The House Sitter

Chapter 5 — The Orchids

The first orchid died on October tenth.

Maya found it during the morning watering — the vanda, the one the color of dusk, its blooms gone papery overnight, the stem soft at the base like something had given up from the inside. She stood there with the copper can dripping onto the greenhouse tiles and felt an absurd, disproportionate grief, as if something had died that trusted her.

She’d done everything right. Exactly seven. Two hundred milliliters. Distilled. She had the initialed chart to prove it, a column of neat M.T.s marching down the page.

She trimmed the dead stem with the greenhouse shears, wrapped the plant in newspaper, and buried it behind the potting shed because throwing it in the trash felt wrong. She said “I’m sorry” out loud to the turned earth. The canyon wind took the words and did nothing with them.

The second orchid died two days later. A white phalaenopsis, blooms dropping like spent confetti. Then a third — the black one, the hole in the air, its dark petals curling at the edges as if burned.

Three orchids in five days. Forty-one minus three. She did the math the way you do math at a funeral, just to have something to do with your hands.

She called the Ashford residence line again. The same man answered. “Miss Torres.”

“The orchids are dying,” she said. “I’m following the chart exactly. Seven a.m., distilled water, two hundred milliliters. Three are dead. I need — is there a greenhouse service? Someone I can call?”

“One moment.” A long pause, muffled voices, and then: “Mr. Ashford says to continue the routine exactly as written. Some loss is natural.”

“Natural? Three in five days? These plants are twenty years old —”

“Continue the routine, miss. Exactly as written.”

The line went dead.

She stared at her phone. Mr. Ashford says. From Europe, presumably, at — she checked the time — whatever hour it was in Paris. He’d answered fast for a man on vacation. Fast, and certain, and uninterested in the details of his dying orchids.

Unless he wasn’t on vacation at all.

The thought arrived fully formed and she shoved it away so hard it left a mark. Richard and Evelyn were in Europe. The note had said so. The rule sheet had said so. Carol Finch had said so, in her way — “Rich people and their Europe.” The west wing was locked. The house was empty. The bench had moved because — because houses settle, because she’d imagined it, because grief made people see things and this house was full of grief, twenty years of it soaked into the walls.

She went to the potting shed for fresh potting mix. If the orchids were dying, she’d repot the weakest ones, check the roots, do something. Doing something was better than standing in the greenhouse watching things die on a schedule.

The potting shed sat behind the greenhouse, cedar-shake, half-swallowed by bougainvillea. Inside: terracotta pots stacked like a clay choir, bags of bark mix, the blue jug of distilled water, a workbench with a vise, and — in the corner, under a cracked plastic tarp — a small wooden crate.

She moved the tarp because she needed the space, because the workbench was cluttered, because there was no reason not to.

The crate was full of paper. Drawings. Dozens of them, on construction paper gone soft at the edges, in crayon and marker and once — she found it near the bottom — in what looked like watercolor, the colors bled by years of shed humidity.

A girl at a piano. Over and over.

The same scene, drawn again and again by a child’s hand: a little girl with dark scribbled hair seated at a big black piano, the piano drawn too large, looming, the girl drawn too small, her feet dangling above the floor, not reaching the pedals. In some drawings there were music notes floating above the keys — whole notes, the round open kind a child would draw. In some the girl was smiling, a wide crayon grin. In others her mouth was a straight line, or absent entirely, just blank paper where a mouth should be.

Maya’s hands were shaking again. She told them to stop and they didn’t listen.

She flipped through faster. Girl at piano. Girl at piano. Girl at piano — and then, near the very bottom, one that was different. The same girl, but standing, holding the hand of a tall figure with silver scribbled hair. Behind them, a door — drawn as a huge dark rectangle, crosshatched until the crayon had nearly torn the paper. And across the top, in wobbly capital letters, the kind a seven-year-old makes when she’s sounding things out:

GRACE.

Maya sat down hard on the shed’s dirt floor, the drawing in her lap.

Grace. The daughter. Dead twenty years. The girl at the piano, over and over, in a crate in the potting shed, as if someone had put them here and couldn’t bear to throw them away and couldn’t bear to look at them either.

She thought about the bench. The music at 2:07. The warm wood of the west wing door. The laugh she’d heard — or imagined — through the walnut.

“You died,” she whispered to the drawing. “Carol said you died.”

But the orchids were dying too, and she was watering them perfectly, and Richard had said some loss is natural with the flat certainty of a man reading from a script, and the bench kept moving, and the music kept coming from behind a locked door in a house where no one was supposed to be.

Maya gathered the drawings — all of them, the whole crate’s worth — and carried them into the greenhouse. She laid them out on the workbench between the orchid pots, girl at piano, girl at piano, girl at piano, a paper chorus surrounding the living and the dead alike.

“Okay,” she said to the forty-one minus three. To the cameras in the corners, red eyes blinking. To the house. “Okay. Somebody’s going to explain this to me.”

From inside the main house — faint, far, unmistakable — a piano key sounded. One note. Then another. Then the halting melody began again, in the middle of the afternoon, in the broad bright daylight, as if whatever had been hiding in the dark had decided it was done hiding.

Maya stood among the orchids, Grace’s drawings spread around her like evidence at a trial, and listened to the dead girl’s song rising through the walls of the house — and this time, she didn’t tell herself it was the wind.