“You do not understand.” Madame Usher moved to the end of the bed, standing over my mother and looking down at her with pursed lips. “I am not merely offering you a place at Manderley, but a chance at a future. I expect every musician who graduates to go on to a stunning international career. You cannot do that tethered to a hospital bed. We have the means to help you.”
“Help me how?”
“Your tuition will be paid by my late husband’s endowment fund. I shall provide your room and board, and an allowance for clothing and necessities. Most importantly, I will pay your mother’s medical debts and move her to a more advanced facility closer to the school, so you can visit her on weekends. In exchange, you will extend your services to the school.”
“My… services?”
“You will cook meals, keep the house and rooms clean, make sure the instruments are stored correctly, that sort of thing.”
“What did your last maid die of?” I muttered.
Madame Usher’s mouth tugged at the corner. “A broken neck.”
I sucked in a breath.Is she serious?
Madame Usher nodded to my phone on the nightstand. “I will not dredge up that unfortunate incident by speaking of it aloud. Look it up if you still have your penchant for morbidity.”
She referred to the fact I’d been a strange kid. I was obsessed with horror books and ghost stories. Still was. My favorite thing to do on a Friday night was curling up in bed with Mom and a stack of junk food to watch a spooky film. I knew all the tropes by heart, but I never got tired of hiding under the covers from ghosts and monsters.
I picked up the phone and tapped a line into the search bar. A few moments later, the headline popped up: “MAID DEAD AT ELITE MUSIC ACADEMY.” The maid had been found crumpled at the bottom of the stairs – a nasty fall. A terrible accident. The journalist took a kind of morbid delight in describing the trauma to her skull, suggesting the angle of her body meant that she’d been pushed. Police investigated, but they eventually ruled her death an accident, although the journalist enjoyed speculating otherwise.
Knowing Madame Usher, she probably folded the towels wrong.
Madame Usher frowned at my phone. “As you may be able to guess, it becomes difficult to find new help when the press has made every attempt to suggest your maid died of foul play. Hence, I was inspired to seek you out. We can help each other.”
A charity case.
I sank into the chair. The plastic creaked as it sagged under my weight. I was never supposed to be a charity case. After Dad disappeared, taking all our hopes of living off his music career with him, Mom swore that we de Winter women would make our own way in the world. She was sick of working sixty-hour shifts as a taxi driver to support a man’s dream. She went back to school for business, and built a successful PR firm from the ground-up. After years living on the skin of our asses, we had money. We moved into a gorgeous East Village townhouse. Mom paid for the best violin tutor money could buy who wasn’t Madame Usher. I went to a fancy prep school where I was ignored because I wasn’t ‘old money,’ but the students were all little shits, so I didn’t give a fuck. We took vacations in exotic places like Vietnam and Istanbul. We weren’t mega-rich, but we were comfortable. We didn’t need anyone or anything but ourselves.
Except, as it turned out, we also needed health insurance.
Mom’s illness crept up on us without warning. One moment she was taking her team on a spa vacation in Hawaii to celebrate her best year ever, complaining the resort food gave her stomach cramps, the next she was lying unresponsive in the back of an ambulance. I called our insurance company to pay the bills and discovered Mom had forgotten to pay her premium, so they had canceled our coverage.
What started as bouts of nausea and cramping turned into a host of strange gastrointestinal problems, and then her kidneys started failing. She’d been deteriorating over the last two years, in and out of the hospital, while they did tests and tried medications and dialysis, but nothing worked. Every new treatment, every flight to a different state to try some new diagnostic machine, stretched our dwindling savings. I sold the townhouse. I graduated high school (barely), moved her to this cheap-ass chop-shop hospital, and took two jobs to try and keep up. Then, a week ago, she slipped into a coma, and the doctors still had no idea what was wrong with her.
What medical dramas on TV don’t tell you is how fucking expensive it is to keep someone on life-support. If I didn’t come up with some way to pay the bills soon, I’d have no choice but to shut her off.
My mom was my whole life. I wasn’t saying goodbye. Not yet.
I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her alive.
If that means bowing and scrubbing for this witch, just call me Cinder-fucking-rella.
I leaned over the bed, pressing my lips to Mom’s forehead. How odd it was to see her this still. Mom was always bouncing off the walls, a ball of boundless energy. “I won’t slow down – you slow down, you die,” she admonished me once after she’d nearly walked out of the house with her underwear on her head because she was so excited about a client’s TV appearance. “The only time I’ll lie still is if you put me in a coma.” Fate is a fucking cruel mistress.
Beep beep,the machines admonished me for my betrayal.
I straightened up and picked up my violin case, hugging it to my chest. All through Mom’s illness, even as I sold off our possessions, she forbade me to sell my violin. She had it custom-made by an artisan luthier as my thirteenth birthday present, and it was the most precious thing I owned.
So I’d kept it, even though I’d all but given up hope of a career in music. The money Mom set aside for college had been eaten by her medical bills in the first three months. This was a second chance for both of us – for her and for me.
My father walked out and left us withnothing. If I took Madame Usher’s deal, then at least something good came of histrahison des clercs.
The smile that crossed Madame Usher’s face was chillier than the winter I’d just survived in my shitty, non-heated apartment. “Your father would be so proud. Faye de Winter, welcome to Manderley Academy.“
Chapter Two
Faye
