I kept going back to the holes in the house—what Detective Hanborn had shown me and what Jake had managed to seal up when we’d gone outside. I thought about his comments, how there were probably multiple holes in the exterior. Were there really other points of entry? Did we need to go around the property with some sort of infrared detector and see what lurked behind the exterior? There was a room in the basement that we hadn’t fully explored, a space with a dirt floor and stuffed full of old wooden shutters and screens. We’d promised to clear it out come summer time but now I wondered what was behind those haphazard stacks. My thoughts drifted to the attic, too. There were trees right on the property line, their thick, low-lying branches almost level with the roof of the house. We’d often heard squirrels scurrying and chittering and I thought about what else might use those branches to access the roof. And, if they could get to the rood, could they get inside the attic? We’d heard scampering feet in the space above our room and had chalked it up to mice. But what if it was something else?  By the time the movie was over and I’d herded the kids up to bed, I’d convinced myself that our house had a neon ‘Open’ sign on every single side of the house, an arrow pointing to all the ways someone could get in, unannounced.

“Did you watch any of the movie?” Jake asked as he pulled off his T-shirt and climbed into bed.

“Of course.”

“Which part?”

I pulled off my socks and sweatshirt and got into bed next to him. “The part where the statues come to life.”

He chuckled and pulled the blankets over himself. “That’s almost the entire movie. And entirely not specific. I think you may have been a little preoccupied about our newly discovered door.”

“It’s a hole,” I said, correcting him. I sighed. “But it might as well be a door.”

He nodded. “Be the right size for a raccoon. Or a midget.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You aren’t helping.”

“I sealed the cinder blocks!”

“Some of them,” I reminded him. I shifted closer and tucked my feet under his calves. “You said yourself that you need to do it when it’s daylight.”

He laughed again. “Daisy. No one else is coming in.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Then what are you worried about?”

I rolled closer to him. “How did whoever killed Olaf find that opening?”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t have a good answer for that,” he admitted.

“I mean, you couldn’t just walk into our yard and see it,” I said. “It wasn’t visible. You would’ve had to know it was there.”

He nodded. “Yeah, suppose so.”

“The only people who could’ve known about it were the owners before us,” I said slowly.

“Or the owners before them…”

I sat up straight. “So it has to be one of them.”

Jake looked dubious. “I don’t know about that.”

“How could it not?” I asked, smacking the pillow. “No one else would’ve known.”

“You’re assuming two things,” Jake said. “One, that the previous owners knew about the opening. We’ve lived here for six months and didn’t know about it, so there’s no guarantee that they knew, either. And, two—which is a far bigger leap—that one of the previous owners had reason to kill Olaf and dump him here to make you look bad.” He raised an eyebrow. “That isn’t just a leap, Daisy. That’s like jumping across the Grand Canyon.”

My excitement deflated like a popped balloon. He was right, of course. About both things. We’d met the previous owner, a lovely older woman who’d lived in the house for a couple of years before deciding to follow her son and his family to Arizona. I was fairly certain she wasn’t even in Minnesota anymore; and, even if she was, she didn’t seem like the person who would kill someone and then drag them through the snow and into a hidden coal chute.

I sighed. “Yeah. Probably.”

He pulled me toward him. “You’re obsessing way too much over this, honey. You need to let it go.”

“What?” I stared at him. “How?” Telling me to let it go was like asking me to climb Mt. Everest.

I couldn’t do it.

He laughed. “Look, I’m aware that you tend to hold onto things and hyper-focus. But there’s nothing you can do here. It’s over and done with. You said the detective told you we were cleared, which was never really in doubt, anyway. But she stated it, so now it’s a fact.” He wrapped his arms tightly around me. “We’re safe. We’re fine. There’s nothing else to do, except finish with the rest of the cinder blocks tomorrow. Which I’ll do. I promise.”

He was right. Again. We weren’t facing the threat of arrest. We were safe. The kids were safe. The opening was on its way to being sealed up for good.

I pressed into him. I needed to let it go, to relax and be satisfied that the police were going to take care of it.

I closed my eyes, prepared to do just that the next day.

FORTY THREE

I got the younger three kids up early the next day so that they were eating breakfast at the same time Emily was leaving for school. They sat at the table, slumped, wiping sleep from their eyes, forcing food into their mouths like zombies.

“Why are we up so early?” Will asked, his eyes barely open.

“Because you’re going down to the science museum,” I reminded him. “With the Witts.”

That didn’t perk him up. “Oh. Right.”

“Why aren’t you coming?” Grace asked.

“It’s Trade Day,” I reminded her.

Trade Day was something Brenda and I had come up with a couple of years ago. As much as we loved hanging out together and spending time with each other and our kids, we also never seemed to get much time on our own, a solo day without the kids in tow. So, once a month, we dropped off our kids with each other. There were no rules about how we spent our day—we could run errands or sit at home and watch soaps or go out to lunch with a different friend. It didn’t matter. What mattered was our kids got to spend some time together and we got a much-needed day off.

They finished breakfast, got dressed, yelled at each other while they were upstairs and were just getting their shoes on when the Witt’s passenger van pulled up in the driveway. I was pretty sure the only reason they’d bought a vehicle so large was to accommodate my kids on Trade Day. I waved to Brenda out the kitchen door and hustled them the kids outside. I watched as they loaded themselves into the van, waving at them as they pulled back out on the street. Brenda lowered the passenger window.

“I’ll have them home before dinner,” she called.

I nodded and smiled and closed the door.

It was amazingly quiet when I was the only one home and, all of a sudden, I had a million things I wanted to do before the kids got home. Reorganize the kitchen and bake cookies and paint the three-season room attached to our bedroom and sand and stain the dining room table and…the list went on and on.

I sighed. I knew none of those things were going to happen. Because I needed to use my Trade Day for something much more mundane: errands. Things like grocery shopping and a trip to the post office and a stop at the auto shop to get the oil changed since it had been six months and Jake was convinced the car was going to picket in protest at having dirty oil circulating through its engine for so long.

So I drained my coffee and put on my winter gear and, grocery list in hand, headed out the door.

It took me a little over an hour to load up on groceries for the next week, drop bills in the mail and stop for the 15-minute oil change. I’d just pulled into the driveway and was opening the trunk when a bright red Ford Taurus pulled in behind me.

I shaded my eyes, the sunlight blinding off the snow.

Helen Stunderson got out of the sedan and removed her sunglasses. She shook out her long hair, shut the driver’s door and walked toward me.

I was totally caught off guard. Why was she at my house?