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The Carriage House
Carla Neggers


Fun and a little hard work.That’s all Tess Haviland had in mind when Ike Grantham paid her for her graphic design work with the run-down, nineteenth-century carriage house on Boston’s North Shore. Then Ike disappeared, and now Tess finds herself with much more than a simple weekend project to get her out of the city. It’s not just the rumors that the carriage house is haunted–it’s the neighbors: six-year-old Dolly Thorne, her reclusive baby-sitter, Harley Beckett…and especially Dolly’s father, Andrew Thorne, who has his own ideas about why Tess has turned up next door.But when Tess discovers a human skeleton in her dirt cellar, she begins to ask questions about the history of the carriage house, the untimely death of Andrew’s wife…and Ike’s disappearance. Questions a desperate killer wants to silence before the truth reveals that someone got away with murder.






Praise for the novels of

CARLA NEGGERS


“No one does romantic suspense better!”

—New York Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich

“Neggers’s brisk pacing and colorful characterizations sweep the reader toward a dramatic and ultimately satisfying denouement.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Cabin

“These pages don’t just turn; they spin with the best of them.”

—BookPage on The Waterfall

“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more can a reader ask for? The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”

—New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen

“Tension-filled story line that grips the audience from start to finish.”

—Midwest Book Review on The Waterfall

“Carla Neggers is one of the most distinctive, talented writers of our genre.”

—New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

“A well-defined, well-told story combines with well-written characters to make this an exciting read. Readers will enjoy it from beginning to end.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub on The Waterfall




CARLA NEGGERS

The Carriage House








To Robyn Carr




Contents


Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six




One


On the day Ike Grantham disappeared, he missed an appointment with Tess Haviland, a Boston graphic designer and one of the few women who didn’t find him irresistible. She liked him, but over a year later, she still couldn’t explain why. He was blond, handsome, a risk-taker, outgoing to a fault, egalitarian and very determined not to fit the stereo-type of the serious, philanthropic-minded heir to a New England industrial fortune. He was without guilt or ambition, and there were days Tess thought he was without morals, too. Especially where women were concerned.

Except for her. “Tess,” he used to say, “you have too many men with guns in your life. I’m steering clear.”

She had no men with guns in her life. It just seemed that way because she’d grown up in a working-class neighborhood and her father owned a pub. Ike wasn’t without stereotypes of his own.

He was on her mind not just because it had been over a year since he’d taken off without a word, but because she’d just received the real estate tax bill for the carriage house he’d given her in lieu of a check. It was an 1868 carriage house on a small lot practically across the street from the ocean, within walking distance of one of the prettiest villages on the North Shore. The structure itself wasn’t much. The location was. This was reflected in the property’s value—and in her tax bill.

Tess stared down at the Old Granary Burial Ground four floors beneath her Beacon Street office. Thin, old tombstones tilted in different directions, and tourists crept along the paths in the lush shade, the tall trees filled out with leaves now, the long hard Boston winter finally over.

It had been a nose-to-the-grindstone winter. She’d left a secure corporate job to go out on her own early last year, just before Ike had bowed out of her life as abruptly as he’d barged in. Sometimes she wondered if he’d infected her—not romantically, but in creating a sense of urgency in her, so that the “someday” she’d go out on her own became something she had to do now. She’d been doing work for his Beacon Historic Project on the side, and before she knew it, she was hanging out her shingle. She’d worked out of her apartment for the first six months. Then, last fall, she and Susanna Galway decided to rent an office together in a late-nineteenth-century building on Beacon Street, a prestigious address. They had one room on the fourth floor, overlooking the city’s most famous cemetery.

Tess turned from the window and looked at her friend. Susanna was tall and willowy, as dark as Tess was fair, with porcelain skin and eyes as green as the springtime grass down in Old Granary. She was also a financial planner, and Tess had only just told her about the carriage house. Susanna was at her desk, Tess’s tax bill laid out on her keyboard. Occasionally she’d emit a sigh that conveyed the utmost distress.

“This is why you’re an artist,” she said finally. “Damn, Tess. You always get paid in cash. It’s Rule One. If I’d been around to advise the Indians, do you think I’d have let them take beads for Manhattan? Hell, no.”

“I can sell it.”

“Who would buy it? It’s run-down. It’s on the flipping historic register. It’s on a minuscule lot. And, I might add—” She swiveled around in her expensive ergonomic chair, zeroing in on her office mate and friend with those piercing green eyes. “I might add that the place is haunted.”

“That’s just a rumor.”

“And not haunted by Casper the Friendly Ghost. Your ghost is a convicted murderer.”

Tess dropped into her own chair at her computer. She did a great deal of her work, but not all, by computer. She still had an easel, oil pastels, drawing pencils, watercolors. She liked to touch and feel what she created, not just see it on a computer screen. Her screen was blank now, her computer in sleep mode. Her U-shaped work area, stacked and overflowing with samples, files, invoices, work in progress, wasn’t as tidy and uncluttered as Susanna’s. They were yin and yang, she liked to tell her more artistic friends. That was why they could work in the same space without killing each other.

“It was a duel,” Tess said. “It’s just that it happened to take place in the carriage house. Benjamin Morse challenged Jedidiah Thorne to a duel after Jedidiah accused him of abusing his wife, Adelaide. Jedidiah killed him and went to prison because it just so happened that dueling was illegal in Massachusetts. If Benjamin had killed Jedidiah instead, he’d have gone to prison.”

“You’re splitting hairs. It was murder.”

Whatever it was, it happened in the carriage house within a few weeks of its completion. Jedidiah Thorne never got to live in the estate he’d built in Beacon-by-the-Sea. The Thornes had been seamen on the North Shore for centuries, but he was the first to make any money, prospering in shipping in those first years following the Civil War. After serving five years in prison for killing Benjamin Morse, Jedidiah headed west, only to return, finally, to the East Coast just before his death. It was his ghost people said haunted the carriage house to this day. It was where he’d killed a man—it was where his spirit remained. Why, no one seemed to know.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Tess said. Susanna rocked back in her chair. She was dressed in smart, slim pants and a shirt-top, naturally graceful, her nails done, her makeup perfect. She’d left San Antonio for Boston late last summer, moving herself and her twin daughters in with her grandmother in Tess’s old neighborhood. There was an ex-, or soon-to-beex-, husband back in Texas. Susanna didn’t like talking about him.

“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “You’re stuck. Pay the tax bill or let the town take the place and call it a day. Or try to sell it. New Englanders are pretty damn weird when it comes to old houses. Maybe someone’ll buy it.”

“I’m not sure I want to sell it.”

“Tess! You’ve had this place for over a year and haven’t stepped foot in it.”

“That’s because I kept thinking Ike would show up and want it back, or want more work for it, or his sister would. Lauren Montague is the workhorse for the Beacon Historic Project—I’m not sure Ike told her what he was up to.”

“He could transfer the deed on his own?”

“Apparently. I did promise him I’d do more work—we were to discuss specifics the day he stood me up. I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Think he’s dead?”

Tess winced at Susanna’s frank question and jumped back to her feet, staring once more at the centuries-old tombstones below. There were more people buried there than had markers. Her throat was tight as she thought about Ike. He was in his mid-forties, so filled with life and energy it was impossible to believe he was dead. Yet, that was what most people assumed—that his recklessness had caught up with him and he’d gone overboard or walked off a cliff. Not on purpose. Ike would never commit suicide.

“Taking off for months at a time without telling anyone is within his pattern of behavior,” Tess said. “The police haven’t declared him a missing person or anything. I don’t know if Lauren has sounded the alarm.” She glanced over at Susanna. “It’s not something I’ve pursued.”

“Well, dead or alive, he signed the place over to you. I assume your accountant factored it into your last year’s income taxes, and now obviously the property tax assessors have caught up with you. So, that cinches it. You can’t avoid reality. The carriage house is yours. What you do with it is up to you.”

“I’ve wanted a place in Beacon-by-the-Sea for as long as I can remember,” Tess said quietly, watching two kids about twelve years old reading Sam Adams’s tombstone. John Hancock was buried in Old Granary, too, as well as Benjamin Franklin’s parents, the victims of the Boston Massacre, Mother Goose. “My mother and father and I used to have picnics there on the beach before she died. We’d walk past all the old houses, and Mum would tell me stories. She loved American history.”

Susanna came and stood beside her. “Fundamentally, all financial decisions are emotional.” She gave Tess a quick, irreverent grin. “Look at it this way—a run-down nineteenth-century carriage house haunted by a convicted murderer ought to make an interesting weekend project.”



Tess decided to drive up to Beacon-by-the-Sea and take a look at her property that afternoon. She quit work early to get ahead of rush-hour traffic and made her way up Route One, then along the water to a quiet stretch of rockbound coast on the tip of Cape Ann. The May sun sparkled on the Atlantic, bringing back memories of driving this way when she was six, up front with her father, her mother tucked under blankets in back, telling stories of whales and lost ships until she either fell asleep or became unintelligible, making sense only to herself.

After Ike Grantham had stood her up, Tess had come to Beacon-by-the-Sea three or four times hunting for him, but to no avail. His own sister didn’t seem to be worried about him. Why should Tess be? Ike had taken off without notice before, often. He was self-centered and inconsiderate, not because he meant to be but simply because he was.

Now she was on her way to the Beacon Historic Project’s offices to pick up the key to the carriage house. The offices were located in one of its restored late-eighteenth-century buildings in the village, just a short walk to the harbor. Modeled after the more famous Doris Duke Foundation in Newport, Rhode Island, the project—Ike’s brainchild—bought up old houses and outbuildings all over the North Shore, gutted them, rebuilt them according to exacting standards and leased them to carefully screened tenants. In many once-decaying neighborhoods, the project’s work had sparked renovation and renewal, a sense of civic pride. When she started freelancing for Ike, Tess had toyed with the idea of leasing a small early-eighteenth-century house herself. Then he’d presented her with the carriage house. Its 1868 construction put it outside the project’s parameters—they preferred pre-1850 structures. Or so Ike had explained. Tess had never really understood what his motives were.

She entered the building that housed the project’s offices, a pretty herbal wreath on its saffron-painted front door. Inside, the atmosphere was sedate and elegant, more like entering a home than offices. The rooms were decorated in period colors and pieces, and through a doorway to the right, a pencil-thin older woman greeted Tess in an affected nasal voice. “May I help you?”

“Hi, Mrs. Cookson.” Tess smiled, walking onto the thick carpet. “I’m Tess Haviland—”

“Why, Miss Haviland, I’m so sorry. I didn’t recognize you. What can I do for you?”

“I stopped by to pick up the key to the Thorne carriage house. I know it’s been a while, but I thought I should take a look at it before I decide what to do.” Muriel Cookson looked confused, and Tess added quickly, “Ike told me you’d have the key here.”

“The key to the Thorne carriage house? I don’t understand—”

“It’s all right.” Lauren Grantham Montague approached from an adjoining room, smiling graciously. Her resemblance to Ike was subtle, but unmistakable. “It’s so good to see you, Tess. I should have called you myself long before now. Mrs. Cookson, I have the key to the carriage house. I’ll get it for Tess.”

