The Carriage House (3 page)

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.

L
auren 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.”