She found out I was Norwegian and was over the moon. Her father’s people were from Norway and she had fond memories of the place. A while afterward I found out she needed a housekeeper. I applied for the job. She hired me immediately.” She smiled at the memory of it. “Sometimes these things . . . they just find you. You don’t find them—they find you.”
“Do you enjoy it?” I asked, thinking about the windowpanes furred with mold and the grime around the toilet.
She sighed. “I used to love it. I always wanted a big family home, full of kids and noise and life. But . . . it didn’t work out. And when I was cleaning Aurelia’s home in Hampstead I felt I was helping create that. Keeping order. But now . . . not so much.”
“Derry said you were an artist,” I said. “I was wondering why you gave up painting to become a housekeeper.”
My mouth had rattled off again, asking questions my brain would otherwise have prohibited.
Maren pulled her lips into a tight grimace and stared at the road, which was a good thing, as she was driving along a particularly narrow stretch of road beside a sheer drop. “What else did Derry tell you?” she said in a low voice.
I struggled to think. “She told me about the seven chakras. And I got some good feedback on my novel. I’m thinking of rewriting the whole thing in third person—”
“Not that,” Maren snapped. “Why would she tell you I was an artist? And how did she know this information?”
I shrugged. “You’ll have to ask her.”
She hit the accelerator and overtook a lorry on a bend. “What does she do, huh? Mix paints? Choose wallpapers?” She gave a loud scoff. “Let her wash her own socks.”
“It sounds like you were very talented,” I observed. “And yet you gave it all up to . . .” I tried to say clean the house, but couldn’t, so went for “. . . iron the tablecloths.”
“Sometimes life turns on a dime,” she said under her breath.
She sounded very sad when she said that, and when I asked what happened—albeit in a tiny voice—she didn’t answer, but I noticed her knuckles whiten on the steering wheel as she gripped it.
“You said that Tom was manipulated into coming back to Norway,” I said after a few minutes of awkward silence. “Who manipulated him?”
She threw me a look of horror. “I told you that?”
I felt a bit confused. “Yes. That night, in your room . . . And then you showed me the scale model of the first house . . .”
“You promise you won’t say a word?”
“I promise.”
She turned her eyes back to the road and visibly chewed over whether or not to divulge it. “Clive,” she said quietly, checking the rear mirror to ensure Gaia was busy with her sketchpad. Then: “Perhaps ‘manipulated’ is the wrong word. He . . . persuaded him.”
“Why do you think Clive would do that?”
“They’re business partners. It was in Clive’s interests to get Tom to finish the job.”
That didn’t strike me as nefarious as it had originally sounded.
“You can understand that it looks extremely bad,” she continued. “For Tom, I mean. Not Clive. Everyone thinks it was Tom’s idea. But as I said, housekeepers hear things that others don’t.” She threw me a smile. “How are you feeling these days? No more . . . dark thoughts? You’re feeling happy, yes?”
“Yes,” I said, realizing a few seconds after I replied that it was true. I was feeling happy. I was occasionally fearing for my life, and scared witless by Granhus’s resident elks and ghostly women, but also happy.
She glanced at my forearms, where the scars still burned beneath the long black sleeves of my jumper.
“You get therapy for it?”
I shook my head.
“Well, out here is the best therapy. The views, the smells . . .” She took a deep breath as if to inhale the smell of the car’s peach melba air freshener. “Good for the soul. And now you get to see Ålesund! Beautiful city. Norway’s Venice, did you know?”
I told her I didn’t. “Aurelia’s grandparents came from this region. She would visit sometimes as a little girl,” Maren said.
“Did Aurelia have any siblings?” I asked lightly, thinking of the girl in the newspaper clippings. “A sister, perhaps?”
Maren frowned. “No. She was an only child.”
“Any cousins, then?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
We reached the brow of a long, steep hill, a spectacular view of the