by Jeff Shelby
“Shouldn’t the inspector have looked in there when we bought the house?”
He shrugged again. “He probably didn’t see the door. He was looking for leaks and broken things. Which, if you remember, he found quite a few of…”
I remembered. The inspection report was nearly forty pages long and when he’d seen it, Jake was adamant that we could not buy the house, that it was a money pit and that we’d be kicking ourselves if we did it. Plumbing issues. Window issues. Electrical issues. Roofing issues. Everything issues.
But the moment I’d walked in, I’d felt a connection with the house, like I was supposed to own it. I didn’t care about the leaky pipes and the cracked windows and the old wiring and the missing shingles. I just wanted the house. The beautifully painted plaster walls and the rich mahogany that framed the windows and doors. The planked wooden floors that were scuffed and scarred from over a hundred years of mothers chasing toddlers and pets skittering through, and all of the nooks and crannies that I was still discovering. I wanted it all.
And since I was the self-appointed president of our family, I’d been the final decider on the house. Jake didn’t mind his vice-presidency too much, especially after I gave him a night of super hot sex the day we signed the papers.
Win-win.
Before I could say anything else, the doorbell chimed upstairs and a stampede of feet roared over us.
“And away they go,” Jake said, shaking his head, but smiling.
At some point, the kids had decided that anyone who came to our door was either a serial killer or a robber. A knock on the door or ring of the bell sent all of them diving for cover, hiding until…the UPS man handed me the package. I’d sympathized with the kids the first time it had happened—after all, the door did look directly into our kitchen, and the window on the porch offered a full view of our main living space. It could be a little scary, I told them, being so exposed in a new house, but we were fine. Jake had watched my explanation with an expression that told me he was five minutes away from locating a straight jacket. For me, not the kids.
Jake followed me up the stairs and I hustled to answer the door. Even though the house had a front door that opened to a beautiful, covered porch, no one used it. The back door faced the driveway and that was the door people came to.
“Look, it is a robber,” Jake remarked.
I opened the door and a thick-bodied man wearing a black face mask and a police uniform hurried inside. A blast of cold air assaulted my exposed skin and I shivered and slammed the door shut.
“Hey, Ted.”
He removed his mask and a pair of brown eyes squinted at me. “Hey, Daisy. Good to see you,” he said, wiping his boots on the mat. Chunks of snow littered the mat and bounced across the tile floor.
Moose River Officer Ted was already on a first-name basis with me, and not because we were friends. We weren’t enemies, either, but our previous interactions had been strictly professional in nature. He’d visited our house a few times since we’d moved in, and not because he was part of the Moose River welcome committee. His first visit had been to find out about some things the previous owner had reported stolen after putting them out for trash pick up. He’d walked in the open door unannounced—the movers were still there—and inspected the house, looking like he expected to find the missing items holed up inside. The second time, he’d stopped by to let us know that we needed a permit to burn leaves. As we burned leaves without a permit.
Oops.
“Jake, how are you?” Ted asked, reaching past me to shake hands.
“Been cleaner,” Jake said, shaking his hand, then reaching for the kitchen faucet. He lifted the handle and water poured from the spigot. He shut it off. “But better now.”
“Alright then,” Ted said, his fat cheeks pink and red. “Uh, so, dispatch said something about…”
“Downstairs,” I said quickly.
I glanced into the living room. Even though I couldn’t see them, I knew the kids were all close by, listening—and probably seconds away from a heart attack now that they knew a police officer was in the house. Again.
We led him down into the basement, navigating the steep, narrow staircase while Jake quietly explained what we’d found. Ted scratched his balding head, nodded a couple times, then hoisted himself up into the elevated crawl space. He grunted and groaned as he shimmied into position and, for one horrified moment, I thought he might meet the same fate as the person we’d just discovered. Because I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get him back out.
But he sucked in his gut and shifted and, with one more groan, managed to reach out and push the coal chute door aside. He stayed there for a minute or so, then slid back out of the space, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
His dark blue uniform was now the color of concrete. “Okay. Well, yeah, that sure looks like a body down in there.”
I glanced at Jake, then back to Ted. “Yeah, that’s what we thought, too.”
Ted scratched his head and his mouth twisted in a couple different directions. “Is there another entrance to that chute area?”
“No idea,” Jake said. “We didn’t even know it was down there until about half an hour ago.”
“How so?” he asked, his bushy eyebrows raised.
“We just moved in, remember?” I said. I waved my hand at the boxes still stacked in the basement. “We’re not even done unpacking.”
“Sure,” Ted said, nodding. “Well, huh. Alright. How about if we use the door to the outside at the top of the stairs? That way we don’t have to traipse in and our of your kitchen to get down here.”
One of the hundred quirks in the house was that there was another exterior door right at the top of the stairs, across from the door that connected to the kitchen to the basement stairs. We’d looked at sealing it up, but hadn’t gotten there yet. Our procrastination looked like a good thing now.
“Sure,” Jake said. “We’ll need to undo the deadbolts.”
Ted nodded. “Think that’ll just be the easiest way to get us down here so we can get into the chute.”
