The Carriage House

Fourteen

Tess sensed someone was watching her. She rolled over in the twin bed in the guest room and came eye-to-eye with a stuffed black-and-white cat in the hands of Dolly Thorne. The little girl giggled. "Her name's Kitty. I've had her since I was three years old." She was wide-awake, still in her pink pajamas with kittens all over them, her coppery hair tangled. No crown. "Daddy said not to wake you up."

"I'm awake," Tess croaked, squinting at the bedside clock. Seven. Not bad, but she was exhausted. Too much tossing and turning, thinking about kisses and skeletons, kittens in her bed, men and intruders. She struggled not to seem grumpy. "Well. Good morning."

"Will you play stuffed animals with me?"

"I need coffee first. Okay? Your dad's up?"

"Uh-huh. He's taking a shower."

Tess didn't even want to think about it, but before that command reached her sluggish brain, the picture formed of Andrew's lean, taut body naked under a stream of hot water. She'd been awake for all of thirty seconds and already was off on the wrong foot. If she didn't get a grip, today would be just as tumultuous as yesterday. It might be, anyway-Susanna Galway was planning to show up first thing. Tess had called her before going to bed.

"Cops hate missing bodies," Susanna had said. "Of course, they want to believe you didn't see anything."

Tess didn't like the idea of a missing body herself. She focused on Dolly. "Let me pull myself together. Then we can see what's what."

Dolly obviously took this as confirmation Tess would play stuffed animals with her. She ran off skipping, her bare feet padding softly on the rug. Tess threw off her blankets and sat up in the Red Sox T-shirt and flannel boxers she'd worn to bed, struggling to wake up. The guest room was cute, its windows overlooking the ocean. From the old-fashioned flowered wallpaper, she guessed Andrew hadn't gotten around to renovating it yet. White curtains billowed in a cool morning breeze. Tess sat a moment, listening to the surf and the gulls, picturing herself hanging wallpaper with Andrew Thorne.

"Damn," she breathed, shaking off the image.

She could hear him speaking to his daughter down the hall, a scene so ordinary it took Tess's breath away. He and Dolly were a family. She needed to keep her wits about her, not barrel in and mess up the life they'd created for themselves. At least, for someone unaccustomed to dealing with six-year-olds, she thought she was handling herself well with Dolly. She was a cheerful kid, not as combative and outspoken as Tess had been at that age with her own mother's death still so fresh.

She used Dolly's bathroom down the hall, grateful she didn't have to share with Andrew, smell his soap, breathe in the steam from his shower. She picked bath toys out of the tub and opted for a shocking-pink towel with a big yellow fish on it. When she climbed into the shower, she imagined Andrew hearing the water running, picturing her the way she had him.

It had to be the skeleton. She trusted her instincts and impulses when it came to her work, but not men-at least not romantically. She could work with men, argue politics and baseball and otherwise hold her own, but romance, intimacy, falling in love… She shuddered just thinking about how many times she'd stopped at the precipice and decided, "No, not him," and refused to jump.

She dressed in a pair of ratty work jeans and a fresh Red Sox shirt. She and Susanna would check the cellar themselves.

She had breakfast on the back porch with Andrew and Dolly, just cereal, toast and juice, but with the sunlight and the sounds of the ocean, it was perfect. Tess had half hoped she'd see Andrew and wonder what had gotten into her yesterday. Instead, she had to admit something about the man set her senses on fire. Even when he was pouring a cup of coffee, she noticed the muscles in his forearms, the angles of his face.

Dolly saw Harl working on her tree house, remembered her new window and scooted off. Tess smiled over the rim of her mug, enjoying her last sips of coffee. "I think I'm off the hook for playing stuffed animals."

"Don't count on it." Andrew sat across the table, studying her with the kind of frank intimacy that said he knew exactly how close they'd come to tearing off their clothes and making love last night. That said he remembered every detail of their kisses. "How are you this morning? Did you get any sleep?"

"Some, thanks. I need to get next door. A friend of mine is coming up this morning."

"I'd like to take another look in your cellar," he said.

She nodded. "Maybe we can figure out what it was my mind turned into a skeleton."

