His Secret Room

Elly had been in the house for exactly one hour when she started arguing with her own suitcase. It was one of those soft-sided ones with a wheel that stuck, and it had come apart on the landing like it had been waiting three years for a chance to humiliate her, and she was forty-four years old and standing in a stranger's guest bedroom saying "oh, wonderful, just wonderful" to nobody at all.

The bedroom was at the back of the second floor, past a bathroom with a clawfoot tub and a hallway that smelled faintly of turpentine, and it had been assigned to her in a one-line email from an artist named Marguerite who was currently in Lisbon and who had written, in its entirety: "Two weeks, keys under the frog, food in the pantry is yours, do not touch the crates in the hall. Thanks, M." Elly had read that email four times on the train and still could not decide whether the thanks was sincere or the kind of thanks you give when you are hoping the person does not look too closely at anything.

She spread her clothes across the bed, which was covered in a sheet like all the other furniture, and lifted the sheet off and folded it and then unfolded it again because she could not remember where people put sheets when they were not using them. The divorce had done this to her, she thought. Three years gone now, three years since the day Bernard said the word "fundamentally" and she had understood, in one cold second, that a marriage could end over an adverb. Since then she had been a nanny to other people's children and a tenant in other people's spare rooms and a woman who owned a suitcase with a broken wheel.

The house made noise the way old houses do, a settling and ticking and occasional groan from somewhere below, and Elly found she resented it. That was the humiliating part, she admitted, smoothing a sweater into a drawer that had a dead spider in the back corner. She had wanted quiet, had driven forty minutes out of the city specifically for quiet, and now that she had it, the quiet sounded like a crowd she couldn't see. Every creak downstairs was a person she would have to talk to. Every tick of the pipes was someone being rude at her.

"You're being ridiculous," she told the spider. "It's a house. Houses make noise."

The spider did not answer, which was, in fairness, the kind of quiet she had been asking for.

* * *

By evening she had made tea in a kitchen that could have hosted a small wedding, and had explored exactly as much of the house as she felt was polite, which was most of the ground floor and her own bedroom and not the sealed-off guest room at the far end of the second-floor hall, the one with the shelving units pushed across the doorway and two crates stacked in front of those, the whole arrangement so deliberate that it had clearly been done by Marguerite herself, or possibly by someone with a strong opinion about that room. Elly had looked at it once, standing in the hallway with her tea, and had thought, well, that's a door someone wants shut, and had walked away, because she was fifty days shy of believing in boundaries but she was working on it.

It was while unpacking the last of her books that she found the granola bar.

It was under a box on the closet floor, a box she had shifted to make room for her shoes, and it was a honey-and-almond granola bar with one end torn open and roughly a third of it gone, and it was not hers, because she had not been in this closet before tonight and she did not buy honey-and-almond, she bought the dark chocolate kind and felt bad about it. She picked it up by the wrapper and held it at arm's length and looked at it the way you look at a thing that has just rearranged your assumptions about a room.

"Well," she said. "That's not mine."

A mouse, obviously. Or a mouse's larger, more organized cousin. The torn end was suspiciously neat, though, she thought, turning it over. Mice did not tear. Mice gnawed, and left little evidence, and did not eat a third and stop, like someone who had been interrupted, or someone who had counted out a portion. She stood there in the closet doorway with the granola bar in her hand and a small cold feeling starting somewhere behind her ribs, and then she told herself firmly that it was a mouse, or a squirrel in the walls, and that she had driven forty minutes for quiet and quiet was what she was going to get.

She did what her mother would have done. She went down to the kitchen, dug through the drawers until she found a mousetrap, the old wooden snap kind, still in its plastic, and she took a corner of peanut butter from the jar in the fridge and baited the trap and set it with a practiced click that surprised her, because apparently that lived in her hands somewhere, thirty years after the farmhouse. She put the trap on the closet floor, right where the granola bar had been, and she left the half-eaten bar beside it as a kind of lure, and she wrote on the back of a receipt, in pen, MOUSE. DO NOT STEP. And propped it against the wall, because the last thing she needed was to explain to Marguerite why there was a dead mouse and a broken foot in the same closet.

"There," she said to the closet. "Your move."

The house creaked, somewhere below, a long slow groan like a floor taking weight, and Elly stood in the hallway listening to it until it stopped.

"That's just the house," she said out loud, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "Houses settle."

She went back to her room and finished the unpacking, or most of it, leaving one drawer for the things you don't unpack because you might have to leave quickly, which was a habit she had picked up at forty-one and had not been able to shake at forty-four, and she got into bed under the sheet she had finally found a place for, and she lay there in the dark of a stranger's house listening to the pipes tick.

It was some time past midnight when she heard the other noise.

It was faint, and it came from the direction of the sealed guest room, and it was not a mouse noise and it was not a pipe noise. It was a cough. A single, muffled, human cough, the kind of cough a person does when they are trying to be quiet about it, followed by a short silence and then the unmistakable soft thud of a drawer closing.

Elly sat up in bed.

