Читать книгу The Carriage House - Carla Neggers, Carla Neggers - Страница 6

Andrew Thorne was not a happy man. He tried to convey this to Harley Beckett, his cousin and the one man on the planet Andrew would trust with his life—if he didn’t kill him first.

“She’s not in her tree house.”

Harl grunted. “Then she’s chasing after that damn cat.”

He was flat on his back under a 1920s rolltop desk he was working on. Harl was the best furniture restorer on the North Shore, maybe in all of New England. His skills as chief Dolly-watcher, however, were currently under suspicion. Dolly was Andrew’s six-year-old daughter, and when he’d come home from work—a long, aggravating day of things not going his way—he’d found her gone. And Harl oblivious.

Harl scooted out from under the rolltop and sat up on the spotless pine floor of the outbuilding where he lived and worked. He was particular. One stray dog hair or speck of mud, he maintained, could ruin a project, a touch of hyperbole few would dare point out to him. He was a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired police detective, and he’d never taken pains to make friends in Beacon-by-the-Sea. Neither had Andrew, but he got along with people better than Harl did. Which wasn’t saying a lot.

Harl pulled his white ponytail from inside his habitual POW-MIA shirt. He had a white beard, shrapnel scars, parts of two fingers missing and a manner that was gruff on his best days. He studied Andrew for half a second, then sighed. “She’s supposed to stay in the yard. She knows that.”

“She won’t have gone far,” Andrew said with conviction, ignoring the twist of incipient panic in his gut. He hated not knowing where his daughter was.

Harl got stiffly to his feet. “Let’s go. Hell, Andrew. Time I realize she can do something, she’s off and done it. She never used to leave the yard without asking.” He shook his head, plainly disgusted with himself. “I told her to stay in the yard not five minutes ago. I swear to God.”

“You go out front,” Andrew said. “I’ll check back here.”

“We don’t find her in five minutes, we call in a search party.”

Andrew glanced at the ocean across the street, and his stomach clamped down. He nodded, and the two of them set off.

Her neighbors, whoever they were, actually owned the lilac hedge. Tess recalled Ike explaining that to her. She reached out a palm and let a drooping cluster of blossoms brush against her skin. They were at peak, the tight, dark purple buds opening into tiny lavender blossoms, spilling their fragrance. Surely she could pick a bouquet. The hedge was obviously neglected, the lilacs in need of pruning and thinning. A few weedy saplings even grew in their midst.

“Here, kitty, kitty. Come, kitty.”

A little girl’s voice rose from the middle of the lilacs, just to Tess’s left. It was high-pitched and cajoling, and a moment later, its owner pushed through to the narrow strip of overgrown grass on the carriage house side of the lilacs. She couldn’t have been more than six, a sturdy girl with coppery braids, freckles and blue eyes that were squinted as she frowned, hands on hips. She hadn’t yet seen Tess. “Come on, Tippy Tail.” She stamped a foot, frustrated and impatient now. “I won’t bother you! I’m your friend.”

Tess noticed something in the girl’s hair and realized it was an elaborate jeweled crown. She also wore denim overalls and a Red Sox T-shirt. Tess still had on her clothes from work, a suit that suggested creativity but also professionalism. She didn’t want to look too artsy and end up scaring off the kind of clients she needed in order to stay in business.

The girl turned and saw Tess, but she seemed neither surprised nor curious. She was obviously a girl with a mission. “Have you seen my cat?”

“No, I haven’t. Actually, I just got here myself.” Tess hadn’t dealt with many six-year-olds. “Is someone with you? Where’s your mother?”

“She’s in heaven.” The girl’s tone was matter-of-fact, as if she were giving the time. Tess pushed a hand through her hair. Lately, she’d been fretting about too much work, Ike Grantham and his carriage house and not enough about the rest of her life. She was thirty-four, and while she wasn’t sure about children she’d had damn rotten luck with men of late. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Over there.” The girl pointed through the lilacs. “Harl’s watching me.”

Not very well, Tess thought. “Harl’s your baby-sitter?”

“Yep.”

“My name’s Tess. What’s yours?”

“Princess Dolly.” She gave her coppery braids a regal little toss.

“Princess? Really?”

“Yep.”

Tess relaxed slightly. A six-year-old who thought she was a princess was something she could relate to. “How did you come to be a princess?”

“Harl says I was born a princess.”

Whoever this Harl was, Tess wondered about his judgment when it came to kids. But what did she know? She glanced at her yard with its strip of overgrown grass. Lots of places a cat could hide. “I take it you lost your cat?”