“Is Miss Haviland doing work for us?”

Lauren continued to smile, but a coolness had come into her gray eyes, as if she was struggling to hide much stronger emotions. “No, I assume she’s checking on her property. Isn’t that right, Tess?”

Tess nodded. “I need to make some decisions.”

At Lauren’s side, Muriel Cookson was obviously confused. Lauren said briskly, “Before he left last year, Ike transferred ownership of the Thorne carriage house to Tess. I should have told you before now. It simply hasn’t come up.”

The elderly receptionist paled, but said nothing. She was a contrast to the tawny-haired Lauren and her expensive, tasteful clothes and easy manner. There was nothing naturally gracious or easy about Muriel Cookson, whom Ike used to describe to Tess in unflattering terms, taking the sting only partly out when he’d declare the project couldn’t run without her. That the Beacon Historic Project interested him at all amazed Tess. Then again, Ike Grantham was a fixer-upper in his own way. It wasn’t so much that he liked to help people for their sake as he believed totally in his ability to know what they needed. As arrogant and self-centered as he was, he had a charm, an energy about him, that inspired people. His enthusiasm for life and risk was contagious.

“Muriel wants to die at her desk, in her Rock-ports,” he would tell Tess, “but Lauren wants Visionary Philanthropist written on her tombstone.”

He’d said this sarcastically, the same day his younger sister had announced her engagement to Richard Montague, a domestic terrorism expert with the North Atlantic Strategic Studies Institute. Ike’s ego knew no bounds. When he took off a week later, Tess half assumed he was miffed because he hadn’t gotten to handpick his future brother-in-law and needed to nurse the wound to his ego. Lauren was totally dedicated to the Beacon Historic Project, wanting to take it in new directions. Ike didn’t care. Tess had sensed he was bored with it, anxious to move on—and apparently he had. Lauren and Richard were married two months later, without Ike.

Lauren withdrew into the adjoining room at the back of the old, restored house. Tess waited in awkward silence with Muriel Cookson, who wouldn’t like not knowing Ike had given away one of the project’s properties, even if he’d done them a favor in dumping the carriage house. They’d bought it five years ago and, Ike had said, hadn’t drawn up even the most preliminary plans of what to do with it. It had been one of his whims, he’d told Tess. A mistake he wanted to correct by transferring ownership to her.

Lauren returned, handing Tess a manila envelope. “There are two keys, both to the side door. There’s no front-door key, I’m afraid, and no bulkhead key.”

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure. Let us know if there’s anything we can do. We have a number of files on the carriage house’s history in our archives upstairs.”

Tess could feel the outline of the keys through the envelope. Her keys. Her carriage house. She was surprised at the sudden rush of excitement. If Ike came back tonight and said it was all a mistake, what would she do? She thanked Lauren, said goodbye to her and Mrs. Cookson and withdrew into the May sunshine. A cute shop across the street had a display of painted furniture in the window. Next to it was a chocolate store. Down the street, she could see boats in the harbor, bright buoys bobbing on the light surf. She breathed in the smell of the ocean and smiled. For the past year, she hadn’t dared believe the carriage house was really hers. It had to be a mistake, never mind the papers she and Ike had signed. Maybe they weren’t legitimate, wouldn’t hold up in court if Lauren decided to contest the transfer. After all, Tess had promised Ike more work. As week after week went by without word from him, as she poured every minute, every dime she had, into her one-woman graphic design business, she had found herself completely paralyzed over what to do about the carriage house.

No more. At least not for the moment. She hopped into her car and headed out of the village along the ocean. The business district ended, houses thinned out. A rock-strewn beach stretched out on the ocean side of the road as it wound onto a narrow point. At the very tip of the point was the Thorne estate, a slate-blue clapboard house with gnarled apple trees, oaks and a huge shagbark hickory holding their own against the elements. The main road hooked around in front of it, intersecting with a narrow side street where the carriage house stood. Tess slowed, barely breathing, and made the turn.

The carriage house was exactly as she remembered it from last March, its narrow clapboards also painted a slate blue, its own gnarled apple tree out front. She pulled into its short, gravel driveway. Well, she thought as she stared at the small house, maybe it was a little more run-down than she remembered.

And in early spring, the lilacs weren’t in bloom. They were now, the bushes growing in a thick, impenetrable border on the back and both sides of the carriage house’s small lot, carving it out from the rest of Jedidiah Thorne’s original estate. She could smell the lilacs through her open windows, their sweet scent mingling with the saltiness of the ocean.

She shut her eyes. “All right, so the place is haunted. What do you care? With your imagination, you’d probably invent a ghost on your own. This way, you don’t have to.”

But leave it to Ike Grantham to give her a haunted house—and her to take it.




Two


Andrew Thorne was not a happy man. He tried to convey this to Harley Beckett, his cousin and the one man on the planet Andrew would trust with his life—if he didn’t kill him first.

“She’s not in her tree house.”

Harl grunted. “Then she’s chasing after that damn cat.”

He was flat on his back under a 1920s rolltop desk he was working on. Harl was the best furniture restorer on the North Shore, maybe in all of New England. His skills as chief Dolly-watcher, however, were currently under suspicion. Dolly was Andrew’s six-year-old daughter, and when he’d come home from work—a long, aggravating day of things not going his way—he’d found her gone. And Harl oblivious.

Harl scooted out from under the rolltop and sat up on the spotless pine floor of the outbuilding where he lived and worked. He was particular. One stray dog hair or speck of mud, he maintained, could ruin a project, a touch of hyperbole few would dare point out to him. He was a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired police detective, and he’d never taken pains to make friends in Beacon-by-the-Sea. Neither had Andrew, but he got along with people better than Harl did. Which wasn’t saying a lot.

Harl pulled his white ponytail from inside his habitual POW-MIA shirt. He had a white beard, shrapnel scars, parts of two fingers missing and a manner that was gruff on his best days. He studied Andrew for half a second, then sighed. “She’s supposed to stay in the yard. She knows that.”

“She won’t have gone far,” Andrew said with conviction, ignoring the twist of incipient panic in his gut. He hated not knowing where his daughter was.

Harl got stiffly to his feet. “Let’s go. Hell, Andrew. Time I realize she can do something, she’s off and done it. She never used to leave the yard without asking.” He shook his head, plainly disgusted with himself. “I told her to stay in the yard not five minutes ago. I swear to God.”

“You go out front,” Andrew said. “I’ll check back here.”

“We don’t find her in five minutes, we call in a search party.”

Andrew glanced at the ocean across the street, and his stomach clamped down. He nodded, and the two of them set off.

Her neighbors, whoever they were, actually owned the lilac hedge. Tess recalled Ike explaining that to her. She reached out a palm and let a drooping cluster of blossoms brush against her skin. They were at peak, the tight, dark purple buds opening into tiny lavender blossoms, spilling their fragrance. Surely she could pick a bouquet. The hedge was obviously neglected, the lilacs in need of pruning and thinning. A few weedy saplings even grew in their midst.

“Here, kitty, kitty. Come, kitty.”

A little girl’s voice rose from the middle of the lilacs, just to Tess’s left. It was high-pitched and cajoling, and a moment later, its owner pushed through to the narrow strip of overgrown grass on the carriage house side of the lilacs. She couldn’t have been more than six, a sturdy girl with coppery braids, freckles and blue eyes that were squinted as she frowned, hands on hips. She hadn’t yet seen Tess. “Come on, Tippy Tail.” She stamped a foot, frustrated and impatient now. “I won’t bother you! I’m your friend.”

Tess noticed something in the girl’s hair and realized it was an elaborate jeweled crown. She also wore denim overalls and a Red Sox T-shirt. Tess still had on her clothes from work, a suit that suggested creativity but also professionalism. She didn’t want to look too artsy and end up scaring off the kind of clients she needed in order to stay in business.

The girl turned and saw Tess, but she seemed neither surprised nor curious. She was obviously a girl with a mission. “Have you seen my cat?”

“No, I haven’t. Actually, I just got here myself.” Tess hadn’t dealt with many six-year-olds. “Is someone with you? Where’s your mother?”

“She’s in heaven.” The girl’s tone was matter-of-fact, as if she were giving the time. Tess pushed a hand through her hair. Lately, she’d been fretting about too much work, Ike Grantham and his carriage house and not enough about the rest of her life. She was thirty-four, and while she wasn’t sure about children she’d had damn rotten luck with men of late. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Over there.” The girl pointed through the lilacs. “Harl’s watching me.”

Not very well, Tess thought. “Harl’s your baby-sitter?”

“Yep.”

“My name’s Tess. What’s yours?”

“Princess Dolly.” She gave her coppery braids a regal little toss.

“Princess? Really?”

“Yep.”

Tess relaxed slightly. A six-year-old who thought she was a princess was something she could relate to. “How did you come to be a princess?”

“Harl says I was born a princess.”

Whoever this Harl was, Tess wondered about his judgment when it came to kids. But what did she know? She glanced at her yard with its strip of overgrown grass. Lots of places a cat could hide. “I take it you lost your cat?”

Reminded of her mission, Princess Dolly raised her shoulders and let them fall in an exaggerated, dramatic shrug. “Yes. That Tippy Tail. She’s having kittens any day. Harl says I should leave her alone.”

Okay, Tess thought, one point for Harl. “What does Tippy Tail look like? If I see her, I can let you know.”

The girl thought a moment, her freckled nose scrunched up as she concentrated. “She’s gray, except for the white tip on her tail.” Her features relaxed, and she giggled suddenly, her eyes lighting up. “That’s why I named her Tippy Tail!”

“Makes sense. You should run along home. I imagine Harl will be looking for you.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s always looking for me.”

This, Tess didn’t doubt. “I can walk you home—”

“I can go by myself. I’m six.” She held up the five fingers of one hand and the index finger of the other hand to prove it.

Tess wasn’t arguing. “It was nice to meet you, Dolly.”

“Princess Dolly.”

“As you wish. Princess Dolly it is.”

The girl spun on her toes and squeezed back through the lilacs.

As independent as Princess Dolly seemed, she still was only six and shouldn’t be running around on her own, crown or no crown. If nothing else, Tess knew she should make sure Dolly got back to her royal palace and wasn’t lost or otherwise in the wrong place.

She started to pry apart the lilacs, but heard a crunch of gravel behind her, then a man’s voice. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She whipped around, realizing she looked as if she was spying on the neighbors. “I’m not doing anything,” she said, taking note of the man in her driveway. Tall, lean, dark, no-nonsense. His angular features, blue eyes and humorless look were straight out of the images she’d conjured of her nineteenth-century murderous ghost. But this man had on dusty work boots, jeans and a denim shirt, all definitely of this century. Good. A princess in the lilacs and a ghost in the driveway would have been more than she could handle.

“I’m looking for my daughter,” the man said. His tone was straightforward, but laced with an edge of fear. “She’s taken off after her cat.”

Tess managed a smile, hoping it would help relieve some of his obvious tension. “You must mean Princess Dolly and Tippy Tail, the gray cat with the white tip on her tail who’s to have kittens any day now. She was just here. The princess, not the cat. I sent her home about thirty seconds ago. She slipped through the lilacs.”

