Chapter 4

4

I wake up the next morning to the whir of the vacuum cleaner. I always felt capable of doing my own cleaning, but Grant loved to spoil me, so he insisted on hiring someone to do this job. And I have to admit, it's nice having a person to clean my floors, swap out the sheets on the beds, and wash the dishes.

Since they will want to clean inside the master bedroom, I shower quickly, throw on a sweater and designer jeans, then head downstairs. When I get to the first floor, the smell of eggs and bacon wafts into my nostrils. I reach the dining room just in time to see the plate containing my breakfast being placed on the huge mahogany table large enough to seat twelve.

"Hello, Mrs. Lockwood," a familiar voice says.

I force a smile onto my lips to greet Willie, our houseman. "Hello."

"I have your full breakfast prepared," Willie tells me in an accent that I've never quite been able to identify. "It's nothing too fancy. Just some bacon, sausages, eggs, black pudding, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, toast, fried bread…" He pauses. "And of course, a cup of tea."

"Thank you, Willie," I say. "It smells absolutely delicious."

"I hope you like it, Mrs. Lockwood."

I meet Willie's eyes across the dining table. Willie is in his late twenties, with a shock of jet-black hair, and there's something incredibly alluring about him. I'm not sure exactly what it is. Maybe it's his dark, dark eyes or his broad, muscular shoulders. Maybe it's the fact that he always cleans our house with his shirt off. It's hard to put my finger on it, but Grant never entirely trusted him.

"Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs. Lockwood?" he asks me. "Anything at all?"

"No, thank you."

"I'll get back to work, then."

Willie grabs a bottle of lemon-scented spray and strides over to the living room to clean our coffee table. I settle down before my plate of food, making sure I have a view of Willie as he bends over to clean the table.

In the weeks before Grant's death, he urged me to fire Willie and find a new houseman. "There's something off about him," Grant used to say.

He would have trusted him even less if he'd known the truth about our houseman's dark past.