His Maid, His Obsession

Chapter 2

The Mansion at the End of the World

The drive was six hours.

Six hours of watching Kentucky dissolve into something I did not recognize. The highways got wider. The trees got thicker then thinner then disappeared entirely into stretches of flat open land that seemed to go on forever. I watched it all through the tinted window like someone watching a film they had not chosen — present but disconnected, there but not quite real.

The two men in the front seat did not speak to me. Not once. Not a single word for six hours. They spoke to each other occasionally in low voices I could not make out and once the taller one took a phone call and said yes sir three times and hung up. I sat in the back with my bag on my lap and my mother's photograph pressed between my palms and I tried very hard not to think too much about what I had just agreed to.

Tried and failed, mostly.

I thought about the papers I had signed. I thought about the things I had understood and the things I had not. I thought about the confidentiality clause — three paragraphs I had skimmed because my hands were shaking — and wondered what exactly I was not supposed to talk about. I thought about the twelve month duration and did the math quietly in my head. Twelve months. If the pay was as good as Raymond said — and Raymond would not have sold me cheaply, that much I knew about him — then twelve months could mean enough money to change things. Enough for a deposit somewhere. Enough for a semester of college at least. Enough to put some distance between myself and Millhaven that was not just geographical.

I was very good at finding reasons to keep breathing.

My mother taught me that too.

We arrived after dark.

I had fallen into a shallow uncomfortable half-sleep somewhere around hour four and I woke to the car slowing, the engine dropping to a quiet purr, and the crunch of gravel beneath the tires. I sat up and pressed my face toward the window and what I saw made me forget, just for one disoriented moment, every single thing that had brought me here.

The mansion rose out of the darkness like something that had always existed and simply waited for the night to frame it properly. It was enormous in a way that the word enormous does not adequately cover. It sprawled — that was the only word for it — across grounds so vast that the edges of it disappeared into the darkness beyond the reach of the exterior lights. Those lights were everywhere, warm and golden, positioned along the stone facade and up through the manicured trees lining the approach and along a circular driveway that could have comfortably fit every vehicle in Millhaven with room to spare.

There were columns at the entrance. Actual columns, like something belonging to a government building or a museum. The windows were tall and arched and the ones on the upper floors glowed softly from within. There was a fountain in the center of the driveway — not running at this hour but grand even in stillness, a tiered stone structure that probably cost more than Raymond Spears had lost gambling in his entire lifetime.

I thought, sitting there with my secondhand bag on my lap and my dead mother's photograph in my hands, that I had made a mistake about where I was going. That there had been some error. That people like me did not arrive at places like this.

But the car stopped. The taller man got out and opened my door. And I stepped out onto the gravel of the Dallas estate because there was nothing else to do.

The night air was cool and carried the smell of cut grass and something floral I could not identify. Up close the mansion was even more overwhelming. I stood at the base of those front steps and looked up at the entrance and felt the particular smallness of a person who has grown up in a house with a leaning porch and a water-stained ceiling standing before something that existed in an entirely different category of the world.

The shorter man took my bag from me without asking.

"Follow me," the taller one said. First words he had spoken to me directly in six hours.

I followed.

Inside was worse. Better. Both at once.

The entrance hall alone was larger than the entire ground floor of the house I had grown up in. The floors were pale marble that reflected the light of a chandelier overhead — not a small chandelier, not a modest one, but the kind that exists to make a statement about the kind of people who live beneath it. There was a sweeping staircase to the right, a hallway stretching ahead that seemed to continue indefinitely, and a silence so complete and so expansive that I was suddenly aware of the sound of my own breathing.

There were no other staff visible. No one was moving through the hallways. No sound from anywhere in the building except our footsteps on the marble and the distant tick of a clock somewhere I could not locate.

The taller man led me up the staircase and down a hallway lined with artwork I did not know how to look at properly — large canvases in heavy frames, landscapes and abstracts and one portrait of a man in a dark suit whose eyes followed me in the particular way of painted eyes in large houses. At the end of the hallway he opened a door and stood back.

"You will sleep here tonight," he said. "Someone will come for you in the morning."

I stepped inside.

