The Babysitter

Chapter 4 — The Closet

At 11:05, Jess gave up pretending to watch television.

*Don’t,* she told herself. *It’s a closet. It’s a child’s closet, in a nice house, and you are a professional.*

*One quick check,* her feet replied. *Thirty seconds. Then you’ll sleep tonight.*

She told herself she was going up to check on Tommy — good sitters checked, great sitters checked, et cetera — but her feet knew the truth before her brain caught up. Her feet took her straight past Tommy’s bed, past the nightlight and the glow stars and the even breathing, and stopped in front of the closet.

Curiosity won. It always won with her. Her dad said it was her best quality and her worst one, often in the same sentence.

She slid the doors open slowly, wincing at every inch of the track, and breathed in cedar and detergent. Small shirts on small hangers, the hangers clicking softly as they settled. Tiny sneakers lined up with military precision — and they were clean, she noticed. Somebody cleaned a six-year-old’s sneakers. That was either love or madness, and Jess wasn’t qualified to say which. Shoeboxes stacked on the shelf above, every one of them labeled in Sarah’s neat, looping handwriting: *Winter boots. Cleats — size 1. Baby shoes (KEEP!).*

Nothing. Of course nothing. She felt seventeen kinds of ridiculous.

She was about to slide the doors shut when she saw it. Her eyes had gone straight past it the first time — the shelf was high, the box was dark — but now she couldn’t unsee it.

One box on the shelf sat crooked — pushed further back than the others, tilted at an angle, like someone had put it back in a hurry. In the dark. And unlike every other box in the closet, it had no label. No looping handwriting. Nothing.

Jess stared at it for a long moment. Her hand hovered. *Don’t be weird,* she thought, and reached up, and pulled it down.

It was light. Too light for shoes. She turned it over — no markings on the bottom either — and lifted the lid slowly, the way you’d open something you half-expected to move.

Empty. Just cardboard — and a smell rose out of it that stopped her cold. Faint, stale, unmistakably human. Sweat and dust. Unwashed skin. Like a gym bag left zipped too long, or a coat closet in a house where someone had been sleeping. She held the box at arm’s length, then, feeling insane, brought it closer and breathed in again. It didn’t get less real.

She stood there holding an empty shoebox, and her detective’s-eyes brain started doing the thing it did: *Why keep an empty box? Why no label, when Sarah labels everything down to the baby shoes she’s keeping? Why shoved at the back, crooked, like it was put there fast?*

She put the box back exactly as she’d found it — she noted the angle first, the tilt, the depth, the precise distance from the shelf edge; she’d always been the kid who noticed, the one her dad called his little crime scene tech — and stepped back, and stood there with cardboard dust on her fingers, trying to think of one innocent reason for an empty, unlabeled, stale-smelling shoebox hidden at the back of a six-year-old’s closet.

She couldn’t.

On impulse, she knocked on the closet’s back wall.

The sound that came back was hollow. A deep, empty boom, like knocking on a drum.

She frowned. She knocked on the bedroom wall beside the closet. Solid. Dull. The sound of drywall over studs, the way walls were supposed to sound.

She knocked on the closet’s back wall again, harder. Hollow. She pressed her ear to it — cool, silent — and felt like an idiot and couldn’t stop. *Different construction,* she whispered. Probably. Closets were framed differently. That was a thing. Probably. She made herself say it a third time, like repetition would make it true.

She slid the doors shut — all the way, until they clicked, because Tommy had asked — and turned around.

Tommy was sitting up in bed.

No — he wasn’t. He was lying down, exactly as before, breathing evenly, triceratops still clutched in one arm. But his mouth had moved. She was sure his mouth had moved.

“Don’t,” he’d murmured. She was sure of it. One word, thick with sleep.

“Don’t what, buddy?” she whispered.

Nothing. Even breathing. Asleep — surely asleep, deeply asleep, the sleep of a six-year-old who had eaten lasagna and laughed milk out of his nose. She crossed to his bed and crouched beside it, watching his face in the blue nightlight glow. His eyelids didn’t flutter. His breathing didn’t change. Whatever he’d said, he’d said it from somewhere far under, where dreams lived.

She stayed there a full minute, telling herself to get up, and then she got up.

Jess stood in the middle of the bedroom, and that’s when she noticed the smell wasn’t just in the box anymore.

It was faint — so faint she might have been inventing it — but it was in the air of the room. Stale. Human. Like someone had been standing right there, in the middle of Tommy Callahan’s bedroom, not long ago.

She checked the window. Locked, latched, the screen undisturbed. She checked the bedroom door — she’d closed it behind her, and the hallway beyond was dark and empty. There was nowhere for a smell to come from. There was no one for it to belong to.

The window was closed. The door had been closed. Tommy was six.

And Jess stood there at 11:20 on a Friday night with the deeply unscientific, completely unshakable feeling that she was not the only person who had been in this room tonight.