Andrew didn't answer. He was, Tess realized, tight-lipped and controlled by nature, but not a man who missed a thing. Something else for her to remember. She set her mug down, part of her wishing she could stay here all day, going from coffee to iced tea to wine, not doing anything more demanding than playing stuffed animals with a six-year-old.

When they set out across the yard, Dolly ran over, torn between helping Harl finish the window in her tree house and checking on the kittens. Finally, she yelled over her shoulder, "Harl, I'm going over to Tess's house! I'll help you later. Don't worry, okay?"

Harl popped his white head out of the tree house door. "Go on. I'll see if I can manage without you."

She giggled and put her warm little hand into Tess's. "Harl's funny."

"You think so?"

"Yep."

Andrew glanced at Tess as if to say Dolly couldn't be expected to know any better.

They took the long way around the lilacs, and when she saw the carriage house in the morning sun, Tess was struck by its graceful lines and picturesque setting. She could almost forget the police crawling around in her cellar last night. Had there been an intruder? Would the police want to talk to her again today, or anyone else? Ike Grantham was the previous owner, his sister the director of the Beacon Historic Project and the one who'd given Tess the key. Wouldn't they want to talk to Lauren Montague and at least try to get in touch with Ike?

Only if they believed there might have been a skeleton in her cellar, Tess thought. And they didn't.

She wondered if word of her call to the police had gotten around Beacon-by-the-Sea, if people would understand how she could have at least thought she'd stumbled onto human remains in the old Jedidiah Thorne carriage house.

Dolly skipped up the kitchen steps, but Andrew quietly moved in front of her, going in first.

"Oh my God," Dolly screamed, panicked. "They're gone! Daddy!"

But he touched her shoulder and pointed into the bathroom. "No, they're not, Dolly. Look. Tippy Tail's moved them into the box."

She placed a palm over her heart dramatically. "Oh my God, they're so cute!"

"Dolly."

She glanced up at him. "I know, I shouldn't say ‘Oh my God.'"

"You really shouldn't."

Tess smiled at the father-daughter exchange. She was relieved to have her bed, such as it was, free of Tippy Tail and family. While Andrew and Dolly checked on them, she scooped up the lilacs she'd dumped out in the sink last night in her haste for a weapon, and tossed them into the trash. She glanced around the kitchen. The carriage house needed so much. She liked the idea of a country house, a weekend project, the physical work that would be involved. If the skeleton proved to her satisfaction to be nothing but a figment of her imagination, she could see herself keeping the place.

Then Andrew came out of the bathroom, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and she thought, Maybe not. Her neighbor could prove to be a bigger complication than whatever it was she'd seen in her cellar.

"Can I name the kittens?" Dolly asked her father in an excited whisper.

"Just for now. The people who adopt them will want to give them their own names."

"I'm naming the black one Midnight," she said.

"Okay, but we're not keeping him."

"What if it's a girl?"

"Then we're not keeping her."

They went back outside, and Dolly got a stick from the lilacs and decided to draw pictures on Tess's driveway while she and Andrew checked out back. In daylight, there was still no clear indication of an intruder. But no forced entry was necessary since the bulkhead only had a broken, rotted wooden latch, no proper lock.

Andrew tested the soft wood with his toe. "Harl's never heard anything back here before last night. Neither have I."

"It wasn't me. I wasn't about to go back down there in the dark."

His gaze settled on her. "What was your relationship with Ike Grantham?"

"He was a client. We were never friends, if that's what you mean. He's so charismatic and intense, it's not that easy to establish firm boundaries with him, but I'd say we did."

"He gave you a historic oceanfront property."

"As payment for work I'd done, and ‘oceanfront property' is a stretch. You know Ike. He's eccentric and impulsive. That's why it took me a year to get up here-I never really believed this place was mine. For all I knew he'd show up on my doorstep and demand my firstborn child or something."

Andrew nodded, removing his foot from the bulkhead. "Ike's not easy to understand."

"What do you think's happened to him?"

"It makes no difference to me. I haven't seen much of him since Joanna's death."

"Then you weren't friends before-"

"No."

