Rebecca, for her part, was having a perfectly ordinary morning. She had noticed that Mr. Caleb’s door was closed, which sometimes happened when he had a lot of work, so she left him to it. She cleaned the sitting room, dusted the hallway, tidied the kitchen after breakfast. She watered the plant in the corner of the sitting room the way Grace’s folder had instructed: not too much, just enough to dampen the soil.
She was calm. She moved through the house the way she always did, quietly, carefully, without rushing.
But the word she had heard through the dining room doorway 2 days ago was still with her in the way certain things lodge themselves in the back of the mind and stay there no matter how many ordinary tasks you pile on top of them.
Victoria.
She had not told anyone. There was no one to tell. And besides, she was not sure what she would say. I heard my employer’s old friend mention my mother’s name at lunch.
It was not strange. Victoria was not an unusual name. It meant nothing.
She went about her work.
At 10:00, she was in the upstairs hallway changing the towels in the bathroom when she noticed that the storage room door at the end of the hall was open. She had not opened it. She had never been inside it. Grace’s folder had said the storage room was Mr. Caleb’s private space and was not part of the regular cleaning unless he specifically asked.
But the door was standing slightly open, and something had shifted on the bottom shelf. She could see from the doorway that a box had been moved, pulled forward from the back and then pushed back, not quite as far as before. She could see the gap it had left in the dust on the shelf.
She looked at it for a moment.
She would not go in. It was not her space.
She reached in and pulled the door shut with 1 finger and went back to the towels.
She was halfway down the stairs when she stopped.
She did not know why she stopped. There was no sound, no movement, nothing that should have made her pause. She simply stopped on the fifth step from the top, her hand on the railing, and looked down at the hallway below.
The study door was still closed.