Then Agent Morales placed a photograph on the table.
“Do you recognize this?”
It was a red door.
Not a house door. Not exactly.
A metal door, rusted at the bottom, painted a deep, ugly red. There were scratches around the handle.
I stared at it.
“No.”
She placed another photo beside it.
This one showed the inside of my mother’s shed.
The floorboards had been pulled up.
Beneath them was a narrow stairway descending into darkness.
At the bottom of the stairs was the red door.
My hands began to shake.
“That was under the shed?”
“Yes,” Morales said.
“How long?”
“We don’t know.”
I thought of Noah at four years old, tugging my sleeve during a Sunday barbecue at my mother’s house.
Mommy, the little house is crying.
I had looked toward the shed and seen nothing but peeling paint, a padlock, and weeds growing wild around the foundation.
