The Carriage House by Carla Neggers Read Free Book Online Page B

meant to own this carriage house. Maybe that was what Ike was trying to tell me.”
    â€œI 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. There were countless people in New England who loved and appreciated historic houses—she just didn’t have any in her life. With her satchel slung over one shoulder, she trotted down the three flights of stairs to the lobby of their 1890s building, avoiding the ancient brass elevator, which was too much like climbing into a rat cage for Tess. Susanna loved their office. Why not the idea of an 1868 carriage house?
    Tess cut down Park Street across from Boston Common, then up Tremont to Old Granary. She’d picked up a sandwich for lunch—Susanna always bagged it and had another chart to demonstrate her savings—and decided to walk through the centuries-old tombstones while she ate. The shade was lovely, and the city, although just on the other side of the iron fence, seemed very far away.
    For no reason she could fathom, Tess found herself looking for the Thorne name. Her own family had come to the shores of Massachusetts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, not back with the Pilgrims and the Puritans.
    She found one, her heart jumping. Thankful Thorne, born in 1733, died in 1754. Not a long life. Was she an ancestor of the man Tess had met yesterday, of his six-year-old daughter with the Red Sox shirt and crown? Tess suddenly wondered how Andrew Thorne’s wife had died. From Dolly’s reaction, she suspected it had been a while—but one never knew with children that age. Tess remembered coming to grips with her own mother’s death, discovering the reality of it over time, the finality.
    She slipped out of the graveyard. The streets were clogged with noontime traffic, one of many daily reminders of how glad she was she didn’t commute. So why was she thinking about hanging on to a place an hour up the coast?
    Her first meeting went well. They loved her, they had plenty of work for her and were pleasant, intelligent, dedicated people. The second meeting was just the opposite. The clients from hell. They were impossible to please, and they didn’t know what they wanted, leaving her on shifting sands. She’d learned early on in her graphic design career that not everyone would love her or her work—and some would be rude about it.
    When she returned to her office, she plopped her satchel onto her chair and started loading it up. Susanna, as ever, was at her computer. “I’ve got an idea,” Tess told her. “I’m going to spend the weekend at the carriage house. I’ll bring my sleeping bag, pack food. It’s the only way I’ll know for sure what’s the right thing to do, whether to keep it or put it on the market.”
    Susanna tapped a few keys and looked up, squinting as if part of her was still caught up in whatever it was she’d been doing. She was a financial planner, but also, as she put it, “an investor,” which covered a wide territory. She pushed back her black hair with both hands. “Bring your cell phone. You have all my numbers? If some hairy-assed ghost crawls out of the woodwork in the dead of night, you call 911. Then you call me.”
    â€œThanks, Susanna.”
    â€œDon’t thank me. As soon as you walk out that door, I’m looking up the name and address of every mental hospital on the North Shore. Don’t worry. I’ll pick out a nice one for you.”
    Tess ignored her. “The weather’s supposed to be great this weekend. I think I’ll stop on Charles Street for scones.”
    â€œGlorified English muffins,” Susanna grumbled. “Three times as expensive.”
    â€œAnd you don’t call yourself a Yankee.”
    They both laughed, and Tess heaved her loaded-up bag onto her shoulder and was on her