The House Sitter

Chapter 2 — The Rules

She moved in on October second, at noon, under a sky so blue it looked staged.

The Ashfords were already gone — or so the note said. It waited on the kitchen island, weighted down by a ceramic owl, in Evelyn’s looping handwriting:

“Dear Maya — We caught an earlier flight and couldn’t say goodbye properly. All the love to the house, and to you. The keys are yours. Richard will text about the orchids. — E.”

No goodbye in person. After the way they’d looked at her, Maya felt an odd, small sting, like being stood up by someone she’d only just met.

The keys were a heavy brass ring. One of them had no twin in the lockbox: a long, blackened key, older than the rest, with a bow shaped like a quatrefoil. A tag hung from it in Richard’s precise print: WEST WING — DO NOT USE.

She found Richard’s rule sheet tucked inside the IN CASE OF ANYTHING folder, three pages, printed, initialed at the bottom in his hand.

Rule one: The west wing stays locked. Not “please.” Not “we’d prefer.” STAYS. The door is at the end of the north hallway, past the library. It has always been locked, and while you are here, it must remain so. (He’d underlined must remain so twice.)

Rule two: The orchids. The greenhouse off the east terrace held forty-one orchids — she counted, because she had to know — in white porcelain pots, each tagged with a Latin name in faded ink. They were watered at exactly seven in the morning, not six-fifty-five, not seven-oh-five, with the copper watering can, two hundred milliliters each, distilled water from the blue jug, never tap. Richard had left a chart. She was to initial each day.

Rule three: The grand piano in the living room. A Steinway, black lacquer, older than the house, older than the Ashfords’ marriage, the note said. “Do not play it. Do not touch the keys. Dust the lid with the feather duster on Tuesdays. That’s all it asks of you.”

Rule four: The cameras. Small domes in the corners of the hallways, the kitchen, the pool deck, the driveway. “For insurance,” Richard had written. “They record continuously. Don’t unplug them. Pretend they’re not there.”

Rule five: No guests. No overnight visitors. No parties. No exceptions.

Rule six: If anything breaks, anything at all, call the number on the card, not a repairman, not anyone else. “The house is old,” Richard wrote. “It has opinions about strangers.”

Maya read the sheet three times. Then she did what any architecture student would do in an empty mansion: she walked it.

The main house was a marvel — open-plan, walls of glass on the canyon side, warm concrete and teak, a floating staircase that looked poured from a single ribbon of stone. The west wing door sat at the end of the north hallway like a full stop: heavy walnut, no handle on this side that she could see, just a brass keyhole and a plate with nothing engraved on it. She pressed her palm to it. The wood was warm, which was strange, because the hallway was cool. She told herself it was the afternoon sun through the skylight.

She tried the door. Locked, obviously. The knob didn’t even shiver.

Next to the west wing door stood the library, and Maya drifted in the way she drifted into every room with books. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, a rolling ladder, a leather armchair angled toward the canyon windows. The shelves held what you’d expect — architecture, art, first editions — but the bottom shelf, low enough for a child, held picture books with sun-faded spines. She crouched and pulled one out: a story about a mouse who played piano for the moon. Inside the front cover, in a child’s careful printing, someone had written a name and then scribbled over it so hard the paper had torn. She put the book back exactly where she’d found it, spine aligned with the others, and felt like she’d touched something she shouldn’t have.

That first evening she cooked the pasta she’d brought, ate it standing at the island, and armed the alarm before dark — a small green light by the front door that made her feel, absurdly, like she’d locked up a bank vault. The cameras’ red eyes blinked in the hallway corners. For insurance. She waved at one on her way to bed, feeling ridiculous, and lay awake a long time listening to the house settle around her: the tick of cooling glass, the sigh of the canyon wind, and once — just once — a soft thud from somewhere deep in the north end of the house, like a book falling off a shelf in a room with no one in it.

She told herself it was the wind, and eventually slept.

The greenhouse smelled like rain and money. The orchids were absurd — phalaenopsis in white and blush, a vanda with blooms the color of dusk, a black orchid so dark it looked like a hole in the air. Each pot sat in a perfect white saucer. Each tag was handwritten. She lifted one: Cattleya labiata, and beneath, in fainter pencil, a date — 2004. Twenty-two years old. Older than her college career. She set it down gently.

By five, she’d claimed the guest suite, unpacked her duffel into the walk-in closet (a closet bigger than her Koreatown bedroom), and stood at the window watching the city arrange itself below. From up here Los Angeles looked like a circuit board, like something you could understand.

Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.

“Richard Ashford. The orchids at seven. Exactly. Thank you, Maya.”

Not “hope you’re settling in.” Not “sorry we missed you.” The orchids at seven. Exactly.

She typed back “Of course. Enjoy Europe!” and got no reply.

That night she ate pasta at the kitchen island — she’d brought groceries, feeling guilty about touching the Ashfords’ provisions, though Evelyn had written “eat whatever you like” — and wandered. Every empty house has a sound, she’d learned, a kind of held breath. This one held its breath differently. She found herself pausing at the west wing door again, on her way to bed, without having meant to go down the north hallway at all.

The hallway was dark. The door was dark. She could have sworn she felt, through the walnut, the faintest vibration — a hum, like a refrigerator, like a held note.

“Old houses,” she whispered to the empty hall. “Opinions about strangers.”

She went to bed at ten and set three alarms for six-forty-five.

At exactly 7:00 a.m., copper can in hand, she watered forty-one orchids with two hundred milliliters each of distilled water, initialed the chart, and stood in the greenhouse doorway feeling oddly proud — like she’d passed a test she hadn’t studied for.

Somewhere in the house, she thought she heard a floorboard sigh.

She told herself it was the wind off the canyon, and went inside to make coffee.