The Turn of The Key

As Sandra and Bill leave the next day, Ellie runs after their car crying. When the car disappears, she falls to the ground. When Rowan tries to pick her up, Ellie’s fist hits the ground, and she accuses Rowan of hurting her. Rowan gives up and heads to the house with Petra. Maddie had disappeared into the woods before her parents left. In the house, Rowan flips through the thick instruction binder but can’t find anything about what to do if the children run off. She calls out to Maddie and Ellie but gets no response. When she gets back to the kitchen, Petra is standing on top of her highchair. Rowan runs to grab her, angrily scolding herself for not fastening the straps tightly enough. She worries Sandra may have seen the incident on camera. She decides to put her down for an early nap and search for Maddie and Ellie.

She first checks Sandra and Bill’s enormous bedroom. She looks out the large window, but there’s no sign of the children. She feels unsettled and decides to walk the dogs in the hopes of finding them. She heads down a path through the trees and comes to a pond. Rowan is relieved to find two small sets of footprints on the muddy banks. She follows the footprints into the woods when suddenly she hears screams. She realizes they’re coming from the baby monitor and sprints back to the house with the dogs. The front door is open, even though she left it closed, and she runs upstairs to find Petra still asleep. She almost begins to cry in her relief and confusion, wondering where the screams came from.

Rowan hears footsteps in the house and heads downstairs to find Jean, who accuses Rowan of locking Maddie and Ellie out. She says she found them shivering outside. Rowan explains that she went out looking for them and left the door open, but Jean insists it was locked. Rowan angrily pushes past her and greets the girls, trying to make amends with Ellie, who has a bruise on her wrist from Rowan’s grip. Rowan apologizes but Ellie refuses to accept. When Jean leaves, Rowan locks all the doors to the outside and tries to talk Ellie and Maddie into watching a movie. They refuse and head to their room.

Her unraveling begins later that night after she leaves dinner outside Maddie and Ellie’s door when they refuse to come out. She sets up the iPad in the kitchen and watches as the girls eat in their room. After dinner, she tries to put Petra to bed but the baby becomes hysterical. Unable to calm her, Rowan eventually gives up and leaves the room. She next checks on Maddie and Ellie, who have barricaded the door with their furniture. She manages to knock it all down and finds them both sleeping. As she’s about to make a pizza, she hears a knocking at the glass window. When she looks out, she thinks she sees, as she says, “something whisk away” (125).

Several minutes later, Rowan hears another knock. She opens the door to the utility room and finds Jack, who has come to check on her. She invites him to stay for dinner and tells him with frustration everything that happened during the day. Petra is still crying, and he offers to tend to her. She listens through the baby monitor as Jack calms Petra. When he returns, he insists the children just have to get used to her. Rowan uses the opportunity to ask why there have been so many nannies. As Jack starts to answer, Sandra’s voice cuts in over the speaker system, asking Rowan how everything is going. Rowan gives her a watered-down version of the day’s events and asks her if the children are allowed to wander around the property without supervision. Sandra becomes defensive at Rowan’s line of questioning, insisting that the grounds were part of the reason she and Bill bought the property.

When Jack tries to leave after the conversation with Sandra, Rowan convinces him to stay. As they eat pizza and drink wine, Jack explains that Jean often tells the children superstitious folk tales, and they may have told some of them to the nannies. He adds that the au pairs want to be around other people and nightlife. Before he leaves for the night, he gives Rowan his cell number. Her sense of unease is magnified when she is unable to find the key over the doorframe of the utility room. She puts a door stopper under the door to prevent it from opening easily and heads to bed.

Rowan awakens suddenly just after three o’clock in the morning. She gets up to find out what woke her. She sees the downstairs hall lights are on and again hears creaking above her—prompting her to wonder if the locked door in her room leads anywhere. She peers through the keyhole, feeling cold air blow onto her face. She sits awake until she hears Petra wake up around six. She reaches for her necklace on the bedside table, but it isn’t there.

As Rowan tries to figure out the coffee machine, Jack arrives to walk the dogs. He asks if she slept well, and she’s momentarily taken aback, wondering what he knows. She quickly realizes he was asking politely and responds that she didn’t, partly because she couldn’t find the key to the back door. He moves the washing machine and pulls up the key. She is immediately suspicious of Jack, wondering what he might have to gain by scaring her. She rules out Jean as a possibility because, despite her obvious dislike for Rowan, she sincerely likes the children and wouldn’t want to leave the house unlocked. Rowan becomes panicked at the idea that there might be someone else who has access to the house.

