“I thought cops got used to seeing stiffs.”
“I was in narcotics, not homicide, and believe it or not, I’ve never had a dead person fall out of a closet at me.”
“I hope you’re not going to blame this on Aunt Tess.”
“Ivan, your house is a loony bin.”
“Honey, this is your house.”
She removed the towel and pushed herself to her feet. “We should call the police. Some undertaker is going nuts looking for that poor old man.”
They walked down the hall to her bedroom and stopped at the door, not able to believe their eyes. The body was gone.
“Am I imagining this?” Stephanie asked. “Did I just throw up over a figment of my imagination?”
“I can guarantee you he didn’t walk away.”
“So someone took the dead guy. While I was in the bathroom, someone came in here and bodynapped him.”
They exchanged glances and knew they were both thinking the same thing. “Melody!” they called in unison.
Melody came to the head of the stairs. “What do you want?”
“There was a dead body here, and now it’s gone. I don’t suppose you know anything about this?”
Melody looked interested. “A dead body? A grossly dead body?”
Stephanie furiously pushed her damp hair back from her forehead, feeling herself teetering on the edge of civility. She’d tried to be philosophical about the toilet, the porch, the water heater, and the multitude of bizarre things that had happened to her, but this was the end. Disappearing bodies were not part of the bargain.
She glared at Melody. “Someone took that body. That body did not just up and walk away. Even Ivan said so. Someone took it, and there’s only one person in this house who would be nutso enough to do it. You. I know you took that body. Now where is it?”
“She’s getting a little weird,” Melody said to Ivan. “Probably PMS.”
Lucy came up behind Melody. “What’s all the racket about?”
“They think I took a body,” Melody said. “They’re missing one.”
Lucy looked from Melody to Stephanie to Ivan. “Uh-huh.”
“It’s true,” Stephanie said to Lucy. “There was a body here.” She lifted the dust ruffle and looked under her bed. “My closet door was locked, so Ivan came up to unlock it, and this dead guy fell out at me, and I threw up, and then poof, the body is missing.”
Lucy looked doubtful. “You’re putting me on, right?”
“No.” Ivan sat on the edge of the bed. “That actually happened… I think.”
“And they think I took it.” Melody rolled her huge black-rimmed eyes. “What do I look like, a body snatcher?”
“This body, did it have a knife sticking in it? Was there a bullet hole in the forehead? A rope tied around the neck?” Lucy asked.
“No. It was an old guy in a gray suit with a maroon tie,” Stephanie told her. “He was fine, except he was dead, and he should have had a different tie. Maybe something with stripes.”
“Why do you think Melody took him?”
Stephanie looked under the bed one more time. “It seemed like something Melody would do.”
“Mmmm, that’s true. But Melody was with me, cleaning the kitchen.”
Melody’s eyes looked even wider than usual. “Are you going to call the police?”
Stephanie flipped her palms up. “I don’t know what I’d say to them. Some refugee from a funeral home fell out of my closet, then disappeared while I was throwing up? They’d give me a breathalizer.”
Ivan took Stephanie by the hand. “Come on. We’re going to check out this entire house, then we’re going to have dessert.”
Two hours later Ivan and Stephanie sat in the kitchen, eating ice-cream sundaes.
“This is very creepy,” Stephanie said. “This is one of the creepiest things that’s ever happened to me.”
“Coming from you, that’s quite a statement.”
Stephanie spooned more fudge sauce over her ice cream. “Being a narc wasn’t usually creepy. It was boring, dangerous, scary, and frustrating. Mostly frustrating.”
Ivan was curious about her past. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that she’d been a cop. If she’d been a secretary or a second-grade teacher, he would have been equally curious. He simply wanted to know about Stephanie. “Why did you become a cop? Can you talk about it?”
“Yeah, the beginning is easy to talk about. It’s the end that’s tough.”
She mashed her ice cream into mush. “I was in college, majoring in art for lack of something better. Lots of kids go to college and have this passion to learn or to go out into the world and be a doctor, or a CPA, or an astronaut. I didn’t have a passion for anything. I was just drifting through life. I was an average person, getting average grades, going to college because that was the average thing to do. Then one day my mom called and said my little brother was in the hospital from a drug overdose. My little brother!” She shook her head, still wondering how such a thing could have happened.
“He was a good kid. We lived in a decent neighborhood. It just blew my mind. There I was, marking time in college as if I were some zombie, and my brother was lying in a hospital bed, fighting for his life. My brother got over it, but I never did. I decided I wanted to do something about the drugs in my neighborhood, so I quit college and became a cop.”
“Any regrets about leaving college?”
She scraped the bottom of her sundae glass. “No. College just wasn’t for me.”
“Any regrets about buying my house?”
Stephanie laughed. “Lots!”
Ivan tapped his spoon against the rim of his glass. “There’s something strange going on here, Steph. Someone cracked that upstairs toilet. And someone purposely weakened the boards in the front porch. And someone put a corpse in your closet.”
“You think someone’s out to get me?”
“Someone is trying to make your life difficult here. You think someone from New Jersey followed you? Someone with a vendetta?”
She snorted. “If someone from New Jersey was after me, I’d have a bullet in my head. At the very least they’d burn the house to the ground.”
“How about someone local?”
“I don’t know many people. You’d be my only suspect. This house was in your family for generations. Maybe you want it back-at a lowered price.”
He slouched in his chair. “Sorry, it’s not me. I’m broke. I couldn’t buy it back at any price.”
Stephanie watched him, waiting for an explanation, but he didn’t offer any. How could he be broke? He’d just sold a house that probably didn’t even have a mortgage on it. He had a successful cruise business. He wasn’t supporting a wife and kids.
He stood and took his glass to the dishwasher. “You know, it really bothers me that we couldn’t find the corpse. Melody and Lucy were in the kitchen. You and I were in the bathroom. And in the space of ten minutes, someone got that body out of the house.”
Stephanie agreed. “There’s something else that bothers me. Whoever locked the body in my closet knew about the skeleton key. Do you have any secret passages in this house? Any long-lost deranged relatives living in concealed rooms?”
“You’ve been watching too many movies.”
She pushed back in her chair. “Lucy called every mortuary within a forty-mile radius, and no one was missing an old man in a gray suit. I can’t believe we’ve hit a dead end on this. What have we overlooked?”
He pulled her to her feet and hooked his arm around her waist. “And you thought Maine was going to be dull.” He nestled her against him, pleased at the feel of her in his arms.
“Tell me the truth, do you mind that I’ve turned Haben into a bed-and-breakfast inn?”
A small, tight, humorless smile curved his mouth. “You think I’m behind all of this, don’t you?”
