The Carriage House

His gaze settled on her. "What was your relationship with Ike Grantham?"

"He was a client. We were never friends, if that's what you mean. He's so charismatic and intense, it's not that easy to establish firm boundaries with him, but I'd say we did."

"He gave you a historic oceanfront property."

"As payment for work I'd done, and ‘oceanfront property' is a stretch. You know Ike. He's eccentric and impulsive. That's why it took me a year to get up here-I never really believed this place was mine. For all I knew he'd show up on my doorstep and demand my firstborn child or something."

Andrew nodded, removing his foot from the bulkhead. "Ike's not easy to understand."

"What do you think's happened to him?"

"It makes no difference to me. I haven't seen much of him since Joanna's death."

"Then you weren't friends before-"

"No."

He started back toward the driveway, and Tess exhaled, realizing suddenly that she'd been holding her breath. Joanna Thorne had died a terrible death, and Andrew wouldn't be normal if he didn't to some degree blame Ike Grantham for encouraging her. He didn't cause the avalanche, and he didn't make Joanna's decision for her. But Tess remembered how adept Ike was, how incredibly persuasive, at making people work outside their comfort zone. Maybe he'd led Joanna Thorne to believe she was ready for Mount McKinley when she wasn't.

Tess's cell phone rang in her jeans pocket, startling her but mercifully interrupting her train of thought.

"I'm in Gloucester," Susanna said. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"You don't need directions?"

"Davey drew me a map. He says he knows pipes, I know money, and I should take a look at this place.

You've got him worried this time. Ghosts, nineteenth-century duelists, the neighbors."

"You didn't tell him about the skeleton, did you?"

"Hell, no. Twenty minutes, okay?"

"I'll be here."

Andrew glanced back at her. "Didn't tell who?"

"My godfather. You know, it's bad enough if it gets around Beacon that I called the police about a nonexistent skeleton in my cellar. If it gets around the neighborhood, I'll never live it down. Never."

"Your friend's from your neighborhood?"

"Her grandmother is. Susanna and I share office space in Boston. She understands how I grew up, the only child of a widowed father in a tight-knit blue-collar neighborhood."

He smiled almost imperceptibly. "Nothing stops you. Maybe you learned that growing up the way you did."

"I suppose. With my father and Davey in my face all the time, I learned to think for myself. And losing my mother so young-she taught me that we all only have right now, this moment." Tess looked up at the sky, picturing her mother sitting on the rocks by the ocean, just listening to the surf. It was one of the clearest, most reassuring images she had of her. She shifted back to Andrew and grinned suddenly. "On the other hand, it means I'm not very good with five-year plans, much to Susanna's distress."

When they reached the driveway, Harl was thrashing his way through the lilacs. "I'm taking a chainsaw to these things." He picked a leaf off his beard. "You two want me to keep an eye on Dolly while you take another look in the cellar?"

"I have a friend coming," Tess said.

"So? I'll send her down." He went over, plopped down on the steps and took Dolly's stick and drew a tic-tac-toe on the driveway. "I'll be O."

Andrew touched Tess's arm. "Let's go, unless you think he'll scare off your friend."

"Susanna? She's not afraid of anything."

"No, no," Dolly was saying. "You can't do two O's in a row."

Harl frowned at her as if he didn't know any better. "Why not?"

"It's cheating."

"Oh." He drew fresh tic-tac-toe lines and handed the stick over to Dolly. "Then you go first."

Taking that as their cue, Tess shot ahead of Andrew and headed back to the bulkhead.

* * *

The cellar again produced nothing. No skeleton, no evidence one had been snatched, no sign of an intruder, not even anything to suggest what Tess had actually seen the other night that her mind had transformed into a human skull.

She wasn't surprised. She sat with Susanna out on the kitchen steps, drinking the last of her soda. Susanna had arrived while Harl and Dolly were still playing tic-tac-toe, and he'd sent her down to the cellar with Tess and Andrew. They were all back on the other side of the lilacs now-Andrew, Harl and Dolly. Tippy Tail and kittens were asleep in their box in the bathroom. Tess could almost delude herself into thinking all was well, but her instincts said otherwise.

Susanna took a long drink of her soda and pressed the cold can to her cheek. "The way I see it, you have four scenarios. One, there was no skeleton. That's the option we all like best, no matter how embarrassing to you. It's the one the police will fly with until they have reason not to. Two, there was a skeleton, but it's a ghost. That's probably our second-best option. People'll believe it or they won't. It doesn't matter. It's a ghost, and that's that."

