The Carriage House

Eleven

Tess sat out on her kitchen steps, feeling the strain in her neck and back from crouching to fix the cellar window. She'd managed the repair job without actually going into the cellar. She had a new plan-she'd go back to Boston tonight and get Susanna to come up with her in the morning. They'd search the cellar together. Susanna could handle a skeleton. If it turned out to be a figment of Tess's imagination, she could count on Susanna not to tell the whole world. She kept people's finances to herself, after all.

It was a good plan. Sensible.

Tess didn't consider herself a coward for not wanting to investigate the dirt cellar on her own. She'd gone down there by herself in the first place, hadn't she? She had nothing to prove, and if a crime had been committed-at whatever point in the past hundred thirty years-it might be smart to have a witness.

She spotted Dolly slipping through the lilacs and eased off the steps, down to the driveway.

"Is it okay if I come over?" Dolly asked, still technically in the lilacs and thus her own yard. "Harl says I'm not supposed to be a pest. Am I a pest?"

Tess smiled. "Mosquitoes are pests. A princess can never be a pest."

The little girl giggled as if Tess had said the funniest thing she'd ever heard. She looked behind her, on the Thorne side of the lilacs, and yelled, "Daddy, she says it's okay!" She turned to Tess and jumped out into the tall grass. "He'll be right over."

Tess had the feeling Andrew and Harl weren't about to let Dolly come over unchaperoned until they were satisfied about what had happened last night. Under the circumstances, she could hardly take offense.

"I brought Tippy Tail some food." Dolly reached into her pocket and withdrew a crumpled, squished individual packet of cat food. She showed it to Tess. "It's her favorite."

"Do you want to put it in her dish?"

Her eyes widened with excitement at such a prospect. "Could I?"

"Sure. Just tiptoe so you don't disturb her and the kittens. We should probably wait for your dad."

She rolled her eyes. "He won't go through the bushes. He says he's too big. Do you think he's too big?"

Tess laughed. "No, Dolly, I don't think he's too big."

He materialized behind her. "Too big for what?"

It was a question to which there was no good answer, and Tess saw the glint in his eyes. She said, "Dolly wants to feed Tippy Tail. I said it's okay, but probably just two of us should go inside. Your cat's on the skittish side."

"You two go ahead."

That was all the encouragement Dolly needed. She bounded over to the steps, stopped herself, then did an exaggerated but very quiet tiptoe. She turned her face up to Tess and whispered, "I have a loose tooth. See?" It was the sort of non sequitur Tess was coming to expect from the six-year-old. "Harl says he can pull it out with his pliers."

"You don't believe him, do you?"

She nodded. "Uh-huh!"

"Dolly," Andrew said. "You know Harl's just teasing you."

She giggled again, and Tess realized that Dolly Thorne had her rather unusual babysitter all figured out. And her taciturn father, too, no doubt. She was no more worried about Harl really pulling her tooth with a pair of pliers than he intended to do so.

She tore open the crumpled packet and dumped the food into the cat's new dish. Tippy Tail, stretching, still scraggly-looking, emerged from Tess's camp bed and padded over to the little girl. Dolly ran her hand over the cat's back. Tess thought the old cat looked as if she'd just delivered four kittens and could use a nice, long rest.

"Are you okay, Tippy Tail?" Dolly cooed. "You have cute babies. You be good to them, okay? I know you will." She looked back at Tess, her eyes bright with affection. "Tippy Tail is a good mommy cat, isn't she?"

Considering the animal had intended to have her kittens in a dirt cellar, Tess wasn't so sure. But what did she know about cats? "She seems to have good maternal instincts."

"What's instincts?"

"An instinct is knowing in your heart what's the right thing to do."

"Oh." Dolly stood up and watched Tippy Tail eat, then, dutifully keeping her distance, peeked at the kittens, who were all asleep on the sleeping bag. She whispered, as if Tess didn't know any better, "We should leave them alone."

She ran out the side door and plopped down on the steps as if she was in for an extended visit. Andrew motioned to her with one finger. "Got to go, kiddo."

"Can Tess come over for supper?"

Tess winced, standing at the bottom of the steps. "Actually, Dolly, I'm thinking about heading back to Boston tonight. That's where I live-"

"Please!"

Andrew leaned against her car, arms folded across his chest, looking relaxed and sexy, slightly less suspicious than last night and at lunch. "You're welcome to join us for dinner before you head back."

"Thanks, but-"

"Why're you going back to Boston?" Dolly asked. "Why can't you stay?"

Andrew gave the barest hint of a smile. "That's a good question, Dolly."

