Chapter 3
I hadn't always fed them through the bars.
That was the part that would have been easiest to explain if he'd let me stay long enough to say it. I used to come through the front door. I had a key. It was silver and small and it opened the side entrance by the laundry, and for eight months I used it three afternoons a week to let myself in when Mrs. Alton, the day housekeeper, left for the afternoon.
I was the extra help. Not the nanny. The estate had a nanny once, then she quit in October, and after that it was just Mrs. Alton until four, and then a night lady named Jen who was supposed to come at seven. I was the one who folded the little pink and blue pajamas and wiped the counters and sometimes stayed to watch Rosaline and Camille when Mr. Whitaker had a dinner downtown. I knew where the rabbit lived on the windowsill. I knew Camille wouldn't sleep without it tucked against the bars.
I told him that night in November. I told Mrs. Alton first, actually. I'd put the girls down at eight-thirty and heard Camille cry an hour later and found their snack cups empty in the nursery fridge. Just milk filmed over. No fruit, no crackers. I said to Mrs. Alton the next morning, "They didn't get their bedtime snack again." She said Jen must have forgotten, she'd talk to him. I told him, too, the next time he was in the kitchen getting coffee. I said, "The girls were asking for food after you left." He didn't look up from his phone. He said, "Jen has it covered."
Jen stopped coming the first week of December. Nobody told me. I showed up on a Tuesday and the side door was locked and my key didn't turn. Mrs. Alton said they'd changed the schedule, that I wasn't needed on nights anymore. That was the last time I was authorized to be inside.
Inside, the house ran on a clock that didn't include the nursery after dark.
I knew it because I'd watched it for months. At six, Mrs. Alton made dinner and left portions covered in the main kitchen. At seven, whoever was on nights was supposed to reheat and bring a tray up the back stairs — milk, applesauce, toast cut small — and stay until the girls fell asleep. At eight, the downstairs lights went off except for his office. After Jen left, there was no one on nights. The tray stopped coming. The estate was quiet in a way a house with two toddlers shouldn't have been quiet. I would drive past on my way home from the gas station on Franklin Pike and see the nursery window glowing amber, and then dark, and I could tell by the stillness that no one had gone in.
That night — the night he saw me — it wasn't the first bowl. The bowl I held was dented on the rim because Rosaline had knocked it against the iron the week before when she reached too fast. I'd brought soup the Tuesday before that, and oatmeal the Saturday before that. I never stayed long. Just long enough to push the bowl through where the bars twisted wide enough, to say "Eat slowly, sweethearts," to watch them scoop with their fingers because I hadn't brought spoons at first and learned they needed them. The pink rabbit had been there every time, propped on the sill like a guard. Camille always moved it aside to make room for the bowl. Rosaline held it against her chest while she ate, as if someone might take it.
He didn't see the pattern through the camera. He saw one night. He heard one sentence — "Because someone inside isn't" — and thought it was an accusation I was making up on the spot. It wasn't. It was an answer to a schedule I'd watched fail for three weeks.
I was already back on the sidewalk off the property when the nursery camera kept recording. I knew it was recording because of the small red light I'd seen from outside, just above the window frame. It blinked every three seconds. I counted it while the girls ate.
Inside, he stood in the hallway between the kitchen and the nursery with his phone in his hand. The footage was on it now. He'd rewound it. He could see me in the grainy night-vision, my olive coat, the bowl. He could also see what happened at 7:15, at 8:00, at 8:45. Nothing. No tray. No hands. The nursery door never opened after Mrs. Alton left at four. The girls had played, they had whined, they had gone to the little fridge themselves. Rosaline tried to open an applesauce pouch with her teeth. Camille cried.
He checked the kitchen. I knew that kitchen. The stainless trays were still covered from dinner, untouched for the nursery. The duty log on the counter — Mrs. Alton always initialed it, Jen had initialed it — was blank for that night. No initials. No entry. The house hadn't just missed one snack. It had missed the person whose job it was to give it.
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His phone rang. It was Mrs. Alton, calling because the camera had sent her an alert, too. She was the emergency contact on the system. He had to answer it.
He stood there in his dark suit with the light from the refrigerator on his face, and he had to explain why two two-year-olds had been waiting at a barred window for a woman he'd let go to feed them.