“If you need a shovel, there’s one on the porch,” I offered. “Because the snow is probably a couple feet high at the back of the house.”
“Oh, I’ll manage,” he said, heading back up the stairs. “Be back in a few.”
We followed him up and all four kids were standing in the dining room.
“Why is he here?” Emily asked.
“Jake?” I asked, trying to inject some humor. “He’s your stepdad. He lives here.”
She rolled her eyes. “Duh. I meant Ted.”
“Officer Ted,” I corrected.
“Whatever,” she muttered, giving me another perfect eye roll. “You didn’t scream about cobwebs. What’s down there?”
“Now just calm down,” I said, holding my hands out. “Just relax.”
Jake sighed and shook his head. Because the minute I spoke those words, the three youngest tensed up. They glanced wildly at each other, their eyes as large as dinner plates.
“Is this about the ghost?” Grace asked, her hands digging into her brother’s back. “Did he find the ghost?”
“Get off,” Will said, shrugging her off. “And there is no ghost. Duh.”
“Yes there is,” Grace insisted. “Lolly is real.”
“Lolly,” Will muttered under his breath, shaking his head. At thirteen, his blossoming practicality was at constant war with his childlike neuroses.
“We didn’t see her in the closet,” Sophie chimed in. “That’s where we were hiding. But she’s here somewhere.”
I looked at Jake. I was firmly planted in the ‘Lolly is real’ camp. Our real estate agent had passed on the bit about Lolly being the ghost of the original owner of the home and that past residents had reported her presence due to various incidents. The one thing they’d all mentioned, however, was that she’d seemed friendly and helpful, as far as ghosts go. I was totally fine with a friendly and helpful ghost.
But I did
n’t want to mention that right then because, as things were looking now, we seemed on the verge of having a new ghost taking up residency in our house.
“Ted is taking a look in our coal chute,” he said.
Will frowned. “Coal chute? We don’t have a coal chute.”
“Ah, but we do,” Jake said. “Didn’t you know? This is the house that keeps on giving.”
“Where is the coal chute?” Will asked, his face screwing up with confusion. “I want to see it. Is there coal in there? How big is it? What’s it made of?”
“Not now,” I told him.
Grace inched toward me and I scooped her up. She was the smallest of the bunch and not just because of her age. She was tiny, compact like me, but a bundle of passion and energy, a lot of it often misdirected. Like me.
“Why is he looking in there?” Emily asked, trying to peek around me so she could see out the window. “And why did you really scream? Because you aren’t afraid of cobwebs. I know you aren’t.”
Emily was the tenacious one. And she wasn’t going to stop asking until I gave her an answer that satisfied her.
“What’s a coal chute?” Sophie asked, wrinkling her nose. “Is that where Santa delivers coal to the bad people?”
“Ohhhhh, Will!!!” Grace shouted next to my ear. I winced and set her down. “Santa is gonna bring you coal! Because you’re such a meanie.”
Will faked a lunge at his youngest sister and I shot him a warning look. “Don’t even think about it.”
“He’s just checking things out,” Jake said. He brushed at the dust on his sweatshirt and specks fell to the floor, settling in the melted puddles of snow. I was going to need to mop. Soon. “We’ll see what he has to say when he comes back in. You guys can go…do whatever it was you were doing.”
They all stood there, staring back at him.
“Or just stay right there,” he said, sighing.
Three minutes later, Ted was back in the kitchen, snow clinging to his arms and legs. He’d neglected to put his face mask back on and his cheeks and nose were bright red, his eyes watering from the bitter cold.
“Well, okay. I made a path to that back door and got it open,” he said, wiping his feet on the mat once again. “We should be able to get everything we need to through that door so we can stay out of your way in here.”
Jake nodded. The kids stared at him, wide-eyed, their mouths open. I was pretty sure the two youngest were expecting him to say he’d found Santa.
“I was able to get my ladder down with me and got down into the chute,” he said, then nodded. “That’s a dead body down there, alright.”
He may have said something after that, but I couldn’t hear.
Because the kids were all screaming at the top of their lungs.
FOUR
We’d had plenty of cars and vans parked in our driveway since we’d bought the house – plumbers, electricians, carpenters, inspectors – but this was the first time we’d had multiple police cars.
Two parka-clad officers were unspooling crime tape around the house. The tape fluttered in the brisk breeze, the yellow practically glowing against the stark white of the house’s stucco and the surrounding snow.
“The entire house?” I said, watching through the kitchen window. “They’re going to wrap the entire house in crime scene tape?”
Jake poured coffee into a mug. “Like a giant Christmas present. That no one wants.”
Ted had made a few phone calls after inspecting the chute and, within twenty minutes, it looked like every law officer in Moose River was on our property. Ted explained that the town didn’t actually employ an investigator, so he’d called in for the county investigator and that he would be arriving shortly.
“But everyone will know,” I said, shaking my head.
“Uh, pretty sure everyone knows now that our driveway is a satellite parking lot for the police department.”
He was right, of course. Our house was on the busiest street in town – we actually lived ON Main Street – and there was no hiding that something was going on at our home.
