited another twenty minutes, just to be sure, before getting out of bed. He went to the wardrobe and took out the flashlight that had belonged to his father, then stole downstairs as quietly as he could manage.
Now here he was, standing at the kitchen door, wondering if his mother was rotting down in the cellar. He closed his eyes for a moment. Brave, he needed to be brave. Not for himself, that wasn’t it, but for her. Samuel’s first steps were slow and wary as if he was uncertain of the ground underfoot. The beam of light flew out in front of him and he felt the cold stone floor and heard the hum and rattle of the icebox.
Despite his slow approach, Samuel soon found himself at the larder door. He shone the flashlight inside, illuminating the wooden shelves stocked with jars of pickles and sugar and flour and baskets of fruit and cabbages and carrots and bottles of treacle and vinegar. The narrow room held the fragrance of all these things, but mostly onions.
The flashlight’s beam seemed to have a mind of its own and was soon gliding over the closed door at the end of the larder. It was made up of vertical boards, the gray paint peeling and the doorknob dented. Samuel walked toward it—he had a job to do, after all—aware of the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the cold clamminess of his hands and the dryness in his throat.
A person would need an awful bad temper to kill someone in cold blood. That’s what Joseph said. Was Ruth a killer? Samuel knew her temper was short. He knew that she could lash out, be violent. But killing? Perhaps Ruth had merely kidnapped his mother. Yes, surely that was it. They had argued, just like Joseph said, about Ruth being let go and the housekeeper had hit his mother, knocking her out. She panicked then, hiding his mother in the cellar, and she was down there right now. She would be hungry and sickly, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed, and she would cry when she saw Samuel, joyful tears, because of all the people in the world he was the only one who had come to find her.
He pressed his hand to the door. Then he bent his head against the boards and closed his eyes. He made a sound then, little more than a faint groan, all the while thinking of her and wondering if it might really be true. He heard himself say her name, and his fingers slid down the door and found the handle.
Though his eyes were closed, the light flew at him.
“What on earth are you doing, child?”
The boy spun around. Ruth was standing at the mouth of the larder, her wavy brown hair loose around her shoulders, her nightdress concealed by a red robe, her finger still on the light switch. Though it was only a dim bulb, the room seemed lit up by a blinding sun.
“I asked you a question, Samuel.” Ruth’s voice took some account of the late hour and it sounded to Samuel like the words were a struggle, taking longer for her to say. “What are you doing down here at this hour of the night?”
“I...wanted something.”
Ruth was moving toward him and Samuel stepped back, hitting the cellar door.
“Down here?” She looked at the flashlight in his hand. “What in heaven’s name could you want at this hour? Were you hungry?”
There was an offering here—an easy way out—but Samuel couldn’t take it. He pictured his mother in the cellar and it seemed to chase some of the fear from his voice. “I wasn’t hungry. I wanted to see.”
“See what?” Ruth was standing over him now and Samuel smelled the sourness of her breath. “See what, Samuel?”
The boy turned and looked at the cellar door. “I wanted to see something down there.”
“Down in the cellar?”
Samuel nodded.
“What on earth could you want down there?”
“Father’s things.” He had intended to be truthful, but with Ruth glaring down at you, courage was hard to find. “His toys from when he was a boy.”
“You know very well your father’s old toys are in the attic. What has come over you?” Ruth put her hand on his forehead. “Are you feeling ill?” Then she grabbed Samuel by the arm. “Come, let’s get you back to bed. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
Samuel pulled away, the anger smothering his fear. “I want to see what’s in the cellar right now.”
“You’ll do no such thing. I won’t have you going down there in the dead of night and breaking your neck.”
“I will see it!” he shouted. “I will go down there!”
He turned and grabbed the handle, pushing on the door.
“It’s locked.” Ruth sounded calm. “You’re being ridiculous, Samuel.”
&nbs
p; Samuel turned back to face her. “Give me the key.”
“I will not.”
“Give me the key, Ruth!”
Ruth raised her finger and moved it between his eyes. “You hush your voice. It’s late, and it’s plain to see you’re not well, so I’m going to overlook this boldness. But you can forget about going down to the cellar. It’s a great mess and, like I said, you’d probably break your neck.”
“I don’t care, I want to see.”
“There’s nothing down there.” Ruth dropped her hand. “Just a stack of damp, moldy boxes, some old wine and a lot of big, ugly rats.”
“Why is the door locked?”
“Well...it always has been locked, for as long as I’ve been here, anyhow. Cellars are locked, that’s all there is to it.”
Samuel shook his head. “I’m not leaving until I see.”
She sprang then, grabbing him by the shoulders with such force the flashlight dropped from his hand. “See what, child? There’s nothing down there, I just told you, nothing that you’d care to look at, anyhow.”
The dread rose up from the pit of his stomach and had nowhere to go, so the tears gathered and fell, his voice hardly a whisper. “What did you do, Ruth?”
He pushed her with all of his might and ran from the larder.
13
There was nowhere else to go but bed so that was where he went. He lay on his back, the blanket pulled up around his chin. It was pitch-dark but he didn’t mind because somehow it made things easier. He hadn’t cried so hard in a long time. It was all about his mother and the cellar. And of course there was fear there, too. Ruth was cruel and hateful and she had it in her to hurt someone. Even kill them? Yes, he thought so.
Why was the cellar door locked? If she had nothing to hide, why wouldn’t she let him go down and see? Samuel was so lost in the burden of his troubles that he didn’t hear Ruth approaching. Not until the door opened and she was coming toward him. He knew that pulling the blanket over his head was a stupid thing to do, something you might expect from an infant, not a nine-year-old boy, but that’s what he did.
The Boy at the Keyhole Page 6