“Then I’ll be off. Thanks.” He started to turn, but added, “This is private property, you know. But go ahead and pick a few lilacs if that’s what you’re after.”

“It’s not. I’m Tess Haviland. I own the carriage house.”

Surprise flickered in his very blue eyes. “I see. Well, I’m Andrew Thorne. I own the house next door.”

“Thorne?”

“That’s right. Jedidiah was my grandfather’s grandfather. Enjoy.”

He retreated along the lilacs, not going through the middle of them the way his daughter had.

A Thorne. He’d obviously liked telling Tess that. Damn Ike. He could have warned her. But that wasn’t his style, any more than telling people he was off to climb mountains, explore rivers, sleep in a hammock on a faraway beach. He was a man who lived life on his own terms, and that, Tess supposed, was why, ultimately, she liked him.

But she’d rather he’d told her the neighbors were related to her ghost.

Using one of the keys in the envelope Lauren Montague had given her, Tess entered the carriage house through the side door, which led directly into a circa 1972 kitchen, complete with avocado-colored appliances. She hoped they worked. She could do fun things with an avocado stove and fridge.

She stopped herself. What was she thinking? She couldn’t afford to keep this place. She’d have to scrape to pay the tax bill, much less find any money for basic repairs and upkeep. The utilities bills must still have been sent to the Beacon Historic Project—she hadn’t seen an electric or a fuel bill. She’d have to straighten that out with Lauren Montague, whether she sold the carriage house or kept it.

This was exactly why she’d dithered for a year, Tess thought. She simply didn’t have the time or the money to deal with a nineteenth-century carriage house. Susanna was right. She should have insisted on cash.

She checked out the kitchen. Solid cabinets, worn counters, stained linoleum floor. Little mouse droppings. The fridge was unplugged. She rooted around behind it and managed to plug it in, smiling when she heard it start to hum. She checked the burners on the stove. They all worked. So far, no sign of Andrew Thorne’s grandfather’s grandfather, the infamous Jedidiah Thorne who’d killed a man here, even if it was over a hundred years ago. Tess shuddered.

There was a full bathroom off a short hallway on the same end of the house as the kitchen. She wondered when the building had been converted from housing horses and buggies to people—sometime in the past century-plus, obviously. She peered up a steep, narrow staircase, shadows shifting at the top of it.

“That’s a little eerie,” she said aloud, then realized she was standing on a trapdoor. She jumped back, her heart pounding. What if she’d fallen through? Balancing herself with one hand on the hall wall, she stomped on the trapdoor with her right foot. It seemed solid enough.

Emboldened, she knelt in front of it, pushed the wooden latch and lifted it. It was solid wood, heavier than she’d expected, every crack and crevice filled with dust and dirt. She wasn’t surprised to find there was no ladder, just a dark, gaping hole to whatever was below—furnace, pipes, spiders.

Then she realized there was a ladder, after all, hooked to the cellar ceiling, under the hall floor. She’d have to reach in through the opening, unhook it and lower it to the cellar floor. Then, presumably, climb down.

“No way.”

Tess shut the trapdoor and latched it. She’d do the cellar another time. Hadn’t Lauren mentioned a bulkhead? Good, she’d go in that way. If she bothered at all.

She resumed her tour, still smelling the dirt, dust and musty smells of the old cellar. She’d lived in older houses her entire life. They were no big deal to her, except they’d always been in the city—never out here on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

“The carriage house has tremendous potential,” Ike had said. “I can feel it when I walk through it. It’s one of my favorite structures. Unfortunately, it’s rather new for us.”

She smiled, thinking of what a contradiction he was. Scion of a New England industrial family, mountain climber, America’s Cup contender, tennis player, white-water kayaker, womanizer…and lover of old houses. Conventional wisdom had him off in the Australian Outback, or Southeast Asia or Central Africa. Sometimes Tess wondered if he weren’t hiding in Gloucester, watching them all.

Surely someone had to know where he was. An open, double doorway led from the kitchen to a long, narrow room with wide-board pine floors, attractive paned windows, a stone fireplace and the front door, probably half the size of the original carriage-width doors. As Lauren had warned, there was no outside lock, just a dead bolt latched from inside. One of the many things to be corrected, Tess thought as she stepped into the middle of the room, imagining color and fabric, music and laughter, friends, children. Dangerous imaginings. She really had no business hanging on to this place for as long as she had.

Her gaze fell on a deep, dark stain on the wooden floor just inside the front door. She walked over slowly, ran her toe over it. It could pass for blood. For all she knew, it was blood.

A man had died here, she remembered. Benjamin Morse, the rich wife-beater, defending his honor. Did a wife-beater have honor? Not in her book. But perhaps he was innocent. Had Jedidiah Thorne been the kind of man to make such a charge recklessly, without proof? Or perhaps he’d done so as an excuse to kill Morse, whom he would have known would challenge him to a duel? Maybe Jedidiah had been in love with Adelaide Morse.

Tess had no answers. There were two small rooms at the other end of the house that immediately presented possibilities. Tess pictured domestic things like sewing machines, library shelves, overstuffed chairs, hooked rugs—and herself, working here. She could create a design studio upstairs, put in skylights and state-of-the-art equipment, work overlooking the sea instead of an historic graveyard. The designer and the ghost of Jedidiah Thorne.

She was getting ahead of herself, and she knew it. She returned to the main room and stood very still, listening for ghost sounds.

Nothing, not even Princess Dolly’s missing cat. “Ridiculous,” Tess muttered, and headed back out to her car.



As soon as he reacquainted Dolly with the rules of the house, Andrew grabbed two beers and sat out with Harl in the old Adirondack chairs under the shagbark hickory. It was a big, old, beautiful tree, probably planted by Jedidiah Thorne himself, before he took to dueling.

“Where’s Dolly?” Harl asked.

“Sulking in her tree house.” It was six rungs up into a nearby oak, and she’d helped Harl build it out of scrap lumber. Andrew, an architect, had stayed out of it. Some things were best left to Dolly and Harl. But not all. “She thinks if she didn’t go out into the street, she didn’t really leave the yard.”

“She’s going to be a lawyer or a politician. Mark my words.”

Andrew gritted his teeth. “It’s that damn cat.”

“I know it. If it wouldn’t break Dolly’s heart, I’d wish Tippy Tail would sneak off and find herself a couple of new suckers to take her in. She’s a mean bitch. Clawed me this morning.” He displayed a tattooed forearm with a three-inch claw mark, then opened his beer. “I should’ve taken her to the pound.”

But Andrew knew that wouldn’t have been Harl’s way. He was a soft touch with children and helpless animals. Tippy Tail was scrawny, temperamental and pregnant, but once Dolly saw her, that was that. Harl had seen and committed more violence than most, first growing up in a tough neighborhood in Gloucester, then in war, finally in his work as a detective. Yet, he was also the gentlest man Andrew had ever known. His first and only marriage hadn’t worked, but his two grown daughters adored him, never blaming him for retreating to his shop, working on furniture, staying away from people.

Sometimes Andrew wondered if Joanna would have approved of Harley Beckett taking care of their daughter. But not tonight. Tonight, Andrew accepted that his wife had been dead for three years, killed in an avalanche on Mount McKinley. She’d only started mountain-climbing the year before, when Dolly was two. Ike Grantham’s idea.

“He makes me want to push myself,” she’d said. “He makes me want to try something out of my comfort zone. Leaving you here, leaving Dolly—it scares the hell out of me. And excites me at the same time. I have to do this, Andrew. I’ll be a better person because of this experience. A better mother.”

Maybe, Andrew thought. If she’d lived. But climbing mountains, even in northern New England, had made Joanna happy, eased some of the restlessness and desperation that had gripped her with Dolly’s birth. She hadn’t been ready for a child. He could see that now. She’d felt, in ways he couldn’t understand, that she’d lost herself, needed something that was hers, that felt daring and not, as she’d put it, “tied down.” She hadn’t meant Dolly in particular. She’d meant everything.

“I love Dolly with all my heart,” she’d tried to explain. “And I love you, Andrew, and my job.” She was a research analyst with the North Atlantic Strategic Studies Institute. “I’m not dissatisfied with anything on the outside, just on the inside.”

Ike Grantham seemed to understand. Or pretended to. Andrew wasn’t any good at pretending.

“Ike and I aren’t having an affair, Andrew. Please don’t ever think such a thing.”

Andrew had believed her. Whatever would have become of their marriage if Joanna had come home from Mount McKinley no longer mattered. She hadn’t, and he’d had to go on without her. So had Dolly. He didn’t blame Ike for Joanna’s death—that would have meant robbing her of her independence, and perhaps even denying her her love of climbing.

He drank some of his beer and listened to the birds in the hickory. Winter had finally let go of the northern coast of Massachusetts. “So, Harl, who the hell is Tess Haviland?”

“No idea. Why?”

“She says she owns the carriage house.”

Harl frowned. “Lauren sold it?”

“I don’t think so. Not recently. We’d have heard.”

“Ike.”

It was possible. Andrew said nothing, picturing Tess Haviland in front of the lilacs. Blond, athletic build, attractive. Pale blue eyes, and a touch of irreverence in her smile and manner. It was difficult to say if she was Ike Grantham’s type. Most women were.

Harl grunted. “All we need is that bastard resurfacing. Things have been quiet this past year.” He settled back in his chair and stared up at the sky. “I like quiet.”

“I’ll find out what the story is. Ike might not have anything to do with this Haviland woman.”

But he knew Harl was dubious, and Andrew admitted he had his own doubts. When most of Jedidiah Thorne’s original property had come onto the market not long after Joanna’s death, Andrew bought it. He’d tried to buy the carriage house as well, but Ike had refused to sell. Not that Andrew had wanted it particularly, given its sordid history, but it seemed odd to have it separated out from the rest of the property—and it meant he had no control over who might end up on the other side of the lilacs.

He finished his beer and decided he should get on with making dinner. Harl sometimes ate with them. Not always. Sometimes his cousin would fix a can of baked beans or chowder and eat out here on an Adirondack chair, in the shade—or the snow. And sometimes, Andrew knew, he didn’t eat at all.

“Dolly’s teacher came out today when I picked her up from school,” Harl said abruptly.

“Why?”

“She’s worried about Dolly’s ‘active imagination.’”

Andrew grimaced. He knew what was coming next. “You didn’t let her wear one of her damn crowns to school, did you?”

“She likes her crowns. I told her to leave them home, but she slipped one into her lunch box. It’s her favorite. What am I supposed to do, frisk a six-year-old?”

Andrew felt his pulse pounding behind his eyes. His daughter had a rich, creative mind, and it was getting her into trouble. He didn’t know what was normal for a six-year-old, what was peculiar. And Harl sure as hell didn’t. They’d both grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Gloucester, in a neighborhood where there was always a fight to be had. Whether at sea, on a battlefield, on the street or in a bar, the Thornes always knew where to find a fight. The enemy didn’t matter.

A lot of people in Beacon-by-the-Sea would say neither he nor Harl had any damn business raising a kid like Dolly. Any kid.

“She thinks she’s a princess,” Harl said.

“That’s what she told Tess Haviland.”

