Page 32 of The Cowboy and the Baby

The uncertain tremor in Cody’s voice drew my attention first. I glanced up, saw his tilted head, and asked, “What?”

He stepped back, gesturing ahead. “Check this out.”

Near his feet was the spot where the drain and water exited the house. They were buried underground outside, beneath the porch, instead of descending into the basement and through drains there. Weird, but this was an old house.

I asked, “What is it?”

“A hole,” he drawled with an implied eyeroll. “The hole that the animals created. Look? See the marks? Animals found the pipe, burrowed around it, dug through the wall, and climbed inside. This is where they’ve been coming in, from beneath the porch.”

“As I thought,” I muttered.

I’d spent an hour demolishing tile and the drywall behind it and scooping enough poop to see the obvious, but that conspicuous issue wasn’t what grabbed my eye.

The exposed outer wall did.

I licked my lips.

Pointing above it, I asked Cody, “What is that?”

His gaze followed my pointing finger. There should have been 2x4 boards framing the inside of the exterior wall, but instead there was a bright red . . . door?

Cody put a hand on it.

“What in the?—”

“Are we done yet?” Wyatt muttered, returning with three empty buckets, his cheeks reddened. Three of us in the bathroom were a tight squeeze, so he stood in the doorway. Reading the strange energy in the room, Wyatt paused.

“What’s the face for, hoss?”

My suspicions had already started to form, and the weighty ball in my stomach sank farther. I had a feeling everything was about to change.

“What do you see, Wyatt?” I asked, tapping the wall with a finger. “Right here. See this red area?”

Wyatt shrugged. “Yeah. It’s a bright red wall with a design on it?”

Cody knocked away a few pieces of tile I had missed.

“Cade,” Cody said, “it’s a damn door. The wall is a door.”

“Language,” I barked, but the command was weak.

Wyatt echoed our astonishment. “There’s a door in the wall?”

“No,” I muttered, thumping it with my knuckles. “The door is the wall. The other side of that door is the exterior of the house. The walls are . . . doors.”

We didn’t speak for a full ten seconds.

A brush of chilly air brought me around. Weird as it was, it didn’t matter what comprised the walls. We had to seal this place up.

I handed Cody a hammer and pry bar. “Let’s get it taken care of, boys. First, we need to seal up the hole with a concrete mix I have in the barn. Wyatt, I want you to go find it. While he does that, Cody, you’re going to peel back more of the drywall and expose the hidden door’s edges. I’ve got a weird hunch there will be more doors.”

After this was done, I eyed the larger area, replete with two more doors. “Boys, looks like whoever put our house together made the exterior walls out of doors.”

An hour later, the three of us stood back and stared.

“Walls made from doors and not an inch of insulation to be found along the exterior of your house,” Cody said, clucking. “You inherited a strange place, hoss.”

The feeling of a cold fist squeezing my guts had overtaken my stomach. We’d cleared away the drywall along the exterior wall, discovering that the only thing standing between us and a Wyoming winter was a wall of doors held together by horizontal wooden slabs.