Reminded of her mission, Princess Dolly raised her shoulders and let them fall in an exaggerated, dramatic shrug. “Yes. That Tippy Tail. She’s having kittens any day. Harl says I should leave her alone.”

Okay, Tess thought, one point for Harl. “What does Tippy Tail look like? If I see her, I can let you know.”

The girl thought a moment, her freckled nose scrunched up as she concentrated. “She’s gray, except for the white tip on her tail.” Her features relaxed, and she giggled suddenly, her eyes lighting up. “That’s why I named her Tippy Tail!”

“Makes sense. You should run along home. I imagine Harl will be looking for you.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s always looking for me.”

This, Tess didn’t doubt. “I can walk you home—”

“I can go by myself. I’m six.” She held up the five fingers of one hand and the index finger of the other hand to prove it.

Tess wasn’t arguing. “It was nice to meet you, Dolly.”

“Princess Dolly.”

“As you wish. Princess Dolly it is.”

The girl spun on her toes and squeezed back through the lilacs.

As independent as Princess Dolly seemed, she still was only six and shouldn’t be running around on her own, crown or no crown. If nothing else, Tess knew she should make sure Dolly got back to her royal palace and wasn’t lost or otherwise in the wrong place.

She started to pry apart the lilacs, but heard a crunch of gravel behind her, then a man’s voice. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She whipped around, realizing she looked as if she was spying on the neighbors. “I’m not doing anything,” she said, taking note of the man in her driveway. Tall, lean, dark, no-nonsense. His angular features, blue eyes and humorless look were straight out of the images she’d conjured of her nineteenth-century murderous ghost. But this man had on dusty work boots, jeans and a denim shirt, all definitely of this century. Good. A princess in the lilacs and a ghost in the driveway would have been more than she could handle.

“I’m looking for my daughter,” the man said. His tone was straightforward, but laced with an edge of fear. “She’s taken off after her cat.”

Tess managed a smile, hoping it would help relieve some of his obvious tension. “You must mean Princess Dolly and Tippy Tail, the gray cat with the white tip on her tail who’s to have kittens any day now. She was just here. The princess, not the cat. I sent her home about thirty seconds ago. She slipped through the lilacs.”

“Then I’ll be off. Thanks.” He started to turn, but added, “This is private property, you know. But go ahead and pick a few lilacs if that’s what you’re after.”

“It’s not. I’m Tess Haviland. I own the carriage house.”

Surprise flickered in his very blue eyes. “I see. Well, I’m Andrew Thorne. I own the house next door.”

“Thorne?”

“That’s right. Jedidiah was my grandfather’s grandfather. Enjoy.”

He retreated along the lilacs, not going through the middle of them the way his daughter had.

A Thorne. He’d obviously liked telling Tess that. Damn Ike. He could have warned her. But that wasn’t his style, any more than telling people he was off to climb mountains, explore rivers, sleep in a hammock on a faraway beach. He was a man who lived life on his own terms, and that, Tess supposed, was why, ultimately, she liked him.

But she’d rather he’d told her the neighbors were related to her ghost.

Using one of the keys in the envelope Lauren Montague had given her, Tess entered the carriage house through the side door, which led directly into a circa 1972 kitchen, complete with avocado-colored appliances. She hoped they worked. She could do fun things with an avocado stove and fridge.

She stopped herself. What was she thinking? She couldn’t afford to keep this place. She’d have to scrape to pay the tax bill, much less find any money for basic repairs and upkeep. The utilities bills must still have been sent to the Beacon Historic Project—she hadn’t seen an electric or a fuel bill. She’d have to straighten that out with Lauren Montague, whether she sold the carriage house or kept it.

This was exactly why she’d dithered for a year, Tess thought. She simply didn’t have the time or the money to deal with a nineteenth-century carriage house. Susanna was right. She should have insisted on cash.

She checked out the kitchen. Solid cabinets, worn counters, stained linoleum floor. Little mouse droppings. The fridge was unplugged. She rooted around behind it and managed to plug it in, smiling when she heard it start to hum. She checked the burners on the stove. They all worked. So far, no sign of Andrew Thorne’s grandfather’s grandfather, the infamous Jedidiah Thorne who’d killed a man here, even if it was over a hundred years ago. Tess shuddered.

There was a full bathroom off a short hallway on the same end of the house as the kitchen. She wondered when the building had been converted from housing horses and buggies to people—sometime in the past century-plus, obviously. She peered up a steep, narrow staircase, shadows shifting at the top of it.