"Well, because I have a lot of work to do, and I'm not getting any of it done here." But the lie was transparent, even Dolly Thorne looked dubious. Tess sighed. "And my Tippy Tail adventures last night have me a little off center. The thought of staying here alone doesn't exactly thrill me."

Dolly's forehead creased. Then her eyes brightened, and she clapped her hands together. "Silly! Who wants to stay in this old place? It's got mice. Harl says so." She jumped up, yanked on her father's hand with excitement. "Tess can sleep over at our house, right, Daddy?"

He tugged gently on one of Dolly's braids. "I've already made the offer, sport."

The little girl swung around to Tess, who could feel her stomach muscles tightening. When a six-year-old was involved, she had to be careful, whether in being attracted to her father or lying to him. She said, "I don't know. Why don't we wait and see?"

Then, as if to deliberately exacerbate her situation, a familiar brown pickup rolled into the driveway.

Tess swore under her breath. "Oh, no."

"What is it?" Andrew asked.

"My father and one of his buddies."

Dolly frowned. "Where's your mom?"

"What? My mom?" She felt as if she'd been hit in the gut, but managed a smile at the little girl. "My mom's in heaven, too."

"She is? She died?"

Tess remembered being perfunctory about such things at six one minute, weaving fantasies and dreams the next. She nodded, trying to match Dolly's mood. "Yes. She died when I was a little girl."

"Like my mommy."

"My mother had a very bad disease, cancer."

"Ick."

Andrew said softly, "Dolly, we should go. Tess has company."

She jumped up, skipping across the driveway as if she and Tess had just been discussing picking flowers.

Davey Ahearn got out of the driver's side of his heap of a truck, his best friend of many years climbing out of the passenger side. Davey had a fresh cigarette lit.

Tess shook her head. "No way. You're not smoking in my house."

"Not even a hello first, just put your butt out? You and your old man. He wouldn't let me smoke all the way up here. Couple of pains in the ass." He tossed his cigarette onto the gravel and ground it out under his steel-toed boot. Then he noticed Dolly. "Geez, I didn't see the kid."

She gave a regal toss of her head, the sunlight catching the flowers in her crown. "I'm Princess Dolly."

"Yeah? No kidding. I'm Davey Ahearn, the hired help."

"If you'll excuse us," Andrew said to Tess. "Din-ner's at six. Come whenever."

That was all Davey needed. Tess could see him go on high alert. She ignored him. "Can I bring anything?"

He shook his head.

She knew she had to introduce them. If she didn't, it would make things worse. Her father came around the truck, and she said, "Pop, Davey, this is Andrew Thorne and his daughter, Dolly. They live next door. Andrew, my father, Jim Haviland, and my godfather, Davey Ahearn."

"You the architect?" Davey asked.

Andrew nodded. "More of a contractor these days."

"Yeah, you're not as big a jackass as most architects I've had to work with." He glanced at Dolly again and reddened. "Sorry."

Jim Haviland was more pensive, taking in Andrew with a tough-minded scrutiny Tess had come to expect whenever her introductions involved a man, no matter who it was. But he said, "Pleased to meet you," and let it go at that.

Dolly disappeared through the lilacs, calling for Harl, on some other tangent, and Andrew seized his opening.

Tess ticked off the seconds until he was reliably out of earshot. Only then, she knew, would her father and Davey speak.

"So," Davey said, easing in beside her, "you take this barn instead of cold hard cash before or after you checked out who lived next door?"

"Davey, I swear to you, if you don't wipe that smirk off your face-"

"I hear his wife died a few years ago."

"Davey."

Her father crossed his arms, rubbed a toe over a small, protruding rock in the driveway. "Dinner, huh?"

"It's a courtesy. His daughter's cat had kittens- " She groaned, throwing up her hands. "Come on, I'll explain while I give you the grand tour. What are you two doing up here, anyway? And don't you have my cell phone number? You could have called."

But the idea that these two men needed to call before seeing her didn't even register with them. She saw her father giving her house a critical once-over from the edge of the driveway. He was trying to look neutral. When he had to try, it meant he wasn't, and usually not because he approved.

Davey picked up his ground-out cigarette butt and set it inside his truck, turning back to Tess. "Business was lousy at the pub. Too nice a day. So, your old man and I decided to take a drive up here, see what's what." He gave the kitchen steps a test kick. "Good, at least I can get inside without falling on my ass."

"This place has character, though, doesn't it?" Tess tried not to think about last night but she didn't want to tell her father and Davey what she'd seen, not until she was sure herself what it was. She'd have to keep them out of the cellar. "Isn't the location just gorgeous? You can smell the ocean."

"Smells like dead fish," Davey said.

She ignored him. "Come on. But you have to be quiet, I don't want to scare Tippy Tail. That's Dolly's cat. She had kittens in my bed early this morning."

