Carla Neggers - The Carriage House

Moving to the back table was Davey Ahearn's idea. He'd seen Tess walking from the subway. It was a setup, pure and simple.

If she'd thrown a chair at him and kicked him, jumped on him, anywhere but her father's pub, with him and her godfather right there, Andrew didn't know what would have happened.

Well, he did, but there was no point thinking about it with her still spitting fire, even as beat as she was.

He wound his way onto Beacon Hill, downshifting on the steep hills. Tess seemed as comfortable here as she did in her father's blue-collar neighbor-hood. Andrew pulled in front of her building, brick with black shutters, brass fittings on the doors. Her apartment had its own entrance behind a wrought-iron fence next to the front stoop and down several steps.

"I notice you didn't need me to give you directions," Tess said.

"I drove by earlier." He pulled alongside the curb and turned to her. "Harl and I decided we needed to check you out. Mission accomplished. I don't blame you for being upset. Now, go home. Cool off."

She nodded at the cut on his arm. "Did I do that?"

"One of the construction workers."

"Billy. He's a hothead. He loves a good fight."

"Seems he's not the only one."

"You deserved it." She softened slightly, sighing. "But it wasn't just you. It was my father, Davey goading me. I don't know, maybe there was something in the beef stew."

"Is that an apology?"

"No." She grinned at him and slid out of the truck. "Thanks for the ride."

He drove to the end of her street, then glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her with her keys out, standing on the sidewalk. He couldn't stay. He wasn't about to leave Dolly and Harl alone on the point with a possible body snatcher in the area.

But he couldn't go off, not just yet.

He backed into a parking space, pulled on the brake, cut the engine and jumped out. He'd been feeling this way all day, a little crazed, a little off center. Unpredictable. A wonder he hadn't thrown her over his shoulder and carried her out of Jim's Place cave-man-style-an impulse the Havilands and Davey Ahearn didn't need to know about.

"We still need to talk." He walked up to her as she stood beside the wrought-iron gate. The gray skies and approaching darkness only made her hair seem blonder, her eyes clearer, but still that very light blue.

She shrugged. "About what? You came to Boston to see if I was a nut, a troublemaker, a stalker, a collaborator with Ike Grantham in some nefarious scheme-to do what, I don't know. What else? A killer. Yes, I suppose you had to be sure I wasn't responsible for a body in the carriage house cellar."

"It never occurred to me you'd killed anyone."

"But nut, troublemaker, stalker and collaborator still stand?"

He resisted the urge to smile. "Not stalker."

She singled out a key and walked around the wrought-iron fence to the stairs down to her apartment. "I should have phoned my father first thing this morning and told him not to let you anywhere near his place."

"You have no idea how not welcome I was this afternoon."

"Good. And actually," she added, a glint in her eyes, "I have a fair idea. Do you want to come in?"

"For a minute."

He followed her down the stairs to a heavy door with a lousy lock. It opened into a small entry with two doors, one to her apartment along the street, another to a second apartment in back. They had lousy locks, too. But when she pushed open her door, he noticed a string of chains and dead bolts that worked from the inside. "Davey stopped by one afternoon," she said by way of explanation.

"Normally I probably wouldn't notice your locks."

"And normally I lead a very ordinary life."

Andrew considered all the contradictions that were Tess Haviland. She was a graphic designer who lived in a Beacon Hill basement apartment. Father a widower. Godfather a plumber. No maternal role models in sight. Office above an old cemetery. Owner of a haunted carriage house given to her by a rich eccentric who happened to be missing.

A woman who'd gone looking for a cat in a cellar and stumbled onto a skeleton, then kept her mouth shut about it.

A woman who might have fallen into bed with him this weekend, almost literally within hours of meeting him, if not for Harl and Dolly.

Or Dolly, anyway. Andrew doubted Harl was much of a deterrent in the sleeping-with-strangers de-partment-for him or for Tess.

"Ordinary," he told her, "is in the eye of the beholder."

She grinned at him. "And I behold myself as ordinary."

"Why?"

"Because I was an odd kid, the one with the dead mother. I like being a regular person."

He edged from the hallway into the living room, which was tiny and had a kitchenette on the other end. She'd decorated with an eclectic mix of flea-market charm and artistic, urban sophistication. There was nothing self-conscious or elitist in the way she put things together, a rooster tray on the coffee table, colorful pillows strewn on the neutral-colored couch.

And a stack of laundry. Lingerie. He noticed a lacy little bra, nothing panties.

She followed his eye, and with a rush of color to her cheeks, snatched up the stack and marched past him to her bedroom. She returned a moment later. "I live alone. I don't have to pick up after myself every single second."

"If it'd been a stack of towels, you wouldn't have bothered."

"It wasn't a stack of towels." She ran her fingers through her short curls, and he looked again for signs of bruises, scratches, cuts from their brawl. None. "Can I get you something to drink?"

"No, thanks."

"Do you think the police did anything today?" she asked abruptly.

He shook his head. "I doubt it."

"They've decided I'm nuts. It's easier."

"Less complicated," he agreed.

"Who knows, maybe the skeleton was Chew-bee's doing. Or maybe she stole it. I think Chew-bee looks after your stretch of coast. Sort of your guardian angel."

"A pain-in-the-neck guardian angel. Dolly blames everything she can on her."

Tess laughed, and it sounded good. "I like the way that kid thinks."

He spotted a picture of Ike and Tess with design work she'd obviously done for the Beacon Historic Project. It was among a cluster of similar photographs, Ike's smile a hot arrow through Andrew. He wouldn't have expected such a reaction, would have said he was over hating Ike-or had never hated him at all. Seeing him here, in Tess's apartment, was a jolt. An unpleasant one.

"Ike was pretty awful at times," Tess said quietly, coming beside him. "But I never took him seriously. I guess that was easy-he was just a client. He was a slasher. He saw people's weaknesses, zeroed in on them."

Andrew nodded. "And he was dead accurate most of the time. That didn't make him any easier to like."

She took the framed picture into her hands, touched his image with real regret, but no yearning, no hint he'd gotten under her skin. "A friend of mine took this picture. A guy I was dating, actually. Ike didn't like him-he said the guy wouldn't know which end of a plunger to use, and I'd never be happy with a man who didn't know how to unstop a toilet."

"Was he right?"

"About the guy? I don't know, we didn't date long enough for me to do the plunger test."

She was teasing, but Andrew saw it as a defense, a way of avoiding what Ike had seen about her. "I meant was he right about you?"

"I know how to use a plunger. That's what counts." She swung off to the kitchen end of the small, compact room. "Are you sure you don't want anything to drink? Pop puts too much salt in his beef stew, I think. I'm dying of thirst."

She filled a glass with water, and Andrew found himself watching her throat as she drank. This wasn't good. He joined her in front of the sink. There wasn't enough room in the kitchen for two people. "Tess, I don't think you had anything to do with whatever you found in the carriage house cellar." He spoke softly, firmly, his eyes connecting with hers. She set her empty glass on the counter and stood very still as he continued. "I didn't, either."