The laminate table in the teachers’ lounge always smelled like stale Maxwell House and whatever pine-scented spray the night custodian used on the linoleum. Nicole sat there on a Thursday afternoon with a stack of construction paper cutouts she needed to staple to the bulletin board before the morning bell. Most of the kids drew trucks, or horses with blue manes, or stick-figure families holding hands under a yellow sun. Normal six-year-old things.

Then she found the one at the bottom of the pile.

It belonged to Sammy. He was a quiet little boy with big round eyes and a chipped front tooth who always sat in the second row by the supply shelf.

His handwriting was neat, almost painfully careful for a kid who still held his Crayola with a full fist. The assignment had been simple: draw your favorite game.

Sammy hadn’t drawn tag. He hadn’t drawn hide and seek in the backyard.

He had drawn a closet. Just a tall rectangle in heavy brown crayon, colored in so hard the wax had torn the cheap paper in two places. Inside the rectangle, a tiny black stick figure sat curled up in the dark. Outside the door, which was drawn half-shut with jagged black lines, stood a taller stick figure with no face at all.

Nicole didn’t call him over right away. She smoothed the paper out with her thumb, feeling the rough tear under her nail, and her coffee went cold beside her stapler.

The next morning, during free play when the room was loud with plastic blocks and the hum of the old radiator, she knelt down by Sammy’s desk.

She kept her voice soft, the way she always did when a kid skinned a knee on the playground. She asked him what he liked to play when he got home from school.

Sammy didn’t look up from his blue crayon at first. He just kept coloring the sky a flat, hard blue.

He told her about the quiet game. He said Uncle Rick played it with him when his mom was working her second job over at the distribution center. He had to sit in the hall closet and stay completely quiet, and if he didn’t make a sound, Uncle Rick gave him a dollar bill.

Nicole told me later that her ears started ringing right then, a high, thin sound like a TV left on after midnight.

She asked him, casual as anything, if his mom knew about the game. Sammy shook his head and kept his eyes on his paper.

He said it was a secret game, and if he told anyone, the game would stop and he wouldn’t get any more dollars to buy candy at the corner store. Then he asked if he could have a fresh piece of blue construction paper because his broke in half.

Nicole stood up and walked straight to the school counselor’s office without telling her aide where she was going.

The counselor, a woman named Mrs. Gable who had gray hair pinned back in a messy clip, took one look at the drawing on her desk and stopped typing on her clunky Dell keyboard. They didn’t have to talk about what it meant. The brown crayon, the dark box, the money, the secrecy. It was all right there in the lines a six-year-old hand had pressed into the paper.

In Springfield, families doubled up in rental houses all the time because the rent on a three-bedroom place was more than most people made in two weeks.

Destiny, Sammy’s mother, was twenty-three and worked doubles from four in the afternoon until midnight. To make the mortgage on the little bungalow off Elm Street, she rented the spare room to a man named Rick who worked construction down by the interstate.

Nicole knew that because she had processed the emergency contact forms back in August. She had never met Rick. She had never had any reason to think twice about him.

The law in Iowa doesn’t give teachers a choice when something like this crosses their desk. You don’t wait to see if Monday brings a better mood. You don’t ask the mother if she’s sure. You pick up the phone on the edge of the desk and you call the state hotline while the office smells like floor wax and old paper.

Nicole made the call from Mrs. Gable’s office while the kids were out on the playground playing tag in the pale October sun. She told me she stared at a dead potted fern on the corner of the filing cabinet the whole time she talked to the intake worker, reciting Sammy’s name, his birth date, the address on Elm Street, and the words he had said about the closet and the dollar bills.

By seven o’clock that night, she was sitting in her Honda Civic in her own driveway three miles away, too tired to turn the engine off.

Her own two kids were inside the house watching television with their dad, and she just couldn’t make her legs work to get out of the car. She sat there in the dark with the dashboard lights glowing green against her knees, listening to the ticking of the cooling metal under the hood.

That was when her cell phone buzzed against her thigh.

It wasn’t a text. It was the main office line from the elementary school, lighting up the caller ID at an hour when the building was supposed to be locked and empty for the night.

She picked it up on the second ring, her thumb pressing hard against the glass. I was still on the other end of the line, listening to her breathe in the quiet of the car.

She said, “Mom, hold on, it’s the school,” and I heard her pick up, and I heard a woman’s voice say, “Nicole, the caseworker’s here, and there’s something about that house you need to know before Monday.”