At 10:00, she was in the upstairs hallway changing the towels in the bathroom when she noticed that the storage room door at the end of the hall was open. She had not opened it. She had never been inside it. Grace’s folder had said the storage room was Mr. Caleb’s private space and was not part of the regular cleaning unless he specifically asked.
But the door was standing slightly open, and something had shifted on the bottom shelf. She could see from the doorway that a box had been moved, pulled forward from the back and then pushed back, not quite as far as before. She could see the gap it had left in the dust on the shelf.
She looked at it for a moment.
She would not go in. It was not her space.
She reached in and pulled the door shut with 1 finger and went back to the towels.
She was halfway down the stairs when she stopped.
She did not know why she stopped. There was no sound, no movement, nothing that should have made her pause. She simply stopped on the fifth step from the top, her hand on the railing, and looked down at the hallway below.
The study door was still closed.