The Carriage House by Carla Neggers Page A

“It’s none of our business.”
    â€œShe 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.”
    â€œWell, Harl, guess what? I don’t care. If she saw a ghost, she saw a ghost. Doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
    â€œWhat if it’s Jedidiah?”
    â€œJedidiah 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.”
    â€œNot 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-covered 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
    T ess 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.
    â€œThe 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