The Carriage House. Carla Neggers

Чтение книги онлайн.

      To Robyn Carr

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      One

      On the day Ike Grantham disappeared, he missed an appointment with Tess Haviland, a Boston graphic designer and one of the few women who didn’t find him irresistible. She liked him, but over a year later, she still couldn’t explain why. He was blond, handsome, a risk-taker, outgoing to a fault, egalitarian and very determined not to fit the stereo-type of the serious, philanthropic-minded heir to a New England industrial fortune. He was without guilt or ambition, and there were days Tess thought he was without morals, too. Especially where women were concerned.

      Except for her. “Tess,” he used to say, “you have too many men with guns in your life. I’m steering clear.”

      She had no men with guns in her life. It just seemed that way because she’d grown up in a working-class neighborhood and her father owned a pub. Ike wasn’t without stereotypes of his own.

      He was on her mind not just because it had been over a year since he’d taken off without a word, but because she’d just received the real estate tax bill for the carriage house he’d given her in lieu of a check. It was an 1868 carriage house on a small lot practically across the street from the ocean, within walking distance of one of the prettiest villages on the North Shore. The structure itself wasn’t much. The location was. This was reflected in the property’s value—and in her tax bill.

      Tess stared down at the Old Granary Burial Ground four floors beneath her Beacon Street office. Thin, old tombstones tilted in different directions, and tourists crept along the paths in the lush shade, the tall trees filled out with leaves now, the long hard Boston winter finally over.

      It had been a nose-to-the-grindstone winter. She’d left a secure corporate job to go out on her own early last year, just before Ike had bowed out of her life as abruptly as he’d barged in. Sometimes she wondered if he’d infected her—not romantically, but in creating a sense of urgency in her, so that the “someday” she’d go out on her own became something she had to do now. She’d been doing work for his Beacon Historic Project on the side, and before she knew it, she was hanging out her shingle. She’d worked out of her apartment for the first six months. Then, last fall, she and Susanna Galway decided to rent an office together in a late-nineteenth-century building on Beacon Street, a prestigious address. They had one room on the fourth floor, overlooking the city’s most famous cemetery.

      Tess turned from the window and looked at her friend. Susanna was tall and willowy, as dark as Tess was fair, with porcelain skin and eyes as green as the springtime grass down in Old Granary. She was also a financial planner, and Tess had only just told her about the carriage house. Susanna was at her desk, Tess’s tax bill laid out on her keyboard. Occasionally she’d emit a sigh that conveyed the utmost distress.

      “This is why you’re an artist,” she said finally. “Damn, Tess. You always get paid in cash. It’s Rule One. If I’d been around to advise the Indians, do you think I’d have let them take beads for Manhattan? Hell, no.”

      “I can sell it.”

      “Who would buy it? It’s run-down. It’s on the flipping historic register. It’s on a minuscule lot. And, I might add—” She swiveled around in her expensive ergonomic chair, zeroing in on her office mate and friend with those piercing green eyes. “I might add that the place is haunted.”

      “That’s just a rumor.”

      “And not haunted by Casper the Friendly Ghost. Your ghost is a convicted murderer.”

      Tess dropped into her own chair at her computer. She did a great deal of her work, but not all, by computer. She still had an easel, oil pastels, drawing pencils, watercolors. She liked to touch and feel what she created, not just see it on a computer screen. Her screen was blank now, her computer in sleep СКАЧАТЬ