The Job
Nyla's POV
Mr Pell put my things on the sidewalk at seven in the morning.
He didn't knock. He used his own key, walked into my room while I was still in bed, and started pulling clothes out of the dresser like he was clearing out a dead woman's house. By the time I got my jeans on, half my life was in two garbage bags by the front steps.
"Three months, Nyla," he said. "I gave you three months."
"You gave me two. And I paid you half of October."
"Half isn't rent." He dropped my mother's old sewing box on top of the bags. The lid popped open, and a spool of red thread rolled into the gutter. "I've got a couple moving in on Saturday. They have jobs."
I had a job too, until the diner closed in August. Since then I'd cleaned motel rooms, walked dogs, and stood in line at the temp agency every Monday with forty other people who also wanted the one-warehouse shift on the board. None of that was going to change his mind, so I didn't say it.
I picked up the thread instead. Then I sat on the curb with my bags and my mother's sewing box and counted the money in my wallet. Thirty-eight dollars. A bus pass with two rides left. A receipt for cough syrup.
I touched the necklace under my shirt. It was a thin silver chain with a small round charm, worn smooth from years of my mother rubbing it with her thumb. She wore it every day of my life, and when she got sick, she put it on me herself. "Don't take it off," she told me. "Not for anybody." I hadn't, not once in six years. It was the only thing I owned that I would never sell, no matter how bad things got.
Things were getting pretty bad.
I carried the bags four blocks to the Hilltop Café because they had free coffee refills and a bulletin board and because Dana behind the counter knew me and wouldn't make me buy anything. She took one look at the garbage bags and poured me a cup without asking.
"Pell?" she said.
"Pell."
"He's a pig." She slid a muffin across the counter. "From yesterday. Don't argue."
I didn't argue. I ate it standing in front of the bulletin board, reading the same cards I'd read a dozen times. Guitar lessons. A lost cat named Pickle. Someone selling a couch with only a small stain. Babysitter wanted; must have own car.
Then I saw a new card, pinned at the top, in neat black handwriting.
LIVE IN HOUSEKEEPER WANTED. ROOM AND BOARD PROVIDED. GOOD PAY. PRIVATE ESTATE, NORTH OF TOWN. APPLY IN PERSON; ASK FOR CAL.
There was no phone number and no address.
"Dana," I said. "Who's Cal?"
She leant over the counter to see what I was looking at, and her face changed. Not a lot. Just enough.
"That's from the Thorne place," she said. "Up on Greyridge."
"Is that bad?"
"It's not bad." She wiped the counter even though it was clean. "They're just private. They come into town for supplies, pay cash, and don't talk much. People say things."
"What things?"
"Nothing real. Small town stuff." She nodded at the corner booth. "That's Cal, if you want to ask him yourself."
I turned around.
The man in the corner booth was maybe thirty, with sandy hair and a grey flannel shirt rolled to his elbows. He had a plate of eggs in front of him and a paper map spread out next to it, and he was marking something on the map with a pencil. He looked up at me before I'd taken a single step, like he'd known I was going to come over.
"You read the card," he said.
"I did." I put my coffee down on his table. "I'm Nyla Ashby. I can clean, cook a little, and do laundry. I've worked at a diner and a motel. I don't have references from the motel because the manager was a creep, but the diner owner will tell you I never missed a shift."
He studied me for a second. Then he folded the map and moved his plate aside.
"Sit down, Nyla Ashby."
I sat.
"It's a big house," he said. "Old. Lots of rooms, most of them closed up. You'd be cleaning the main floor, the kitchen, the dining room, and some of the bedrooms. Laundry for the staff. There's a cook already, so you'd help her when she needs it. You'd live on site. The pay is nine hundred a week."
I laughed because I thought he was joking. He wasn't smiling.
"Nine hundred," I said. "A week."
"Plus your room and all your meals."
"What's wrong with it?"
That made him smile, a little. "Nothing's wrong with it. The house is far from town, and the man who owns it is particular. Most people don't last."
"How long do most people last?"
"The last one lasted four days."
"Why did she leave?"
"He," Cal said. "And he left because he broke a rule."
I waited for him to explain. He picked up his coffee and drank it instead.
"What rules?" I said.
"I'll tell you in the truck if you want the job."
I should have asked more questions. Anyone smart would have. A strange man in a café was offering me almost four thousand dollars a month to live in a house in the woods, and the last person who took the job was gone in four days. My mother would have dragged me out of that booth by my ear.
But my mother wasn't here, and my things were sitting in garbage bags by the door.
"I want the job," I said.