She sat there for a long moment with the sheet pooled in her lap, doing the arithmetic that people do at midnight in strange houses, the arithmetic that goes, either I imagined that, or there is a person in the sealed room of this house, and both of those options are bad, and one of them is worse. She thought about the granola bar and its tidy torn end. She thought about the one-line email. She thought, absurdly, about the frog under which the keys had been left, and whether Marguerite had known, and then she thought about the trap in the closet, baited with peanut butter, waiting for a mouse.

"Right," she whispered to the dark. "Sure. Fine."

She did not get up. She was forty-four years old and she had learned, at cost, the difference between bravery and getting out of bed at midnight to investigate a cough, and she pulled the sheet up and lay back down and stared at the ceiling and told herself that in the morning this would all be a mouse, one very large mouse with a drawer, and that she had driven forty minutes for quiet and she was damn well going to lie here and get some.

The house creaked again, closer this time, or it felt closer, and somewhere down the hall, behind the shelves and the crates and the door someone wanted shut, the small sounds of a person trying not to be heard went on a little longer, and then stopped.

She did sleep, eventually, the way you do in strange houses, in shallow bribes of sleep traded for silence, and then at two in the morning she woke to footsteps.

Not creaks. Footsteps. The measured, deliberate kind, the kind with a heel and a purpose, moving overhead, and Elly lay flat under the sheet and listened to them cross the ceiling of her room from one side to the other, pause, and cross back. Her room was on the second floor. Above the second floor there was an attic she had not been up to, a staircase she had noted on her first walk-through and dismissed as the kind of steep, narrow thing nobody used, and so the footsteps were either in the attic, or they were in the hallway one floor down and the house was lying to her about it, and she lay there doing that arithmetic too until the footsteps stopped and the house went quiet in a way that felt performed.

"Okay," she said to the ceiling. "Fine. Sure."

She got up, because apparently the part of her that had set the mousetrap with a practiced click was also the part that got out of bed at two in the morning, and she put on the grey cardigan she kept over the chair, and she took the flashlight from her bag, the little black one Bernard had bought her for the car, and she went out into the hall. The second-floor hall at two in the morning was a different country from the second-floor hall at nine at night. The turpentine smell was stronger, or she was just noticing it more, and the sheets over the furniture in the alcoves hung still and white like the furniture was holding its breath, and at the far end the sealed guest room sat behind its shelving units and its two stacked crates, exactly as she had left it, exactly as Marguerite's email had warned her off it, do not touch the crates in the hall, and she stood there with the flashlight beam shaking slightly and made herself look at all of it anyway.

"Hello?" she said, and it came out loud in the quiet, embarrassingly loud, the voice of a woman who had watched too many movies and knew it. "I know someone's in there. I heard you."

Nothing. The house ticked. A draft moved somewhere, cool and thin, and she felt it on her ankles before she found where it came from, which was high up, near the ceiling, where a narrow vent sat above the sealed doorway, one of those tall Victorian vents built for a heating system nobody had used in a hundred years, and the draft was coming down from it, which meant it was coming from somewhere above, which meant the attic, which meant the footsteps had been real and had gone up, not down. She stood under the vent for a moment with her hand raised into the moving air, feeling like a fool and doing it anyway, and the air smelled faintly of dust and of something else, something human and close, and she lowered her hand and turned around and there was nothing to turn around to, just the hall and the sheets and the crates, and she said, to nobody, "Wonderful," and went back to bed and did not sleep much after that.

* * *

The next time was two nights later, and this time she was ready for it, or she told herself she was ready for it, which is a different thing, and when the sounds came again, past midnight, a cough and a drawer and then, after a longer silence than before, the careful grind of a shelf being moved a half inch, she got up and did not turn on any lights and did not take the flashlight either, and she positioned herself in the deep dark of the doorway across from the sealed guest room, where the sheet-draped armoire made a shadow deep enough to stand in, and she waited.

She waited maybe forty minutes, which is a long time to stand still in a cold hallway in a cardigan over your nightshirt, and she used the time to be angry, which kept her warm. She was angry at the granola bar and its tidy torn end, and at the trap she had baited for a mouse while a grown man ate granola bars three feet away, and at Marguerite's one-line email, and at Bernard, vaguely, on the principle that some of this was probably his fault, and she had worked herself into a fine cold fury by the time the shelf finally moved.

It moved slowly, and then the door opened a few inches, and a man came through the gap sideways, the way you do when you have been living behind a wardrobe for a while and have learned the angles of your own door. He was tall, and he was holding a paper bag against his chest with both hands like a man carrying something breakable, and he had a headlamp pushed up on his forehead, switched off, and he took two soft steps into the hall and stopped, because Elly said, from the dark, "Turn around slowly."

He did not scream, which she would remember later and be oddly grateful for. He turned around slowly, and she stepped out of the shadow so he could see her, and he looked at her, and then he said, in a voice that came out flat with disbelief, "Elly."

Which was her line. She had a whole speech prepared, about trespassing and police and Marguerite, and it died in her throat, because she was looking at his face in the thin light from the bathroom window at the end of the hall, and she knew it. She knew it from a wedding twenty years ago, a mutual friend's, a long table and too much wine, when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-six and they had argued, loudly, appallingly, about something she could no longer remember, only that he had been insufferable and certain and quick, and she had told a friend at the time that she would rather be set on fire than speak to him again, and here he was, coming sideways out of a sealed room in her employer's house with a paper bag.

"Tate," she said.