He started back toward the driveway, and Tess exhaled, realizing suddenly that she'd been holding her breath. Joanna Thorne had died a terrible death, and Andrew wouldn't be normal if he didn't to some degree blame Ike Grantham for encouraging her. He didn't cause the avalanche, and he didn't make Joanna's decision for her. But Tess remembered how adept Ike was, how incredibly persuasive, at making people work outside their comfort zone. Maybe he'd led Joanna Thorne to believe she was ready for Mount McKinley when she wasn't.

Tess's cell phone rang in her jeans pocket, startling her but mercifully interrupting her train of thought.

"I'm in Gloucester," Susanna said. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"You don't need directions?"

"Davey drew me a map. He says he knows pipes, I know money, and I should take a look at this place.

You've got him worried this time. Ghosts, nineteenth-century duelists, the neighbors."

"You didn't tell him about the skeleton, did you?"

"Hell, no. Twenty minutes, okay?"

"I'll be here."

Andrew glanced back at her. "Didn't tell who?"

"My godfather. You know, it's bad enough if it gets around Beacon that I called the police about a nonexistent skeleton in my cellar. If it gets around the neighborhood, I'll never live it down. Never."

"Your friend's from your neighborhood?"

"Her grandmother is. Susanna and I share office space in Boston. She understands how I grew up, the only child of a widowed father in a tight-knit blue-collar neighborhood."

He smiled almost imperceptibly. "Nothing stops you. Maybe you learned that growing up the way you did."

"I suppose. With my father and Davey in my face all the time, I learned to think for myself. And losing my mother so young-she taught me that we all only have right now, this moment." Tess looked up at the sky, picturing her mother sitting on the rocks by the ocean, just listening to the surf. It was one of the clearest, most reassuring images she had of her. She shifted back to Andrew and grinned suddenly. "On the other hand, it means I'm not very good with five-year plans, much to Susanna's distress."

When they reached the driveway, Harl was thrashing his way through the lilacs. "I'm taking a chainsaw to these things." He picked a leaf off his beard. "You two want me to keep an eye on Dolly while you take another look in the cellar?"

"I have a friend coming," Tess said.

"So? I'll send her down." He went over, plopped down on the steps and took Dolly's stick and drew a tic-tac-toe on the driveway. "I'll be O."

Andrew touched Tess's arm. "Let's go, unless you think he'll scare off your friend."

"Susanna? She's not afraid of anything."

"No, no," Dolly was saying. "You can't do two O's in a row."

Harl frowned at her as if he didn't know any better. "Why not?"

"It's cheating."

"Oh." He drew fresh tic-tac-toe lines and handed the stick over to Dolly. "Then you go first."

Taking that as their cue, Tess shot ahead of Andrew and headed back to the bulkhead.

The cellar again produced nothing. No skeleton, no evidence one had been snatched, no sign of an intruder, not even anything to suggest what Tess had actually seen the other night that her mind had transformed into a human skull.

She wasn't surprised. She sat with Susanna out on the kitchen steps, drinking the last of her soda. Susanna had arrived while Harl and Dolly were still playing tic-tac-toe, and he'd sent her down to the cellar with Tess and Andrew. They were all back on the other side of the lilacs now-Andrew, Harl and Dolly. Tippy Tail and kittens were asleep in their box in the bathroom. Tess could almost delude herself into thinking all was well, but her instincts said otherwise.

Susanna took a long drink of her soda and pressed the cold can to her cheek. "The way I see it, you have four scenarios. One, there was no skeleton. That's the option we all like best, no matter how embarrassing to you. It's the one the police will fly with until they have reason not to. Two, there was a skeleton, but it's a ghost. That's probably our second-best option. People'll believe it or they won't. It doesn't matter. It's a ghost, and that's that."

"Why would a ghost turn itself into a skeleton?" Tess asked reflectively, her own soda untouched.

"Why wouldn't it? Ghosts are ghosts. They do their own thing." Susanna leaned back against the step above her and stretched out her long, lean legs. "Third option, there was a skeleton, and it's some poor bastard from a million years ago."

"My nineteenth-century horse thief theory."

"Or Jedidiah Thorne didn't die at sea."

Tess nodded since it was a scenario she'd considered herself. "But who'd care enough to steal his remains?"

"His descendants might. Maybe they know something we don't about how he died and want to keep it their little secret."

