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there, but they don’t have anything to do with the body. They were just looking.” I realized right after I said it that that sounded peculiar, as if I’d been selling tickets for self-guided tours. “One of them may be unconscious.”
    That was enough to send the officers storming into the house without asking more questions, although the woman paused long enough to yell back, “Nobody leaves! We have questions to ask you.”
    “But I just got here,” Mac protested. “I don’t know anything. But that’s okay,” he added hastily in response to her stern look. “I wasn’t going anywhere anyway.”
    “Good.” The woman officer transferred the stern look to me. “Don’t let anyone else come inside.”
    Right. No more tour tickets.
    That left Mac and me looking at each other, Mac with silver-gray eyebrows raised in a questioning arc. He looked good. Khaki shorts, light green polo shirt, and that disreputable old straw hat that somehow manages to look rakish instead of bag-lady-boyfriend on him. Even that blue tattoo and his knobby knees looked good.
    Mac crossed his arms over his chest. “A dead body in your bathtub?” he inquired.
    “Okay, go ahead and say it,” I muttered. Just because he looked good, and I was glad to see him, didn’t mean he wasn’t going to go snarky on me. “You warned me. You told me so.”
    “I admit an I-told-you-so is tempting,” Mac agreed. “Although I hadn’t figured even you would come up with a dead body this soon. My apologies for underestimating you.” He gave me a complimentary bow of head.
    “Maybe you’d prefer the dead body was me . Although then you wouldn’t have anyone to say ‘I told you so’ to.”
    “Has anyone ever mentioned that sometimes you sound as if you should be riding on a broomstick instead of driving a motorhome?” he grumbled.
    We glared at each other for a long minute.
    Okay, I’d started this by being a tad snappish. “I’m glad you’re here,” I finally said.
    He was still scowling, but he grabbed me in a big Mac-hug. I was still a little unhappy with his grumpy attitude about my coming home to Madison Street, but I was too glad to see him not to hug back.
    “I came because I missed you,” he said. “I tried to call but I couldn’t get through.”
    “My phone was dead.” Still was.
    “I was worried about you. Apparently with good reason.” He held me off at arm’s length and inspected me. “Are you okay?”
    “A little shook up,” I admitted. Yes, as I’d told Eric and Tasha, I’d found dead bodies before. But it isn’t as if this is something you want to incorporate into your daily routine.
    “You want to tell me what this is all about?” Mac said with a wave at the police car.
    Someone had put a couple of rickety old benches under the maple tree, so we moved over there into the shade and sat down. He kept hold of my hands while I told him. Arrival yesterday. Smelly house. Staying in the motorhome last night. Finding a sleeping bag and a woman’s clothes in my bedroom this morning, followed by wrinkled, blackened toes under blankets in the bathtub. Running to the neighbor’s. Calling 911.
    “I didn’t deliberately try to get involved with a dead body. I wasn’t sticking my nose in where it didn’t belong.” I needed to emphasize that point. Because, what my friend Special Agent Dix called my “mutant curiosity gene,” has gotten me in trouble before. “It just … happened.”
    “You’re thinking this is a natural death? This woman just crawled in your tub and died?” He sounded skeptical.
    “Tasha said there’s a big hole in the body,” I answered uneasily. “And the blankets were pulled up over her face. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she was murdered .”
    “No?” He lifted his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his chest again.
    “The police haven’t said anything about murder.”
    “What would you expect? An officer rushing out and screaming ‘Murder! Murder!’ like some guy on a