The Turn of The Key

Sandra Elincourt is the mother of the four girls Rachel, posing as Rowan, is hired to watch. Sandra is a thin, blond woman about forty years old. She works as an architect with her husband, Bill, and is regularly away with him on business. She specifies to Rowan that their specialty is vernacular architecture—as indicated by their significant restoration of Heatherbrae House. Based on the massive binder of instructions Sandra leaves, as well as the surveillance cameras around that house that Sandra uses to regularly watch everyone, Rachel finds Sandra to be conflicted about her situation. She can’t figure out if Sandra is just controlling or is overcompensating for the fact that she leaves her children so much. Rachel’s ability to deceive Sandra about her identity suggests a lack of loyalty and respect towards the woman who is technically her stepmother.

Bill Elincourt is Sandra’s husband and the patriarch of Heatherbrae House. It is later revealed that he is Rachel’s father. He is tall and tan with short hair. He wears rimless glasses, and his age range is difficult to determine—Rachel guesses it’s somewhere “forty to sixty” (92). Rachel judges him to be ignorant of his comfortable station in life, which she finds infuriating. She also views him as selfish and self-centered and concludes that he has no compunction about trusting his children to the care of a stranger. It is later revealed that Bill had an affair with one of the previous nannies and was about to leave Sandra and the children—the same way he left Rachel and her mother. Ultimately, Rachel condemns him as a “predatory, abusive man” (318) who willingly leaves his children.

Maddie, Ellie, and Petra Elincourt are the three youngest Elincourt children, and the ones initially left to Rachel’s care. They are also Rachel’s half-sisters. Petra is an 18-month-old baby. Ellie is 5 years old and has blond hair and blue eyes. Maddie is 8 years old but looks younger. She has dark hair and a sallow complexion. Rachel describes her as “an angry little dark changeling among her blond sisters” (165) and sees a reflection of herself in Maddie’s dark, flickering eyes. Maddie generally acts glumly and challenges Rachel’s authority, often encouraging Ellie to do the same. At the end of the book, Ellie’s letter to Rachel reveals that Maddie was the mastermind behind the alleged hauntings in the house. Ellie betrays her sister by not only exposing her charade but also by pushing her off the roof and killing her. She demonstrates that her sisterly loyalty is to Rachel, although at the time of Maddie’s death, she did not know they were related.

Rhiannon Elincourt is the Elincourts’ oldest child. Sandra describes her to Rachel as “fourteen going on twenty-four” (35). She has long blond hair and an aristocratic accent. She displays an aloof, rebellious attitude that is accurately symbolized by the sign on her bedroom door: “FUCK OFF, KEEP OUT OR YOU DIE” (38). She is surly and dismissive towards Rachel when she comes home from boarding school and uses the fact that she knows Rachel’s true identity as a bargaining chip to get what she wants—although she doesn’t know they are related. Rachel finds that the similarities between Rhiannon, Maddie, and her make her heart give “a little skip” (308), and she ultimately feels compassion for Rhiannon, who reveals to Rachel that she is angry and hurt by her father’s affair with their former nanny.

Jack Grant is the Elincourts’ employee and Rachel’s love interest while she’s at Heatherbrae. He’s in his early thirties by Rachel’s guess, and she finds him “extremely good-looking” (24). He is tall, thin, and unshaven with dark hair, a Scottish accent, and, she says, a “scatter of freckles across his broad cheekbones” (134). Although Rachel is attracted to Jack, and they eventually consummate their interest in one another, she wavers between ogling him and viewing him suspiciously. In her paranoid sleep-deprived state, she begins questioning his behavior and whether he’s the culprit behind the strange activities in the house. When he discovers the missing key to the back door in a place she already looked, she wonders if he’s deceiving her. After she goes to prison, she learns he’s married with a child—which is perhaps why she could never bring herself to fully trust him.

Jean McKenzie is the Elincourts’ other employee. She’s around fifty years old and spends most of her time caring for her father in the village. Rowan says she is “plump and motherly” with a “ruddy” face (112). She never fully warms to Rachel, but when she eventually smiles at her with a sense of approval, it makes her face appear younger. After Rachel is in prison, Jean writes her a letter explaining that she was initially harsh to Rachel because she knew that Bill would approach her, and she felt bad for the children. However, she believes Rachel is innocent, demonstrating that her allegiance is—and has always been­—to the children.

Catherine Gerhardt is Rachel’s mother. Her character is fleshed out through Rachel’s recollections of her childhood and adolescence, which indicate that they do not have a good relationship. Rachel explains to Mr. Wrexham that she never felt good enough for her mother, regardless of how hard she tried to be “the perfect daughter” (308). She feels her mother’s general sentiment towards her has always been that Rachel “ruined her life” (309). The absence of a strong maternal figure in Rachel’s life is perhaps what leads her to gravitate towards childcare as her profession. It may also be why she desperately wants to connect with her half-sisters. They are the family she never had.

Dr. Kenwick Grant is the previous owner of Heatherbrae House, which was called Struan House when he lived there. He was an analytical chemist who specialized in biological toxins. Rachel wonders if his ghost haunts the attic at night since his daughter died tragically after ingesting poison berries from his garden. As Maddie tells Rachel, he allegedly heard her crying in the night after she passed away and eventually went mad. He represents the torment that lurks in the shadows of Heatherbrae. He embodies the anguish and despair that can result from bad parenting decisions. Although his ghost turns out to be an illusion orchestrated by Maddie, his emotional torment still seems to haunt the house—both encapsulating and adding to the turmoil felt by everyone living inside it.