She returns to Petra in the kitchen and then finds Maddie and Ellie in the playroom. She offers them a picnic and, to her surprise, they accept. As they head out, Rowan notes the bleak view and is surprised at how neglected the grounds are. As the girls leap onto some old swings, Rowan gets a call from her former flatmate, Rachel, who says she’s at a commune in India. Rowan tells her she moved out but is still paying rent on their place. She assures Rachel she’s doing well. They hang up and the girls lead Rowan to a garden enclosed inside a crumbling brick wall. Despite the locked door, Maddie and Ellie know how to open it. They enter a lush, overgrown garden punctuated with small greenhouses. At the center stands a creepy statue of a skeletal woman in ragged clothes that Rowan finds. The name Achlys is etched on the pedestal. Rowan wants to leave the garden immediately and gathers the girls.

Rowan and the children eat lunch by a burn or waterway­. However, Rowan’s forehead itches intensely from contact with a vine in the garden. She’s relieved to get back to the house, settling in with the girls to watch a movie after Petra falls asleep. Sandra’s voice comes over the speaker and, after Sandra explains to Rowan how to transfer the conversation to the phone, Rowan tells Sandra the day is going well. She gives the phone to Ellie and Maddie, quickly heading to the kitchen so as not to hover. As she’s comforting Ellie, who comes in with a sad expression saying she misses her mom, Maddie enters with the phone and a strange expression on her face. When Rowan takes the phone, Sandra angrily asks what they were doing in the locked garden. Sandra explains that it’s a poison garden—which is clearly outlined in the binder. It was created by the chemist who owned the house previously and contains only toxic plants. Rowan interrupts to explain that Maddie and Ellie know how to open the gate and have been there before. Sandra falls silent and asks to talk to Maddie again—whose eyes, Rowan says, are “full of malice” (159).

Rowan stays in the kitchen and looks up Achlys on the internet. She finds that she is the “Greek goddess of death, misery, and poison” (160). She then returns to the den, noting that Ellie looks anxious as if she knows she did something wrong, while Maddie wears an expression of triumph. Later, after dinner, Rowan asks if they knew the garden was dangerous. Ellie admits that Jean told them a little girl died there—the daughter of the previous owner—and he had gone insane as a result. He used to stay up all night pacing. Rowan assures them that ghost stories are nonsense. As she’s clearing Maddie’s plate, the alphabet spaghetti is shaped into the words “we hate you” (163). Rowan thinks at that moment that she hates them too, and it takes her back to how she used to feel about her mother, who always brushed off Rowan’s desire for affection. While Maddie seems to have everything anyone could want, Rowan sees a reflection of herself in the child. They carry the same anger and determination. Now she just needs to figure out Maddie’s plan.

Rowan finds herself to be exhausted, and when the girls pass up a bedtime story, she doesn’t argue. Instead, she puts on an audiobook with Ellie’s help. While Ellie allows Rowan to give her a bedtime kiss, Maddie simply pretends to be asleep. Just as she’s marveling at her success in getting everyone to bed, she thinks she sees something in Bill and Sandra’s room. As she brushes her hand along the comforter, she wonders what Sandra would think, she says, of “the audacity of this intrusion” (169). However, she knows that it’s difficult to see a darkened room through the camera. She finds Bill’s side of the bed and opens his bedside drawer. She judges his belongings to be impersonal and remembers how casually he slipped his leg between hers in the kitchen. She suddenly feels sick and runs out of the room, not caring if Bill and Sandra see her. She goes to her room, and as she gets comfortable in her bed, she thinks of Jack. She feels his gentleness is sincere, but she knows she checked under the washing machine for the key. She spirals into paranoia, wondering why he might take the key, or her necklace, which is still missing. She finally dismisses the thoughts, turning her attention to the previous owner and his little girl, and she falls asleep.

Rowan is awakened by the sound of screams and distorted sounds coming through the speakers. All the lights in her room are on and it’s frigid. She begins yelling commands but nothing happens. She runs downstairs to find Petra wailing in fear and Maddie on her bed in a fetal position with her hands over her ears. She finds Ellie in the kitchen with a blank look on her face. She grabs the tablet and tries to type in her access code, but it locks her out. With the battery already low, the tablet shuts down. Rowan becomes panicked, realizing she can’t turn anything off. Suddenly a shirtless Jack appears, asking what’s happening. Rowan explains, and he heads to the utility room. Shortly after, all the power shuts off, then a few of the lights come back on. Jack returns saying he put everything back to its default settings. Rowan notices both their hands are shaking.

After they all eat a snack to settle down, Jack turns to the tablet. He says you get three tries before it locks you out, but Rowan insists she only entered her passcode once. He enters his passcode, and Rowan notices that he has access to different parts of the house than she does. He starts dimming the kitchen lights and explains that when you are close to the room, you can access everything in it. It makes her wonder if he has access from the yard, but she brushes off her suspicion that he was somehow involved. He tells her to get the children to bed, and he’ll come back to run some antivirus software.

