"You the architect?" Davey asked.

Andrew nodded. "More of a contractor these days."

"Yeah, you're not as big a jackass as most architects I've had to work with." He glanced at Dolly again and reddened. "Sorry."

Jim Haviland was more pensive, taking in Andrew with a tough-minded scrutiny Tess had come to expect whenever her introductions involved a man, no matter who it was. But he said, "Pleased to meet you," and let it go at that.

Dolly disappeared through the lilacs, calling for Harl, on some other tangent, and Andrew seized his opening.

Tess ticked off the seconds until he was reliably out of earshot. Only then, she knew, would her father and Davey speak.

"So," Davey said, easing in beside her, "you take this barn instead of cold hard cash before or after you checked out who lived next door?"

"Davey, I swear to you, if you don't wipe that smirk off your face-"

"I hear his wife died a few years ago."

"Davey."

Her father crossed his arms, rubbed a toe over a small, protruding rock in the driveway. "Dinner, huh?"

"It's a courtesy. His daughter's cat had kittens- " She groaned, throwing up her hands. "Come on, I'll explain while I give you the grand tour. What are you two doing up here, anyway? And don't you have my cell phone number? You could have called."

But the idea that these two men needed to call before seeing her didn't even register with them. She saw her father giving her house a critical once-over from the edge of the driveway. He was trying to look neutral. When he had to try, it meant he wasn't, and usually not because he approved.

Davey picked up his ground-out cigarette butt and set it inside his truck, turning back to Tess. "Business was lousy at the pub. Too nice a day. So, your old man and I decided to take a drive up here, see what's what." He gave the kitchen steps a test kick. "Good, at least I can get inside without falling on my ass."

"This place has character, though, doesn't it?" Tess tried not to think about last night but she didn't want to tell her father and Davey what she'd seen, not until she was sure herself what it was. She'd have to keep them out of the cellar. "Isn't the location just gorgeous? You can smell the ocean."

"Smells like dead fish," Davey said.

She ignored him. "Come on. But you have to be quiet, I don't want to scare Tippy Tail. That's Dolly's cat. She had kittens in my bed early this morning."

Her father exhaled in a loud whoosh. "Jesus H. Christ," he breathed, and followed his daughter and best friend into the carriage house kitchen.

Davey grinned at the sleeping kittens and mother cat in her camp bed. "Did I tell you this place was a goddamn barn? These guys are cute now, but wait'll you get little kitty turds all over your kitchen floor. They won't be so cute then."

"They don't look so cute now," her father said. "I don't get what people see in cats."

"I set up a box with a towel in a corner in the bathroom," Tess said. "It's a lot cozier than out here in the open. I'm hoping Tippy Tail'll move the kittens there, free up my bed."

She showed them around the kitchen, and as they moved through the house, the two men checked out the wiring, the plumbing, deciding which were the load-carrying beams and what problems and possibilities they presented-focusing, of course, on the problems. Tess didn't point out the stain in the living room, but Davey shot her a look that said he'd seen it and had drawn the same conclusion she had. Ghosts, nineteenth-century murderers.

"How'd you sleep last night?" her father asked.

"Fine."

"Yeah?"

"Yes, fine."

"Bullshit. You were worried about ghosts."

"You knew?"

"That this place is haunted? Of course I knew. Your mother loved telling me about the crazy, murdering ghost. I guess he killed some wife-beating bastard way back when." He looked around the big, empty room, shaking his head. "But I figured, you in a haunted house, that's your business, I wasn't getting into it. Besides, you didn't give me a chance."

"I don't believe in ghosts," Tess said.

Davey laughed. "Ha, I bet you did last night." But then his gaze fell on the trapdoor, and he shook his head. "Oh, man. I hate trapdoors."

"There's a bulkhead."

He sighed without enthusiasm. "Come on. Let's go. Show me the cellar, let me check out the pipes."

Tess led her father and Davey around back to the bulkhead, telling herself if they found the skeleton, there'd be hell to pay, but at least she would know it was real and she would have to deal with it.

"Davey, you've been crawling around in people's basements for forty years." She pushed open the six-foot door at the bottom of the bulkhead and let them go past her. Both men had to duck. "What's the strangest thing you've found?"

"I make it a policy not to look. I focus on the pipes." He made a beeline through the finished laundry room and stood in the dirt cellar's open doorway. "Ah, hell. I hate dirt cellars."

"It's a nineteenth-century carriage house," Tess said, "so it shouldn't be a surprise."

He scowled at her. "It's not."

"You know," her father said, "you give a cat a dirt cellar, you've got a hell of a big catbox."

"Gee, Pop, I'm so glad you came up here. What took you so long? I mean, I've been here, what, twenty-four hours?"

He ignored her, and she walked across the cool concrete floor and stood next to Davey. With the late-afternoon light angling through her repaired window, the cellar seemed almost ordinary. "People ever bury things in their dirt cellars?"

"You mean like pets? They'd stink."

She felt her stomach fold in on itself, but tried not to react visibly. Decaying corpses weren't one of her areas of expertise and not something she wanted to think about. Still, it was a point to consider. If the skeleton had been buried as an intact corpse, and not just bones, surely it couldn't have been recent, or it would have called attention to itself during the natural process of decomposition.

Her father was scrutinizing her. "Tess?"

"My mind's wandering. Sorry. There's a light under the trapdoor. But don't feel as if you have to go in there. I mean, you can see the pipes from here, can't you?"

Davey grinned at her. "What, it gives you the creeps?" He made a phony, B-movie ghost sound and laughed, amused with himself. "Relax. I've seen worse than this. Let me take a look."

Tess lingered in the doorway while he and her father went into the older part of the cellar, their attention clearly on the pipes and heating ducts, not on what was underfoot. She bit down on her lower lip, waiting, feeling only a slight twinge of guilt that she hadn't warned them what could be in store. If there was no skeleton, there was no skeleton. Simple.

"Actually," Davey said, "these pipes aren't bad. Cellar's dry, too, which is a good sign."

Her throat was suddenly so constricted she couldn't answer. She kept feeling herself falling last night, spotting the skull in the dirt, letting out that blood-curdling scream.

Finally, she couldn't stand it anymore, muttered something about getting some air and fled up the bulkhead steps.

She ran headlong into the rock-solid body of Andrew Thorne. He caught her around the middle and held firm. "Easy, there, where are you going?"

Tess choked back a yell, tried to control a wild impulse to break free and run out to the ocean, charge into the waves. She felt as if she were covered in cobwebs, unable to breathe. But she made herself stand still, realized she had a death grip on his upper arms. She eased off. "I couldn't breathe down there. It must be the dust. Allergies." She coughed, suddenly very aware of the feel of his hands on her waist. "I'm okay now."