The corners of Harl’s mouth twitched behind his white beard. “A princess has to have a crown.”

“Jesus, Harl. What did Miss Perez say?”

He shrugged his big shoulders. “No more crowns in school.”

Andrew knew there was more. “And?”

“She wants to meet with you.”

“Damn it, Harl—”

“You’re the father. I’m just the baby-sitter.” He yawned, the prospect of a first-grader who liked to pretend she was a princess obviously not one of the great concerns of his life. “Any idea where this Tess Haviland’s from?”

“Her car had Massachusetts plates.”

“What kind of car?”

“Rusted Honda.”

Harl nodded knowledgeably. “City car.”

Andrew watched as a few yards off, Dolly found a rung with one foot, then the other, lowering herself out of her tree house. On the second rung, she turned herself around very carefully and leaped to the ground, braids flying, crown going askew. She let out a wild yell, ran to Andrew and jumped on his lap with great enthusiasm. She was a solid girl, sweating from her adventures, bits of leaves and twigs stuck in her socks and hair. Her crown hadn’t flown off because it was anchored to her head with about a million bobby pins. She and Harl had put it together in his shop. The Queen of England couldn’t have asked for anything gaudier, never mind that “Princess” Dolly’s jewels were fake.

“What’s up, pumpkin?”

“I can’t find Tippy Tail. She won’t come out.”

If he were an expectant cat, Andrew thought, he wouldn’t come out, either. “Did you call her in a nice voice?”

Dolly nodded gravely. This was serious business. “I used my inside voice even though I was outside. Like this.” She dropped to a dramatic whisper, demonstrating. “Come, kitty, kitty, come.”

“And she didn’t come?”

“No.”

“Then what did you do?” Harl asked.

“I clapped my hands. Like this.”

She smacked her palms together firmly and loudly, which didn’t help the pounding behind Andrew’s eyes. “That probably scared her, Dolly,” he said.

She groaned. “Princess Dolly.”

Andrew set her on the grass. He was beginning to get a handle on this princess thing. “Do you make everyone call you princess?”

“I am a princess.”

“That doesn’t mean everyone has to call you Princess Dolly—”

“Yes, it does.”

Harl scratched the side of his mouth. “You don’t make them bow and curtsy, do you?”

She tilted her chin, defiant. “I’m a princess. Harl, you said the boys should bow and the girls should curtsy, that’s what people are supposed to do when they see a princess.”

Andrew suddenly understood the summons from her teacher. It wasn’t just about crowns. He shot Harl a look. “You got this started. You can finish it. You talk to Miss Perez.”

“What?” Harl was unperturbed. “She’s six. Six-year-olds have active imaginations. I thought I was G.I. Joe there for a couple years.”

“Six-year-olds don’t make their classmates bow and curtsy.”

“I don’t make them,” Dolly said.

Harl was doing a poor job of hiding his amusement. As a baby-sitter, he was reliable and gentle. Andrew never worried about his daughter’s safety or happiness with his cousin. But Harl had a tendency to indulge her imagination, her sense of drama and adventure, more than was sometimes in her best interest.

“I’m taking a walk down to the water before I start dinner,” Andrew said to her. “Do you want to come with me, let Harl get some work done?”

“Can we find Tippy Tail?”

“We can try.”

She scrambled off toward the front yard ahead of him. Andrew got to his feet, glancing back at his older cousin, remembering those first months so long ago when Harl had come home from Vietnam, so young, so silent. Most people thought he’d kill himself, or someone else. Andrew was just a boy, didn’t understand the politics, the limited options Harl had faced—or the low expectations. His cousin had defied everyone and become a police detective, and now an expert in furniture restoration and a keeper of six-year-old Dolly Thorne.

He and Andrew had each defied expectations, fighting their way out of that need to keep on fighting. Andrew had worked construction, forced himself to give up barroom brawls and a quick temper, met Joanna, had become an architect and a contractor. He and Harl weren’t part of the North Shore elite and never would be. They didn’t care.

“We’re not keeping the kittens,” Andrew said. “We’re clear on that, aren’t we, Harl?”

“Crystal. I told you. I hate cats.”

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep the kittens, especially if Dolly badgered him. Harl operated according to a logic entirely his own. He hated cats, but he’d taken in a mean, scrawny, pregnant stray.

“Daddy,” Dolly called impatiently, “come on. Let’s go.”

He headed out across the lawn, smelling salt and lilacs in the warm spring air. If finding Tess Havi-land at the carriage house somehow meant Ike Grantham was back in town, so be it. Dolly was happy and healthy and thought well enough of herself to wear a crown. As far as Andrew was concerned, nothing else really mattered.




Three


Lauren couldn’t get the clasp on her pearl necklace to catch. Her neck ached, and she’d lost patience. She wanted to throw the damn necklace across her dressing room.

Ike had given it to her. He’d picked it up on one of his adventures. “You should go with me next time. Beacon-by-the-Sea will get along fine without you. So will the project. Live a little.”

She shut her eyes, fighting a sudden rush of tears. Too much wine. She’d already had two glasses on an empty stomach. She didn’t know how she’d make it through dinner. Richard had chosen a dark, noisy restaurant in town. She could sit in a corner and drink more wine while he played terrorism expert and husband of the North Shore heiress.

God, what was wrong with her? She opened her eyes and tried again with her necklace. Richard never gave her jewelry. He liked to give her books, theater and concert tickets, take her to museum openings. No flowers, jewelry, scarves, sexy lingerie. No pretty things.

Ike hadn’t understood what she saw in Richard. He was protective for a younger brother, possibly because it had been just the two of them for so long, their parents dying in a private-plane crash twenty years ago. They’d liked Ike best, of course. Everyone did. People spoiled him, spun to his whims and wishes.

“Richard Montague, Lauren? You can’t be serious!” Ike had stamped his feet, horrified. “He’s one of those limp-dicked geeks who thinks he’s covering up his geekiness by knowing scary things.”

“He plays squash and racquetball,” she’d argued. “He’s run a marathon.”

Her brother had been singularly unimpressed. “So?”

To Ike, Richard was the antithesis of everything he was. Ike had dropped out of Harvard; Richard had his doctorate. Ike had never worked seriously at anything, even his beloved Beacon Historic Project. Richard worked seriously at everything. Ike played to play, for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of it. Richard played for self-improvement, networking, always with a greater purpose than mere pleasure.

Marrying Lauren, she was quite certain, came under that same heading. It was to his personal benefit. She was an asset. She had money, a good family name, “breeding,” as he’d once let slip, smiling to cover his mistake. It didn’t mean Richard didn’t love her. He did, and she loved him. Not everyone operated out of the passions of the moment the way Ike did. He had spontaneity and a keen sense of fun and adventure, but no idea what real love, real commitment, meant.

“Oh, Ike.”

The clasp fell into place. She ran the tips of her fingers over the pearls and managed, just barely, not to cry. She’d have to start all over with her makeup if she did. She studied her reflection in the wall of mirrors. She was tawny-haired and slender, determined not to let her body slip and sink and turn into mush now that she was forty.

Ike had teased her about turning forty. “You’re on the doorstep, kid, and look at you—you haven’t lived!”

She had a failed first marriage, a daughter away at boarding school, all the responsibilities of managing Grantham family affairs on her shoulders. Even the project, which he’d so loved early on, was largely her doing. She saw to the details, showed up when he didn’t. She made his lifestyle possible.

He knew it. He would tell her how much he appreciated what she did, even as he teased her for doing nothing riskier than go frostbite sailing with friends, laugh too loud at a cocktail party.

“Ike,” she whispered. “Oh, God.”

He’s dead. You know he’s dead. But she didn’t, not for sure. Tess Haviland wouldn’t keep the carriage house. She hadn’t even been up to see it in the year she’d owned it. Giving Tess the carriage house had been a stupid, impulsive thing for Ike to have done—but so like him.

When Tess put the carriage house on the market, Lauren would snap it up. Maybe they could work out an arrangement on their own, without Realtors. She had to keep her focus on that singular, positive thought and will it to happen.

Her three miniature white poodles wandered in, rubbing against her legs and making her laugh. “You lazy little rats, you’ve been sleeping on my bed all day, and now you want my attention? Where were you when I wanted to play, hmm?”

Ike had warned her against poodles. “You’re playing to stereotype, Lauren. Get yourself a rottweiler or a Jack Russell terrier.”

She’d threatened to knit them little vests. Suddenly unable to breathe, she ran out into her spacious bedroom. The windows were open, and she inhaled the smell of spring, stemming her panic. She didn’t want to think about her brother. Wouldn’t. He’d dominated her life for too long. He was selfish, insulting, reckless. He didn’t like Richard because he was doing something important with his life and Ike wasn’t. That was the truth of it. The poodles followed her into the bedroom, and she scooped them up and sank onto a white chair in front of the windows. The sun was fading, but her gardens were still bright with color. This was the house where she and Ike had grown up, built by their grandfather in 1923, high on a bluff above the ocean. She preferred her view of the gardens.

She would die here, she thought as she stroked the backs of her poodles. Fifty years from now, she would be sitting right here in her chair, perhaps with descendants of these very poodles, but otherwise alone. Ike would be gone, and so would Richard. That was her destiny, and there was no escaping it.



Richard Montague knew his wife was annoyed with him. She had poured herself another glass of wine and retreated to the back porch, knowing she couldn’t do anything that might embarrass him. He had company. Unexpected company. Dinner was canceled at the last minute. He didn’t understand her irritation. She hadn’t wanted to go in the first place.

“Care for a glass of scotch?” Richard offered his guest.

The chief of staff of the senior senator from Massachusetts declined politely. Jeremy Carver was a very careful man. Richard had noticed that about him straight off, when they’d first met at Carver’s office on Capitol Hill. He was careful, discreet, naturally suspicious, and he would destroy Richard Montague, Ph.D., if Richard gave him the slightest cause. There would be no mercy.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead,” Carver said.

“No problem. Lauren and I both had long days. It was an easy dinner to cancel. Won’t you sit down?”

They were in Richard’s study on the first floor of the sprawling Grantham house. It had once been his father-in-law’s study, his father’s before that. Richard liked feeling a part of a tradition, even if it wasn’t his own. He had no traditions in his family beyond whacks up the side of the head.

Jeremy Carver sat in the cranberry leather chair as if he owned it, yet Richard knew Carver’s background was no better than his own. South Boston, six brothers and sisters, a scholarship to Georgetown. He was a natural for state and national politics.

Richard resisted pouring himself a scotch and sat opposite Carver on the plaid fabric-covered love seat. Carver, he noted, had the position of power in the room. Jeremy Carver was short, paunchy and gray-haired, five or ten years older than Richard, but he radiated self-confidence, a certainty that he was in the right place, doing the right thing.

As Carver settled back in the leather chair, Richard studied the man across from him. Richard knew he was in better condition. He worked out regularly, strenuously. He was taller, and if not handsome, not as pug-nosed and unprepossessing as Carver. He was better educated, worked in a field that gave him intimate knowledge of violent fanatics, amoral operatives. Terrorists, pure and simple, although there was little that was simple or pure about them, at least from his position as someone who studied them, tried to understand them. His work mired him in shades of gray, rationalizations, excuses, life experience, points of view and mind-sets that could justify mass murder.

