The House Sitter

Chapter 3 — The Neighbor

Carol Finch arrived on the fourth day with a bundt cake and no intention of leaving.

Maya had been deadheading roses along the front terrace — the rules said nothing about roses, so she figured they were fair game — when a voice called out, “Well, aren’t you a sight for tired eyes!” A woman in her sixties was already halfway up the walk, cake carrier swinging, garden clogs scuffing the stone. Gray bob, oversized sunglasses, a caftan printed with what appeared to be flamingos.

“Carol Finch. Next door, the white one with the lemon trees. You’re the house girl.”

“Maya. I’m house-sitting for the Ashfords.”

“For three weeks? While they’re in Europe?” Carol set the cake down on the terrace wall like a treaty offering. “Rich people and their Europe. Richard’s father bought that house the year I moved in, and I have never once seen the man take a vacation that wasn’t a business trip in disguise. Europe, he says.” She squinted at Maya over her sunglasses. “Well. Everyone needs to get away sometimes. Even from paradise.”

Maya cut the cake on the terrace — lemon drizzle, excellent — and Carol talked. She talked about the canyon, the coyotes (“they’ll take a poodle like it’s a meatball”), the fire season, the couple three doors down who’d had a drone wedding. And then, with the ease of someone turning a key, she said, “Such a sad house, though. You know about the girl, I suppose.”

“The girl?”

Carol’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “Oh, honey. They didn’t tell you?” She leaned in, and the flamingos leaned with her. “The Ashfords had a daughter. Grace. She died in that house twenty years ago. Car accident — no, wait, don’t let me get it wrong. She was seven. It was the crash that killed her, but everyone in this canyon knows it happened right here. The funeral cars lined the street for a mile. Evelyn didn’t come out of the house for a year.”

The lemon cake turned to paste in Maya’s mouth.

“Twenty years,” Carol went on, mistaking her silence for appetite. “Right in there, practically.” She gestured at the house with her fork. “Evelyn keeps the west wing like a shrine, they say. Hasn’t changed a thing since the girl was alive. Richard had it locked up — the door, the whole wing. ‘Some rooms you don’t go back into,’ he told my husband once. Men and their metaphors.”

“Locked,” Maya said. Her voice sounded far away. “The west wing is locked.”

“Is it now? Well.” Carol patted her hand. “Don’t let me spook you. The dead don’t bother the living, hon. It’s the living you watch out for. The Ashfords are good people. Just… heavy. They carry that house like a coffin.” She laughed at her own darkness, then sobered. “You sleep okay in there?”

“Fine,” Maya lied. The hum through the walnut door. The warm wood. The floorboard sighing.

“You’ll be fine,” Carol said, standing, brushing crumbs from the flamingos. “Girls like you — young, alive, full of juice — houses like this need that. It does them good, having someone breathing in them again.” At the walk she turned. “Oh — and if you hear the piano at night, don’t mind it. The wind does something funny through the west wing shutters. Sounds just like music. Used to scare the daylights out of me.”

After Carol left, Maya stood on the terrace for a long time.

A daughter. Dead at seven. Twenty years ago — which meant the Ashfords had been her parents’ age now when it happened. Maya did the arithmetic without meaning to. Twenty years ago, she herself had been four. A four-year-old in — where? She’d been adopted at five. The year before that was a blank her parents had always described gently: a difficult year, a foster placement, records lost in a fire. “You were safe the whole time,” her mother always said. “That’s what matters.”

The house felt different now, and she hated that it did. The glass walls showed too much sky. The floating staircase looked less like a ribbon and more like something that had snapped. She went inside and found herself in the living room, in front of the Steinway.

She hadn’t really looked at it before. Black lacquer, yes, but the lid was open, propped on its long stick, the strings inside catching the afternoon light like the ribs of something that had once been alive. The bench sat perfectly centered, its leather cushion indented in the middle — worn by years of someone sitting in exactly the same spot.

“Do not touch the keys,” Richard had written.

She didn’t. She stood with her hands folded behind her back like a museum visitor and looked at the bench, at the indentation, and thought about a seven-year-old girl whose legs wouldn’t have reached the pedals.

That night she dreamed about music for the first time. Not a song she knew — something slow and searching, played by small hands, stopping and starting, as if the player kept losing her place and finding it again. In the dream Maya stood outside a locked door, and on the other side a little girl laughed, and the laughing turned into crying, and the crying turned into her own name.

She woke at 3:14 a.m. with her face wet.

The house was silent. The west wing door was locked. The Steinway sat untouched in the living room, moonlight pooled on its lid.

But on the bench — she was sure, she would swear it in court — the bench had moved. Not much. An inch. Maybe two. Angled now, as if someone had stood up from it in a hurry.

She stared at it until dawn came up over the canyon, and she went out to the greenhouse at exactly seven, and she watered the orchids with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, and she initialed the chart, and she told herself, with enormous effort, that Carol Finch was a lonely woman with a flamingo caftan and an imagination.