“Ted is already on his way, ma’am.”

I said thank you and goodbye and punched off the phone. “On their way, Jake.”

He didn’t say anything, focused on holding the hair dryer up into the crevice as high as he could.

I smacked his foot and he turned the dyer off. “What?”

“They’re on their way.”

“Oh. Alright.”

“How are you not freaking out about this?” I asked. I lowered my voice to an elevated whisper. “There’s a corpse in our home!”

“It’s not in our home,” he clarified, scooting out and off the ledge. His eyebrows and hair were caked with gray dust and I suddenly had a vision of him thirty years into the future…if he went gray and also decided to never wash his face again. “It’s in our coal chute. A coal chute we didn’t even know we had.”

“You know what I mean.”

He shrugged and set the hair dryer down. “Nothing to get excited about until we know what to get excited about.”

Typical Jake. One thing at a time. No hysteria, no dramatics, no concern. Steady. Deliberate.

Like the anti-me.

“How did it get in there?” I asked.

He shook his head and more dust lifted off him in a cloud. Maybe I was actually seeing an adult version of Pigpen. “No clue. I didn’t put it there.”

“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.