“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 didn’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?”