I sighed. “This is not what I envisioned in our new old home.”
He put his arm around me. “I know.”
I leaned into him. His arms felt good. Solid. Reassuring. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? Did you put the body down there?”
I pulled back and whacked him in the stomach. “No, you dork. I mean I’m sorry that this house has been a constant source of…work…ever since we moved in.”
“Yeah, but I’m not having to do any work on this particular problem,” he said, smiling. “I get to gawk like the kids.”
The kids. After we’d assured Sophie and Grace that the dead body was not, in fact, Santa Claus, the hysteria had died down a little. There were still nervous whispers and anxious looks but the screaming had stopped. All four of them were in the living room, their noses plastered to the windows, watching the police outside our home.
I watched them for a minute, then dug the mop out of the broom closet and stuck it in the sink. The entire tile floor was flecked with mud and snow.
“You know what I mean,” I said, returning to our conversation.
“Yeah, I do and it’s fine,” he said. He leaned against the counter and sipped his coffee. “Just think of this as a little more…cleaning.”
I glared at him. “Not.”
I attacked the floor, gliding the mop across the tiled surface. Muffled voices echoed beneath the kitchen, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. I assumed someone besides Ted had made their way inside the coal chute. A shudder rippled through me. I wondered how long the body had been in there. I wondered what condition it was in. I wondered who the hell it was. And who’d put it there. I wondered a lot of things.
A sharp knock on the kitchen door snapped me out of my thoughts. Jake pushed off the counter and reached for the doorknob.
A short, wide woman with a snowy white crew cut wiped her boots hard on the mat outside the door. Her cheeks were pink and her hard blue eyes looked first at Jake, then me. She looked like an aging Susan Powter.
“I’m Detective Priscilla Hanborn,” she said, her voice thick and raspy, as if the collected smoke of years of smoking cigarettes had settled permanently in her throat. I couldn’t imagine anyone looking and sounding less like a Priscilla. “From the county offices.”
Jake smiled and motioned her inside.
Her eyes darted between the two of us, a sour expression on her face. “You’re the homeowners.”
“We are,” Jake said. “I’m Jake Gardener. This is my wife, Daisy.”
She didn’t offer her hand, just dipped her chin as a curt hello to each of us. She adjusted her belt, hitching up her pants beneath a khaki jacket that looked two sizes too big for her. “Hear we got a body?”
“Uh, yes,” Jake said, clearing his throat. “We were in the crawlspace downstairs…”
“Who found it?” Detective Hanborn asked sharply.
Jake and I looked at each other.
“I guess I did,” I said. I stowed the mop back in the closet and wiped my hands down the front of my jeans. They came away covered in wet dust and I bit back a sigh. “I lifted up the door to the chute and…”
“Why?” she asked, fixing me with a hard stare. “Why did you open the door?”
“Because we didn’t…we didn’t know there was a door,” I explained. I didn’t want to say that I’d heard the house had been built by the owners of the first bank of Moose River and that part of me had thought maybe, just maybe, we might find a secret tunnel leading to some long-forgotten vault. “The pipe was frozen and it was the first time we’d ever gone into the space. So we hadn’t seen it before.”
She started to say something, but something caught her eye in the living room. The kids. She stared again for a long moment, as if each one of them were a suspect. “Those your kids?”
“Yes,” I said, a little defensively. “All four of them.”
“Four?”
she asked incredulously. “You lose a bet or something?”
Jake shot me a warning look and I took a deep breath. “No. We…we like kids.”
“Well, I like cats, too. But I’ve got three of ‘em and that’s one too many,” she said, shaking her head. “Can’t imagine feeding and taking care of four.”
I wasn’t clear on whether or not she thought our kids actually were cats or what she was getting at.
She refocused. “Did you know the deceased?”
“We haven’t even seen the…deceased,” I said. “Other than his shoes.”
“So you did not put the body down there?”
“No,” I said, bristling at the idea. “We did not.”
“I was asking just you, ma’am,” Hanborn said, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” I repeated. I folded my arms across my chest. “I did not.”
“Hmm. Okay. We’ll see about that, then.” Her voice told me everything I needed to know. She didn’t believe a word I’d said. “Gonna go outside now and help them pull the body out,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“It’s our house,” Jake pointed out. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Right,” the detective said. She glanced into the living room again. “Four. Wow. Just…wow.”
She turned on her heel and headed back outside, pulling the door closed behind her.
“I’m gonna buy a massive litter box,” Jake said. “Should cut down on the need for the toilet for them. Since we only have one.”
“Pretty sure litter is more expensive than toilet paper.”
He chuckled. “Maybe. But we could always try.”
I peered out the kitchen window. Priscilla Hanborn joined the group of officers who’d gathered in our backyard. She said something to them, then stomped toward the back door, the officers trailing behind her.
“She was…interesting.” I chose my words carefully, trying to be diplomatic.
“She seems…intense. And slightly insane,” Jake said, standing behind me to get a look outside, as well. “I’m glad you did not put that body down there.”
“Be careful or they’ll come back and find yours.”