The Carriage House. Carla Neggers
up, I could keep it as a weekend place.”
“Old as it is,” Davey went on, as if he’d never stopped, “it’s probably got asbestos, lead pipes. Lead paint.”
“So? I could buy a duplex up the street with lead paint and asbestos.”
Davey eased off the bar stool. “Now, why would you want to buy a place in a neighborhood with people who’ve known you your whole life? That wouldn’t make any sense when you can fix up some goddamn barn some goddamn rich nut gave you in a quaint little town up on the North Shore where not only no one knows you, no one wants to know you.”
“That’s pure prejudice, Davey, and I earned the carriage house. It wasn’t ‘given’ to me.” Except she’d thought she’d have to do more work to really earn it, although Ike had never put that on paper. Technically, the carriage house was hers, free and clear of everything but taxes.
“You know I’m telling the truth.” Davey walked heavily over to her, this big man she’d known since she was in a crib. Her godfather. “You’ve lost sight of who you are, where you come from.”
“Davey, I’m sitting here eating clam chowder in my father’s pub. I haven’t lost sight of anything.”
He snorted, but kissed her on the cheek, his mustache tickling her. “You need a plumber for that barn of yours, kid, give me a call. I’ll see what I can do. If it’s hopeless, I’ll bring a book of matches. You can collect the insurance.”
Tess fought back a smile. “Davey, you’re impossible.”
“Ha. Like you’re not.”
The guys at the tables ragged him about the bald spot on the back of his head, and he gave them the finger and left.
“You’re thirty-four years old, Tess.” Her father exhaled a long, slow breath, as if his own words had taken him by surprise. “I can’t be telling you what to do.”
“That’s not what I was worried about. I was worried you’d talk me out of doing something before I could figure out for myself if it was something I really wanted to do.”
“And since when have I done that?”
“It could have happened today.”
“You want to keep this place?”
“I’m thinking seriously about it, Pop.”
“Well, so be it. How ‘bout a piece of pie?”
“What do you have?”
“Lemon meringue.”
She smiled. “Perfect.”
Davey Ahearn was smoking a cigarette on his front stoop across the street from the pub when Tess headed out into the cool evening. He walked over to her. “You take the subway?” He tossed his cigarette onto the street. “I’ll walk you to the station.”
There was no point in telling him she could see herself to the subway station. He’d walk with her, anyway. “Thanks.”
He glanced at her as they headed to the corner. “You didn’t tell him about the ghost, did you?”
Tess hoisted her satchel higher onto her shoulder. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Tess.”
“No, I didn’t tell him, okay? For God’s sake, I’m a grown woman. I don’t have to tell you or my father that a few highly imaginative people believe my carriage house is haunted.”
“Not a few people. It’s in the goddamn guidebooks.”
She gripped her satchel with one hand. “How do you know these things?”
He grinned at her from behind his oversize mustache. “I know everything.”
“If I decide to turn the place into a bed-and-breakfast, a ghost could be good for business.”
“Not that ghost.”
Tess didn’t respond.
Davey grunted. “No wonder you still keep your old man up nights. He wants to go to his grandkids’ Little League games, and he’s got a daughter wanting to renovate a barn haunted by a murderer.”
“I’m not answering you, Davey. Answering would only encourage you.”
They turned onto the main road, traffic streaming past them, the last of the daylight finally fading. She thought of Beacon-by-the-Sea, how quiet it would be.
Davey eased back. “Go on. Go home, Tess. If you screw up, you screw up. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”
She smiled at him. “And you and Pop will be there. Don’t think I don’t know that, Davey.”
“Hell, no. I’m not cleaning up after this mess. You’re on your own.”
She laughed, not believing him. “Look, I’ll invite you up for scones and tea one Sunday. Okay?”
“I’ll wear garlic.”
“That’s for vampires.”
He shrugged. “Close enough.”
Five
Susanna denied all knowledge of how Davey Ahearn had learned about the carriage house. “He and your father have extrasensory perception where you’re concerned.” She plopped down at her computer with a tall mug of coffee she’d brewed herself. She’d once done a chart on how much she and Tess were saving over a lifetime by staying out of coffee shops. “It’s creepy. I don’t think I want to know that much about my kids.”
Tess emptied her satchel onto her desk. She hadn’t done any work last night when she’d gotten home from the pub. “Pop and Davey don’t know anything about me.”
“They don’t understand anything about you. They know everything.”
Susanna wanted to know all the details of Tess’s trip to see her carriage house, from the avocado appliances to the trapdoor and possible bloodstains. “Sounds like a nice little shop of horrors,” Susanna said.
“It’s got great potential.”
“That’s what we say in Texas when we’re about to tear a place down and put up a new one.”
Tess never knew when Susanna was being serious about her Texas observations. Some days, it was like she was living in exile in Boston. Other days, she seemed very content not to be in San Antonio.
“My neighbor’s a Thorne,” Tess added.
“As in Jedidiah and the bloodstains by the front door?”
“So he says.”
“What’s he look like?”
Tess thought of Andrew Thorne’s piercing blue eyes and lean good looks. “A nineteenth-century duelist.”
“Your basic rock-ribbed Yankee?”
“If that’s the way you want to put it.”
“Okay.” She tilted back her chair and sipped her coffee, which she drank black and strong. “It’s going to be tough, paying rent on your apartment and office and keeping up this carriage house. At least there’s no mortgage. Damn, you must have a good accountant—”
“I do.” Tess crossed their small office to the coffeepot, filled her own mug. She added more milk than she normally would since Susanna had done the brewing. “I don’t know, Susanna, but I think somehow I was meant to own this carriage house. Maybe that was what Ike was trying to tell me.”
“I doubt it. I think he was just unloading a white elephant.”
Tess had meetings from noon until three, which gave her a break from Susanna’s skepticism.