Page 92 of The Housemaid
“On the contrary.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and brings up an app. A crisp color image of my room fills the screen. I can see the two of us sitting together on the bed in incredible resolution. The image of myself shows me looking pale and hunched over, with stringy hair. “Isn’t that a great image? Like a movie.”
That bastard. He watched me suffer in here for the entire day. And he has every intention of doing this to me again. Except next time it will be longer. And God knows what he’ll make me do next time. I’ve already been a prisoner once—I won’t let it happen again. No way.
So I reach into the pocket of my jeans.
And I pull out the bottle of pepper spray I found in the bucket.
FIFTY-THREE
NINA
When I hired that private investigator to dig into Wilhelmina Calloway’s past, I found some very interesting information.
I had assumed Millie went to jail for some sort of drug crime or maybe theft. But no. Millie Calloway went to jail for something entirely different. She was in prison for murder.
She was only sixteen years old at the time of her arrest and was in prison by seventeen, so it took some effort for the detective to get all the information. Millie was in boarding school. No, not just a boarding school. A school specifically for teenagers with disciplinary problems.
One night, Millie and one of her girlfriends snuck out to a party at the boys’ dormitory. Millie was passing by a bedroom and heard her friend screaming for help behind the door. She entered the dark room and found one of their classmates—a two-hundred-pound football player—forcing himself on her friend.
So Millie picked up a paperweight from on top of a desk and bashed the boy in the head with it. Multiple times. The boy was dead before he even got to the hospital.
The detective had photographs. Millie’s attorney argued that she had been trying to defend her friend, who was being assaulted. But if you look at those photographs, it would be hard to argue she hadn’t meant to kill him. His skull was visibly crushed.
She eventually pleaded guilty to lesser manslaughter charges, given her age and the circumstances. The family of the boy was in agreement—they wanted vengeance for their son’s death, but they also didn’t want him branded a rapist all over the internet.
Millie took the deal because there were other incidents. Things that would have come to light if she had gone to trial.
In grade school, she was expelled when she got into a fight with a little boy in her class who was calling her names—she shoved him off the monkey bars and broke his arm.
In middle school, she slashed the tires of her math teacher’s car when he gave her a failing grade. Soon after that, she was sent to boarding school.
And then even after her prison sentence, the incidents continued. Millie wasn’t laid off from her waitressing job. She was fired after she smashed her fist into the nose of one of her coworkers.
Millie seems like a sweet girl. That’s what Andrew sees when he looks at her. He won’t dig into her past the way I did. He doesn’t know what she’s capable of.
And here’s the truth:
I initially wanted to hire a maid in hopes that she would become my replacement—that if Andrew fell in love with another woman, he would finally let me go. But that’s not why I hired Millie. That’s not why I gave her a copy of the key to the room. And that’s not why I left a bottle of pepper spray in the blue bucket in the closet.
I hired her to kill him.
She just doesn’t know it.
FIFTY-FOUR
MILLIE
Andrew screams when the pepper spray gets him in the eyes.
The nozzle is about three inches away from his eyes, so he gets a good dose of it. And then I press it a second time for good measure. While I do it, I turn my own head away and close my eyes. The last thing I need is to get pepper spray in my eyes, although it’s hard not to get a little bit of residue.
When I look up again, he’s clawing at his face, which has turned bright red. His phone has fallen from his hands onto the floor, and I scoop it up, being very careful not to touch anything else. Everything has to go exactly right in the next twenty seconds. I have spent over six hours planning this while three books were resting on my belly.
My legs are wobbly when I stand up, but they work. Andrew is still writhing on the cot, and before he can get his sight back, I slip out of the room and close the door behind me. Then I take the key Nina gave me and fit it into the lock. I turn the key and pocket it. Then I take a step back.
“Millie!” Andrew screams on the other side of the door. “What the hell?”
I look down at the screen of his phone. My fingers are shaking, but I’m able to get into settings, and I shut off the Lock Screen setting before the phone locks automatically, so the phone won’t require a password anymore.
