“If I leave this house, it will be in handcuffs.
I should have run for it while I had the chance. Now my shot is gone. Now that the police officers are in the house and they’ve discovered what’s upstairs, there’s no turning back.
They are about five seconds away from reading me my rights. I’m not sure why they haven’t done it yet. Maybe they’re hoping to trick me into telling them something I shouldn’t.
Good luck with that.”
Unlike many murder mystery novels, this book does not open with any attempt to establish the setting or character before getting right to the action. With these opening lines, the reader is thrust immediately into a situation that is dire for the narrator but lacks any context for the reader to make assumptions. The purpose of such an ambiguous opening is to immediately lure readers into the story and hook them into continuing to read. The murder itself can wait, the real mystery from the start is finding out who this person is and what’s upstairs that she doesn’t want the police to discover. The technical term for what is being established here is not mystery but rather suspense.
“The ham and American cheese in my stomach churn. I had read online that Munch Burgers didn’t have very strict hiring practices. That even if I had a record, I might have a chance. This is the last interview I’ve managed to book, ever since Mrs. Winchester failed to call me back—and I’m desperate. I can’t eat one more sandwich in my car. I just can’t.”
This short passage conveys a wealth of information about Millie. She is poor to the point of her car being her bedroom and dining room. She was not even able to land a job at a place not particularly picky about their employees. She has some kind of police record. And she also seems to have lost out on another job for which she applied. The final word emphasized with italics paints a portrait of a desperate woman at the end of her rope. This state of mind suggests she is a person who might well be on the verge of adding another line to her police record. This raises the question of just how serious that next arrest might be. All this information also underscores the consequences of poverty, economic inequality, the failure of the justice system in the rehabilitation of released convicts, and the lack of opportunity which stifles hope that things can be made better.
“If a few months ago, someone had told me I would be spending tonight in a hotel room while Andy was at my house with another woman—the maid!—I wouldn’t have believed it.
But here I am. Dressed in a terry cloth bathrobe I found in the closet, stretched out in the queen-size hotel bed. The television is on, but I’m barely aware of it. I’ve got my phone out and I click on the app I have been using for the last several months. Find my friends. I wait for it to tell me the location of Wilhelmina “Millie” Calloway.
But under her name, it says: location not found. The same as it has since the afternoon.
She must’ve figured out I was tracking her and disabled the app. Smart girl.
But not smart enough.”
As it turns out, however, Mrs. Winchester does hire Millie as a maid. Their relationship is tumultuous as Nina Winchester bounces back and forth between being an especially nice employer and an especially difficult one. Everything changes once Millie begins having an affair with her employer’s husband. The book is thus told through a dual narrative perspective. Parts are told by Millie and parts are told by Nina. As this passage demonstrates, there are no secrets of either woman that are kept from the reader. This is an unusual choice in such a story since revealing significant information such as Nina’s having put a tracker on Millie’s phone undoes some of the mystery. At the same time, however, this peek into Nina’s mindset reveals her insecurities and makes her more sympathetic. Since Millie has been situated as the protagonist with whom the reader is supposed to identify, such a more complex understanding of a character who is not exactly always sympathetic has the effect of instilling a greater emotional complexity. Nina may not exactly be portrayed as a “good” person in this passage, but her actions become more relatable and understandable. This serves to increase the suspense established in the opening scene in which the unidentified speaker could wind up being either Millie or Nina.
