Carla Neggers - The Carriage House

Tess promised she would.

The archives were in a small room overlooking the harbor. She was immediately drawn to the view of boats and buoys, the sparkling ocean and endless blue sky. Yesterday's rain and clouds had pushed off over the Atlantic, leaving behind warm, summerlike air and light breezes. These were the images, she realized, that she associated with her best memories of her mother. They were why she'd taken Ike's offer of the carriage house-not its history or its architecture, its rumors of ghosts or any urge on her part to restore an old house. She'd wanted it for its location. The ocean, the rocks, the beach, the gulls and the memories they brought back.

But reality surged back in, as inexorable as the tide. When he'd talked of the carriage house, Ike had made her believe in her fantasy. Then had come the tax bill, the stray pregnant cat, the kittens, the neighbors, the skeleton.

And now, she thought, reporters. They wanted to talk to her about her call to the police over her missing human remains. They'd left messages at her apartment and at her office, where, at least, she had Susanna.

"You need to learn two words-no comment."

"They don't believe me."

"Of course they don't believe you. Tess, you don't even believe yourself!"

It was true.

She'd had trouble from the very beginning believing what she'd seen. Even before she'd charged up from the cellar, she'd backed off. It couldn't be. Not a human skeleton. Impossible.

Because it destroyed her fantasy. It didn't fit with her memories of her mother and her mother's tales of New England history, even the ones that included ghosts.

She set to work. The room was lined with old wooden file cabinets and shelves, with a big, scarred oak table in the middle of the floor. Simple furnishings compared to downstairs. In her work with Ike, she'd never been up here. "Lauren loves the archives. Not me. Boring as hell. A lot of musty, yellowed papers of no importance to anyone with a real life." He'd grinned, irreverent, the adolescent boy who could smile his way out of anything. "Lauren loves them."

Tess never had the arrogance to assume he didn't see through to her weaknesses, just as he did everyone else's. What had he told his sister about her, the graphic designer from Boston?

She familiarized herself with the archives in general, then focused on her carriage house. Information on it was filed with the Thorne family, among Bea-con-by-the-Sea and Gloucester's earliest settlers. It didn't take long for Tess to see that Andrew hadn't been exaggerating when he talked about his ancestors.

Jedidiah Thorne had been a captain in the Civil War, wounded at Gettysburg, but fighting on until Appomattox. In a ragged manila folder, Tess found a brown-edged picture of him in his Union uniform in 1863, five years before he'd shot Benjamin Morse. He stared straight into the camera, unwavering, serious. He was tall and lean, with the same hard angles that were in his great-great-grandson's face.

She stared into his eyes, and she knew they were blue. Her pulse raced, blood pounding, her head whirling. She saw images of bodies littering blood-soaked fields, thousands of writhing men and corpses, dead horses and the living, grim-faced, unable to keep up with the horrors they faced. She could smell the smoke of the cannons, the stench of gangrene and death, and she could hear the cries of the dying, and the friends who'd lost so much.

And she saw Jedidiah Thorne walking among the dead and wounded, himself bloodied as he tended to his men, the other side's men. It was as if she were inside that image captured so long ago, seeing what he saw, touching what he touched. Boys, old men, young. Too many praying, begging. Jedidiah comforting when he could, but never looking away from what he knew he must see.

Hating it. The violence. Promising himself he wouldn't kill again, ever, even in self-defense.

He would die first.

Tess had to push the picture away and close up the folder. She was gasping for air, sweat streaming down her temples, between her breasts. She stumbled to her feet and found a washroom down the hall. With shaking hands, she splashed her face with cold water.

How could Jedidiah have killed Benjamin Morse after what he'd seen and done?

She returned to the archives. She was drained, as if she'd spent three days at Gettysburg herself. She wished there was a soda machine and gave a small, humorless laugh at what Muriel Cookson would say if she slipped down the street and fetched herself a Coke while she sorted through the files. She could use the jolt of sugar and caffeine, the tangible presence of the twenty-first century. A nice cold can of soda. She felt better just thinking about it.

The next folder contained a dozen pictures of the carriage house since its construction in 1868. Much better. Tess noticed the lilacs had been there from the beginning, and she sat back in her uncomfortable wooden chair, thinking about a handsome, serious young captain on a bloody battlefield, a stern man who would later build a house by the sea and plant lilacs-and who reminded her too much of the man she'd nearly made love to last night.

There was a separate folder on the duel. "I think Benny Morse is the one haunting the carriage house," she remembered Ike saying. "He got what he had coming to him. Jedidiah should be resting well in his grave."

But he had no grave, Tess thought.

Thirty minutes later, Lauren Montague joined her in the small room. She was dressed in trim, elegant slacks and a silk sweater, a contrast to Tess's casual slim khakis and black cotton top. "The duel's fascinating, isn't it?" She came up behind Tess and peered over her shoulder at a yellowed, crumbling clipping of a newspaper article on Jedidiah's trial. "It's still something of a mystery why a pacifist like Jedidiah Thorne would even respond to Benjamin Morse's challenge, never mind actually shoot him. Morse was a bastard. Everyone knew it."

"Your brother told me he was a man who needed killing."

She smiled wistfully. "That sounds like Ike. But who are we to say who needs killing and who doesn't?"

"It gets at Benjamin's character," Tess said, "if not what should have happened to him."

Lauren pulled out a chair on the other side of the table and sat down. She was gracious and mannerly, so unlike her brother it was hard to believe they were siblings-and yet Tess could see touches of Ike in her, especially in her eyes and the shape of her mouth. But she wondered if Lauren tended to operate in his shadow, if she ever resented her brother's strong personality and outrageousness.

"I'm mesmerized by these files," Tess said. "Suddenly it all seems so real. Jedidiah Thorne, Benjamin and Adelaide Morse. She never remarried. She stayed right here in Beacon-by-the-Sea until her death in her mid-eighties."

"Apparently she was quite a shallow, vain woman. Most people believe she was rather pleased to have two men fight a duel over her."

"I haven't gotten the impression she and Jedidiah were lovers-"

"Oh, no, nothing like that. But she was the reason for the duel. She caused the two men to do what they did, and I think it gave her a sense of power over them. In the end, Benjamin was dead, and Jedidiah was in prison." Lauren leaned back, smiling enigmatically. "I wouldn't be surprised if she manipulated the whole thing to get rid of Benjamin."

"But she couldn't have been sure he'd be the one killed-"

"Couldn't she?"

"You mean she rigged the duel," Tess said.

"Why not? We would think of it as dishonorable and manipulative, but women had to use the means they had to effect a desirable outcome. Maybe Benjamin abused her-maybe she just wanted to be rid of him and convinced Jedidiah her husband was beating her." Lauren swung back to her feet and walked over to the window, staring down at the harbor. "Have you seen pictures of her? Adelaide Morse was a very beautiful woman."