Yet, despite all Richard knew, Jeremy Carver was just the sort of man who made him feel unaccomplished, as if he’d never gotten out of the faceless, middle-class subdivision where he’d grown up west of Boston.

“I’ll come straight to the point,” Carver said. “The senator wants to push for your Pentagon appointment.”

Richard’s heart skipped a beat, childishly. Of course the senator wanted him at the Pentagon. Why wouldn’t he? He was the best. He was the right person for the job. “I’m grateful,” he said simply.

Carver had no reaction. “Before the senator pitches his tent in your camp, he’ll want to know there’s nothing in your background that’ll jump in his sleeping bag and bite him in the balls. Understood?”

“Of course.”

The room was silent. Richard thought he could hear the creaking of Lauren’s porch swing. She’d had a lot of wine already this evening. It wasn’t like her. He pretended not to hear, instead watching Senator George Bowler’s chief of staff. A high Pentagon appointment was just the beginning. Richard saw himself eventually as defense secretary, CIA director, perhaps even secretary of state. He was only fifty. There was time.

“So,” Jeremy Carver said, rubbing the fine, soft leather with the fingertips of one hand, his hard eyes never leaving Richard, “tell me about Ike Grantham.”




Four


It was chowder night at Jim’s Place. By the time Tess slid onto the worn stool at the bar, her father had dipped her a heavy, shallow bowl of his famous clam chowder and set it in front of her. He had a bar towel slung over one powerful shoulder. “No beer for you tonight, Tess. You look done in.”

“I am done in. It’s been a long week.”

The chowder was thick and steaming. Jim Haviland didn’t skimp on the clams, and he didn’t use canned. She watched the pat of butter melting into the milk. The good, simple fare and the old-fashioned pub atmosphere, with its dark, smooth wood and sparkling glasses, drew a diverse clientele, from construction workers and firefighters to university students and tech heads. Somerville might be on the road to gentrification, but not Jim’s Place.

“You work too hard,” her father told her.

“That’s why I let you cook for me tonight.”

“The hell it is.”

He pinned his blue eyes on her, the same pale shade as her own, and she saw the jig was up. He knew about the carriage house. He had spies everywhere. Including Susanna Galway. Her grandmother’s place was just up the street, and she wasn’t one to miss chowder night. Tess could imagine how it went. Often she and Susanna had chowder together, and when she didn’t show up, her father would have asked where she was, and Susanna would have blurted, “Tess? Oh, she’s up in Beacon-by-the-Sea checking out that damn carriage house of hers.”

Tess hadn’t told her father that Ike Grantham had paid her in the form of a haunted, run-down 1868 carriage house. Jim Haviland liked cash, too.

“You’re here to fess up about that damn place up on the North Shore. Tess. Jesus. A falling-down carriage house?”

She let her satchel slide to the floor. “Susanna?”

“No, couldn’t get a damn word out of her. I knew something was up, though.”

“Davey.”

Her father’s mouth snapped shut. Tess groaned. She should have expected as much. Davey Ahearn was on his stool at the opposite end of the bar. He was a twice-divorced plumber, her father’s lifelong friend and a constant burr in Tess’s side. He took his role as her godfather far too seriously. She knew he was listening to every word between her and her father. “Damn plumbers. They mind everyone’s business but their own.”

“Hey,” Davey said. “What’re you saying about plumbers?”

Tess pointed at him with her soupspoon. “I’m saying you’ve all got big mouths.”

“This has nothing to do with me being a plumber.”

So that was it. Susanna had told Davey, and Davey had told her father. Or Susanna had told her grandmother and word had gotten out that way. That was one thing Tess had learned long ago about life in her neighborhood: word got out. She’d driven straight home from Beacon-by-the-Sea, jumped in the shower and hopped on the subway. And still word of her afternoon’s adventures had arrived at Jim’s Place before she had.

“Somebody has to tell Jimmy here what’s going on,” Davey said.

“And somebody could give me half a chance to tell Jimmy myself.”

“Half a chance?” Davey snorted. He was a beefy man with a huge salt-and-pepper mustache and an amazing capacity for physical labor. His friends liked to joke he would die with a plunger in his hands. “You’ve had this place for a year. You’ve had a hell of a lot more than half a chance.”

This was true. Tess returned to her soup. That Davey and her father could get away with treating her as if she were eleven years old was a feat on their part. Not that she put up with it.

“You’ve got yourself a mess, Tess,” Davey said. “A damn barn. You know what barns have? Barns have snakes.”

“It’s an antique carriage house.”

Her father pointed a callused finger at her. “Don’t move. I have to wait on a customer.”

“I’m not moving until I finish my soup. I don’t care what you and Davey say.”

“Truer words never spoken right there,” her father grumbled.

Tess spooned up plump clams, potatoes, buttery milk. She’d worry about her fat intake another day. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees on a television above the bar. It was a home game. The patrons of Jim’s Place didn’t like the idea of shutting down Fenway, building a new park. But that was the nature of things, Tess thought with a fresh rush of frustration. They change. Even in her father’s neighborhood. Even with his daughter.

At the tables behind her, a group of about a half-dozen men were arguing over who was the greatest president of the twentieth century. “Ronnie Reagan.” A dark, young construction worker raised his beer glass in solemn homage. “Bow your heads when you say his name.”

“No way. FDR was the man.”

“Harry Truman.”

Davey shook his head and glanced back at the men, all younger than he was by two decades or more. He weighed in, deadpan. “Adlai Stevenson.”

“Get out. He was never president.”

“Should have been,” Davey said.

A kid in dusty overalls frowned. “Who the hell’s Adlai Stevenson?”

“Ignoramus,” his friend, the one who’d named Reagan, said. “He was that—who the hell was Adlai Stevenson?”

Davey sighed as Jim Haviland came back around the bar. “Country’s doomed, Jimmy. Your daughter’s stuck with an old barn that has snakes, and these dumb bastards never heard of Adlai Stevenson.”

The conversation shifted to baseball, an even more dangerous subject in metropolitan Boston than politics. On another night, Tess might have joined in. Good food and a good argument were part of the charm of her father’s pub, a contrast to the pace and complexity of her normal routine as both business-woman and designer. Unfortunately the last man in her life hadn’t seen the appeal of Jim’s Place and chowder night.

“Pop,” she said, “it’s not a barn, and I wasn’t stupid not to take cash. This was a great opportunity. I never could have afforded something like this otherwise. It’s a half block from the ocean. It just needs work.”

He put together a martini, seemingly absorbed in his work. Tess knew better. It had been just her and her father for so long, she knew when he was on automatic pilot. She’d had ample opportunity to tell him about her carriage house, and she hadn’t. And they both knew it. She was the daughter who’d lost her mother at six, who’d always told her father everything. Even as they’d carved out the landscape of their adult relationship, she and Jim Haviland hadn’t abandoned their tendency to speak their minds. It didn’t matter if the other didn’t want to hear what had to be said.

But not this time.

Tess finished her soup while he pretended to concentrate on his drink-making. It wasn’t that she needed her father’s approval. They’d worked that out a long time ago. It was just that her life was easier when she had it.

“How much work?” he asked.

“A lot,” Davey said.

Her father shot him a warning look, and Davey shrugged and finished his beer.

Tess opened a small package of oyster crackers. She never ate them with her soup, always after. “A fair amount.”

He nodded. A place that needed work was something he could understand. “You’ve decided to keep the house?”

“I don’t know. I think so. Pop, when I was up there this afternoon, I kept thinking of all the possibilities. There’s something about this place—it fired my imagination.”

That he could understand. Her imagination had put them at odds before. He grunted. “Well, if you decide to hang on to it, a bunch of these bums here owe me favors.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” She nibbled on a cracker, and added, “But if I go through with this, I think I’d like to do as much of the work as I can myself.”

Davey gave an exaggerated groan. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s cleaning up after some do-it-yourselfer.”

“Give me a break, okay, Davey? I’m trying to have a conversation with my father. This is important to me.”

“True confessions,” Davey said. “You’re a day late and a dollar short, Tess.”

She ignored him. “I’ve got pictures, Pop. Do you want to see? Ike Grantham gave them to me when he signed over the property.”

“Ike Grantham.” Jim Haviland snorted. “Now there’s a piece of work.”

“Pop.”

“Yeah, sure. Show me your pictures.”

Tess slid off the stool and picked up her satchel. Her father’s pub was one of the rare places that made her feel short. She unzipped a side pocket and removed the best two shots of the roll Ike had taken. He’d been very proud. “It’s a great place, Tess. I know I can trust you with it.”

She passed the pictures across the bar to her father.

He put on his reading glasses and took a look. “Tess. Jesus. It is a barn.”

“I’m telling you,” Davey said, “it’s got snakes.”

Davey was getting on Tess’s nerves. She almost told him the place was haunted by a convicted murderer whose descendants lived next door, never mind that one of them was a six-year-old who thought she was a princess. But she said nothing, because arguing with Davey Ahearn only encouraged him.

“It’s in Beacon-by-the-Sea, Pop. Remember when we used to go up there for picnics on the beach?”

“Yeah. I remember.” He took off his glasses and pushed the pictures back to her. “Long commute.”

“It’d be a while before I could move in, and I’m not sure I would. If business keeps up, I could keep it as a weekend place.”

“Old as it is,” Davey went on, as if he’d never stopped, “it’s probably got asbestos, lead pipes. Lead paint.”

“So? I could buy a duplex up the street with lead paint and asbestos.”

Davey eased off the bar stool. “Now, why would you want to buy a place in a neighborhood with people who’ve known you your whole life? That wouldn’t make any sense when you can fix up some goddamn barn some goddamn rich nut gave you in a quaint little town up on the North Shore where not only no one knows you, no one wants to know you.”

“That’s pure prejudice, Davey, and I earned the carriage house. It wasn’t ‘given’ to me.” Except she’d thought she’d have to do more work to really earn it, although Ike had never put that on paper. Technically, the carriage house was hers, free and clear of everything but taxes.

“You know I’m telling the truth.” Davey walked heavily over to her, this big man she’d known since she was in a crib. Her godfather. “You’ve lost sight of who you are, where you come from.”

“Davey, I’m sitting here eating clam chowder in my father’s pub. I haven’t lost sight of anything.”

He snorted, but kissed her on the cheek, his mustache tickling her. “You need a plumber for that barn of yours, kid, give me a call. I’ll see what I can do. If it’s hopeless, I’ll bring a book of matches. You can collect the insurance.”

Tess fought back a smile. “Davey, you’re impossible.”

“Ha. Like you’re not.”

The guys at the tables ragged him about the bald spot on the back of his head, and he gave them the finger and left.

“You’re thirty-four years old, Tess.” Her father exhaled a long, slow breath, as if his own words had taken him by surprise. “I can’t be telling you what to do.”

“That’s not what I was worried about. I was worried you’d talk me out of doing something before I could figure out for myself if it was something I really wanted to do.”

“And since when have I done that?”

“It could have happened today.”

“You want to keep this place?”

“I’m thinking seriously about it, Pop.”

“Well, so be it. How ‘bout a piece of pie?”