"Why would a ghost turn itself into a skeleton?" Tess asked reflectively, her own soda untouched.

"Why wouldn't it? Ghosts are ghosts. They do their own thing." Susanna leaned back against the step above her and stretched out her long, lean legs. "Third option, there was a skeleton, and it's some poor bastard from a million years ago."

"My nineteenth-century horse thief theory."

"Or Jedidiah Thorne didn't die at sea."

Tess nodded since it was a scenario she'd considered herself. "But who'd care enough to steal his remains?"

"His descendants might. Maybe they know something we don't about how he died and want to keep it their little secret."

"It doesn't wash with what I know about the Thornes. They're not exactly North Shore bluebloods who want to protect the family name. Jedidiah was already convicted of murder." Tess sighed, hating discussing something so real and potentially tragic as a dead body buried in her cellar in such a clinical fashion. "The important thing isn't what I want, it's learning what the truth is."

"You know the fourth scenario," Susanna said.

"Ike."

"Yep. That's the one no one likes. He ends up dead in the carriage house cellar. Whoever buried him there doesn't realize you own the place. You pop up here, push comes to shove, they slip in and dig him up."

Tess didn't want to give this fourth option any credence. She set the soda can on her knee and watched the condensation on the outside drip onto her jeans. "Someone should try to locate him."

"That would be the thing to do, yes."

"One would think his sister-"

"One would."

Tess glanced at her friend. "If there was a skeleton down there and someone stole it last night, I could have put myself in a dangerous position by saying I saw it. I should have pretended I didn't see a thing."

"Too late. You screamed bloody murder. The neighbors knew you'd seen something. It'd be worse if you didn't mention it. Better to have everyone know. Now if someone runs you off the road or something, we'll all think you were right about the skeleton, after all."

"This is supposed to make me feel better?"

Susanna shrugged, pragmatic. "No, but that's not why I'm up here. By the way," she added, easing gracefully to her feet, "why didn't you tell me about the guy next door sooner?"

"What's to tell?"

She raised both eyebrows and shook her head. "No wonder Davey and your dad worry about you. Tess, I noticed this guy, and I have made it a policy not to notice men. He's your lean, tight-lipped, rock-ribbed Yankee. I can see him dumping tea in the harbor and hopping a whaling ship with Ahab, killing a wife-beater in a duel." She polished off the last of her soda. "And he spent more time in the cellar watching you than hunting a skeleton."

"Does that mean you don't suspect him of offing Ike and burying him in the cellar?"

"No."

"He has a six-year-old daughter."

Susanna was silent.

"I slept in his guest room last night," Tess added.

"And?"

"There's a certain attraction at work between us."

"No kidding. Davey already told me, you know."

"Davey? He saw us together for maybe three seconds-"

"All it takes."

Tess gave up. Even Susanna's clients knew not to expect false comfort from her, just her bald assessment of the facts. Her reality checks could leave clients teetering, but they knew where they stood, what they had to do. Often, they knew it before they sat down with her, but needed that blunt back-and-forth with her to admit it.

"Tell me what you know about dead bodies," Tess said.

Susanna cast her a calculating look, vivid green eyes narrowed. "What makes you think I know anything about dead bodies? I know money."

"Your ex-husband's a Texas Ranger. You must have picked up a few things."

"My ex-husband's a snake in the grass," she said calmly.

Tess judiciously remained silent.

Susanna groaned. "Okay, okay. I suppose you want to know how long it takes a corpse to turn into a skeleton?"

"Pretty much."

"For this, I deserve a walk on the beach. Shall we?"

Susanna refused to say another word until they'd crossed the main road, climbed over the rocks and were walking along the cold, wet sand in their bare feet. She breathed in the salt air. "Best to talk about dead bodies when the air is good."

"I took anatomy in art school, but we didn't get into this sort of detail."

"Flesh rotting off bones, you mean? It didn't come up in my money classes, either." She stopped a moment, curling up her toes in the sand. "I missed the ocean in San Antonio, I have to say, although there's nothing quite like a Texas sunset. All right. Dead bodies. Conditions make a difference. A body left out in the open in hot, wet conditions would decompose rapidly. Cool, dry conditions delay decomposition. Usually. Take Ben Franklin and company down in Old Granary."

"Ben Franklin's buried in Philadelphia," Tess said. "His parents are buried in Old Granary."

"Whatever. Point is, the ground there was wet and spongy. That would speed things up."

Tess grimaced. "Gross."

"You asked."

"I know. What else?"

