THE HOUSE SITTER

THE HOUSE SITTER is about a woman who takes a house-sitting job at a lake house and slowly realises the owner's wife — who is supposedly travelling in Europe — is actually being held in a hidden room beneath the floor. The owner is a pleasant, generous man who has kept his wife down there for eleven months, ever since she found out he covered up a death at his company and said she'd go to the police. To make the house look normal while he does it, he hires house-sitters. Mara is the fifth. Over fifteen days she notices twenty-eight small things that are wrong. She explains away every single one, because none of them is strange on its own — a locked office, a dog on an odd feeding schedule, a wife who emails at exactly the same minute every morning. She figures it out on day fifteen. Barely in time.