Carla Neggers - The Carriage House

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?"