"It doesn't wash with what I know about the Thornes. They're not exactly North Shore bluebloods who want to protect the family name. Jedidiah was already convicted of murder." Tess sighed, hating discussing something so real and potentially tragic as a dead body buried in her cellar in such a clinical fashion. "The important thing isn't what I want, it's learning what the truth is."

"You know the fourth scenario," Susanna said.

"Ike."

"Yep. That's the one no one likes. He ends up dead in the carriage house cellar. Whoever buried him there doesn't realize you own the place. You pop up here, push comes to shove, they slip in and dig him up."

Tess didn't want to give this fourth option any credence. She set the soda can on her knee and watched the condensation on the outside drip onto her jeans. "Someone should try to locate him."

"That would be the thing to do, yes."

"One would think his sister-"

"One would."

Tess glanced at her friend. "If there was a skeleton down there and someone stole it last night, I could have put myself in a dangerous position by saying I saw it. I should have pretended I didn't see a thing."

"Too late. You screamed bloody murder. The neighbors knew you'd seen something. It'd be worse if you didn't mention it. Better to have everyone know. Now if someone runs you off the road or something, we'll all think you were right about the skeleton, after all."

"This is supposed to make me feel better?"

Susanna shrugged, pragmatic. "No, but that's not why I'm up here. By the way," she added, easing gracefully to her feet, "why didn't you tell me about the guy next door sooner?"

"What's to tell?"

She raised both eyebrows and shook her head. "No wonder Davey and your dad worry about you. Tess, I noticed this guy, and I have made it a policy not to notice men. He's your lean, tight-lipped, rock-ribbed Yankee. I can see him dumping tea in the harbor and hopping a whaling ship with Ahab, killing a wife-beater in a duel." She polished off the last of her soda. "And he spent more time in the cellar watching you than hunting a skeleton."

"Does that mean you don't suspect him of offing Ike and burying him in the cellar?"

"No."

"He has a six-year-old daughter."

Susanna was silent.

"I slept in his guest room last night," Tess added.

"And?"

"There's a certain attraction at work between us."

"No kidding. Davey already told me, you know."

"Davey? He saw us together for maybe three seconds-"

"All it takes."

Tess gave up. Even Susanna's clients knew not to expect false comfort from her, just her bald assessment of the facts. Her reality checks could leave clients teetering, but they knew where they stood, what they had to do. Often, they knew it before they sat down with her, but needed that blunt back-and-forth with her to admit it.

"Tell me what you know about dead bodies," Tess said.

Susanna cast her a calculating look, vivid green eyes narrowed. "What makes you think I know anything about dead bodies? I know money."

"Your ex-husband's a Texas Ranger. You must have picked up a few things."

"My ex-husband's a snake in the grass," she said calmly.

Tess judiciously remained silent.

Susanna groaned. "Okay, okay. I suppose you want to know how long it takes a corpse to turn into a skeleton?"

"Pretty much."

"For this, I deserve a walk on the beach. Shall we?"

Susanna refused to say another word until they'd crossed the main road, climbed over the rocks and were walking along the cold, wet sand in their bare feet. She breathed in the salt air. "Best to talk about dead bodies when the air is good."

"I took anatomy in art school, but we didn't get into this sort of detail."

"Flesh rotting off bones, you mean? It didn't come up in my money classes, either." She stopped a moment, curling up her toes in the sand. "I missed the ocean in San Antonio, I have to say, although there's nothing quite like a Texas sunset. All right. Dead bodies. Conditions make a difference. A body left out in the open in hot, wet conditions would decompose rapidly. Cool, dry conditions delay decomposition. Usually. Take Ben Franklin and company down in Old Granary."

"Ben Franklin's buried in Philadelphia," Tess said. "His parents are buried in Old Granary."

"Whatever. Point is, the ground there was wet and spongy. That would speed things up."

Tess grimaced. "Gross."

"You asked."

"I know. What else?"

"An unclothed body tends to decompose faster than one that's clothed, especially if it's tight clothing."

"The mummy effect."

"Was your body-"

"I didn't see any clothes," Tess said quickly. "That doesn't mean there weren't any."

"If I buried a body in a cellar and wanted to hurry up decomposition, I'd strip it. It'd be a pain in the neck, but you have to figure the whole business wouldn't be much fun. I'd take the time."

