Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman

there were no rooms with doors on the first floor of a foursquare. And a closet, with its winter layers of outerwear, would be the perfect place to hide.
    I twisted around, praying that the ungainly movement wouldn’t catch Eileen’s eye, and slipped through a narrow crack in the doorway. I wound up at the top of a staircase, nearly toppling down the whole flight before I could catch myself, fingers crooking painfully as I dug them into a wall. Then I eased the door shut behind me.
    This wasn’t a closet. It was the basement.

Chapter Sixteen
    The basement was so dark that I had to stand balanced, still teetering on that first step, as I let my eyes adjust.
    Then I heard the sluggish grumble of a car engine igniting outside in the cold, and knew Eileen must be driving her old Ford away. She’d just forgotten something.
    It would be best if I went now, too. While I could be sure of leaving unspotted. The photo album was a solid rectangle, distorting the shape of my pocket. I’d gotten what I’d come here for.
    But then my eyes picked out something from the darkness. A slit of light below. Was there a sealed-off room in this basement? I couldn’t think where a line of light like that, faint and far away, would be coming from except underneath a door.
    Eileen might spot my car on her way out, and come back, intent on finding me. I could imagine the exact sequence unraveling, and yet I was drawn like a moth to that light, one of the few turned on in this unwelcoming house.
    I made my slow, careful way down the stairs.
    The dark got thicker as I descended, as if black sludge had settled toward the bottom. I followed that splinter of light like a beacon. When I reached the last step, I put one foot out in front of me, then swept it all around, in case I was simply standing on a landing, poised to fall as soon as I started walking again.
    The blackness was complete, like space, or the bottom of the sea. Stumbling forward in the murk, I kicked out my feet and fanned my hands around to prevent falls and avoid knocking into something. My mind conjured up images of basement things: tearing cobwebs; roosting beetles; hulking, covered objects.
    I knew houses with more than my eyes, though, and could sense the size of this space. A long series of steps later, my outstretched palms scraped against the wall.
    That line of yellow lay at my feet. I blinked to make out a doorknob, protruding a yard or so above. With no idea what I might find on the other side, I twisted the knob.
    It was locked.
    A locked, lit room in a basement. Yes, it was like something out of a horror movie—mandating instant flight in the real world—but in the real world there was also a good reason to stay. With no obvious explanation for such a place, I thought its existence might possibly reveal something essential.
    My fingers traced the keyhole beneath the knob. Whatever this room withheld, the lock warded off only the least determined of intruders; any rigid object should force the mechanism to unclick.
    There were half a dozen tools in my bag that would make short work of this task. Despite the near total lack of light, the correct one all but sprang into my practiced grip. I’d never used a flathead screwdriver to pick a lock before, but it worked as well in the keyhole as it did installing a quarter-inch screw.
    The room I entered was so bright that a spear of pain instantly penetrated my head. I shut my eyes, leaving afterflashes of white. When I opened them again, I took in the walls, which were papered, but not with flocking or flowers.
    Instead, all of the pictures that didn’t adorn the rest of this house had found their way down here. Eileen had made a mosaic on the walls of her hidden room, a mural of all the moments it was a parent’s deepest desire to chronicle.
    I stepped closer to look.
    There were a few shots of Brendan as an infant, Eileen and Bill as brand-new parents. But the bulk of the photographic