A House for Keeping

by Matteson Wynn

  “Hall and Oates? I thought they were Thor and Heimdahl?”

  I blushed a little. “You heard that, huh? I haven’t landed on the right combo yet, but give me time, I’ll get it.”

  She gave me an amused grin. “I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, don’t worry about them. A certain lack of privacy comes with being on the council—we’ve always got various people trailing after us. But good assistants do have their uses.” She lowered her voice and winked at me, “Watch this.”

  She turned and called, “In about ten minutes, I’ll need some more tea.”

  Both Hall and Oates nodded.

  Sarah turned back to me, grinning. “Every job has its perks! Speaking of which, let’s talk about the house and being its housekeeper.”

  We were standing at the front door. She turned around and faced into the house, like we’d just stepped inside. The doors to the rooms on either side of the hallway were still closed, as they’d been every time I’d seen them so far.

  Sarah gestured to the door on the left side of the hallway. “Let’s start over here. After you.”

  I walked to the door and turned the knob. The door opened easily—no comments from the house.

  “Oh cool!” I strode into a parlor/sitting room. Of course, the ceiling, floor, and walls were made of wood. It was a little dark, so I asked, “Is it okay if I open the curtains?”

  “Of course,” said Sarah. She stood just inside the doorway, sipping her tea.

  I walked to the window, whisked open the curtains, and turned around to survey the room. Under the window was a small table and two chairs. There was a fireplace opposite the door, and arranged in front of it was a horseshoe-shaped seating area consisting of two couches and an armchair, with a low coffee table in the middle and end tables by the ends of the couches. A few other random chairs were placed around the room, including a rocking chair that sat near the fireplace.

  There were built-in shelves and cabinets lining the walls. My fingers itched to open the cabinets and explore them, but I didn’t think this was the time for it. Maybe later.

  I wondered why we didn’t have dinner in here last night. The dark wood everywhere gave it a cozy feeling that certainly would’ve made last night less awkward. Out loud I said, “It’s the kind of place that makes you want to have a bunch of friends over for a board-game night.”

  “You’re not far off the mark. At one time, it was a formal sitting room for entertaining visitors,” said Sarah. “There’s all sorts of interesting oddities in here that have collected over the years. You should take a peek in the cabinets.”

  It was so close to what I’d been thinking a few minutes ago that I wondered if my curiosity was obvious. Maybe Nor was right, and I needed to find a game face. I smiled at Sarah and said, “Sure.”

  I walked over to the nearest wall. The built-in shelves went from the ceiling to a bit more than halfway down the wall, then the cabinets took up the rest of the space to the floor. I reached for the knob and twisted it.

  “I think it’s stuck,” I said.

  “Ah well, the house is old, and sometimes things stick. I can have Meg take a look at it later. Maybe we should continue on,” said Sarah.

  I wasn’t about to give up my chance to get a peek that easily. “Hang on a sec,” I said. I gently worked the knob back and forth, muttering under my breath, “Come on sweetie. You can do it.” With a tiny snick, the latch gave and the door swung open, giving us a view of the crammed contents.

  Behind me, I heard Sarah take a breath. I turned and smiled, “I know! Pretty cool, right? Just look at all this stuff!” The cabinet had a series of cubbyholes at the top and a few widely spaced shelves underneath. Every inch was crammed with a variety of bric-a-brac. Some of it looked really, really old.

  I said, “Well, this is an antique dealer’s dream. You could spend a whole afternoon in here just searching through the cubbies.”

  “Speaking of searching, you don’t happen to see a pair of eyeglasses anywhere do you?” Sarah was pacing around the room, peering under chairs and tables. “I had them earlier today, and I can’t find them. I must’ve put them down somewhere when I was walking around the house earlier.”

  I gave a last longing glance at the contents of the cabinet, then shut the door with a sigh. I gave it a little pat of thanks before I walked over to join Sarah.

