The Dead Room by Chris Mooney

doing great. Let’s talk about why you came to Belham. You said something about a job opportunity. What kind of jobs?’
    ‘She didn’t tell me specifics. My mom… She’s fun and everything, takes me places, but there are certain things she’s real private about. At least with me.’
    ‘Like what happened to her parents.’
    ‘Right. She told me they were murdered before I was born. She was always afraid of something happening. And she’s not, you know, gushy with her emotions. She keeps them bottled up. When you talk to her about what’s bothering her, she won’t tell you.’
    John was talking about her in the present tense, as if she were going to come through this door at any moment, sit down on the bed and hold him, tell him everything’s going to be fine.
    ‘Tell me about your mother’s friends,’ Darby said.
    ‘I never met them. For all I know, she didn’t have any.’
    ‘How long have you been living in Belham?’
    ‘Just a couple of days,’ he said. ‘We were only going to stay for, like, a week, or something.’
    ‘Do you know the names of the people who owned the house?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Okay, let’s go back to when you were on the sofa. You said you heard the door open.’
    ‘It was the door at the end of the kitchen hall, the one that lead out to the garage. I know that because it makes this swishing sound against the floor when it opens.’
    ‘Did your mom leave one of the garage doors open?’
    He thought about it for a moment.
    ‘I… I remember when my mom left, she told me to lock the door – the door at the end of the kitchen hall. But I don’t remember hearing the garage door shut. I’m not sure. It’s all confusing. It’s like I have all these snapshots flashing through my head all at once. It’s hard to keep track.’
    ‘That’s normal.’
    ‘So when it opened later, I thought it was my mother. And I was half-asleep on the sofa. I remember it was dark – I could see the backyard through the sliding glass door in the living room. That’s when I saw him, the man with the gun. He was standing at the end of the sofa telling me to stay quiet.’
    ‘Describe him to me. Tell me everything you noticed, even if you don’t think it’s important.’
    ‘He wasn’t wearing a ski mask or anything, which I thought was kind of odd. The other guy wasn’t either. I mean, that’s what you do when you rob a house, right?’
    ‘Right.’ Darby felt excitement bumping in her chest. Two men had entered the house and the boy had seen their faces. He could give descriptions to a sketch artist. A long shot, maybe, but if the pictures ran on TV someone might recognize them.
    ‘He was a white guy,’ John said. ‘And he was wearing this warm-up suit – the kind the Celtics wear. Had a Celtics hat too. A baseball cap. He was old. He kind of looked like someone’s grandfather but his face was, like, weird.’
    ‘Weird how?’
    ‘He didn’t have any wrinkles. His skin was, like, all smoothed back. It reminded me of Mrs Milstein – she was our neighbour when we were living in Toronto. She got a facelift and her skin was real tight and kind of shiny. My mom said Mrs Milstein had gotten a facelift. This Celtics guy had the same kind of face, and his hands… they weren’t right. They looked like they belonged on someone else. They were all wrinkled and hairy, and I saw these big veins sticking out on them. They reminded me of the hands I saw on the really old guys at nursing homes.’
    ‘When did you get a close-up look at this man’s hands?’
    ‘When he was…’ He swallowed again. ‘He made me get up from the sofa and sit on one of the kitchen chairs. That’s when I saw the other guy. He was standing in the kitchen. He pointed a nine-millimetre at me while the Celtics guy taped me down to the chair.’
    ‘You recognized his gun?’
    ‘I watch a lot of cop shows. CSI, Law and Order – stuff like that. The cops always carry nines. And when they interview the victims, they