Carla Neggers - The Carriage House

"Well, I don't know, I haven't thought about it. I already have three poodles."

"I don't like dogs. I like cats."

Harl placed a protective hand on Dolly's shoulder. "Inside. Your dad'll be home soon." He shifted briefly to Lauren. "I'll turn the porch light on so you don't trip."

Talk about being shoved along your way. Lauren manufactured a cool smile. "Thank you."

But he and Dolly were already through the door. The light came on, as promised.

Lauren didn't want to leave.

She wanted Andrew to know what she'd done for him. Not the particulars. In general.

She popped open her trunk. The black garbage bag was still there. If the weather got hot, would it stink? She thought she could smell death but wondered if it was the nearby ocean, low tide, her imagination.

"Ike. Sweet Jesus."

They'd talked about dying when they were kids.

He'd never wanted to go out quietly, in his sleep. He'd wanted to see death coming.

He had, she thought as she climbed back behind the wheel.

And that was something good to hold on to in this ugly business.

Moving the kittens was Harl's idea. He stayed with Dolly while Andrew rounded them up. The carriage house was pitch-dark, no stars or moon shining through the clouds, no streetlights. He had all the lights on out back at his place, but it didn't help. He wished he'd taken a bigger flashlight and imagined Tess here alone Friday night, hearing a cat yowling through the floorboards.

Tippy Tail didn't appreciate being moved. She clawed him, but he hung on. The kittens stayed asleep in their box.

He dumped them in the pantry, then had a beer in the kitchen with his cousin.

Harl pointed to the cut on Andrew's arm. "Damn cat do that?"

Andrew shook his head. "Barroom brawl."

"Do I want to know the details?"

"No."

Harl grinned. "I didn't think so."

They drank their beers, and Andrew told his cousin what he'd learned in Boston, which was nothing. "Everything checks out with Tess. There's no reason to suspect she made up this skeleton sighting just to rattle our chains."

"Anyone else's?"

"Whose? Ike's, to draw him out? Lauren's? Rich-ard's? He's up for a Pentagon appointment. I don't see why Tess would care about that."

"Someone slips her a few bucks, tells her to think of something that'd undermine Montague's appointment." Harl shrugged, getting to his feet. "It could happen."

"Anything could."

"Yeah. We have to follow the facts." He rinsed his bottle and set it on the counter. "By the way, I called Rita Perez tonight. I'm volunteering at Dolly's school. I figure, hell, I can't have six-year-olds thinking I'm a frigging bank robber."

Andrew hid his smile behind a swallow of beer. "What're you going to do?"

"Help at snack time. Sounds like hell on earth, doesn't it?"

"School's out in a few weeks. If it's that bad, you don't have to go back next year."

Harl grunted as he made his way to the door. "If it's that bad, I'm not going back next week. Screw it. I just hope parents don't complain. I'm not your average first-grade volunteer, you know."

"I won't complain. I'm a parent."

"Yeah. Like you're your average father."

He left, and Andrew checked on the kittens. Tippy Tail was still agitated, but she was in the box, nursing her kittens, no sign she planned to abandon them. He made sure the doors were secured in case she decided to move them back to the carriage house.

On his way to the den, he thought about calling Tess and decided against it. Harl was right. They had to follow the facts, wherever they lead.

Lauren Montague had stopped by with a magic wand for Dolly. Harl said Lauren was pale, on edge. Because of the skeleton report? Did she suspect the remains were her brother's? If she did, why not sound the alarm with the police?

Was that what Tess wanted? What if she'd engineered the skeleton-sighting to prompt a police investigation into Ike Grantham's disappearance?

Then why not tell Andrew about the skeleton on Friday night?

Because, he thought, she needed Saturday night to make it "disappear." To make her it-got-stolen story work. No way would it have worked that first night.

The facts.

Andrew turned on the last of a ball game and sat in his old leather chair, wishing he could focus more on the facts and less on the memory of Tess in his arms.

Tess figured she'd made four big mistakes. One, not taking Andrew down to the cellar on Friday to check out the skeleton. She'd needed a witness and confirmation.

Two, kissing Andrew in his daughter's doorway. Three, kissing Andrew on his back porch. Four, kissing Andrew in her kitchen.

Trying to throw him out of her father's bar hadn't been a mistake. That had been smart. The mistake- a little one, she'd decided-was how she'd gone about it. She'd operated on the assumption, however deeply buried under her anger, that he'd take the hint and leave once she'd started throwing furniture.

He hadn't.

But it was kissing him that was her big mistake.

"Mistakes," she muttered aloud. "Plural."

She sat on the couch with her laptop. She had her e-mail archives on the screen and was waiting for a search on Ike Grantham to finish.

A list of eighty-seven popped up.

She was surprised. She wouldn't have thought they'd e-mailed each other that much. With a sigh, she set the laptop on the coffee table and went into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine.

Susanna called. "Gran says you drew blood."

Tess knew instantly she meant the brawl at Jim's Place. There would be at least a dozen different stories circulating through the neighborhood by now. "No such luck."

"You broke a bowl on his head?"

"The wall."

"A beer bottle?"

"Well, I did pour beer on him."

"That's good. I like that. And Davey had to go and intervene, didn't he?"

"Susanna, this is a serious situation."

"I know, I know. Dead bodies in the cellar and all that. It's a good sign this Thorne character was checking you out. It probably means he doesn't know how a bunch of bones ended up in the carriage house cellar, either." But she sucked in a sharp breath. "You're alone? You want to come here, stay with Gran, the girls and me?"

"And have your grandmother interrogate me about Andrew Thorne? No, thanks." Tess laughed, but heard the strain in her own voice. "I'm okay. Thanks for checking in."

"I still have friends in Texas I can call if you need a bodyguard."

Tess thanked her for her concern and hung up.

A bodyguard. Damn, she thought, and poured her wine.

The first e-mail from Ike was a simple confirmation of their upcoming meeting on her work for the Beacon Historic Project. It was short, but the telltale Ike-slashing wit was there, if only a hint of it. "We watery-eyed rich Yankees love old houses. Only we call them historic. They're only old when they belong to fishermen."

Suddenly the intercom buzzed, and two minutes later her father was standing in her living room. "I parked on the street. I'm going to get towed?"

"Not if you don't stay too long."

"This place. You pay four times the rent for a quarter the space, and the parking stinks."

It was the same litany whenever he visited, which wasn't often. Usually they saw each other in Somerville. "Did you get the mess cleaned up?"

"Yeah, it didn't take long. You owe me for that bowl you broke."

"Susanna's grandma thinks I broke it over Thorne's head."

Jim Haviland shuddered. "That old bat. She was old even when I was a kid." He glanced around her small apartment, nodded to her laptop. "You working?"

"Yes," she said, because it was easier than trying to explain about Ike's e-mails. She wasn't sure herself what she was looking for.

"Thorne leave?"

"He only stayed a few minutes."