Her father exhaled in a loud whoosh. "Jesus H. Christ," he breathed, and followed his daughter and best friend into the carriage house kitchen.

Davey grinned at the sleeping kittens and mother cat in her camp bed. "Did I tell you this place was a goddamn barn? These guys are cute now, but wait'll you get little kitty turds all over your kitchen floor. They won't be so cute then."

"They don't look so cute now," her father said. "I don't get what people see in cats."

"I set up a box with a towel in a corner in the bathroom," Tess said. "It's a lot cozier than out here in the open. I'm hoping Tippy Tail'll move the kittens there, free up my bed."

She showed them around the kitchen, and as they moved through the house, the two men checked out the wiring, the plumbing, deciding which were the load-carrying beams and what problems and possibilities they presented-focusing, of course, on the problems. Tess didn't point out the stain in the living room, but Davey shot her a look that said he'd seen it and had drawn the same conclusion she had. Ghosts, nineteenth-century murderers.

"How'd you sleep last night?" her father asked.

"Fine."

"Yeah?"

"Yes, fine."

"Bullshit. You were worried about ghosts."

"You knew?"

"That this place is haunted? Of course I knew. Your mother loved telling me about the crazy, murdering ghost. I guess he killed some wife-beating bastard way back when." He looked around the big, empty room, shaking his head. "But I figured, you in a haunted house, that's your business, I wasn't getting into it. Besides, you didn't give me a chance."

"I don't believe in ghosts," Tess said.

Davey laughed. "Ha, I bet you did last night." But then his gaze fell on the trapdoor, and he shook his head. "Oh, man. I hate trapdoors."

"There's a bulkhead."

He sighed without enthusiasm. "Come on. Let's go. Show me the cellar, let me check out the pipes."

Tess led her father and Davey around back to the bulkhead, telling herself if they found the skeleton, there'd be hell to pay, but at least she would know it was real and she would have to deal with it.

"Davey, you've been crawling around in people's basements for forty years." She pushed open the six-foot door at the bottom of the bulkhead and let them go past her. Both men had to duck. "What's the strangest thing you've found?"

"I make it a policy not to look. I focus on the pipes." He made a beeline through the finished laundry room and stood in the dirt cellar's open doorway. "Ah, hell. I hate dirt cellars."

"It's a nineteenth-century carriage house," Tess said, "so it shouldn't be a surprise."

He scowled at her. "It's not."

"You know," her father said, "you give a cat a dirt cellar, you've got a hell of a big catbox."

"Gee, Pop, I'm so glad you came up here. What took you so long? I mean, I've been here, what, twenty-four hours?"

He ignored her, and she walked across the cool concrete floor and stood next to Davey. With the late-afternoon light angling through her repaired window, the cellar seemed almost ordinary. "People ever bury things in their dirt cellars?"

"You mean like pets? They'd stink."

She felt her stomach fold in on itself, but tried not to react visibly. Decaying corpses weren't one of her areas of expertise and not something she wanted to think about. Still, it was a point to consider. If the skeleton had been buried as an intact corpse, and not just bones, surely it couldn't have been recent, or it would have called attention to itself during the natural process of decomposition.

Her father was scrutinizing her. "Tess?"

"My mind's wandering. Sorry. There's a light under the trapdoor. But don't feel as if you have to go in there. I mean, you can see the pipes from here, can't you?"

Davey grinned at her. "What, it gives you the creeps?" He made a phony, B-movie ghost sound and laughed, amused with himself. "Relax. I've seen worse than this. Let me take a look."

Tess lingered in the doorway while he and her father went into the older part of the cellar, their attention clearly on the pipes and heating ducts, not on what was underfoot. She bit down on her lower lip, waiting, feeling only a slight twinge of guilt that she hadn't warned them what could be in store. If there was no skeleton, there was no skeleton. Simple.

"Actually," Davey said, "these pipes aren't bad. Cellar's dry, too, which is a good sign."

Her throat was suddenly so constricted she couldn't answer. She kept feeling herself falling last night, spotting the skull in the dirt, letting out that blood-curdling scream.

Finally, she couldn't stand it anymore, muttered something about getting some air and fled up the bulkhead steps.

She ran headlong into the rock-solid body of Andrew Thorne. He caught her around the middle and held firm. "Easy, there, where are you going?"

Tess choked back a yell, tried to control a wild impulse to break free and run out to the ocean, charge into the waves. She felt as if she were covered in cobwebs, unable to breathe. But she made herself stand still, realized she had a death grip on his upper arms. She eased off. "I couldn't breathe down there. It must be the dust. Allergies." She coughed, suddenly very aware of the feel of his hands on her waist. "I'm okay now."