“That’s a little eerie,” she said aloud, then realized she was standing on a trapdoor. She jumped back, her heart pounding. What if she’d fallen through? Balancing herself with one hand on the hall wall, she stomped on the trapdoor with her right foot. It seemed solid enough.

Emboldened, she knelt in front of it, pushed the wooden latch and lifted it. It was solid wood, heavier than she’d expected, every crack and crevice filled with dust and dirt. She wasn’t surprised to find there was no ladder, just a dark, gaping hole to whatever was below—furnace, pipes, spiders.

Then she realized there was a ladder, after all, hooked to the cellar ceiling, under the hall floor. She’d have to reach in through the opening, unhook it and lower it to the cellar floor. Then, presumably, climb down.

“No way.”

Tess shut the trapdoor and latched it. She’d do the cellar another time. Hadn’t Lauren mentioned a bulkhead? Good, she’d go in that way. If she bothered at all.

She resumed her tour, still smelling the dirt, dust and musty smells of the old cellar. She’d lived in older houses her entire life. They were no big deal to her, except they’d always been in the city—never out here on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

“The carriage house has tremendous potential,” Ike had said. “I can feel it when I walk through it. It’s one of my favorite structures. Unfortunately, it’s rather new for us.”

She smiled, thinking of what a contradiction he was. Scion of a New England industrial family, mountain climber, America’s Cup contender, tennis player, white-water kayaker, womanizer…and lover of old houses. Conventional wisdom had him off in the Australian Outback, or Southeast Asia or Central Africa. Sometimes Tess wondered if he weren’t hiding in Gloucester, watching them all.

Surely someone had to know where he was. An open, double doorway led from the kitchen to a long, narrow room with wide-board pine floors, attractive paned windows, a stone fireplace and the front door, probably half the size of the original carriage-width doors. As Lauren had warned, there was no outside lock, just a dead bolt latched from inside. One of the many things to be corrected, Tess thought as she stepped into the middle of the room, imagining color and fabric, music and laughter, friends, children. Dangerous imaginings. She really had no business hanging on to this place for as long as she had.

Her gaze fell on a deep, dark stain on the wooden floor just inside the front door. She walked over slowly, ran her toe over it. It could pass for blood. For all she knew, it was blood.

A man had died here, she remembered. Benjamin Morse, the rich wife-beater, defending his honor. Did a wife-beater have honor? Not in her book. But perhaps he was innocent. Had Jedidiah Thorne been the kind of man to make such a charge recklessly, without proof? Or perhaps he’d done so as an excuse to kill Morse, whom he would have known would challenge him to a duel? Maybe Jedidiah had been in love with Adelaide Morse.

Tess had no answers. There were two small rooms at the other end of the house that immediately presented possibilities. Tess pictured domestic things like sewing machines, library shelves, overstuffed chairs, hooked rugs—and herself, working here. She could create a design studio upstairs, put in skylights and state-of-the-art equipment, work overlooking the sea instead of an historic graveyard. The designer and the ghost of Jedidiah Thorne.

She was getting ahead of herself, and she knew it. She returned to the main room and stood very still, listening for ghost sounds.

Nothing, not even Princess Dolly’s missing cat. “Ridiculous,” Tess muttered, and headed back out to her car.

As soon as he reacquainted Dolly with the rules of the house, Andrew grabbed two beers and sat out with Harl in the old Adirondack chairs under the shagbark hickory. It was a big, old, beautiful tree, probably planted by Jedidiah Thorne himself, before he took to dueling.

“Where’s Dolly?” Harl asked.

“Sulking in her tree house.” It was six rungs up into a nearby oak, and she’d helped Harl build it out of scrap lumber. Andrew, an architect, had stayed out of it. Some things were best left to Dolly and Harl. But not all. “She thinks if she didn’t go out into the street, she didn’t really leave the yard.”

“She’s going to be a lawyer or a politician. Mark my words.”

Andrew gritted his teeth. “It’s that damn cat.”

“I know it. If it wouldn’t break Dolly’s heart, I’d wish Tippy Tail would sneak off and find herself a couple of new suckers to take her in. She’s a mean bitch. Clawed me this morning.” He displayed a tattooed forearm with a three-inch claw mark, then opened his beer. “I should’ve taken her to the pound.”

But Andrew knew that wouldn’t have been Harl’s way. He was a soft touch with children and helpless animals. Tippy Tail was scrawny, temperamental and pregnant, but once Dolly saw her, that was that. Harl had seen and committed more violence than most, first growing up in a tough neighborhood in Gloucester, then in war, finally in his work as a detective. Yet, he was also the gentlest man Andrew had ever known. His first and only marriage hadn’t worked, but his two grown daughters adored him, never blaming him for retreating to his shop, working on furniture, staying away from people.