“What do you have?”

“Lemon meringue.”

She smiled. “Perfect.”



Davey Ahearn was smoking a cigarette on his front stoop across the street from the pub when Tess headed out into the cool evening. He walked over to her. “You take the subway?” He tossed his cigarette onto the street. “I’ll walk you to the station.”

There was no point in telling him she could see herself to the subway station. He’d walk with her, anyway. “Thanks.”

He glanced at her as they headed to the corner. “You didn’t tell him about the ghost, did you?”

Tess hoisted her satchel higher onto her shoulder. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Tess.”

“No, I didn’t tell him, okay? For God’s sake, I’m a grown woman. I don’t have to tell you or my father that a few highly imaginative people believe my carriage house is haunted.”

“Not a few people. It’s in the goddamn guidebooks.”

She gripped her satchel with one hand. “How do you know these things?”

He grinned at her from behind his oversize mustache. “I know everything.”

“If I decide to turn the place into a bed-and-breakfast, a ghost could be good for business.”

“Not that ghost.”

Tess didn’t respond.

Davey grunted. “No wonder you still keep your old man up nights. He wants to go to his grandkids’ Little League games, and he’s got a daughter wanting to renovate a barn haunted by a murderer.”

“I’m not answering you, Davey. Answering would only encourage you.”

They turned onto the main road, traffic streaming past them, the last of the daylight finally fading. She thought of Beacon-by-the-Sea, how quiet it would be.

Davey eased back. “Go on. Go home, Tess. If you screw up, you screw up. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”

She smiled at him. “And you and Pop will be there. Don’t think I don’t know that, Davey.”

“Hell, no. I’m not cleaning up after this mess. You’re on your own.”

She laughed, not believing him. “Look, I’ll invite you up for scones and tea one Sunday. Okay?”

“I’ll wear garlic.”

“That’s for vampires.”

He shrugged. “Close enough.”




Five


Susanna denied all knowledge of how Davey Ahearn had learned about the carriage house. “He and your father have extrasensory perception where you’re concerned.” She plopped down at her computer with a tall mug of coffee she’d brewed herself. She’d once done a chart on how much she and Tess were saving over a lifetime by staying out of coffee shops. “It’s creepy. I don’t think I want to know that much about my kids.”

Tess emptied her satchel onto her desk. She hadn’t done any work last night when she’d gotten home from the pub. “Pop and Davey don’t know anything about me.”

“They don’t understand anything about you. They know everything.”

Susanna wanted to know all the details of Tess’s trip to see her carriage house, from the avocado appliances to the trapdoor and possible bloodstains. “Sounds like a nice little shop of horrors,” Susanna said.

“It’s got great potential.”

“That’s what we say in Texas when we’re about to tear a place down and put up a new one.”

Tess never knew when Susanna was being serious about her Texas observations. Some days, it was like she was living in exile in Boston. Other days, she seemed very content not to be in San Antonio.

“My neighbor’s a Thorne,” Tess added.

“As in Jedidiah and the bloodstains by the front door?”

“So he says.”

“What’s he look like?”

Tess thought of Andrew Thorne’s piercing blue eyes and lean good looks. “A nineteenth-century duelist.”

“Your basic rock-ribbed Yankee?”

“If that’s the way you want to put it.”

“Okay.” She tilted back her chair and sipped her coffee, which she drank black and strong. “It’s going to be tough, paying rent on your apartment and office and keeping up this carriage house. At least there’s no mortgage. Damn, you must have a good accountant—”

“I do.” Tess crossed their small office to the coffeepot, filled her own mug. She added more milk than she normally would since Susanna had done the brewing. “I don’t know, Susanna, but I think somehow I was meant to own this carriage house. Maybe that was what Ike was trying to tell me.”

“I doubt it. I think he was just unloading a white elephant.”

Tess had meetings from noon until three, which gave her a break from Susanna’s skepticism. There were countless people in New England who loved and appreciated historic houses—she just didn’t have any in her life. With her satchel slung over one shoulder, she trotted down the three flights of stairs to the lobby of their 1890s building, avoiding the ancient brass elevator, which was too much like climbing into a rat cage for Tess. Susanna loved their office. Why not the idea of an 1868 carriage house?

Tess cut down Park Street across from Boston Common, then up Tremont to Old Granary. She’d picked up a sandwich for lunch—Susanna always bagged it and had another chart to demonstrate her savings—and decided to walk through the centuries-old tombstones while she ate. The shade was lovely, and the city, although just on the other side of the iron fence, seemed very far away.

For no reason she could fathom, Tess found herself looking for the Thorne name. Her own family had come to the shores of Massachusetts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, not back with the Pilgrims and the Puritans.

She found one, her heart jumping. Thankful Thorne, born in 1733, died in 1754. Not a long life. Was she an ancestor of the man Tess had met yesterday, of his six-year-old daughter with the Red Sox shirt and crown? Tess suddenly wondered how Andrew Thorne’s wife had died. From Dolly’s reaction, she suspected it had been a while—but one never knew with children that age. Tess remembered coming to grips with her own mother’s death, discovering the reality of it over time, the finality.

She slipped out of the graveyard. The streets were clogged with noontime traffic, one of many daily reminders of how glad she was she didn’t commute. So why was she thinking about hanging on to a place an hour up the coast?

Her first meeting went well. They loved her, they had plenty of work for her and were pleasant, intelligent, dedicated people. The second meeting was just the opposite. The clients from hell. They were impossible to please, and they didn’t know what they wanted, leaving her on shifting sands. She’d learned early on in her graphic design career that not everyone would love her or her work—and some would be rude about it.

When she returned to her office, she plopped her satchel onto her chair and started loading it up. Susanna, as ever, was at her computer. “I’ve got an idea,” Tess told her. “I’m going to spend the weekend at the carriage house. I’ll bring my sleeping bag, pack food. It’s the only way I’ll know for sure what’s the right thing to do, whether to keep it or put it on the market.”

Susanna tapped a few keys and looked up, squinting as if part of her was still caught up in whatever it was she’d been doing. She was a financial planner, but also, as she put it, “an investor,” which covered a wide territory. She pushed back her black hair with both hands. “Bring your cell phone. You have all my numbers? If some hairy-assed ghost crawls out of the woodwork in the dead of night, you call 911. Then you call me.”

“Thanks, Susanna.”

“Don’t thank me. As soon as you walk out that door, I’m looking up the name and address of every mental hospital on the North Shore. Don’t worry. I’ll pick out a nice one for you.”

Tess ignored her. “The weather’s supposed to be great this weekend. I think I’ll stop on Charles Street for scones.”

“Glorified English muffins,” Susanna grumbled. “Three times as expensive.”

“And you don’t call yourself a Yankee.”

They both laughed, and Tess heaved her loaded-up bag onto her shoulder and was on her way.

She walked up Beacon Street and behind the Massachusetts State House to the narrow, hilly streets of residential Beacon Hill, with its prestigious Bulfinch-designed town houses, brick sidewalks, black lanterns and surprisingly eclectic population. She’d moved into her basement apartment eight years ago, over her father’s and godfather’s objections. She could have gotten more space for the same money—less money—in other neighborhoods, certainly in her home neighborhood. Davey liked to tease her about trying to pass as a Boston Brahmin, never believing she liked the charm and convenience of Beacon Hill, and didn’t mind the tradeoff of space. With a tiny bedroom, bath and kitchen-living room, she had learned to buy and keep only what she truly needed—which allowed her to pack for her weekend in under forty-five minutes.

She called her father on her cell phone after she’d stopped at a bakery on Charles Street. “I’m on my way to the North Shore for the weekend. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

“You going up there alone?”

She could hear the criticism in his tone. “Yes, why not?”

“Because it’s nuts, that’s why not. I hate that guy Ike Grantham. Where the hell is he, anyway? What’s he been doing all these months?” Her father paused for air. “You don’t have a thing for him, do you?”

Tess was irritated with herself for giving her father an opening. She’d asked why not, and now he was telling her. “Ike’s a former client. That’s all. He doesn’t have to keep me informed of his whereabouts.” She knew that to use the words missing, disappeared or even took off would be a huge mistake.

“I don’t like this,” Jim Haviland said.

“You don’t have to like it. Love you, Pop. Have a great weekend.”

“Wish I had a couple of Little League games to go to,” he said, and hung up.

Tess tossed her cell phone back into her satchel. The man never gave up. His ideas about men, women, marriage and family were old-fashioned and completely unreformable. She wondered if her mother had lived, or if he’d remarried, would he still be so stubborn and impossible?

Probably, she decided, and got onto Storrow Drive and headed north.



“Looks as if the Haviland woman’s moved in for the weekend,” Harl said. “I saw her hauling in groceries and camping gear.”

Andrew frowned. “What were you doing, spying on her?”

Harl pinched dead leaves off Andrew’s one indoor plant. It was in the kitchen window, and it wasn’t in good shape. Harl didn’t allow plants in his shop. “I was looking for that goddamn cat.”

“You introduced yourself?”

“No. She didn’t see me.”

Andrew smiled and sat at the table. Harl wouldn’t go out of his way to introduce himself to anyone. He’d eaten dinner with them that night and insisted on cleaning up the dishes. Dolly was in the den watching cartoons, mourning over her cat, who, Andrew was becoming convinced, didn’t plan on returning.

“Lucky she didn’t see you peering through the bushes and call the police.”

Harl grunted. “It’d be the first smart thing she did. What kind of woman spends a weekend alone in a haunted carriage house out here on an isolated point?”

“We’re not even a mile from the village.”

“You don’t think she’s odd?”

“Harl, we live here.”

“Well, our great-great-granddaddy didn’t off anyone in your living room.” He shook his head, his white ponytail trailing several inches down his broad back. He’d let his hair grow since giving up police work. It had turned white a few years after he’d come home from Vietnam, and he’d gotten into bar fights over people saying the wrong thing about his white hair. Andrew had participated in a few of them himself. No point sitting out a bar fight, not in those days.

Harl dumped the dead plant leaves in the trash. “I have to tell you, Thorne, my instincts are all on high alert. You find out how she ended up with that place?”

“Not yet, I haven’t asked.”

“Ask.”

Harl left for his shop, and Andrew went in to shoo Dolly up to bed.

He read her two Madeleine books and a few pages of The Hobbit, but she was preoccupied with her missing cat. She’d pulled out all her stuffed cats and put them in bed with her, leaving very little room for Andrew to sit next to her for their nightly reading.

“Maybe Tippy Tail’s gone on an adventure like Bilbo,” Andrew said, referring to The Hobbit.

Dolly shook her head, her big eyes brimming with tears. She smelled of a fruity bubble bath that he found particularly nauseating, and she hugged three stuffed cats close to her. “She’s dead, Daddy. I know she’s dead.”

He breathed deeply. A six-year-old shouldn’t know so much about death. “Tippy Tail can take care of herself. She’s tough. Trust her, okay? Cats like to have their kittens where little girls can’t find them.”

“Not Tippy Tail.”

“Yes, Tippy Tail.”

“Harl says we can put up posters. I can draw a picture of her, and—and if somebody sees her, they can call us, and we can go get her!” She sniffled, perking up. “Do you think that would be good, Daddy?”