The guest room was larger than my bedroom in Millhaven by a factor that felt almost insulting. There was a bed with a headboard that touched the ceiling, dressed in white linen so crisp it looked like it had never been touched. There was a writing desk, an armchair, heavy drapes at the window, a private bathroom through a door to the left. A small vase of fresh flowers on the nightstand.

Fresh flowers. For a maid they had collected from a porch in rural Kentucky that same afternoon.

The taller man set my bag just inside the door.

"Good night," he said, and pulled the door closed behind him.

I stood in the center of that room for a long time without moving.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed — carefully, like I was not sure I was allowed — and I put my mother's photograph on the nightstand beside the flowers and I looked at her face and I said, very quietly, "I don't know what I'm doing, Mama."

She did not answer. She never would again. But I kept the photograph facing me anyway because even a silent mother is better than no mother at all.

I did not undress. I lay on top of the white linen in my clothes with my shoes on and I stared at the ceiling — no water stains, no cracks, just smooth perfect plaster — and I let myself feel, just for that hour in the dark, everything I had been holding back since the moment Raymond said find somewhere else to live.

I cried quietly into the pillow so that even if anyone was listening — and in a house this large, who knew — they would not hear it.

You are going to be okay. You are going to figure this out. You are going to survive this and come out the other side of it with something worth having.

I had kept that promise for two years already.

I intended to keep it for whatever came next.

Sleep came eventually. Shallow and restless and full of half-formed dreams that dissolved the moment I reached for them. I woke twice — once to a sound somewhere in the house I could not identify, once to nothing at all, just the particular alertness of a body in an unfamiliar place. Each time I lay still in the darkness and listened until I was satisfied and closed my eyes again.

By the time pale morning light began pressing through the edges of the heavy drapes I had given up on sleep entirely. I sat up, changed into the cleanest clothes I had packed, washed my face again, and sat in the armchair by the window with my mother's photograph in my lap and waited.

The knock at the door came at eight in the morning.

It was a young man I had not seen before, carrying a tray with breakfast on it — eggs, toast, orange juice, a small pot of coffee. He set it on the writing desk without making eye contact, said "Ma'am" in a voice barely above a whisper, and left before I could say anything at all.

Ma'am.

I was twenty years old and someone had called me ma'am.

I ate slowly, more out of necessity than appetite. I had not eaten anything since the previous afternoon and my body had started making its objections quietly known somewhere around hour three of the drive. The eggs were better than any eggs I had ever made myself. The toast was thick and golden. The coffee was the kind of coffee that makes you understand why people talk about coffee the way they do.

I ate everything on the tray and felt marginally more capable of facing whatever was coming.

She arrived at half past eight.

I heard her before I saw her — the precise unhurried click of heels on marble in the hallway outside, the kind of footsteps that belong to someone who has never once in their life questioned whether they had the right to take up space. The door opened without a knock.

The woman who walked in was in her late forties and she wore it the way certain women do — not fighting it, not performing youth, but carrying her age like a deliberate choice. She was tall, impeccably dressed in a dark fitted blazer and trousers, her hair pulled back from a face that was all sharp angles and careful composure. She wore no jewelry except a single gold watch on her left wrist. She did not smile.

She looked at me the way you look at something you have purchased and are now assessing for quality.

I stood up from the armchair because sitting felt wrong under that gaze.

"You are Glande," she said. Not a question.

"Yes ma'am."

"I am Eleanor Dallas." She said it the way people say names that are supposed to mean something. "This is my home. You will follow my instructions without question. You will not discuss your employment here with anyone outside these walls. You will not use your personal phone in the working areas of the house." She paused, her eyes moving over me in a quick clinical sweep. "Do you understand?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Good. Bring your things."

She turned and walked out.

I grabbed my bag and my mother's photograph and I followed Eleanor Dallas down the hallway and toward whatever was waiting for me on the other side of this enormous impossible house.

I did not know yet that I would walk into a room at the end of a quiet corridor and find a man who would undo me completely.

I just followed her heels on the marble and breathed and told myself I was going to be okay.

I was still telling myself that when she stopped at a door at the far end of the east wing, turned the handle, and looked back at me with an expression I could not read.

"He is mentally ill," she said quietly. Almost gently. "Be careful."

Then she walked away and left me standing alone in front of that door.