Mallory Gets a Fresh Start

At twenty-one, Mallory Quinn is trying to rebuild her life. She has been sober for eighteen months after an addiction to oxycodone and heroin that began following the death of her thirteen-year-old sister, Beth, in a car accident. Mallory carries enormous guilt over Beth’s death, and although she has made significant progress in recovery, her past still follows her everywhere.

Her sponsor, Russell, an Olympic track coach who rebuilt his own life after serving time for involuntary manslaughter, helps Mallory land an interview with Ted and Caroline Maxwell in wealthy Spring Brook, New Jersey. The Maxwells have recently returned from Barcelona with their five-year-old son, Teddy, and need a live-in nanny.

Mallory immediately likes Teddy, a quiet, affectionate little boy who loves drawing. The Maxwells hire her, and she moves into a guest cottage behind their house. The arrangement seems almost too good to be true: Mallory has a comfortable place to live, steady work, and a family willing to overlook her history with addiction.

There is only one unsettling detail. Mallory eventually learns that locals call her cottage the “Devil House” because of a decades-old story about a woman who supposedly disappeared there.

Teddy’s Drawings Become Disturbing

At first, caring for Teddy is exactly the fresh start Mallory needs. They spend their days swimming, playing outside, exploring the woods, and drawing pictures together. Teddy’s early artwork is exactly what Mallory would expect from a five-year-old.

Then the pictures change.

Teddy begins talking about an imaginary friend named Anya, who he says lives beneath his bed. According to Teddy, Anya tells him stories and sometimes tells him what to draw. His pictures become increasingly sophisticated, far beyond anything a five-year-old should realistically be capable of producing.

Even more disturbing is what they show.

A sequence of drawings appears to depict a woman being attacked by a man, dragged through the woods, and buried. Mallory also notices something physically strange while Teddy is producing them: although he is naturally left-handed, he sometimes draws these elaborate images with his right hand, almost as though someone else is controlling it.

Mallory begins hearing Teddy apparently speaking to someone when nobody else is present. She becomes convinced that Anya may be more than an imaginary friend, but the Maxwells are far less receptive. Caroline, a psychiatrist, repeatedly suggests that Mallory’s concerns may be connected to her unresolved grief over Beth.

Because of Mallory’s history with addiction and trauma, it becomes increasingly easy for the Maxwells to make her question her own judgment.

The Mystery of Annie Barrett

Searching for an explanation, Mallory turns to Mitzi, an eccentric neighbor who claims to be psychic. Mitzi knows the local history of Mallory’s cottage and tells her about Annie Barrett, an artist who lived there during the 1940s.

According to the story, Annie mysteriously disappeared after evidence of violence was discovered inside the cottage. Given Teddy’s increasingly graphic drawings of a murdered woman, Mallory begins to wonder whether Anya is actually Annie’s ghost, using Teddy to reveal what happened to her.

Mallory and Mitzi hold a séance inside the cottage. During it, an unseen force seems to take control of Mallory’s hand, guiding her into writing unfamiliar Hungarian words. Among them are ovakodik, meaning “beware,” and tolvaj, meaning “thief.”

The Hungarian messages don’t fit the Annie Barrett theory, but they convince Mallory that something supernatural is happening.

At the same time, Mallory grows close to Adrian, a handsome landscaper and Rutgers student. Embarrassed by her past, she tells him a small lie and claims she attends Penn State. Their relationship gives Mallory one connection to a normal life outside the increasingly bizarre Maxwell household.

Then Mitzi dies from what appears to be a heroin overdose.

The death is particularly disturbing because Mallory notices needle caps in Mitzi’s house that she doesn’t remember seeing before. She begins to suspect that someone deliberately killed Mitzi and staged the scene to resemble an overdose.

Mallory Realizes Anya Is Real

The supernatural activity around Teddy continues escalating. Mallory finds him entering strange trance-like states, and eventually the same force that appears to control Teddy takes control of her.

While possessed, Mallory produces elaborate drawings across the walls of the Maxwells’ den. When Ted and Caroline discover what she has done, the situation becomes impossible to explain away. Instead of believing her, they use the incident as further evidence that Mallory is unstable.

She is fired.

Before leaving, however, Mallory makes a startling discovery about Teddy: Teddy is biologically female.