For someone who hated cats, Harl was going out of his way to find this one. “Sure, Dolly. We can do posters in the morning.”

She nodded eagerly, her mood transformed now that she had a plan. This quickly led to indignation. “I don’t think Tippy Tail should have runned away. I’m a princess. She’s supposed to obey me.”

“Cats don’t obey anyone, Dolly. That’s why they’re cats.”

She snuggled down into her pillow, a black-and-white stuffed kitten pressed against her rosy cheek, fat tears on her dark eyelashes. She shut her eyes. “Can you read to me some more?”

Andrew read The Hobbit until she drifted off. He was aware of his own voice in the silent, still room. It was a kid’s room, simply furnished and not overly childish. He wasn’t about to redo it every year. There was an oak dresser Harl had refinished, a round mirror, a bulletin board covered with pictures of cats and fairies, crates of toys and stuffed animals, handheld computer games and a long pegboard overloaded with baseball caps, sequined shawls and at least six different crowns.

Above her bed was a framed cross-stitch Beatrix Potter D that Joanna had done when she was pregnant, teasing herself even then about “turning domestic.” But she’d been happy, excited about their child. Ike Grantham had been off on one of his escapades, not a factor in their lives, although they knew him because they lived in Beacon, where everyone knew the Granthams. Only later, after his sister started dating Joanna’s boss, Richard Montague, did Ike mention how he could help her train to climb Mount McKinley. “If you can chase a toddler around the house, you can climb a mountain.”

Andrew shut The Hobbit, a weighty, oversize edition. He didn’t know how much Dolly understood, but he enjoyed reading to her. Harl never did. He could sit still for hours working on a piece of furniture, but not for more than five minutes with a children’s book. He was back in his shop now, working. Some nights he’d work until dawn.

What was Tess Haviland, Andrew wondered, doing in her carriage house? It had no furniture, lousy wiring. Was she one of Ike’s women? Andrew had been too busy today to ask around town. If anyone would know, it would be Lauren, and Lauren Montague was about the last person he’d want to ask anything. She felt guilty about her brother’s role in Joanna’s death even though Andrew assured her there was no need. Joanna had wanted to climb Mount McKinley. It wasn’t just Ike’s doing.

He headed downstairs, picking up Dolly’s sneakers and the odd toy on the way. He wasn’t much of a taskmaster. He settled into a battered, comfortable leather chair in the den and flipped on the ball game. A stiff wind off the water beat against the tall, old windows. A little atmosphere, he thought with amusement, for Tess Haviland’s first night on the point.




Six


By ten o’clock, Tess was thinking about calling it quits and heading back to the city. But she’d had two glasses of wine with the Brie-and-cucumber sandwich she’d picked up at the bakery, along with her scones for the morning, and she was too sleepy to drive.

She was tempted to get a hotel room for the night. The wind howled and whistled, rattled doors and windows, and her avocado refrigerator was making strange wheezing noises. And it was dark. She was used to streetlights.

All she needed now were a couple of bats.

Or a ghost.

“Now, stop that,” she said aloud, her voice echoing in the big, empty room. She was sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag. She’d set up camp on the wooden floor just over the kitchen threshold, close to the bathroom and the side door, which would take her straight out to her car.

She had a battery-operated lantern Davey had given her for her birthday one year, a camp mat for padding and her portable white-noise machine with a choice of sounds: ocean, dolphins and whales, a tropical rain forest, a mountain stream. She hadn’t bothered turning it on. Nothing would drown out the sound of that wind.

She shifted her position, casting dramatic shadows all around her. She wasn’t used to such a huge, dark, cavernous space.

She’d tried leaving the kitchen light on, but it flickered and cast a green glow that made her avocado appliances look sickly. The plan was to have a cup of chamomile tea and read until she felt sufficiently sleepy, then switch off the lantern and not look around, just burrow in her sleeping bag and wait until morning.

She was beginning to regard it as an insult that Ike thought this place suited her. Maybe Susanna had a point. And her father and Davey. How much could she get for it?

She heard a sound, somewhere close. She set her mug of tea on the floor and held her breath, listening. What now?

Barns have snakes…

It was probably just a squirrel or a skunk in the lilacs. She’d picked a big bouquet of them and put them in an old mason jar she’d found in a cabinet, feeling rather warm and fuzzy about her carriage house. That was before the sun went down.

This wasn’t the city. She had to expect night sounds she might not recognize. She’d never gone to summer camps in the wilderness. Her father’s idea of an excursion was a subway trip to Fenway Park—and the occasional picnic on the beach right across the street from the carriage house.

There it was again. Tess exhaled, relaxing somewhat now that she knew what it was she was hearing. A meow. It was coming from the cellar, up through the trapdoor.

Dolly Thorne’s missing cat, Tippy Tail. It had to be.

Tess debated ignoring the meow, but it came again, loud and whining. The poor cat was obviously in some kind of distress. And even if the animal was just being obnoxious, she could easily go on all night. Tess flipped on the white-noise machine, but it didn’t mask the cat’s noises, or the wind.

With a put-out groan, she got to her feet and flipped on the kitchen overhead, its greenish light making her feel even more isolated and alone than her lantern. She was wearing warm-up pants and a T-shirt to sleep in, but the cracked linoleum floor was cool on her bare feet.

She walked over to the trapdoor. “Kitty?”

There was no answering meow.

“Kitty, kitty.” She knelt on the floor beside the trapdoor, but had no intention of lifting it and peering into her dark pit of a cellar. “Tippy Tail, hey, are you down there?”

A plaintive, utterly miserable yowl came up through the floorboards. Definitely a cat. No self-respecting, murdering Yankee ghost would make that kind of noise.

Tess swore softly. She had no choice. She couldn’t leave the poor thing down there to fend for herself. What if she were hurt? How would Tess explain a dead cat to little Princess Dolly?

What kind of coward would leave a distressed cat alone in a dark, dank cellar anyway?

Tess sat back on her camp bed and put on her sneakers, then grabbed her lantern and headed out the kitchen door. The trapdoor was out of the question. If she fell off the ladder or it came apart under her, she’d die down in the cellar like a rat.

This reminded her to grab her cell phone off the kitchen counter.

The wind was still gusting, and the sky was dark, with no moon. Tess tried not to pay too close attention to the conditions, refused to think about night creatures on the prowl. At ten o’clock at night in the city, there’d be people on the streets. Four in the morning, she might have more misgivings, but not at ten. Up here, she didn’t know what to expect.

She debated calling the police or pounding on Andrew Thorne’s front door, but decided that would be wimpish. What if it wasn’t the missing pregnant cat?

“It damn well better be,” she muttered, refusing to consider the alternatives to Tippy Tail.

She flicked on the lantern, its light spreading out across the gravel driveway in front of her.

The smell of lilacs, sweet and homey, helped reassure her. Okay, you can do this.

She ducked onto the narrow strip of yard between her house and the lilac hedge. The shaggy grass was up to her calves, conjuring up more of Davey’s warnings about snakes. Tess dismissed them and walked quickly to the bulkhead, its soft, half-rotten wood painted a dull gray. She wondered how the cat could have gotten into the cellar, then spotted a missing pane in a small, two-pane casement window. There you go, she thought. It was just right for a gray cat with a white-tipped tail.

She set her lantern on the ground and pushed at the wooden latch. It broke apart, and she immediately put replacing the bulkhead door on her mental to-do list. Even if she sold the place, potential buyers would want the bare minimums covered.

She grabbed the edge of the bulkhead and lifted. It was heavy, the old wood sodden with years of rain and snow. She could only imagine what her father, Davey and the rest of the guys at Jim’s Place would say if they could see her now.

She propped the bulkhead door open and grabbed her lantern, pointing it down the concrete steps.

Cobwebs. Her stomach muscles tightened. Spiders didn’t scare her, but couldn’t any part of this adventure be easy?

She wondered what she’d have done when she’d heard the noise if she hadn’t known a six-year-old was looking for a missing pregnant cat. Probably gotten a hotel room, she decided, or headed back to Beacon Hill, wine or no wine.

Lantern firmly in hand, Tess made her way down the steep steps, through a gauze of cobwebs. When she came to a six-foot metal door at the bottom, she shone her light on her shirt, pants and arms, just to make sure nothing had crawled off the cobwebs onto her.

Above her, the bulkhead door creaked and moaned in a gust of wind. She had no idea what she’d do if it slammed shut. She didn’t want to think about it.

She pushed open the metal door, and her lantern illuminated a small, finished space under a low ceiling. This wasn’t so bad. There were proper walls, a concrete floor, shelves, wooden crates and a washer and dryer that predated her kitchen appliances. But who would do laundry down here? She would have to take either the trapdoor or the bulkhead to get here, neither of which she would want to negotiate with a basket of dirty clothes.

There was a light switch by the door. Tess flipped it, and one of three fluorescent tubes overhead flickered on. The room, she saw, was dusty and damp, but tidy. She could feel the dust in her throat and wondered about radon. Ike had probably never had the place tested. It could be loaded.

On the other hand, any radon could just seep out the cracks and holes. This was not an airtight modern home. If nothing else, the carriage house “breathed.”

Tess cleared her throat. “Kitty, oh, kitty, where are you?”

Nothing.

“Tippy Tail?”

A moan of a meow sounded from deeper within the cellar. Tess walked over to a dark doorway adjoining the laundry room. She held up the lantern, and swore under her breath when she realized it was a dirt cellar. She could see the outlines of heating ducts, pipes, piles of junk.

“Damn. Come on, cat, don’t you want to let me take you home?”

It was pitch-dark in the dirt cellar, utterly black, with no windows at all. Tess had newfound respect for Davey Ahearn and the forty years he’d spent going in and out of places like this to fix people’s plumbing.

She tilted her lantern, its light striking more cobwebs. “Man, Davey, never mind snakes. I bet you know your spiders.”

But thoughts of him and the way he’d doubted her, what she knew he’d say if he could see her now, rekindled her resolve. She proceeded.

It was a dirt floor, silty, cool and a dull brown. The foundation walls were stone. It was like a cave. As she picked her way deeper into the old dirt cellar, Tess could see the outlines of the trapdoor overhead, light from the kitchen angling through the narrow gaps. She made out the ladder hooked to the ceiling. There was no way. No damn way.

A naked, dusty lightbulb was screwed into a socket in the ceiling, and she had to put her hand through thick cobwebs to reach the string. The bulb gave off a dull, yellowed light. She saw a bunch of dead flies caught in a cobweb.

Pipes and heating ducts hung from the low ceiling, and there was a furnace, a pump, piles of cast-off furniture, buckets, old brooms. Nasty.

The cat meowed again, softly.

“You’d better be a cat.” Tess touched the cell phone on her hip, just to reassure herself. “Tippy Tail, don’t you want to call it a night and come on out?”

She had three choices. One, call it a night herself and turn up the volume on her white-noise machine. Two, get help from the neighbors. Three, proceed.

At least she wasn’t worried about coming upon Jedidiah Thorne. If she were a ghost, she’d find a better place to hang out than down here.