An hour later Rowan finds Jack waiting in the kitchen. She begins to cry. He puts his arm around her, and she sobs into his shoulder. He comforts her and tells her that he blames Bill and Sandra for not being honest with her about Maddie. She asks if the children could have set everything off, but Jack insists it would be virtually impossible. He also tells her the virus scan came back clean. Before he leaves, she kisses him on the cheek, and he kisses her back. She resists the urge to say yes when he offers to stay.

Rowan once again addresses Mr. Wrexham directly, admitting she is far from a perfect nanny. The reality is she is a person who is not always composed and who doesn’t always want to play by the rules. She’s someone, she says, who has “smoked and drank and swore” (185). Mr. Gates wanted her to keep pretending to be someone she isn’t, and ultimately it led her to prison. She holds out hope that the truth will set her free.

In the morning, she finds Jean in the kitchen, who tells her the children need to be up and ready to go to school. Rowan has forgotten it’s Monday. While Ellie gets ready without a problem, Maddie refuses to go. Rowan tries to bribe her with food on Sandra’s forbidden foods list, as she has done, she says, “at every single obstacle” (187). She tries not to react angrily to Maddie’s recalcitrance and puts her school clothes on her as she lies in bed. She asks Rowan to brush her teeth for her, then spits toothpaste on Rowan when she complies. Rowan pulls her hand back to slap her but stops short when Maddie flinches. Although she feels rage toward Maddie, she doesn’t let her anger get the best of her. Instead, she goes to the bathroom and cries. Jean tells her from downstairs that Jack is ready with the car, and Rowan finds Maddie waiting as if nothing has happened. When Rowan decides to confront the situation and tell her she can’t spit at people, Maddie claims she sneezed. Despite their dysfunctional relationship, Rowan is proud that she restrained herself and didn’t, she says, “let the demons win” (190).

Rowan feels relief when Jack drops the girls at school, and she has several hours where Petra is her sole responsibility. Jack offers to give her a tour of Carn Bridge and takes her to a small tea shop called the Parritch Pot. Jack introduces Rowan to Mrs. Andrews, who runs the shop. She tells Rowan she hopes she lasts longer than the other nannies. Rowan asks Jack if he knows what’s above her room. He mentions he has a set of keys and can try to get up there. When Mrs. Andrews brings their coffees, she marvels at the Elincourts taking on Heatherbrae given its dark history—which includes a man who took the lives of his wife and child, another who committed suicide, and Dr. Grant’s daughter, who was poisoned.

As Jack takes the scenic route back to Heatherbrae, Bill texts and asks Jack to immediately bring him some files. Rowan despairs at the thought of being alone on the property until tomorrow. Back at the Heatherbrae, she does some research on the house’s history. She takes the baby monitor and goes back to the garden, grabbing some string. Once inside, she notices a new set of pruning shears and observes that someone has been tending to the garden. She wonders if it’s Jack and whether it’s merely a coincidence that his last name is Grant. She hears Petra on the baby monitor and quickly winds string around the top of the garden gate to secure it, grabbing the shears on her way out.

Later, Rowan picks up the girls, who are exhausted from their day of school. The rest of the day passes without incident. Although Rowan is aching from fatigue, she stays up to research Dr. Grant. She finds that his daughter died from eating cherry laurel berries that had been mistakenly used to make jam. The child’s nanny had resigned two weeks prior and was not implicated in the incident.

Rowan is awakened by the Happy app indicating that the doorbell is ringing. She goes down to open the door, but no one is there. On her way back up to her room, the doorbell rings again, but again there’s no one. When she returns to her room, the window is wide open. After she closes it and lays in bed, the creaking returns. She understands the terrors the other nannies felt and knows she won’t sleep. She wonders if she’s going mad from lack of sleep.

Rowan heads downstairs to make a cup of coffee, finding several of the girls’ toys along the way and a single wilting purple flower on the kitchen floor. She decides to rescue it and put it in some water. She is startled by a voice calling to her that turns out to be Ellie on the stairs. Rowan invites her to come down, but Ellie reminds her that she’s not allowed to leave her room until six o’clock. Rowan tells her they can make an exception since it’s almost six. They drink hot chocolate, and Ellie observes “He’s gone” (215). She adds that she likes it better when he’s not here because he makes the girls do things against their will. Rowan tries to find out who “he” is but the panic in her voice, and her hand clenched around Ellie’s wrist, only prompts Ellie to shut down and head to the TV room. Rowan feels her stomach turn and wonders if she means Bill, Jack, or someone else.