At roughly the same time, Adrian and his librarian mother, Sofia, finally uncover the truth about Annie Barrett. Annie wasn’t murdered at all. She ran away to Ohio with a man named Willie, escaping her judgmental cousin, George Barrett.

That destroys Mallory’s entire explanation for the haunting.

If Annie Barrett lived, then the woman communicating through Teddy’s drawings must be someone else.

And the Hungarian words suddenly become much more important.

Teddy Is Really Flora

The Maxwells’ carefully constructed story begins collapsing.

Three years earlier, Caroline Maxwell encountered a Hungarian woman named Margit Baroth and her young daughter, Flora, at Seneca Lake. Caroline became convinced that Flora needed to be “rescued” from her mother.

So Caroline killed Margit.

She then took Flora and brought her home. Caroline and Ted changed the child’s identity, cut her hair, raised her as a boy, and began calling her Teddy. Their supposed time living in Barcelona provided a convenient cover story for how their family had suddenly acquired a child without people in Spring Brook asking too many questions.

The ghost haunting Teddy isn’t Annie Barrett.

It is Margit, Flora’s murdered mother.

The disturbing drawings have been Margit’s attempt to communicate the truth about her death and lead someone to the daughter who was stolen from her. Her messages—including “thief”—were warnings about Caroline.

Ted knows what Caroline did and has helped conceal Flora’s true identity, but his guilt has been eating away at him. He is no longer willing to let Caroline continue destroying anyone who threatens their secret.

Caroline Tries to Kill Mallory

Caroline realizes that Mallory knows too much and decides to eliminate her in a way that will exploit Mallory’s history.

She restrains Mallory and prepares to inject her with enough heroin to kill her. Given Mallory’s past addiction, an overdose would be easy for authorities to accept, especially after Mitzi’s apparent overdose.

But Ted has secretly sabotaged Caroline’s plan.

Knowing what his wife is capable of, he has replaced the heroin with baby powder. Mallory survives, and Ted finally admits the truth about his own behavior as well: he installed a hidden webcam in Mallory’s cottage and has been watching her.

Ted intends to help Mallory and Flora escape, but Caroline discovers his betrayal. She shoots him, killing the husband who helped her hide the kidnapping but ultimately couldn’t continue protecting her.

Mallory escapes with Teddy—now understood to be Flora—and runs into the woods.

Margit Protects Her Daughter

Mallory and Flora flee through the area they call the Enchanted Forest, but Caroline follows them. The chase ends near the enormous tree they have nicknamed the Giant Beanstalk.

Caroline corners them, leaving Mallory with few options.

Then Margit intervenes one final time.

Flora has a broken arrow they found earlier that summer. Margit’s spirit appears to take control of her daughter’s arm, just as she previously controlled the drawings. Flora drives the broken arrow into Caroline, killing her.

The woman who murdered Margit and stole Flora is finally dead.

Mallory immediately realizes what the truth could mean for the traumatized child. Flora has already endured kidnapping, years of living under a false identity, the revelation that the people raising her murdered her biological mother, and now Caroline’s violent death.

When Detective Briggs and the police arrive, Mallory protects her.

She claims that she killed Caroline in self-defense, taking responsibility so Flora will not have to carry the legal and psychological burden of explaining what happened.

Flora Gets Her Life Back

One year later, the Maxwells’ lies have been exposed enough for Mallory to clear her name, although the public version of events does not contain every supernatural detail.

Flora is finally living as herself again.

She has been reunited with her biological father, József Baroth, and lives with him in upstate New York. After three years of being raised as Teddy Maxwell, she has regained both her real name and her surviving family.

Mallory has also continued rebuilding her life. She is now thirty months sober and attending Drexel University, where she is studying to become a teacher. Her relationship with Adrian has survived everything that happened, giving her a future that once seemed impossible during the worst years of her addiction.

The story itself is revealed to be Mallory’s memoir. She is writing down everything that happened—the strange drawings, Margit’s ghost, Caroline’s crimes, and Flora’s rescue—so that Flora can read the complete story when she is older and ready to understand it.

Mallory began the summer believing she had been hired to take care of a little boy named Teddy Maxwell. She leaves knowing that the child was Flora Baroth, a kidnapped girl whose murdered mother had been desperately trying to lead someone to the truth.