The Carriage House (5 page)

“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.”

S
usanna 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.