Carla Neggers - The Carriage House

She was stuck with a run-down nineteenth-century carriage house. She owed taxes on it. It was haunted. Its previous owner hadn't been heard from in over a year. The taciturn descendant of the convicted murderer who was haunting it lived next door.

He had a daughter who thought she was a princess and a white-haired cousin who probably had posttraumatic stress disorder.

A stray cat had delivered kittens in her makeshift bed.

She'd kissed Andrew Thorne and talked to him as if she could fall in love with him with no effort at all.

Under the circumstances, she could hardly blame herself for making up a dead body in the cellar.

Except she hadn't.

Tess could feel the panic welling up in her, the urge to hyperventilate, run. She kicked off her blankets to ease the sense of suffocating.

She'd seen bones. A skull. Human remains. A dead person.

She rolled over onto her stomach and switched on the bedside lamp. Her first panic attack in months. They'd come often when she was just starting up her business, going out on her own. She'd told Ike about them. "Normal," he'd told her in that confident way of his. "Get yourself some kava. You'll be fine."

She didn't want to think about Ike.

Her digital clock switched from 4:59 to 5:00 a.m. Close enough to morning, she decided, and flopped over onto her back, staring at the ceiling, concentrating on her breathing. In for eight counts, hold for eight, out for eight. Her heartbeat slowed. Rationality returned. She flipped on her white-noise machine, her small bedroom filling with the sounds of the ocean. Not a good choice. She switched to a tropical rain forest. But it was too late, her mind already filled with images of kissing Andrew in the doorway of his daughter's bedroom, on the porch in the dark.

She hadn't conjured up the skeleton.

That was the problem. She wasn't that imaginative, or that crazy, and it wasn't a trick of the light or a damn ghost. It was a skeleton.

And now it was gone. The police had looked, she and Susanna had looked, Andrew had looked.

Davey and her father could have missed it. They'd been interested in pipes and heating ducts, not what was under their feet.

She wondered how close she'd come to catching someone charging out of the cellar Saturday night with a bag of bones.

She took herself back to that night after dinner, when she'd returned unexpectedly to lock the door. She'd meant to head straight back to Boston. Who had she told? Andrew. Harl. Dolly. But her car hadn't been in the carriage house driveway, so someone could have reasonably thought she'd cleared out.

"I'm a graphic designer," Tess muttered at the ceiling, "not a damn detective."

She rolled out of bed and pulled on running clothes, then gulped down a glass of orange juice in the kitchen and headed out into the cool, rainy Boston morning. The narrow streets of Beacon Hill were quiet at this early hour, slick with the overnight rain. It had tapered off to a chilly, steady drizzle. She jumped off the curb and ran on the street, the brick sidewalks too treacherous when wet. She went at a slow, steady pace to warm up, stopping on Beacon Street to do some stretches before crossing over to Boston Common, where she mingled with a few other early-morning joggers, working up a sweat, fighting off her demons.

When she returned to her apartment, she showered and stumbled into the kitchen in her bathrobe. She poured herself a bowl of corn flakes, cut up a banana and sat at the table below her street-level window. If she'd stayed at her corporate job, she could be above ground by now, in a bigger apartment. But Susanna had warned her about cash flow, maintaining a larger cash reserve now that she was a "sole proprietor."

She thought about lilacs and the smell of the ocean. Except for the complications, the carriage house was just what she wanted.

She finished her cereal, got dressed and headed over to Beacon Street. She loved being able to walk to work, not having to depend on a car. People were out walking their dogs now, but it was still only seven-thirty when she greeted the doorman at her building.

Susanna Galway was already at her computer. "God, you look awful," she said.

"Good morning to you, too."

"Tell me you saw a skeleton in your apartment last night. That'd be great. We could take you to a shrink and forget the police."

"No such luck."

Tess set her satchel on the floor by her chair. She could barely remember what she had to do today. Any client meetings? Something with her printer, she recalled vaguely. Normally she kept everything clear in her head and didn't have to consult her calendar.

"I've been roaming around on the Internet for info on your buddy Ike and those two next door," Susanna said.

That sparked Tess's curiosity. "And?"

"Nothing new on Ike. The Globe ran a picture of him and Joanna Thorne after her death. He was a good-looking son of a bitch, wasn't he?"

"Don't use the past tense."

Susanna ignored her. "Were you attracted to him?"

"No, I never had any romantic interest in him. I don't think he had any in me, either." Tess sank onto her chair, her thighs sore from running, or from planting catnip with Dolly Thorne yesterday. Dolly didn't do anything by half measures. "Ike's always struck me as a rather sad character, if you want to know the truth."

"Heir to a fortune, handsome, physical, sails, plays tennis, climbs mountains, has women falling all over him-except Tess Haviland of Somerville, Massachusetts. Sure, your basic sad character." Susanna tapped a few keys on her computer. "I can see how he could end up buried in an old dirt cellar."

"Susanna."

"Sorry. I keep forgetting you like the guy. You want me to pour you a cup of coffee?"

Tess shook her head. "No, I'll get it. What did you find out about Harley Beckett and Andrew Thorne?"

"Andrew's in demand as an architect and contractor. Good reputation, at least nowadays. Quite the brawler in the past, if a profile of him in the Gloucester paper's to be believed." She rose, graceful as ever, even before eight in the morning, and crossed to the coffeepot. Tess hadn't moved fast enough. Susanna filled a mug with her super-strong brew and delivered it to Tess's desk. "Harley Beck-ett's another story."

Tess gratefully wrapped both hands around the hot coffee mug. "He's older than Andrew."

"And he volunteered for Vietnam."

"Volunteered? He wasn't drafted?"

"Nope. Signed up. He was shot late in his tour of duty. Had a rough time for a few years after he came home, then managed to get himself on the Gloucester police force. He stabilized, worked his way up to detective. Shot again a few years ago. Bank robbery. He ended up killing the guy who shot him." Susanna pushed back her dark hair with one hand, her expression serious, her skin so pale it was almost translucent. "It was some guy he grew up with."

"That must have been awful," Tess said inadequately.

"He quit and turned to furniture restoration a short time later."

"Ike Grantham had nothing to do with the bank robbery, I hope."

"No, but Beckett's done a lot of furniture restoration work for the Beacon Historic Project. He's mentioned on their Web site."

"I hate this," Tess whispered.

"Good. You should. Tess, not one thing about this mess sits right with me. You want my advice? Keep an open mind. Stay objective. Don't be a participant."

She thought of kissing Andrew and thinking of kitten names with his daughter, planting catnip with her. "Too late."

Susanna sighed heavily. "I know."

Andrew returned from a project site in Newburyport in time to meet Dolly on her way home from school. He was wet and muddy. Fog had settled in on the coast, and it had rained steadily since noon, a cold, miserable rain that felt more like early April than late May. On the whole, it fit his mood. He'd punished himself most of the day for letting himself get caught up in Tess Haviland's dramas. No woman he knew would have ventured into that cellar Friday night in the first place, cat or no cat. It was an indication, and not a good one, of the kind of personality with which he was dealing. In one weekend, she'd turned his calm corner by the sea upside down, with kittens and a skeleton and long, deep kisses.