“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, grabbing the light.

I propped myself up on my elbows and angled the light down into the now-open door. The drop down was about twelve feet and the walls were made entirely of metal. I felt a twinge of disappointment. It looked like an old coal chute. I did not see a tunnel. I did not see treasure.

“Daisy?” Jake asked. “What do you see?”

I angled the light again, searching every crevice of the space. The light flickered over something and my hand stilled before it began to tremble. I tried to steady the beam of light, to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I swallowed hard and wiped at the cobwebs clinging to my face.

“I see…a pair of shoes,” I said.

“Shoes?” Jake asked.

“Yeah.” I swallowed again. “And someone’s in them.”

TWO

Footsteps clamored on the wood floor above me.

“Don’t say a word,” I hissed at Jake.

“Well, maybe if you hadn’t screamed after you told me about the shoes, they wouldn’t be running down here,” he said.

I frowned at him but I was still facing the kitchen wall and he couldn’t see me.

He tapped on my foot. “Get out of there so I can take a look.”

I managed to wiggle out of the crawl space just as all four kids crashed down into the basement, eyes wide, ears open.

Four kids. Three girls and a boy. Emily (fourteen, mine), Will (twelve, mine), Sophie (ten, his) and Grace (eight, mine). We’d managed to dispense with the mine and his, however, since all four lived with us ninety eight percent of the time and had morphed fairly easily into a modern day Brady Bunch, sans the even numbers and maid. We were a unit of six, a unit that had a combustible quality and a ferocious curiosity and an uncountable number of quirks.

Will was first down. His blond hair flopped across his forehead and was in desperate need of a trim. “Why are you so dirty?” he asked accusingly.

“Because I was in the crawl space,” I said, trying to knock the dirt off my sweatshirt.

He peered up into the space, his eyes narrowing. He was the most observant of the four, the one we couldn’t pull anything over on. “What is Jake doing?”

Jake had shimmied into the crawl space the minute I’d eased myself out. “He’s…uh…unfreezing the pipe.”

“I don’t hear the hairdryer,” Emily said, her eyes, blue like her brother’s, just as narrow. “We heard screaming.”

Grace, the youngest, was attempting to climb onto a table to get a better look. “Are there snakes up there?” she yelled, her voice so loud that dust and cobwebs shook free from the rafters, raining down on us.

“Snakes? I want to see snakes!” Sophie said, pushing her glasses up on her nose so she could get a better look. “Daddy! Are there snakes?”

“No snakes,” Jake muttered. Then, “Oh. Huh. Wow.”

Will took a step closer, his eyes huge. “What? Is there a snake?”

“Nothing is wow,” I said, putting my arms out like a defender, keeping them from getting too close to the space. “We’re just working on the pipe. Head back upstairs.”

“Why did you scream?” Emily asked, squinting at me.

“I didn’t.”

She folded her arms across her chest. Her brown hair was so long, the ends brushed her hands. “You totally screamed,” she said.

“Cobwebs,” I said. “I got a cobweb in my mouth.” I wiped at my lips for emphasis. “Maybe even a spider. I don’t know.”

Her face paled. “Gross,” she said. She wasn’t fond of spiders. Or ladybugs. Or butterflies. Or anything else that remotely resembled an insect. Some days, this included her siblings.

“I don’t see any snakes,” Grace said, now standing on an old table and looking over my head.

“Aw man,” Sophie said, her face falling.

I grabbed Grace by the hips and set her back down on the basement floor. “All of you, back upstairs. Now. We’ll be up in just a bit.”

They all grumbled but headed back up the stairs. Will took one more look at me, then the space, then followed his sisters up to the main floor.

As soon as the door at the top of the stairs shut, I whispered, “You see?”

“I see,” Jake whispered back. “But I can’t get down there.”

“Well you aren’t going down there,” I said. “Because there is a body down there. But you see it, right?”

“I see it,” he said. “Pair of running shoes. Probably a guy’s. Dirty socks.”

I nodded. The shoes were blue with yellow stripes. And there were still feet in them.

I grabbed my phone off the table. “I’m calling the police.”

“Wait,” he said.

“Jake, we can’t wait,” I said, not believing that he thought we should do anything else. “There is…”

“Give me the hair dryer,” he said. “Before you call. So I can fix the damn pipe and create a little noise so four sets of ears don’t hear you on the phone telling someone that there’s a dead body in our new old house!”

I handed him the hair dryer. “What do I tell them?”

Jake twisted so he was on his back and tucked his chin to his chest so he could see me. His blue eyes were barely visible in the sea of dust covering his face. “Tell them that, because you insisted on buying an ancient house—despite neither yourself nor your husband having any technical expertise whatsoever which would allow us to, you know, fix things—we were up in a crawl space designed for really thin midgets because the jerry-rigged plumbing system from our kitchen froze because you refused all of my requests to move to Fiji so that we could be outside at least for a couple of days each winter without the fear of freezing our lips off. And because we can’t, you know, fix things, we were using your hair dryer to warm a century old pipe and in doing so, you happened to find a door that you thought led to Narnia but instead led to an old coal chute and in the coal chute you found what looks to be a…person. We don’t think it’s the Wicked Witch but we’re not totally sure.”

I stared at him for a long moment. I loved him so much it made my heart hurt sometimes. But there were other times when I wanted nothing more than to stick my foot in his giant, sarcastic mouth.

“I’m just gonna ask if they can send an officer over,” I said. “Continue thawing.”

THREE

Moose River is appropriately named in that there are moose around somewhere and the town sits on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Not a whole of creativity, but it was a very Minnesota-like name and offered the opportunity for a very cute town logo: a moose standing in the river. Smiling. It was forty five minutes north of Minneapolis, which meant it was close enough that we could get down there for our urban fix of museums and sports, but rural enough to get away with a name like Moose River. Despite being just a few miles away from the suburban sprawl of the Twin Cities, it somehow managed to maintain a small town feel with its Main Street businesses, local children’s theater, an American Legion hall that hosted fish frys and meat raffles, and a lake that housed an awful lot of ice houses in the winter. And when you owned one of the only century-old homes in town—and the only one a stone’s throw away from the Legion—you didn’t need to explain to the dispatcher where you’re located.

“That’s the old, white house on the train tracks, right, ma’am?” the dispatcher asked.

“We aren’t on the tracks,” I said. “We’re next to them.”

“Sure,” she said. “I know that place. I’m always at the Legion on Taco Thursday nights.”

“That right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she answered. “There’s karaoke, too.”

“We know. We can hear it.” I was pretty sure the Legion’s cracked asphalt parking lot had magical acoustics because there were nights where it felt like the town’s American Idol rejects were serenading us from our front porch.

“Oh really? Well, next time you hear Pat Benatar’s Heartbreaker, you’ll know that’s me, then.”

“Terrific,” I said, nodding. More dust rained down from my ponytail. “Anyway. Can you send someone over?”