The House Sitter

Chapter 4 — The Piano

She told herself the bench had been like that all along.

Maya said it out loud in the greenhouse the next morning, to forty-one orchids, while the copper can glinted in her hand. “It was like that all along.” The orchids offered no opinion. She initialed the chart — October 7th, neat block letters — and went back inside, and stood in the living room, and looked at the bench.

It was centered. Perfectly centered. Leather cushion facing the keys, not angled at all.

Which meant either it had never moved, or it had been moved back.

She laughed then, a short sharp sound that bounced off the glass walls. “Stop it,” she told the empty house. “You don’t get to be haunted. You’re a mid-century architectural landmark.”

The house said nothing. The house was very good at saying nothing.

She filled the day on purpose. She sketched the floating staircase from three angles, losing herself in the geometry the way she used to lose herself in studio at two a.m. She cleaned rooms she wasn’t required to clean. She reorganized the spice drawer — a house-sitter’s crime, she knew, but a satisfying one. She ran six miles on the treadmill in the gym, showered in the guest suite’s rain shower, and ate dinner in front of the living room’s enormous windows, watching the sun go down over the Pacific like a coin dropping into a slot.

She did not go down the north hallway. She did not touch the piano.

She was asleep by eleven.

The music woke her at 2:07. She knew the time because she grabbed her phone, because her first thought was that she’d left a playlist on, because that was a sane explanation and she was clinging to sanity with both hands.

No playlist. The phone screen showed nothing playing.

The music was coming from inside the house.

Slow. Searching. The same halting melody from her dream — a few bars, a pause, the same few bars again, as if the player were practicing, working something out. Small hands. She thought of small hands again and hated herself for it.

And it was coming from the west wing.

She lay frozen under the guest suite’s white duvet, counting her own heartbeats against the notes, and the rational part of her brain — the part that had gotten her into USC — was filing explanations as fast as it could. Carol had said the wind through the shutters sounds like music. Old houses settle. Pipes. The ice maker. A neighbor’s stereo carrying up the canyon.

But the melody repeated. Practiced. And it was behind the locked door — she was sure of it now, she could feel the direction of it the way you can feel the direction of heat — from down the north hallway, from behind the walnut door with the quatrefoil key.

She got up. She didn’t decide to; her feet were on the cold floor and then she was in the hallway, phone in one hand, the other hand empty because she had nothing to defend herself with, because this was insane, because the door was locked and there was nobody in the west wing and Richard and Evelyn were in Europe.

The hallway was dark except for the red eye of a camera dome, watching her. For insurance. She looked straight into it — let them watch, let the insurance company enjoy the show — and pressed her ear to the walnut door.

Silence. The music had stopped.

She stood there in her sleep shorts and a USC t-shirt, ear against the wood, and the wood was warm again — warmer than the hallway, warm like something living on the other side — and she heard, very faintly, from very far inside: a child’s laugh.

Then nothing. The hum. The held breath of the house.

Maya walked back to the guest suite on legs that didn’t feel like hers. She locked the bedroom door — a lock the Ashfords’ rule sheet said nothing about, a lock she was suddenly grateful existed — and sat up against the headboard until the sky went gray.

At seven, because the rules were the rules and she was not going to be the girl who broke down in week one, she watered the orchids. Exactly seven. Two hundred milliliters each. Distilled. She initialed the chart with a steady hand she was proud of.

Then she went to the living room.

The Steinway’s bench was angled. There was no question this time, no trick of memory, no maybe. Yesterday it had been centered — she’d stared at it, she’d memorized it, she’d built a whole theory of her own madness on its centeredness. Now it sat at a diagonal, pulled out from the piano by a good six inches, the leather cushion turned slightly toward the west wing hallway, as if whoever had been sitting there had gotten up and walked in that direction.

Maya stood in the middle of the living room, in the mansion in the Hollywood Hills, in the morning light, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach.

“Nobody’s here,” she said to the cameras, to the house, to herself. “You’re in Europe. The door is locked. Nobody’s here.”

But the bench had moved. And sometime in the night, someone had played the piano. And in the greenhouse, forty-one orchids stood in their white saucers, perfect and silent, like an audience.

She took a photo of the bench with her phone. Evidence. For whom, she didn’t know.

That afternoon she called the number on Richard’s card — the “if anything breaks” number. A man answered on the second ring. “Ashford residence line.”

“This is Maya Torres, the house-sitter. I —” She stopped. What was she going to say? The piano bench is haunted? “Nothing’s broken. I just wanted to check that — have you heard from Mr. and Mrs. Ashford? Are they — is everything okay with them?”

A pause. “They’re traveling, miss. Is there a problem with the house?”

“No. No problem.” She hung up and felt like a fool.

But that night, before bed, she did something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She took the desk chair from the guest suite and wedged it under the bedroom doorknob. Then she lay awake, listening, until 2:07 came and went in silence.

At 2:08, she almost laughed with relief.

At 2:09, from behind the west wing door, a single piano key sounded. One note. Clear as a bell. As if to say: I know you’re listening.