Tess hadn't moved from her position against the counter. "Okay. Great." She sipped her tea, watching him as he headed for the kitchen door. He noticed she was no longer shaking. "I suppose if I do end up keeping this place, I'll have my hands full. Dirt cellars, spiders, mice. Who knows what else."
Andrew smiled. "I'd say spiders and mice are the least of your problems. The offer of a guest room stands."
"She's lying."
Harl had opened them each a beer. They were in the kitchen, at the table. Andrew had checked on Dolly, just to make sure she wasn't cowering under the covers the way she did in a thunderstorm, but she was fine, fast asleep. Harl had listened without interrupting as Andrew had related Tess's story about finding the cat in the cellar. He'd known what his cousin would say. Harl didn't believe anyone.
"How do you know she's lying?"
"That wasn't a falling-on-my-ass scream. That was a scared-shitless scream. I know the difference."
"She says she was worried about snakes."
Harl shook his head knowingly. "Nah. Doesn't wash."
Andrew agreed. "What would wash?"
His cousin took a long drink of his beer, an expensive local brew he'd never touch if it weren't in Andrew's refrigerator. He set the dark bottle on the kitchen table. "Ghosts."
"I suppose she could have imagined-"
"Nope. Not imagined. Saw."
"Oh, come on." Andrew wanted to laugh, but he could see Harl was serious. "I don't believe in ghosts. Neither do you."
"Doesn't mean she didn't see one."
"Then it was her imagination."
"No."
Andrew frowned at his cousin's logic. "You think she saw a real ghost in the cellar?"
Harl shrugged. "Why not?"
Andrew thought of her pale face, the way she shook, the faraway expression in her eyes. He'd have looked pretty much like that if he'd encountered a ghost. Then again, she could simply have had her first adventure in an old New England dirt cellar and let her imagination get away from her. But he knew there was no arguing with Harl.
"There's something else," Andrew said, and repeated what Tess had told him about her relationship with Ike Grantham.
"Shit," Harl said. "Doesn't that beat all?"
"Ike's eccentric and impulsive, but practically giving away the carriage house-" Andrew shook his head, not able to make sense of it. "I know Tess worked for him, but it must have been a good deal for him or he wouldn't have done it."
"She one of his women?"
"I didn't ask."
"Ike wouldn't have gone down in the cellar after Tippy Tail, that's for damn sure. I'd feel better about this if we knew where the hell that slippery bastard's got himself off to."
Harl was more inclined to blame Ike for Joanna's death than Andrew was, believing the man had slipped through a troubled woman's defenses, into her psyche, and used her for his own ego.
"It's getting late," Andrew said.
Harl didn't move. He took a sip of beer. "Don't you wonder why Haviland didn't just tell you the truth?"
"Harl, if I saw a ghost-whether I thought I saw one or actually knew I saw one-I don't know if I'd go out of my way to tell anyone."
"Ah." Harl settled back in his chair, in no apparent hurry to return to his quarters across the yard. "A sin of omission isn't the same as a sin of commission."
Andrew sighed. One beer, and Harl was in the mood to give him a headache. "It's none of our business."
"She lied. If we hadn't heard her scream, or if you ran into her over the lilacs tomorrow and she didn't mention falling, that'd be a sin of omission. Telling you it was the thought of snakes that made her scream is a sin of commission. A flat-out lie."
"Well, Harl, guess what? I don't care. If she saw a ghost, she saw a ghost. Doesn't have anything to do with me."
"What if it's Jedidiah?"
"Jedidiah has nothing to do with me. Or you." He rinsed out his beer bottle in the sink. "I just want to find Tippy Tail, for Dolly's sake. The rest I don't care about."
"Not me." Harl pushed back his chair and got to his feet, his white ponytail hanging down his back. "I want to know about the ghost."
He left without another word, taking his baseball bat with him. In the ensuing silence, Andrew refused to think about what Tess had actually seen in her cellar. Instead he thought about what he'd have done if she'd taken him up on his offer to spend the night. The guest-room beds weren't made up.
Dangerous thinking.
He thought of her tucked on her camp mat for the night with her lantern, her book, her white-noise machine. Would she sleep in her dusty, cobweb-cov-ered clothes? Would she sleep at all?
More dangerous thinking.
He jumped up, and when he walked down the hall, he could feel how big and empty his house was. He'd renovated a few of the rooms, had more to go.
He headed up to Dolly's room. She was curled up with her stuffed kittens and wore a glittery star crown half off her coppery hair. His sweet, stubborn, imaginative daughter. Whatever else he did wrong in his life, he needed to do right by her.
Tess Haviland had done right by her six-year-old neighbor and her expectant cat, never mind what she was willing to admit about why she'd screamed.
And yet, Harl's reaction had done the trick. She was hiding something. Andrew had sensed it, and now he wondered what it was, and why she hadn't just told him the truth.
Eight
Tess didn't sleep, at least not enough to amount to much. Awake or asleep, her mind kept conjuring ghosts and skeletons, yowling cats, strange men materializing out of the dark. She could have taken up Andrew Thorne's invitation to sleep at his house, but what did she know about him and this Harl character?
At 5:00 a.m., she grabbed her cell phone to call the police-but stopped after punching the nine and first one. She needed to go back down into the cellar first, herself, and make sure of what she saw. Then call the police if necessary. This was a small town. Word would get out if it was simply a Halloween skeleton or her imagination.
"The hell with it," she muttered. "Let the police check the damn cellar."
She wasn't going back down there.
But she didn't call.
At seven, she decided to put the carriage house on the market. She wouldn't mention the skeleton. Had Ike mentioned the skeleton? She'd never be able to sell the place if she made a big stink and got the police in here, forensics, historians, exorcists, God knew who else.
If it was human remains she'd seen, they had to be of a nineteenth-century horse thief, some anonymous person, not Jedidiah Thorne.
Not Ike.
At eight, Tess crawled stiffly out of her sleeping bag into the glorious May sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. How could she possibly have seen a human skull in the cellar? Ridiculous. At worst, she'd come upon the resident ghost and his tricks. At best, nothing at all, just the workings of her creative mind.
Andrew Thorne hadn't believed she'd screamed at the thought of snakes. She was sure of that. She should have said she'd seen an actual snake. Two feet long, with spots. Slithering among the heating ducts. That would have wiped the skepticism out of those incisive, very blue eyes.
She took a long, very hot shower in her gold-fix-tured bathroom. The heat helped her bruises and eased her tension, but provided no clear-cut answers about what she should do. She changed into her favorite jeans, a denim work shirt and cross-trainers, then made Earl Grey tea and warmed up her apricot scone.
She had breakfast on the kitchen steps, feeling a twinge where she'd banged her hip last night. It was a warm, breezy morning, something in the air suggesting the ocean was just across the main road.
After breakfast, she walked out to the water, over rocks and down to the sand, where the tide was rolling out. The ocean smells were strong here, pungent and salty, yet pleasant. A strand of wet, slimy seaweed curled around the bottom of her sneaker, water easing under her feet. The sun sparkled on the horizon. Boats were out.