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