Sometimes Andrew wondered if Joanna would have approved of Harley Beckett taking care of their daughter. But not tonight. Tonight, Andrew accepted that his wife had been dead for three years, killed in an avalanche on Mount McKinley. She’d only started mountain-climbing the year before, when Dolly was two. Ike Grantham’s idea.

“He makes me want to push myself,” she’d said. “He makes me want to try something out of my comfort zone. Leaving you here, leaving Dolly—it scares the hell out of me. And excites me at the same time. I have to do this, Andrew. I’ll be a better person because of this experience. A better mother.”

Maybe, Andrew thought. If she’d lived. But climbing mountains, even in northern New England, had made Joanna happy, eased some of the restlessness and desperation that had gripped her with Dolly’s birth. She hadn’t been ready for a child. He could see that now. She’d felt, in ways he couldn’t understand, that she’d lost herself, needed something that was hers, that felt daring and not, as she’d put it, “tied down.” She hadn’t meant Dolly in particular. She’d meant everything.

“I love Dolly with all my heart,” she’d tried to explain. “And I love you, Andrew, and my job.” She was a research analyst with the North Atlantic Strategic Studies Institute. “I’m not dissatisfied with anything on the outside, just on the inside.”

Ike Grantham seemed to understand. Or pretended to. Andrew wasn’t any good at pretending.

“Ike and I aren’t having an affair, Andrew. Please don’t ever think such a thing.”

Andrew had believed her. Whatever would have become of their marriage if Joanna had come home from Mount McKinley no longer mattered. She hadn’t, and he’d had to go on without her. So had Dolly. He didn’t blame Ike for Joanna’s death—that would have meant robbing her of her independence, and perhaps even denying her her love of climbing.

He drank some of his beer and listened to the birds in the hickory. Winter had finally let go of the northern coast of Massachusetts. “So, Harl, who the hell is Tess Haviland?”

“No idea. Why?”

“She says she owns the carriage house.”

Harl frowned. “Lauren sold it?”

“I don’t think so. Not recently. We’d have heard.”

“Ike.”

It was possible. Andrew said nothing, picturing Tess Haviland in front of the lilacs. Blond, athletic build, attractive. Pale blue eyes, and a touch of irreverence in her smile and manner. It was difficult to say if she was Ike Grantham’s type. Most women were.

Harl grunted. “All we need is that bastard resurfacing. Things have been quiet this past year.” He settled back in his chair and stared up at the sky. “I like quiet.”

“I’ll find out what the story is. Ike might not have anything to do with this Haviland woman.”

But he knew Harl was dubious, and Andrew admitted he had his own doubts. When most of Jedidiah Thorne’s original property had come onto the market not long after Joanna’s death, Andrew bought it. He’d tried to buy the carriage house as well, but Ike had refused to sell. Not that Andrew had wanted it particularly, given its sordid history, but it seemed odd to have it separated out from the rest of the property—and it meant he had no control over who might end up on the other side of the lilacs.

He finished his beer and decided he should get on with making dinner. Harl sometimes ate with them. Not always. Sometimes his cousin would fix a can of baked beans or chowder and eat out here on an Adirondack chair, in the shade—or the snow. And sometimes, Andrew knew, he didn’t eat at all.

“Dolly’s teacher came out today when I picked her up from school,” Harl said abruptly.

“Why?”

“She’s worried about Dolly’s ‘active imagination.’”

Andrew grimaced. He knew what was coming next. “You didn’t let her wear one of her damn crowns to school, did you?”

“She likes her crowns. I told her to leave them home, but she slipped one into her lunch box. It’s her favorite. What am I supposed to do, frisk a six-year-old?”

Andrew felt his pulse pounding behind his eyes. His daughter had a rich, creative mind, and it was getting her into trouble. He didn’t know what was normal for a six-year-old, what was peculiar. And Harl sure as hell didn’t. They’d both grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Gloucester, in a neighborhood where there was always a fight to be had. Whether at sea, on a battlefield, on the street or in a bar, the Thornes always knew where to find a fight. The enemy didn’t matter.

A lot of people in Beacon-by-the-Sea would say neither he nor Harl had any damn business raising a kid like Dolly. Any kid.

“She thinks she’s a princess,” Harl said.

“That’s what she told Tess Haviland.”

The corners of Harl’s mouth twitched behind his white beard. “A princess has to have a crown.”