And unclothed remains might take longer to identify, buying time for whoever had-what? Tess shuddered at the thought-the real possibility-that she'd stumbled on a murder victim.

"Most of this is common sense," Susanna went on. "We've all seen dead deer and skunks and such on the side of the road. It's a different picture in summer than in winter, in Florida than in Wyoming. You follow?"

"Oh, yes. I follow."

"As I recall, children and diseased bodies tend to decompose faster than healthy adults." She let the tide wash over her ankles, yelped at the cold water and dashed back to the warm, dry sand, then went back for more. "Also, fat people go faster than skinny people."

"I don't even want to think about that one. It's disgusting."

"Think of it as natural. Mutilated bodies also decompose faster. Makes sense, don't you think?"

Tess walked along the sand, the cold water lapping at her feet as she thought about the natural process of decomposition occurring on a corpse buried in a shallow grave in the carriage house cellar. What she saw the other night had to be her imagination. "What would slow decomposition?" she asked quietly.

"Dry, cool conditions, as I said. And bogs. If you get dumped in a bog, your body can last for ages." She shrugged, matter-of-fact. "Anthropologists love bogs."

Tess breathed out. "Charming."

"A lot of people think lime speeds decomposition, and it can, but only if the body's wet. Otherwise it can slow the process. And arsenic. Arsenic slows decomposition."

"There's lime in the cellar. For the lilacs."

"I noticed."

"Could a body buried in the carriage house cellar last March, when Ike took off, decompose between then and now?"

"Yes."

Tess couldn't speak, felt her head spinning. She was so cold that the seawater seemed warm under her feet.

"Are you going to barf?" Susanna asked.

"No. I'll be okay."

"You want me to throw water on your face?"

"I'm fine."

"Tess, I want you to listen to me. Whatever you saw the other night is dead or nonexistent. If they're dead, they know how they died, and they know how they ended up in that cellar. You don't need to know." Susanna grabbed Tess by the shoulders, her thick, black curls hanging down her shoulders, her eyes bright, intense. "Nobody gets buried in a cellar for a good reason."

Tess nodded grimly. "I know."

"Chances are there's no truth to be found out and justice to be served here. Even if there is, it's not your job."

"That's what I keep telling myself." Her voice was quiet, calmer than she'd anticipated. "Right now, I'm ending up looking like some hysterical nut."

Susanna gave her a pointed look. "Better than ending up buried in someone else's cellar."

Tess managed a smile. "True."

"Now, are you feeling better? You're not going to throw up or faint?"

"I'm fine."

"Good, because Ahab's walking across the rocks."

"You're thinking of Ishmael. Ahab's the one with the missing leg."

Susanna grimaced at the approaching figure of Andrew Thorne. "If this guy favors his ancestors, I can see why Moby Dick wanted a piece of Ahab. Talk about your take-no-prisoners type. Can't you see him on deck with a harpoon?"

"The whaling industry did incredible damage-"

"Tess. I'm not talking about endangered species. I'm talking about your neighbor. You've seen him with his daughter. I haven't."

"What are you saying?"

Her expression turned serious, less animated. "I'm saying you should be careful before you end up way over your head in very deep, cold water."

Andrew arrived, squinting at the two women in the bright sun. "Am I interrupting?"

Susanna Galway gave him her brightest, prettiest smile, which Tess had seen melt even Davey Ahearn and Jim Haviland. "We were just discussing nine-teenth-century American literature. Doesn't this place make you think of Herman Melville?"

Tess could see Andrew didn't believe Susanna. He knew they'd been talking about him. But he said, "I can see how it would." Then he turned to Tess. "Word's out about last night. Lauren Montague's here."

Susanna dropped her shoes onto the sand and tucked one foot in at a time. "Time I headed back to Boston. Tess?"

"Later," she said, aware, as Susanna would be, of Andrew's eyes on her.

"You'll call me?"

Tess nodded and slipped on her own shoes, remembering running on the beach as a child, flying a kite, listening to her mother tell tales of New England history, her father watching her every move, knowing that their time together was short. She felt as she did then, aware of what was going on, yet determined to pretend as if her life were normal and nothing bad would happen.