The Carriage House (2 page)

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.

A
ndrew 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.