“Jesus, Harl. What did Miss Perez say?”

He shrugged his big shoulders. “No more crowns in school.”

Andrew knew there was more. “And?”

“She wants to meet with you.”

“Damn it, Harl—”

“You’re the father. I’m just the baby-sitter.” He yawned, the prospect of a first-grader who liked to pretend she was a princess obviously not one of the great concerns of his life. “Any idea where this Tess Haviland’s from?”

“Her car had Massachusetts plates.”

“What kind of car?”

“Rusted Honda.”

Harl nodded knowledgeably. “City car.”

Andrew watched as a few yards off, Dolly found a rung with one foot, then the other, lowering herself out of her tree house. On the second rung, she turned herself around very carefully and leaped to the ground, braids flying, crown going askew. She let out a wild yell, ran to Andrew and jumped on his lap with great enthusiasm. She was a solid girl, sweating from her adventures, bits of leaves and twigs stuck in her socks and hair. Her crown hadn’t flown off because it was anchored to her head with about a million bobby pins. She and Harl had put it together in his shop. The Queen of England couldn’t have asked for anything gaudier, never mind that “Princess” Dolly’s jewels were fake.

“What’s up, pumpkin?”

“I can’t find Tippy Tail. She won’t come out.”

If he were an expectant cat, Andrew thought, he wouldn’t come out, either. “Did you call her in a nice voice?”

Dolly nodded gravely. This was serious business. “I used my inside voice even though I was outside. Like this.” She dropped to a dramatic whisper, demonstrating. “Come, kitty, kitty, come.”

“And she didn’t come?”

“No.”

“Then what did you do?” Harl asked.

“I clapped my hands. Like this.”

She smacked her palms together firmly and loudly, which didn’t help the pounding behind Andrew’s eyes. “That probably scared her, Dolly,” he said.

She groaned. “Princess Dolly.”

Andrew set her on the grass. He was beginning to get a handle on this princess thing. “Do you make everyone call you princess?”

“I am a princess.”

“That doesn’t mean everyone has to call you Princess Dolly—”

“Yes, it does.”

Harl scratched the side of his mouth. “You don’t make them bow and curtsy, do you?”

She tilted her chin, defiant. “I’m a princess. Harl, you said the boys should bow and the girls should curtsy, that’s what people are supposed to do when they see a princess.”

Andrew suddenly understood the summons from her teacher. It wasn’t just about crowns. He shot Harl a look. “You got this started. You can finish it. You talk to Miss Perez.”

“What?” Harl was unperturbed. “She’s six. Six-year-olds have active imaginations. I thought I was G.I. Joe there for a couple years.”

“Six-year-olds don’t make their classmates bow and curtsy.”

“I don’t make them,” Dolly said.

Harl was doing a poor job of hiding his amusement. As a baby-sitter, he was reliable and gentle. Andrew never worried about his daughter’s safety or happiness with his cousin. But Harl had a tendency to indulge her imagination, her sense of drama and adventure, more than was sometimes in her best interest.

“I’m taking a walk down to the water before I start dinner,” Andrew said to her. “Do you want to come with me, let Harl get some work done?”

“Can we find Tippy Tail?”

“We can try.”

She scrambled off toward the front yard ahead of him. Andrew got to his feet, glancing back at his older cousin, remembering those first months so long ago when Harl had come home from Vietnam, so young, so silent. Most people thought he’d kill himself, or someone else. Andrew was just a boy, didn’t understand the politics, the limited options Harl had faced—or the low expectations. His cousin had defied everyone and become a police detective, and now an expert in furniture restoration and a keeper of six-year-old Dolly Thorne.

He and Andrew had each defied expectations, fighting their way out of that need to keep on fighting. Andrew had worked construction, forced himself to give up barroom brawls and a quick temper, met Joanna, had become an architect and a contractor. He and Harl weren’t part of the North Shore elite and never would be. They didn’t care.

“We’re not keeping the kittens,” Andrew said. “We’re clear on that, aren’t we, Harl?”

“Crystal. I told you. I hate cats.”

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep the kittens, especially if Dolly badgered him. Harl operated according to a logic entirely his own. He hated cats, but he’d taken in a mean, scrawny, pregnant stray.

“Daddy,” Dolly called impatiently, “come on. Let’s go.”

He headed out across the lawn, smelling salt and lilacs in the warm spring air. If finding Tess Havi-land at the carriage house somehow meant Ike Grantham was back in town, so be it. Dolly was happy and healthy and thought well enough of herself to wear a crown. As far as Andrew was concerned, nothing else really mattered.