  As we searched around, Sarah said, “Let me tell you a little more about the position. While the title is that of housekeeper, you wouldn’t be responsible for cleaning, if you don’t want to be. The housekeeper is expected to work with the house to help it stay functional. The house will communicate its needs to you, and you will see that those needs are met. But how you do that is your decision. You can hire any staff you need. In the past, some housekeepers have preferred to do everything themselves, right down to actual housekeeping tasks like cleaning, while others have preferred to act as an overseer.”

  “As long as the staff are Fosters?”

  “Correct. From time to time, different Fosters will visit the house. I, for example, and other members of the council are likely to visit. In those instances, you would make sure that everything is ready for our visit, that food has been ordered, that kind of thing.”

  “Kind of like an innkeeper?”

  “A bit, yes. Again, you can be as hands-on as you like, or you can staff it out. The most important thing is that things here run smoothly. And that the house is happy. How you accomplish that is entirely up to you.”

  I had a lot of experience from the diner that would easily transfer to running the house. But I had a million questions I wanted to ask, not the least of which was how did one keep a living house happy? What kinds of things did it need? Did it eat? Did it have special care instructions? I couldn’t imagine what they’d be. I mean, maybe it preferred lemon-scented furniture polish. Oh god, maybe it had allergies, like to certain kinds of cleaning products. Who knew.

  I shook my head and reined in my thoughts. I wasn’t actually interested in the job, and I wouldn’t let her suck me into considering it.

  We’d been looking for several minutes, and we still hadn’t found any glasses. Sarah said, “I don’t think they’re in here. I’ll find them later. Let’s continue the tour, shall we?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Okay, where next?” I said, following her out into the hall.

  Sarah nodded at the closed door on the other side of the hallway, near the stairs.

  “Let’s go in there next,” Sarah said. Teacup in hand, she moved past me and over to the door. Hall appeared, topped off her tea, and retreated. Oates was still skulking about at the far end of the hallway.

  She tried to turn the doorknob one-handed, but it was huge, and she had trouble getting a grip on it.

  “Let me,” I said.

  She shot me a grateful look and stepped back.

  I used two hands and tried to open the door. Though the knob felt incredibly heavy, it turned when I applied some effort. But when I pushed, the door stuck shut.

  “Oh dear. This door is always so finicky. I swear, you’d think a living house wouldn’t have the same problems that regular houses do. But wood is wood, I suppose. Well, if we can’t get in this way, we can go through the other door off the mudroom. That’s what we did earlier.”

  “It might be alright. Sometimes you have to kind of pull and lift up a bit with these older doors. The wood swells, and you just have to give it a little help.” I tried wiggling the door a bit, but it didn’t move much. Whispering “C’mon big fella,” I turned the knob, bent both knees, gave a tug up and a swift shove of my shoulder. The door groaned at me, but it scraped forward, and swung open.

  When I walked into the room, I wooshed out a “Whoa.”

  The room was huge. It ran the length of the house, and like every other room, was all wood. But unlike the other rooms I’d seen so far, this room was empty.

  The windows were different in here, too. They ran in long verticals, near
ly floor to ceiling. For some reason, the curtains were open on all the windows, and I wondered if the house had opened them for me, since I’d opened the curtains in the other room.

  Though the windows let in plenty of light, the sunlight didn’t have much to do, other than illuminate the drifting dust motes and the dark wood of the floor and walls. A few forlorn ceiling-to-floor bookcases lined the walls, but they just looked lonely, devoid of all but a few books as they were.

  The click-click of Sarah’s heels changed to a more hollow, echoing clomp-clomp sound as she entered the room behind me.

  “What is this place?” I asked, my voice bouncing around the room.

  “It’s had various uses over the years. At one time or another it’s been a library, a study, a music room, even a dance room. Recently, it’s fallen into disuse.”

