The Off-Season House

Val took the house-sitting job out of spite. There was no other honest word for it.

The colleague in question was Velma Shelton. Velma had gotten the promotion in March, the one Val had spent two years angling for. Then in April, at the quarterly meeting, Velma had stood up in front of forty people and called Val's failed product launch "a useful learning experience." Val had quit the same week. Nine months later, she was twenty-eight years old, unemployed, and accepting a favor request from her old rival like a fool.

The message had come through a mutual friend. Velma needed someone to watch a house in Sands End, on the Baltic coast, for three weeks in the dead of winter. Nobody local wanted it. Off-season. Frozen lake. Nothing to do.

Val said yes before she'd even thought about why.

She knew why, of course. She wanted to be the one doing Velma the favor. She wanted Velma to owe her something, even something this small, even something Velma would never think about again. Spite, pure and simple. It wasn't noble. It wasn't wise. But it got her on a train north with a duffel bag and a grocery run, and that counted for something.

The train had other plans. It sat outside Rostock for forty minutes with no announcement, no apology, nothing. Val missed her connection and spent two hours on a platform bench eating a stale pretzel. By the time she'd rented a car, it was past four in the afternoon, and the winter dark was coming down like a lid.

The drive took another hour. The GPS gave up twice. She found the gravel road off the coast road by luck more than anything, a gap between pines with a wooden post and a number that matched the instructions in her email.

Gravel crunched under the tires for a long, long time. A kilometer at least. The pines closed overhead and the world went black except for her headlights.

Then the trees opened up, and there it was.

The house was glass. All of it, or nearly all. Two low stories of dark timber and enormous panes, set back from the shore of a lake that was frozen solid, white and flat to the far shore. Moonlight came off the ice and made the whole building glow faintly, like something lit from inside by a bulb that had almost died.

And at the end of the gravel drive, where it met the coast road, a single streetlight flickered.

On. Off. On. Off. Not a rhythm. Not random either. Some third thing.

Val sat in the parked car for a moment and looked at it. It was the only light for miles, she realized. The coast road had no lamps. The neighboring properties were dark summer houses, shuttered until April. One flickering streetlight at the mouth of a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. She should have found it eerie. Mostly she found it ugly. Somebody had installed a streetlight at the end of a private drive, and now it was dying, and nobody would come fix it until spring, because that was the off-season for you.

She grabbed her bags and let herself in with the code from the email.

Inside, the house was warm and empty and smelled faintly of new wood. Furniture she'd never be allowed to sit on in Velma's actual presence. A kitchen with appliances that probably had never cooked anything. She found the bedroom, made the bed with her own sheets because she didn't trust anybody else's, and unpacked.

Then she went looking for the sauna.

The listing had mentioned it. A private sauna jutting out over the lake on stilts, with a hole cut in the ice below for the hardy. The email from Velma's assistant said the owner kept it stocked. Val had brought a towel of her own anyway, because she didn't trust anybody else's towels either.

The path down to the lake was shoveled and scattered with grit. That struck her as odd. Nobody had mentioned maintenance. The sauna itself was a low dark building on thick posts, its deck hanging over the white ice. Smoke smell, woodsmoke, faint but real.

Light in the window.

Val stopped halfway across the deck. Somebody was already in there. She knocked on the door frame, once, hard.

"Hello?"

The door opened from the inside. A man stood there wrapped in a towel, mid-thirties maybe, tall, sandy hair going gray at the temples early. Steam rolled out behind him. He looked at her with what she'd later describe to herself as mild inconvenience, like she'd interrupted him mid-thought and not mid-sauna.

"You're the house sitter," he said.

"I'm the house sitter," Val agreed. "Who are you?"

"Terence. I train horses at the stable up the coast road." He jerked a thumb in a direction that could have been any direction. "The owner lets me use the sauna. Always has. I come most evenings in winter."

Val crossed her arms. The cold was getting into her coat.

"That's funny," she said. "Because the arrangement I was given was private use. Whole property. Whole lake front. Three weeks."

"Whole property, sure." Terence stepped back and let her see the interior. Benches, a stove, a bucket, the works. "But the sauna's mine by old agreement. Ask the owner. She'll tell you."

She. Val filed that away. The email had said nothing about gender, or neighbors, or agreements.

"Then I'll ask her," Val said. "Tomorrow. Tonight I'm going to stand here looking cold while you decide whether you're leaving."

