The Fourth Nanny

The agency file says difficult household, underlined twice, and then, in the margin, in someone's panicked handwriting: Triple rate. Please don't quit.

You stand on the brick sidewalk of a Beacon Hill street so pretty it looks fake, gas lamps flickering even though it's two in the afternoon, and you read the address again. Number 14. Black door, brass knocker shaped like a fox. Four stories of old red brick with not one wreath, not one string of lights, while every other house on the block looks like a Christmas card had a baby with a candle shop.

Twenty-three days until Christmas. Twenty-three days at triple rate pays off the last of your mother's hospital bills.

You know whose house this is. That's the problem. You've known since the agency called.

You knock.

The door opens on a man holding a phone to his ear, and your brain stops working.

He's tall enough that you have to tip your head back. Dark hair that needed a cut three weeks ago, a jaw shadowed with stubble, slate-blue eyes that land on you like a verdict. He's wearing a gray sweater with a hole at the cuff and he still looks like the poster for a movie you'd pay full price to see. You've seen his author photo a hundred times. It lied. It made him look approachable.

"No," he says into the phone. "No, Thurston, I said the twenty-third and I meant the twenty-third. Don't call me champ." He looks you up and down. "Who are you?"

"Ava Rainey. From Desrosiers Placement. The new nanny."

"Of course you are." Into the phone: "I have to go. The fourth one's here." He hangs up mid-protest and steps back to let you in. "Grady Holcombe. You're early."

"I'm on time."

"Early is when I'm not ready. I'm never ready, so everyone is early." He shuts the door on the cold. "Did they tell you about the last three?"

"They said the household was difficult."

"The last one cried in the Public Garden. The one before that said my daughter was possessed. The first one left a note that said good luck with no comma." He rubs his face. "My daughter is six. She's not possessed. She's committed."

From somewhere deep in the house comes a muffled, imperious voice. "YOU'RE FIRED."

Grady closes his eyes. "And there she is."

The kitchen is on the garden level, warm and big, with a scarred farmhouse table and copper pots nobody has used in a while. The pantry door is shut. A strip of masking tape across it reads, in purple marker, NO NANNYS.

"She's been in there twenty minutes," Grady says. "She has crackers, a juice box and a flashlight. She's better provisioned than I am."

"Does it lock?"

"From the inside. The previous owners had opinions about snacks." He leans on the counter, arms crossed, watching you like a man waiting to see how a stranger fails. "Go ahead. Everyone has a method."

You sit down on the floor with your back against the pantry door.

He raises an eyebrow. You ignore it.

"Hi," you say to the door. "I'm Ava. I hear I'm fired."

"You are," says the door. "I fire everybody."

"That's fair. I'll go soon. I just need to sit for a second. It's been a bad day for moose."

Silence. Then, suspicious: "What moose?"

"There's a moose who lives in Maine," you say, settling in. "His name is Gerald. Every December all the other animals put lights on the trees, and Gerald hates it, because his antlers get tangled in them. So every year he goes and hides in a barn and tells everyone he's fired."

A pause. "You can't fire a moose."

"That's what the chickens said."

You hear a crinkle of crackers. You keep going: Gerald in the barn, a very bossy hen named Doris, the year the lights got stuck in his antlers and he lit up the whole forest like a parade float and everyone cheered and he realized, horribly, that he liked it. Halfway through, the lock clicks. By the time Gerald is glowing on the hill, the door has opened four inches and a small face with cracker crumbs on it is peering at you through a curtain of dark tangled hair.

She has her father's eyes. Exactly his. Same verdict.

"Is that a true story?" she asks.

"Every word. Except the hen's name. The hen's name was classified."

"I'm Josie." She considers you. "You can be un-fired. For one day."

"That's very generous."

"I know." She pushes the door the rest of the way open and walks past her father with the dignity of a queen leaving a tribunal. "I'm going to draw Gerald."

When she's gone, the kitchen is quiet. You get up off the floor and brush off your jeans. Grady hasn't moved. He's looking at you in a way you can't read, like you're a sentence he's trying to decide whether to cut.

"A moose," he says finally.

"Children like animals with problems."

"Everyone likes animals with problems. It's the whole publishing industry." He pushes off the counter. "Fine. You're hired. Until Christmas, not one day longer. After the twenty-fifth her grandmother takes over, or I lose my mind, whichever comes first. Room's on the third floor. Josie's bedtime is seven-thirty and she will lie about it. Don't feed her after eight, she becomes a gremlin. Don't come up to the top floor. That's my study. That's the only rule that matters."

"Only the study."

"And don't touch anything Christmas. There are boxes. Leave them." Something moves behind his eyes and goes still again. "I'm on deadline. I'm always on deadline. If the house is on fire, knock first."

"Is it often on fire?"

"Not yet." He's already walking away. "Welcome to the house, Rainey. Try not to cry in the Public Garden."

Your room is small and slanted under the eaves, with a white quilt and a window that looks out over a hundred snowy rooftops. You set your duffel down and breathe for the first time in an hour.

He doesn't know. Of course he doesn't know. Nobody knows except Lulu.

Two years ago you were Spinecracker, and Spinecracker had two hundred thousand followers and a sharp tongue and a review of Grady Holcombe's last novel that the whole internet quoted for a month, for all the wrong reasons. Then you deleted every account you had and went quiet, and you haven't written a word about a book since.

You took this job for the money. You tell yourself that one more time.

Then you go back downstairs for your other bag, and on the stairs you glance up at the top-floor landing and notice a door standing half open. Through the gap you can see a desk drowning in paper, a dead plant, a window full of gray sky. And a corkboard over the desk, layered with index cards and maps and photos of Boston streets.

In the middle of it, pinned with a red tack, is a printout you'd know anywhere. Your headline. Your blog's ugly old font. One sentence circled in red so many times the pen went through the paper.

Paxton grieves like a man who has read about grief in a pamphlet.

And underneath, in black marker, in handwriting that presses so hard it dents the cork:

FIND HER.