  Looking at the polished floor, all I wanted to do was to whip off my shoes and see if I could slide from one end of the room to another. Instead, I walked to a window in the far wall and sighed at the view of the forest. “I can see why someone would look out these windows and be inspired to make music.”

  Sarah smiled. “You could easily make this a music room again. One of the benefits of being the housekeeper is that the position comes with a substantial decorating budget, which is renewed annually. The housekeeper has absolute autonomy in redecorating the house, so you could turn any room into anything you want, really.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I’d have thought you historical council people would be more hands-on than that, given that this is a historic place and all.”

  “We are deeply grateful to our housekeepers for their service and consider it a great honor to make their stay here as comfortable as possible. That, of course, includes encouraging them to make this place as much their personal dream home as they can. A happy housekeeper makes for a happy house.”

  From the little I knew about historical preservation, that didn’t sound at all right to me. But this wasn’t an ordinary house, so it sort of made sense that the usual rules wouldn’t apply.

  “That’s nice of you.” I gave her my most bland smile and tried not to let her see how much the idea of a huge redecorating budget made the wannabe designer part of me bounce with glee.

  Sarah took a sip of her tea. “If Meg stays on as housekeeper, I understand that Doug has been lobbying for her to turn this into a sort of rec room. Something about a big screen TV, video game consoles, a pool table, a foosball table, and so on.”

  I smiled, “That sounds like Doug.” I was sort of surprised that he planned on staying here with Meg, though.

  “In addition to the redecorating budget, the position comes with a generous salary—think more along the lines of top-level management.”

  “For a housekeeper job?”

  “Next to being a member of the council, the housekeeper position is the most prestigious job in the family. So of course the pay is commensurate with the level of prestige.”

  Well, now it was making sense to me why Meg wanted the position so bad. Being a regular housekeeper didn’t seem like her thing. Wads of cash and a whopping ton of clout, now that sounded right up her alley.

  Sarah watched me as I drifted around the room. I trailed my fingers along one of the shelves. Was it my imagination or did Sarah just seem to flinch a bit?

  I decided to try an experiment. I reached for a book, watching Sarah out of the corner of my eye. Yup, she tensed. It was subtle, but it was there.

  Huh. I turned my attention to the shelves in the room. There wasn’t a lot to see. I reached to put the book back and nearly dropped it. An arrow had appeared in the grain of the wood on the shelf in front of me. It was pointing to the left.

  I pulled down the other book on the shelf and flipped through it while I thought.

  Okay, the house was trying to tell me something. And it was being stealthy about it. The house wasn’t talking to me. Instead, it was making sure that only I saw what it was communicating. My guess was that it didn’t want Sarah to know what it was doing. Interesting.

  “Old books are neat,” I said. I cringed inwardly at how lame I sounded. Sarah seemed to buy it, though.

  She said, “Well feel free to look around as much as you like.” She was smiling, but there was an alertness to her that hadn’t been there before.

  She’d said that she was required to give me a speech about being housekeeper. I wondered if she was also required to let me look around as much as I wanted. If so, maybe she was just tense because she wanted to move things along.

  I returned the book and walked to my left. When I got to the next bookshelf, another arrow was waiting for me, pointing to the left. I didn’t want to look obvious, so I paused where I was. This bookshelf only had one book on it. Again, I took it down, and again Sarah flinched. What was she worried about?

  I meandered from bookcase to bookcase, seemingly fascinated by the books I was finding, but really just following the arrows. The house led me to the far end of the room. With no windows along the back wall, the shadows pooled in this part of the room. When I turned to look at her, Sarah was standing at the other end in a beam of sunlight, sipping her tea. The brightness at her end just reinforced how dim the area was where I was standing.

  I turned to look at the next bookcase. There was no arrow on the shelf that was at my eye level. There wasn’t anything else on the shelf either. In fact, the last two bookcases back here appeared to be empty.