Terence laughed. Actually laughed, short and surprised.

"You're blunt."

"It's a character flaw I've been encouraged to keep."

"I'll go, then." He gathered his clothes from a peg, stepped past her onto the deck. "For what it's worth, I don't fight over it either way. It's a sauna, not a kingdom. But I've been using it since before you were hired, and I'd rather you heard it from me than found out halfway through a nice evening."

"That's almost considerate," Val said.

"Almost is my best setting." He went down the deck steps toward the lake path, barefoot, in the dark, in January. She watched him go and noticed he didn't put his boots on. Didn't head up toward the coast road, either. He walked out along the shore path, north, and the dark took him.

Val stood on the deck a while longer. The streetlight at the end of the drive flickered across the frozen lake, a long way off now, a small stubborn strobe.

She went back to the house and called the owner. It went to voicemail. She left a message, polite but pointed, the kind of message you leave when you want it on paper later: this is Val, I've arrived, a gentleman named Terence says he has standing permission to use the sauna, please confirm the arrangement at your convenience.

At her convenience. Right. She hung up and stood in the glass-walled living room with her coat still on, looking at the lake.

It was while she was standing there that the thing about the footprints came back to her. She'd seen them without seeing them, the way you do. Damp footprints on the sauna deck, and inside on the boards by the door. His. Bare feet, obviously, he'd been in the sauna. But here was the thing that didn't fit.

She'd watched him leave. He'd walked out onto the lake path, north along the shore, toward the ice. Not back up the gravel road. Not toward any car. And when she'd arrived, there had been no other car in the yard, no tire tracks on the fresh grit, nothing but her own.

His damp footprints on the deck went one direction. Down the steps. Toward the ice.

The stable he'd mentioned was up the coast road. That was a walk of kilometers, in January, at night, barefoot, and the coast road had no shoulder to speak of and no lights except one flickering streetlight that wasn't anywhere near his path.

Maybe he kept shoes stashed somewhere. Maybe there was a boat under the deck, frozen in, some shortcut across the lake to a road on the far side. Maybe a dozen ordinary things.

Val stood in the dark glass room and counted the ordinary things and got to about four before she ran out.

She checked her phone. No signal. One bar, then none, then one, like the streetlight. On, off, on, off.

"Well," she said out loud, to the empty house, because talking to yourself was a habit and she wasn't going to fight it. "Spite brought me here. Fine. Spite can get me through three weeks."

She made tea in a kitchen that cost more than her last year's salary. Through the enormous windows she could see the sauna, dark now, and beyond it the lake, white and silent, and past that the far pines, and past those nothing at all.

The streetlight kept flickering. On, off. On, off.

She went to bed and did not sleep well, and this, she reflected somewhere around two in the morning, was somehow also Velma Shelton's fault.

Morning came gray and thin. Val drank her tea standing up, which felt right for the mood. Then she put on her coat and boots and walked down the gravel drive to the streetlight.

It was still flickering. On, off. On, off. Not random, she decided, standing under it with her breath fogging. Rhythmic. Like a metronome. Like something breathing, or counting.

"You'll stand there all day if you wait for it to settle."

Terence was coming up the drive from the lake path. Boots this time, and a coat. He looked as though he had slept fine, which annoyed her a little.

"You walked on ice at midnight," she said. "Barefoot."

"I did."

"And this morning you have boots."

"Morning has different rules," he said, and didn't explain.

Val pointed at the light. "This thing. It flickers in a pattern. It's been doing it since I got here. Either the town owes the electric company an apology or you know something about it."

Terence looked at the light the way people look at an old dog that keeps finding its way home. "I know it's been doing that for eleven years," he said. "Long before you, long before the current owner. It flickers and nobody fixes it and nobody ever really tries."

"Eleven years."

"Give or take." He turned to face her properly. "You called the owner. I'd guess you got voicemail."

"I did."

"You'll keep getting voicemail. Velma travels. Or doesn't answer. Depends on the month." He said it flat, no drama in it. "Look. This house was my mother's. She sold it ten years ago, after my father died. The buyer wanted it furnished as it was, staff agreement for the sauna, the lot. My mother's dead now, four years this February. But I kept a key, and I kept the habit, and I come back most evenings in the off-season because it's the only place on this coast that still feels like somewhere I lived instead of somewhere I visit."

Val stood there processing that. Thirty-two years old, she thought, mother gone four years, and he still