The Carriage House Read Online Free

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.
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œNo 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.
    â€œThe 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 Morse, the rich wife-beater, defending his honor. Did a wife-beater have honor? Not in her book. But perhaps he was innocent. Had Jedidiah Thorne been the kind of man to make such a charge recklessly, without proof? Or perhaps he’d done so as an excuse to kill Morse, whom he would have known would challenge him to a duel? Maybe Jedidiah had been in love with Adelaide Morse.
    Tess had no answers. There were two small rooms at the other end of the house that immediately presented possibilities. Tess pictured domestic things like