Jean comes in and judgmentally observes that Rowan is up early. Rowan suddenly asks Jean why she doesn’t like her and again insists she didn’t lock the children out on the first day. Jean cryptically responds, “Kindness is as kindness does” (218), which angers Rowan. She grabs Jean’s arm, causing Jean to look at her with hatred. Jean then turns on the sink in the utility room to indicate the conversation is over. After dropping the girls at school, Rowan gets an email from Sandra telling her she’ll be gone longer than expected, and Rhiannon will be back from school later that day. Rowan’s relieved that she’s not in trouble for anything that’s happened over the past couple of days and that she’ll have another person in the house. Although the sign on Rhiannon’s door indicates she may possess a temper similar to Maddie’s, Rowan thinks she might finally be able to figure out its cause.

On the drive back from Maddie and Ellie’s school, Rowan gets stuck behind a van that turns out to be carrying Rhiannon. After exiting the vehicle, Rhiannon asks Rowan who she is and then commands her to help with her huge trunk when Rowan explains that she’s the nanny. In the kitchen, Rhiannon tells Rowan she’s not what she was expecting but doesn’t elaborate. She adds that she’s going to a sleepover that night at her friend Elise’s house, who lives an hour away.

As Rowan is feeding Petra, Rhiannon comes downstairs and says she’s leaving. She responds sarcastically when Rowan asks for Elise’s mom’s number, but Rhiannon reluctantly gives it to her on the back of one of Maddie’s drawings. She slams the door on her way out. Rowan looks at the drawing and realizes it looks like the one from her room. She says, however, that its contents are “distinctly darker and more disturbing” (228), as it depicts a girl who looks like she’s in a prison cell, but which Rowan assumes to be the poison garden. She’s holding a branch with red berries in one of her hands and has blood, and a look of despair, on her face. Rowan finds the picture unsettling and decides to leave it in a drawer in the study for Sandra to find.

Rowan accidentally falls asleep in Petra’s room while putting her down for a nap. She’s awakened by the doorbell and fears a repeat of the night before. But when she goes downstairs and opens the door, she finds Jack, who asks if she wants some tea. She explains she fell asleep because she was again disturbed during the night by the noises. He asks if she wants him to open the door in her room right then. She says yes, and he goes to retrieve his keys.

They head to Rowan’s room, where she quickly tries to clean up the crumpled clothes on the floor. She apologizes for the mess, lying and telling him she’s not normally “such a slob” (233). She knows her façade is starting to crumble. Jack doesn’t seem to notice and begins trying the lock with some of the keys on his ring. He tries several before he finally finds one that unlocks the door, albeit with some lubricant and major effort on his part. Rowan stands behind him as he opens the door, disappointed to find it only leads to another closet. However, Jack comments on the unusual draft and concludes that there is something behind the closet that has been boarded up. He uses a crowbar and pries off some of the back wall, revealing a staircase. Jack leads the way, his creaking footsteps sounding more solid that the noises she hears at night. He calls down to her, telling her she needs to come up. Although she is initially frozen in fear, she finds the strength to follow him.

Rowan observes that the attic is filled with black bird feathers that cover everything. The walls are scrawled with children’s writing, with the words “WE HATE YOU” (237) etched in the center of the room. They are the same words Maddie had spelled in her spaghetti. Rowan realizes Maddie must have been repeating words that had been said to her. There are dozens of other similar phrases. Jack points to a dead bird and tells Rowan that the noises she’s been hearing were probably the sound of it trying to get out. Rowan is suddenly overcome with anxiety and emotion, and Jack tries to lead her out of the room. However, not wanting to yield to the stereotype of, she says, a “hysterical, superstitious woman” (240), Rowan pulls her hand out of his and stays behind. As he calls to ask if she’s coming, her foot catches on something, which knocks over a large pile of broken china dolls in the corner. She quickly heads downstairs as a doll’s head rolls toward her.

Rowan is shaking as she tries to make tea. She wants to tell Jack she’s not the kind of person who gives in to superstition, but she has heard noises every night that she knows wasn’t a bird. She can still smell the stench from the room and removes her dusty sweatshirt, despite being cold. Seated next to her on the kitchen sofa, Jack begins rubbing her arms to warm her. She wants to lean into him, but Petra suddenly cries out on the baby monitor.

Returning to the kitchen with Petra, Rowan asks Jack if he thinks Sandra and Bill know about the attic. Jack suspects that they don’t, given how difficult it was to turn the key. She asks if maybe they ignored it, like the poison garden, explaining to a surprised Jack that the girls showed it to her. They talk about the children’s writing, and Rowan wonders if it’s from an adult pretending to be a child. Jack suggests it’s vandals since the house was empty for a long time after Dr. Grant lived there. He clarifies for Rowan that they aren’t related and tells her that local gossip says Dr. Gant purposely fed his daughter the poison. Jack offers to paint the room for her and try to fix it up, handing her the key to the door before he leaves. She thanks him for taking her seriously.