Carla Neggers - The Carriage House

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."