Chapter 4: The Locked Room

Clem walked me up to the room she had made for me and left me at the door with a hug and a plate of crackers.

"Eat those," she said. "I opened the box myself."

I waited until her footsteps faded, and then I took my sketch out of my jacket and studied it.

My room was at the east end of the family wing.

Gerard's study was two doors down, on the same hall, behind a heavy oak door and a keypad.

I wanted to see that door up close.

I stepped into the corridor in my socks and walked straight into my mother.

She was standing in the dark at the end of the hall, in a silk robe, with a key in her hand.

"I couldn't sleep," Lenora said. "I never can, in this house."

"Neither can I," I said.

She looked at the key.

"Would you like to see it?" she asked.

"See what?"

"Where you were a child."

I should have said no.

I said, "Show me," and followed her to a white door I had passed on the way in.

The lock turned with a dry click.

The room inside was small and yellow.

There was a narrow bed with a quilt of faded stars, a shelf of picture books and a rocking horse with one glass eye.

Everything was clean, and nothing had been moved in nineteen years.

Lenora stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.

"I come every night," she said. "I sit in that chair. Gerard thinks I should have taken it down after the first year."

"But you didn't."

"I screamed in this room for a year," she said. "I couldn't walk out of it. After that I only came to sit."

I stepped inside.

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