She could hear her father and Davey in the laun-dry-room door and backed up a step, releasing her grip on Andrew. He lowered his arms and rolled back on his heels, his eyes half-closed. She met his suspicious gaze straight-on, but had the uncomfortable feeling he could see right into her brain and pull out the image stored there of the yellowed skull lying in the silty dirt of her cellar.

"I came by to remind you to bring a key to the carriage house." His voice was quiet, dead calm, his eyes still half-closed, still appraising her. "We'll need to look after the kittens while you're in Boston."

"Yes. Of course." Not that he couldn't get in, easily, without a key.

"You sure you're okay?"

"I think so." She sniffled, wrinkling up her nose to prove it was the dust. "I must be allergic to something down there."

Andrew said nothing, but his expression was serious, even humorless. He knew she was hiding something. She could feel it. And here she'd just presented him with another lie he could chalk up against her. But what did she really know about him? If there was a dead body in the cellar, wasn't it possible he knew about it? Or Harl did? She had to be careful.

Davey and her father lumbered up out of the cellar, and Tess could feel the blood rush to her face when they saw Andrew back in her yard. They'd jump to conclusions. They always did.

But Andrew retreated quickly, though not quite rudely.

Tess turned to her father. Obviously he and Davey hadn't stumbled onto any skeleton. If they had, they'd have said something by now. She took this as a positive development. "Pop, why don't I get you and Davey something cold to drink?"

She brought out cold sodas, and they walked out to the main road and across to the water, down to the wet, packed sand. It was low tide, the surf gentle, quiet in the late-day sun. Tess regarded the two men at her side with affection. They were the most prominent men in her life, constant, uncompromisingly honest. Her father was a longtime widower, Davey twice married, two old friends who worked hard and asked so little of her. She knew her father just wanted grandchildren and Little League games, and that Davey, who had grown kids of his own, would get in the dirt with them, show them how to hold the bat, the way he had shown Tess as a kid.

The problem was, she didn't have a man in her life. The men she met either didn't understand her father and Davey and the rest of the guys at Jim's Place, or they understood them too well. She didn't mind saying she wanted a relationship, but she wasn't going to settle for the wrong man just to have one. She knew she could be happy on her own. That had never been a question.

As for children-that was something else altogether. She was so young when her mother died, and there'd never been another maternal figure in her life. She didn't have a natural trust of her maternal instincts, didn't even know if she had any.

"You should have told me about this place," her father said. Davey had gone up ahead, his hands shoved in his pockets as he walked within inches of the water.

Tess nodded. "I know." She glanced over at him, this man who'd been by her side for so long. "You won't think I'm giving up on men if I decide to keep it?"

She was quoting his own words back to him, one of his most stubborn, most old-fashioned convictions that if a woman bought property, it meant she was giving up on having a man in her life. It was one thing to buy a house if she were widowed or divorced-but single? Never married? It was tossing in the towel, he'd told her at least a hundred times.

"Giving up? Nah. Not after meeting that Thorne guy."

Tess groaned. "Pop, if I decide to keep the carriage house, it won't be because of who lives next door."

He sighed, watching two gulls careen toward the shallow water before he replied. "Listen to me, Tess. You don't want to end up like me, all alone, or like Davey, with a couple of ex-wives hounding him for money all the time. Getting a place of your own- yeah, it's like saying you give up, you don't care if you find someone." He added frankly, "Men can sense that, you know."

"They cannot."

"Mark my words." He grabbed up a clamshell and flung it into the surf. "It's that last little prick you went out with. He threw you off."

"He didn't throw me off. He was a jerk. He'd check the stock market when we had lunch. No more investment bankers for me."

She smiled, well aware she wouldn't change how her father thought about relationships, or about her. But there was more to his concern than an old-fash-ioned outlook on women and marriage, only they'd always avoided going that deep. It was too painful, not just for her, but for him, too. She was terrified of motherhood, terrified of dying too soon, leaving behind children who loved and needed her. Not because they couldn't go on, but because they did.

She pushed away the thought, as she always did.

Davey swung back to them, obviously sensing what she and her father had been talking about. "One day, Tess, you won't have to worry about your old man getting in your business. The two of us'll be on our walkers in the home."

"Davey Ahearn in a home?" Tess laughed. "You tell me one home in metropolitan Boston that would have you. No way. You're not moving from the neighborhood until you go to the great big plunger in the sky."

As she turned to head back, she saw Andrew out on the beach with his daughter. They were throwing a Frisbee, and Tess could hear Dolly's squeals of laughter above the surf and gulls, the hum of the wind. She imagined them thirty years from now, Dolly as a grown woman out on the beach with her father, who was still alone, who'd sacrificed so much for his daughter.