“I’ll go look at the fuse box. Did it happen in the middle of the night? You tried to turn on the lights and they wouldn’t work?” He moved to the utility room, where the ancient washer and dryer sat. There was a fuse box trapped behind a stack of something. “What the hell is in here?”

“Numerous items. If you’re wondering what’s in that closet, it’s comic book boxes, I think. I peeked in there and that’s what it looks like. The guy who owned this place before me collected everything. I mean everything.”

He could see the outline of her frame in the shadows thrown off by her flashlight. She held it down and away, keeping it from hitting his eyes. It made it easy for him to work. “I haven’t been in here in a couple of years. Not since before Glenna passed. I knew he had a record collection and he liked stamps, but I didn’t know about the comics.”

“Oh, he collected all kinds of stuff.” Her voice had regained its composure. She was calm again and he was a bastard because he missed the moment when it sounded like she needed him. “I will say, for a hoarder he was a neat and orderly one. Everything is stacked and organized. I would actually say he probably had a mild case of OCD. He has stamps and coins. I guess they’re not worth anything or his kids would have taken them. Though they didn’t take the sweetest thing, did they? They didn’t take the puppy. Bastards.”

The end of her speech was said in that singsong tone women reserved for babies and small creatures. And some not-so-small ones since Peanut had been misnamed. The mutt was part lab, part golden retriever. Armie found the right switch and sure enough it had popped. He flipped it and the lights immediately came back on.

Lila sighed, a sound of pure relief. “Thank you. I didn’t know where the box was. That was foolish of me.”

“It’s a new place and you didn’t exactly give yourself a ton of time to settle in before you went to work.” He stepped around the stack of boxes and moved back into the kitchen. He’d wondered about why she’d simply moved in one day and gone to work the next. Most people would have unpacked.

Not that she’d brought much with her.

“I didn’t see a reason to wait. I don’t like to sit around. You know, I’m not normally this woman. I don’t flip out. I’m a trauma nurse and I freaked out over a dog.” She took a long breath and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry to have woken you, Sheriff.”

“Armie, please.”

“I thought you liked ‘Sheriff’ when you’re working.”

“I’m off the clock. Hence the lack of a uniform.”