Cal stood up, dropped two twenties on the table for his eggs, and picked up both of my garbage bags like they weighed nothing.
His truck was old and black and very clean inside. He put my bags in the back, opened the passenger door for me, and waited until I was buckled in before he walked around to his side. We drove out past the gas station, past the high school, past the last streetlight, and then the road turned to gravel and started to climb.
"Okay," I said. "The rules."
"Three of them," Cal said. "They're simple. People still manage to break them."
"I'm listening."
He held up one finger without taking his eyes off the road. "One. You don't go into the east wing. Ever. It's locked, but even if you find it open, you don't go in."
"What's in the east wing?"
He held up a second finger. "Two. You don't leave the house after dark. Not to the garden, not to the porch, not to your car if you get one. When the sun goes down, you're inside, and you stay inside until morning."
"Why?"
He held up a third finger and finally looked at me.
"Three. No questions."
I opened my mouth. Then I shut it.
"You just broke rule three twice," he said, and he sounded almost amused. "I'll let it go, since you haven't started yet."
"That's a strange set of rules."
"That's not a question, so it's fine."
The trees got thicker as we drove. Tall pines, so close together that the light came through in thin yellow stripes. Twice I saw a deer standing at the edge of the road, and both times it ran before the truck got close. The air coming through the vent smelled cold and green.
"The man who left after four days," I said. "Which rule did he break?"
Cal's hands moved on the wheel.
"The second one," he said.
"And he just quit?"
"Nobody said he quit."
I looked at him. He kept his eyes on the road, and he didn't say anything else for the rest of the drive.
After almost forty minutes, we turned through a stone gate with no sign on it, and the house came into view.
It was bigger than I'd pictured. Three stories of dark grey stone with a slate roof and long windows that caught the afternoon light. There was a wide front porch and a gravel drive that circled a dead fountain. To the left, the house went on and on, a second long wing reaching back into the trees. All the windows on that side had heavy curtains drawn shut.
The east wing, I guessed. I didn't ask.
Cal parked by the front steps and carried my bags inside. The front hall was cool and quiet, with a stone floor and a staircase that split in two halfway up. Everything was clean, but it had the feel of a place that nobody really lived in. No coats on the hooks. No shoes by the door. No pictures on the walls, only pale squares where pictures used to be.
A woman came out of a door at the back of the hall, drying her hands on an apron. She was short and round, with grey curls pinned up on her head and flour on one cheek.
"This is Mira," Cal said. "She runs the kitchen. Mira, this is Nyla. She's starting today."
Mira looked me up and down, then leaned in close, close enough that I thought she was going to hug me. She didn't. She just breathed in, slow, near my neck.
Then she stepped back, and her eyes went to Cal.
Something passed between them. Cal gave her the smallest shake of his head, and Mira put on a big smile like nothing had happened.
"Well," she said. "You're too skinny. We'll fix that. Have you eaten?"
"I had a muffin."
"A muffin isn't food." She took my arm. "Come on. I'll show you your room, and then I'm feeding you."
"Wait," Cal said. He was looking up the stairs.
I heard it a second later. Footsteps on the landing. Slow and heavy and even.
A man came down the stairs.
He was tall, taller than Cal, with black hair cut short and a face as hard as the grey stone of the house. Sharp jaw. A straight nose that had been broken at least once. He wore a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and his forearms were covered in old white scars, thin ones, like something had clawed him a long time ago.
He stopped on the last step and looked at me.
His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and they didn't move. He didn't blink. He looked at me the way you'd look at a stranger standing in your kitchen at midnight.
Mira let go of my arm.
"Rowan," Cal said. "This is the new housekeeper. Nyla Ashby."
The man's nostrils flared, just once. His hand closed on the stair rail, and the wood cracked under his grip. A long split ran down the polished rail, right under his fingers.
"No," he said.
His voice was low and rough, like he didn't use it much.
"She needs the job," Cal said.
"I said no. Drive her back to town."
"It's almost four. I won't get back up the mountain before dark."
Rowan's jaw moved. He looked at the window, at the light already going orange behind the trees, and then back at me. For one second, something showed on his face that I didn't understand. It didn't look like anger. It looked like fear.
"Then she leaves at sunrise," he said.
"Rowan."
"Sunrise, Cal."
He came down the last step and walked past me towards the back of the house. He didn't look at me again. But as he passed, so close that his arm almost touched mine, he slowed for half a step and put his mouth near my ear, where nobody else could hear.
"Lock your door tonight," he said. "And whatever you hear outside it, don't open it."
Then he was gone, and somewhere deep in the woods behind the house, something began to howl.