  The floor under my right foot jiggled a little. I looked down. The wooden floorboards had rearranged themselves to form an arrow pointing toward the bottom shelf of the bookcase.

  It was too dark to see what was down there from where I was standing. How was I going to get down there without looking obvious?

  “Looks like I’ve run out of books,” I called to Sarah.

  “Ready to move on with the tour?” she asked.

  “Sure. Let me just tie my shoelace,” I said.

  I knelt on my unbruised knee and fiddled with my shoelace. I kept my head angled toward my shoe, but slid my gaze around me, trying to figure out what the house wanted me to know.

  A small glint caught my attention. To my right, deep in the shadows, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, was a pair of eyeglasses.

  When I looked up, Sarah was still sipping her tea, trying to cover the fact that she was keeping an eye on me. Good thing it was so dim at my end and so bright at hers because she couldn’t see me that well.

  “Might as well do the other one while I’m down here,” I mumbled loud enough that she could hear me. I switched feet and started retying my other shoe while my thoughts scurried around my head.

  Okay, I had to figure out what was going on, fast.

  I sent a glance Sarah’s way. She strolled over to the window next to the door and looked outside, while she waited for me to get it together.

  She was definitely checking out what I was doing. But she didn’t seem particularly alarmed at where I was kneeling.

  I realized two things.

  One, Sarah didn’t know exactly where the glasses were, but she knew they were somewhere in the room. That’s why she’d been tensing when I pulled things off the shelves. It also explained why she didn’t look any more tense than usual at my current location.

  And two, the glasses hadn’t wound up where they were by accident. No way could Sarah have dropped and kicked her glasses all the way into the shelf without hearing or noticing.

  So someone had put the glasses there, likely on Sarah’s orders.

  Sarah had probably given the glasses to her assistants and told them to hide them somewhere in this room. You know, because the room was obviously empty. Nothing to see here. Best to just whip through and keep on going.

  It was especially smart, handing the glasses off to someone else. If she didn’t know exactly where they were, she couldn’t accidentally give away their location.

  But why go to all the trouble to hide the glasses in the first place? It made no sense. Unless, of cours
e, she was trying to see if the house would help me find them.

  Which was exactly what was happening.

  And that meant that despite what she said earlier, this was it.

  I was taking the test.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Son of a bitch. She flat out lied to me.

  Okay, fine. She wanted to play games? Well, game on, lady. I could play, too. I wasn’t sure how yet, but I was going to figure it out, fast.

  Whatever I decided to do, I was pretty sure that I shouldn’t leave the glasses behind. At the very least, the house wanted me to have them, and since it had gone to so much effort, I wanted to make it happy. Plus, having the glasses would give me some options. And I really needed some options because I still wasn’t sure exactly what game these people were playing.

  “Distract her, please,” I whispered to the house.

  Sarah was still standing in front of the window. She turned to look at me, and the curtain nearest to her swayed as though she’d bumped it. A shower of dust sprinkled down on her.

  “Oh dear,” she said, hastily stepping out of the way. She set her teacup on the windowsill and began brushing at her suit.

  While she was momentarily occupied, I made my move. The shadows worked to my advantage, obscuring my movement. Lightning quick, I reached over, snagged the glasses, and tucked them in the side of my shoe under my pant leg. I was already standing up by the time Sarah finished swiping away the dust on her skirt.

  “You okay?” I asked. My voice sounded strained to me, but she didn’t notice.

  “Just a little dust. It’s no problem.” She retrieved her teacup and turned to me. “Well, I think you’ve got an idea of the potential of this room, and of the overall decorating potential you get to wield as the housekeeper. Shall we continue on?”

  “Sure.”

  I had to physically restrain myself from stomping across the room.

  I was so angry that all I could do was smile and plot. I knew if I opened my mouth, yelling would commence, and any subtlety was going to go right out the window. So I plastered my “dealing with a customer-from-hell” smile on my face. And I used my anger to set the more devious section of my brain into motion.