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."
Her father's eyes bored into her, as if to say he knew what could go on in a few minutes. "You falling for this guy?"
"Pop, I've only known him a few days."
"Like that matters."
Tess didn't answer because he had a point and she didn't want to lie. She didn't always tell him every-thing-she hadn't mentioned the skeleton-but she seldom lied outright. But to talk about her reaction to Andrew, her relationship with him, if it could be called that, was decidedly premature.
"He's got baggage, you know."
"Baggage? You mean his daughter? Is that what I was-baggage that you didn't want to inflict on another woman?"
He heaved a sigh, making it sound more like a growl. "That's not what I meant. And it wasn't like that with me and your mother. I wasn't the marrying kind to begin with. It took her to come along." He scratched his head with one hand, obviously hating having this conversation. "That doesn't mean I'm living in the past. I've had my women friends."
"Like who?"
"Never mind. For chrissake, that's not why I'm here. I'm just saying when you've been married before, you got a kid-it's not the same anymore. Don't fool yourself and think it is. You're not getting involved with someone who's never been through that."
"The investment banker," Tess said.
"Not him. Jesus, he was an asshole. He got an F on Davey's test."
"Davey's what?"
Her father was pacing, frowned at the picture of Ike and her. He looked back at her, distracted. "What? Oh, Davey. He's never told you about his test? He's got, I don't know, five or six questions he asks guys when they show up at the pub."
"Guys-you mean men I'm going out with. He doesn't ask every guy who comes into the place these questions."
"Yeah. Right. Nobody's done better than a B-minus."
Tess didn't know why, but she wasn't horrified. This was the sort of thing she expected from her father and godfather, the sort of thing her friends said didn't happen, couldn't possibly happen, she had to be exaggerating. "Has he given Andrew these questions yet?"
"I don't know."
"Tell him not to."
"What, you afraid he'll flunk or get an A-plus?"
"I'm not afraid of anything."
Her father pointed a thick finger at her. "That's your problem right there. Maybe you should be afraid once in a while. Finding a dead body. Sleeping alone in that damn carriage house in the first place with ghosts and crap."
Tess refused to let him change the subject. "Pop, Andrew Thorne is an architect. He and Davey probably speak the same language. It's not fair."
"All the questions aren't about plumbing. Jesus. Davey knows you can call him about plumbing problems."
That was all she was going to get out of him. She understood. He'd had to see for himself that she was okay, not sitting on Beacon Hill in terror of whatever was going on up on the North Shore, perhaps even in terror of Andrew.
After her father left, Tess dialed Davey Ahearn's number. "You should give me your little test. See if
I pass."
"It's a guy test."
"Davey! I'd hoped Pop was making this up. You really have five or six questions you ask men I bring to the pub? What are they?"