I shared a tease about this on Facebook earlier this week. Today, I’m revealing what the dead body was! And, no, it wasn’t a mouse…

I should have been a CSI detective!!! Last week, there was a weird smell in the house. Our son Max has been staying here to help out (bless his heart!) since Brian broke his back.

We all smelled it one morning. My first thought? It’s been raining every single day for the past 10 days. Wet dogs… Wet dogs on the sofa! I don’t let the dogs on the sofa, but Brian does when I’m not looking. (He spoils all the pets. He’s a big animal lover.) So, Brian steamed the sofa. (He is able to do more and more things since he broke his back five weeks ago.)

In the meantime, I got on Amazon and bought “dog sofa covers.” They come in a variety of colors. Even a color to match our sofas. Cost me 50 bucks! They are waterproof on one side, and you put them on your sofa so that your husband can spoil your dogs and let them lay all over the couch, even when they are wet after coming inside when it’s raining out (sigh…).

But, the smell didn’t go away. It got worse! On day two, Max went downstairs to the basement. It’s a finished basement. We even have an apartment down there for the boys. That’s also where the podcast recording studio is.

Max came up the stairs and said, “Mom, it REALLY stinks down there!”

I opened the upstairs door that goes to the basement and took a whiff. Holy moley! Brian thought the smell was from water intrusion because of all the rain. He was worried we were going to have to call somebody to figure out where it was coming in.

I told Brian, “That isn’t water intrusion!” My stomach was coming up and my eyes were watering. I said, “That’s rigor mortis! Something died down there!”

Now, I have some experience with that. When we lived in Florida, we had the same smell coming from the sun room. I could not figure it out, and I had to call a specialist. He found a 4-inch long green lizard dead in the sun room. And it caused that much stink! But I can tell you that the basement smell was FAR worse!

So Brian and Max went down into the basement and searched high and low and everywhere. No dead body. Not even a lizard. They determined that something had died in the ceiling or in a wall of the basement. Brian, with his broken back, really wasn’t up to cutting through the sheetrock. I googled it. Decomposition could take three to four weeks for the smell to go away. That really didn’t sit well with me!

I looked online, and you can actually buy dead animal odor absorbers. I bought five bags. Another 100 bucks! Cha-ching! They were going to arrive the next day. In the meantime, Google said to open all the windows and run fans. We did. It also said to look for flies to figure out where the dead body is. There were no flies in the basement.

Now remember, I’d sent two men down there to check the entire basement to see if there was anything amiss. They checked everything. Including the closets down there. There are three. They checked under the beds in the apartment. They checked behind all the boxes and storage totes. They even checked the garage. Nothing.

Yesterday afternoon, I held my breath and ran down to the basement to get a family-size TV dinner out of the big freezer to make for dinner because I was choosing the winners from the finalists of our Quarterly 24-Hour Short Story Contest. I didn’t have time to cook that night.

I was literally down there for two minutes before I found…THE DEAD BODY! And it was FAR bigger than a lizard! Literally the size of a bowling ball! AND BLOATED!!!

That’s probably 500 times the size of a lizard, right? It was not behind a wall and not in the ceiling! And the guys had not noticed it! Again, RIGHT IN PLAIN SIGHT!!! Right there on the floor!!! 

So, what was it? When we unload frozen groceries into the big box freezer, we save the plastic bags they came in. I thought somebody had left the bag of bags in front of the freezer. NOPE!

I peeked inside and got the full brunt of the stink! Inside the bag was a full-sized (previously frozen) chicken from the grocery store. While loading the freezer, somebody (not me!) forgot to put that juicy morsel inside. The plastic shrink wrap had split open and the bird had expanded to astronomical proportions! I grabbed the bag, walked out the back basement door, tossed it in the garbage can, and said a quick prayer for the garbage men since garbage day was still two days away.

I ran upstairs and told both the guys, “I found the dead body!!!”

When I went back downstairs to try to figure out more creative ways to get rid of the stink, I noticed that there was a significant wet spot on the carpet. It had leaked through the bag!!! Long story short, after one and a half rolls of paper towels, using our steamer over and over again (to kill the bacteria), and Max running to the store to rent a Rug Doctor, which Brian used over a two-day period, over and over, the smell is GONE!

And the next time I need somebody to search for a dead body in our house, I’m going to do it MYSELF!!!  😉

Oh, and what did we have for dinner that evening? Before I knew what the stink was, I’d chosen a frozen family meal of cheesy rice with JUICY chicken!!! Brian and Max gave that a hard pass, and had leftover pizza.