She hit her shin on a rusted bucket. “Ouch—damn it.” But she checked herself, keeping her tone cajoling, slightly high-pitched. She didn’t want to scare the cat. “Come on, kitty.” She felt silly. She’d never had a cat, but one ex-boyfriend had talked to his Siamese this way, so it had to work. “Have you had your babies? Couldn’t you find a nice place? I mean, Tippy Tail, this is a dungeon.”

Tess coughed, resisted the urge to spit. Dirt and dust seemed to invade her eyes, her nostrils, her throat. She pulled her shirt up over her mouth and pushed farther into the cellar, away from the lightbulb and laundry room.

It was so damn dark, even with her lantern and the lightbulb.

“The hell with it. Tippy Tail, you are on your own.”

She pulled on the string, and the lightbulb went off.

The cat meowed again, pitifully, and Tess couldn’t abandon her without one more try. The animal was somewhere close, very close. Tess sighed and shone the lantern into a corner piled with old furniture, none of which looked worth saving. There were dining-room chairs, a metal kitchen table, a couple of old nightstands too rickety even for the country look she planned for the carriage house if she kept it. She spotted an iron bed frame that might have possibilities.

Her light hit a pair of golden eyes, and she had to stifle a startled yell. “Well, there you are.”

The cat was out of reach, tucked amidst old rags and junk in the absolute farthest corner of the old cellar. Tess couldn’t tell if the presumed Tippy Tail had had her kittens. She leaned over a nightstand for a better look, trying not to spook the cat with her lantern.

Suddenly the nightstand gave way. Tess lost her balance, her lantern flying out of her hand, her right arm following the crashing nightstand while the rest of her went sprawling in the opposite direction. She jerked her arm free, but her momentum pitched her backward onto the bed frame.

She landed on her back on the dirt floor.

“Oh, gross!”

And painful. She hurt just above her hip where the bed frame had dug in. She pushed it away, scrambling onto her knees and reaching for the lantern. She was disgusted, shuddering at the thought of what she might be kneeling in. Cobwebs, decayed animal droppings.

She got to her feet, ignoring the pain in her hip, and pointed the light back toward the corner. She was breathing hard, beyond repulsed.

The cat was gone. The commotion must have frightened her off.

Tess was in no mood. “Tough, kitty. It didn’t do much for me, either.” She felt her hip. No blood. Probably just bruised. The pain subsided, slowly. “Tippy Tail?”

Her cell phone was missing, too. It must have gone flying at the same time she had. She brought the lantern around, searching for cat and cell phone.

She spotted the phone in the dirt under the bed frame.

But no cat.

She wasn’t about to continue the night without a phone. Ignoring her bruises and scrapes, she lifted the bed frame and reached down into the dirt. “Just don’t think,” she muttered.

Her light caught something. She wasn’t sure what, but her response was visceral, almost primal. Adrenaline pumped into her bloodstream, and her muscles tightened, every fiber of her body and soul urging her to run.

Bones.

Her mind registered what the rest of her already knew she had seen.

Bones.

And not rat bones. Human bones.

No. This was not possible. She was imagining things because she was totally grossed out from falling onto the dirt floor.

She steadied her lantern for another look. “Jesus.”

It was a human skeleton. A skull, right there in the dirt under the bed frame. She must have dislodged the shallow grave when she’d taken her spill.

Well, it wasn’t a real skeleton. It couldn’t be. Some weird doctor or mad scientist must have lived here, had himself a little fun. It could not be real.

The skull looked real.

“’Alas, poor Yorick.’” Her voice was a rasping, dust-choked whisper, and she couldn’t breathe. She coughed, sick to her stomach. “Holy shit.”

She was blinking rapidly, unable to get a decent breath. Her heartbeat was wild. She took a step backward, then another, then turned and ran.

When she reached the laundry room, she screamed. It was a cathartic scream, no holds barred, loud and deep and unrepressed. When she finished, she shuddered. “Damn.”

She was shaking now, and she flipped off the light and stumbled up the bulkhead steps, just managing to hold on to her lantern. “Holy shit.”

A cat having kittens. Cobwebs. A spooky, dark, old cellar.

And a skeleton.

“My God.”

She didn’t even sound like herself. She charged out into the cool, clear, clean night air and slammed the bulkhead door shut as fast as she could, as if the skeleton might swoop up out of there.

She breathed deeply. Lilacs tinged with ocean salt. The wind was calmer. She breathed again.

“Ike—Jesus, what the hell was that?”

She was drenched in sweat, shaking, coughing dust and God only knew what, and she breathed again, trying to calm herself.

She had no idea what to do. Call the police? Her father? Davey? What did she know about the Beacon-by-the-Sea police? She was alone up here in a strange town, at night. Susanna would come in a flash. Her ex-husband was a Texas Ranger, her parents both in law enforcement.

No. Tess shook her head, breathing more slowly now, more deeply. She must have imagined the skeleton—or, with her vivid imagination, turned something innocent into a skull. This place had been in the Beacon Historic Project’s hands for five years before Ike had turned it over to her. Surely they’d have noticed if a damn skeleton was buried in the cellar.

Maybe it was just a dog skeleton, or a raccoon. Not human.

Ike.

That was more than her mind could comprehend. She wouldn’t even let the thought form completely. This was an old house. Whatever was down in her dirt cellar could have been there for more than a century.

Maybe it was Ike’s idea of a joke.

She brushed herself off, wondering what had happened to the cat. And if her neighbors had heard her scream.




Seven


Harl showed up at Andrew’s back door with a baseball bat. It was after ten, dark outside. “You hear that?”

Andrew nodded. “It wasn’t the wind.”

“Nope.” Harl rolled the bat in his big, callused palm. “I know a scream when I hear one. You want to call 911?”

That had been Andrew’s first impulse, but he shook his head. “We don’t know enough. I’ll check next door. You stay here with Dolly. She’s asleep.”

“Watch yourself.”

“Our new neighbor probably just tripped in the dark. Let me see what’s up.”

The bloody-murder scream had drawn him to the back porch, where he’d already flipped a light. He had his flashlight from the kitchen, debated taking some sort of weapon. He dismissed the idea. That was Harl-thinking.

“I’ll stay out here,” Harl said. He wasn’t giving up his baseball bat. “You need help, yell.”

“Under no circumstances are you to leave Dolly here alone.”

Harl nodded. “Understood.”

Andrew set out across the lawn, the grass soft under his feet. He didn’t need his flashlight until he was at the lilac hedge at the far side of the yard. Dolly was small enough to find an opening she could fit through, but he followed his side of the hedge out to the street, then hooked around to the carriage house driveway.

He heard someone breathing, gulping in air in the dark.

“Tess?” He pointed his bright arc of light at her kitchen steps, moved it back toward the lilacs. “Tess, are you out here?”

His light caught her in the face as she stood in the overgrown grass at the other end of the driveway. She blinked rapidly, blinded, and he lowered the flashlight.

“Oh, it’s you.” She choked a little as she spoke, then rallied. “Thank God. I didn’t know who might be sneaking around out here. You heard me yell?”

He nodded, watching her closely. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes, fine.”

She walked over to the steps, moving unsteadily, almost drunkenly, and sat, putting a hand on her upper chest, as if trying to still a wild heartbeat. She pushed her other hand through her short curls. She wasn’t looking at him, didn’t seem to be looking at anything.

Andrew switched off the flashlight, the light from the open kitchen door sufficient. “What’s going on?”

“I was startled, and I yelled. Screamed my head off, actually.” She cleared her throat and attempted a smile. “I found your cat.”

“Tippy Tail?” He took another step toward her, still watching. She had strong, attractive features, nothing delicate or tentative about her. But she’d had a scare. He could see that. “Dolly will be pleased.”

Tess nodded. “I hope my scream didn’t wake her up.”

He saw she was more pale than he’d thought, and her clothes were streaked with dirt and cobwebs. He noticed a scrape on her left wrist, another on her jaw-line. And more cobwebs in her hair.

He stood at the bottom of the steps and touched her jaw next to the scrape. She had soft, smooth skin. “The cat do this?”

She shook her head. “No, no,” she said, her voice hoarse. Whatever had happened, she was stemming a shock reaction. Chattering teeth, trembling, rapid heartbeat. She looked as if she had every muscle in her body tensed to keep herself from jumping out of her skin. “I just fell. It was stupid. I heard the cat down in the cellar and went to investigate.”

“At night? You’re braver than I am. Old Tippy Tail would have been on her own if I’d heard her.”

“I was afraid she was having her kittens, and I could hear her through the floorboards. She sounded awful.” Tess pushed her hand through her short curls again, and for no reason he could think of, Andrew noticed her long, slender fingers. An artist’s hands. “It’s an old house. I can hear everything.”

“I understand.”

Her eyes lifted, focusing on him for the first time. Her smile, although still tentative, seemed genuine, her nerves less rattled. “I know about the house’s history. I refuse to be scared, let myself get creeped out. When I heard the cat, I went around to the bulkhead.” She pointed to the back of the house, as if to remind herself what she’d done, how it had made sense at the time. “There’s a trapdoor inside, but I’m not sure it’s safe.”

“I’ve seen that trapdoor. I wouldn’t want to go that way either.” Andrew sat on the step next to her; she smelled as if she’d been rolling around in a hundred-year-old dirt cellar. “I don’t imagine the bulkhead’s much better.”

She almost managed a laugh. “So I discovered. Tippy Tail had lodged herself way back in the old dirt cellar. I tripped over some junk and fell.”

“That’s when you yelled?”

She averted her eyes, and they took on a faraway look, as if she were back down in the cellar, falling in the dark. She blinked a couple of times, focused again on him and forced a smile. “Yes. I kept thinking about snakes. It was ridiculous.”

Not so ridiculous in an old dirt cellar, but Andrew decided Tess didn’t need him to confirm her worst suspicions. “Hurt yourself?”

“Not really. I’m afraid I scared off your cat, though. I have no idea where she is.”

“She hadn’t had her kittens?”

Tess shook her head. “No. Just as well. Next time I’ll leave her alone.”

“Tippy Tail’s a survivor. She’ll be fine.”

“I hope so.”

She started to her feet, calmer now, but there was little improvement in her color. She was still pale, shaken from her encounter with Tippy Tail. Andrew followed her up. As she started to turn to go inside, she winced suddenly and grabbed his arm, steadying herself.

“Sorry.” She still held on tight. Andrew didn’t move, let her gain her balance. “I forgot—I took a pretty good hit on my side.” Her grip relaxed slightly, but she didn’t let go. “I’m okay.”

“Maybe you should come back to my house.” Andrew’s voice was quiet, and he tried to sound sensible, not dictatorial. Tess Haviland didn’t seem the type to want anyone to swoop in to the rescue. “I can make you a cup of tea, and you can see if you discover any more aches and pains.”

“I really did take a tumble.” She smiled, but he could see the pain in her eyes. But she shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ve got chamomile tea inside. I’ll make myself a cup.”

“Okay, but I wouldn’t be much of a neighbor if I left you before you’re steady on your feet. Come on, I’ll fix you that chamomile tea.”

She released her grip on his arm, managed a quick nod. She seemed appreciative, not as if she’d given in. “That’d be nice.”




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