"An unclothed body tends to decompose faster than one that's clothed, especially if it's tight clothing."

"The mummy effect."

"Was your body-"

"I didn't see any clothes," Tess said quickly. "That doesn't mean there weren't any."

"If I buried a body in a cellar and wanted to hurry up decomposition, I'd strip it. It'd be a pain in the neck, but you have to figure the whole business wouldn't be much fun. I'd take the time."

And unclothed remains might take longer to identify, buying time for whoever had-what? Tess shuddered at the thought-the real possibility-that she'd stumbled on a murder victim.

"Most of this is common sense," Susanna went on. "We've all seen dead deer and skunks and such on the side of the road. It's a different picture in summer than in winter, in Florida than in Wyoming. You follow?"

"Oh, yes. I follow."

"As I recall, children and diseased bodies tend to decompose faster than healthy adults." She let the tide wash over her ankles, yelped at the cold water and dashed back to the warm, dry sand, then went back for more. "Also, fat people go faster than skinny people."

"I don't even want to think about that one. It's disgusting."

"Think of it as natural. Mutilated bodies also decompose faster. Makes sense, don't you think?"

Tess walked along the sand, the cold water lapping at her feet as she thought about the natural process of decomposition occurring on a corpse buried in a shallow grave in the carriage house cellar. What she saw the other night had to be her imagination. "What would slow decomposition?" she asked quietly.

"Dry, cool conditions, as I said. And bogs. If you get dumped in a bog, your body can last for ages." She shrugged, matter-of-fact. "Anthropologists love bogs."

Tess breathed out. "Charming."

"A lot of people think lime speeds decomposition, and it can, but only if the body's wet. Otherwise it can slow the process. And arsenic. Arsenic slows decomposition."

"There's lime in the cellar. For the lilacs."

"I noticed."

"Could a body buried in the carriage house cellar last March, when Ike took off, decompose between then and now?"

"Yes."

Tess couldn't speak, felt her head spinning. She was so cold that the seawater seemed warm under her feet.

"Are you going to barf?" Susanna asked.

"No. I'll be okay."

"You want me to throw water on your face?"

"I'm fine."

"Tess, I want you to listen to me. Whatever you saw the other night is dead or nonexistent. If they're dead, they know how they died, and they know how they ended up in that cellar. You don't need to know." Susanna grabbed Tess by the shoulders, her thick, black curls hanging down her shoulders, her eyes bright, intense. "Nobody gets buried in a cellar for a good reason."

Tess nodded grimly. "I know."

"Chances are there's no truth to be found out and justice to be served here. Even if there is, it's not your job."

"That's what I keep telling myself." Her voice was quiet, calmer than she'd anticipated. "Right now, I'm ending up looking like some hysterical nut."

Susanna gave her a pointed look. "Better than ending up buried in someone else's cellar."

Tess managed a smile. "True."

"Now, are you feeling better? You're not going to throw up or faint?"

"I'm fine."

"Good, because Ahab's walking across the rocks."

"You're thinking of Ishmael. Ahab's the one with the missing leg."

Susanna grimaced at the approaching figure of Andrew Thorne. "If this guy favors his ancestors, I can see why Moby Dick wanted a piece of Ahab. Talk about your take-no-prisoners type. Can't you see him on deck with a harpoon?"

"The whaling industry did incredible damage-"

"Tess. I'm not talking about endangered species. I'm talking about your neighbor. You've seen him with his daughter. I haven't."

"What are you saying?"

Her expression turned serious, less animated. "I'm saying you should be careful before you end up way over your head in very deep, cold water."

Andrew arrived, squinting at the two women in the bright sun. "Am I interrupting?"

Susanna Galway gave him her brightest, prettiest smile, which Tess had seen melt even Davey Ahearn and Jim Haviland. "We were just discussing nine-teenth-century American literature. Doesn't this place make you think of Herman Melville?"

Tess could see Andrew didn't believe Susanna. He knew they'd been talking about him. But he said, "I can see how it would." Then he turned to Tess. "Word's out about last night. Lauren Montague's here."

Susanna dropped her shoes onto the sand and tucked one foot in at a time. "Time I headed back to Boston. Tess?"

"Later," she said, aware, as Susanna would be, of Andrew's eyes on her.

"You'll call me?"

Tess nodded and slipped on her own shoes, remembering running on the beach as a child, flying a kite, listening to her mother tell tales of New England history, her father watching her every move, knowing that their time together was short. She felt as she did then, aware of what was going on, yet determined to pretend as if her life were normal and nothing bad would happen.