Sixteen

His Pentagon appointment was on hold.

Richard poured himself a scotch as he absorbed the news. Jeremy Carver had delivered it personally, calmly. He was in Richard's chair in the study now, watching his reaction. "Once we have a definitive answer on your brother-in-law's whereabouts, we can move forward," Carver said. "The senator believes it's in everyone's best interest to wait."

"The senator? Or you?"

"I speak for the senator."

"Yes, of course."

Richard tried to keep the contempt out of his tone. He was smarter and more educated, did more important work than almost anyone else he knew, yet he always had to go through the mind-boggling boredom of pretending he was just a regular guy who didn't think himself above anyone else. Anti-intel-lectualism reigned. He had no doubt if he weren't married to a Grantham, he wouldn't be on his way to Washington.

He sipped his scotch, felt it burn all the way down, waited a moment for the burning to subside. It was late evening. Lauren was with her book club. He'd hardly seen her at all today and wondered if she regretted last night. Maybe she was embarrassed. He smiled a little, thinking of it. To have sexual as well as intellectual power over her was something to relish.

But he had no power over Jeremy Carver. None at all. Carver would bail without hesitation. It wouldn't matter that Richard was the best mind for the job, that his experience and knowledge were without parallel. Carver only cared about what was good for his boss. Nothing else mattered. Richard admired that level of clarity. He seldom operated in such a simple, black-and-white world.

Someone had Ike's body.

Someone.

"Would you care for anything to drink? There's iced tea, sparkling water, springwater. Lemonade, too, I believe."

Carver shook his head. "No, I need to get back to Boston. I have a plane to catch."

"To Washington?"

He nodded. "I'll keep in touch. Listen, the minute we hear from Ike, or your wife tells us how we can get in touch with him, we're back in business."

"Lauren doesn't know where her brother is."

"No? Well, I think that's weird."

"You never met Ike," Richard said simply.

"We all have our family problems. The senator won't hold a difficult brother-in-law against you. But a scandal? A goddamn missing dead body? That's something else."

"I can't control Ike Grantham. That's putting an unfair burden on me."

"Yeah? Welcome to the big leagues, Dr. Montague."

Richard took another swallow of scotch, didn't even feel the burn. The light was dim in the study, producing no shadows whatsoever, the air outside still, gray with impending rain. "And Tess Haviland likely saw nothing in that cellar."

"Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I can't help but question her timing. You're up for a Pentagon appointment, and she's finding dead bodies in the cellar." Carver got to his feet, pointing at Richard. "She could be a problem for you."

"You mean that she's making trouble for me deliberately," Richard said quietly. "That assumes I have enemies."

Carver grinned and started for the door. "We all have enemies, Doctor, even a bright, important guy like you." He patted the door frame, turned and winked. "Produce Ike. Let me check out this Haviland woman, see if someone's paying her to make your life miserable. It could be one of the senator's enemies, you know."

"I'm an expert on terrorism, Mr. Carver, not politics."

"I know. Why do you think I'm here?"

Tess awoke in a panic. She was in her own bed in her own apartment, fighting a terrible sense of urgency, a crawling anxiety that defied rationality. She tried to focus on the familiar shifting shadows in her half-dark bedroom, the sounds in the courtyard outside her window. But her mind charged ahead, her heart racing. She couldn't breathe.

She was stuck with a run-down nineteenth-century carriage house. She owed taxes on it. It was haunted. Its previous owner hadn't been heard from in over a year. The taciturn descendant of the convicted murderer who was haunting it lived next door.

He had a daughter who thought she was a princess and a white-haired cousin who probably had posttraumatic stress disorder.

A stray cat had delivered kittens in her makeshift bed.

She'd kissed Andrew Thorne and talked to him as if she could fall in love with him with no effort at all.

Under the circumstances, she could hardly blame herself for making up a dead body in the cellar.

Except she hadn't.

Tess could feel the panic welling up in her, the urge to hyperventilate, run. She kicked off her blankets to ease the sense of suffocating.

She'd seen bones. A skull. Human remains. A dead person.

She rolled over onto her stomach and switched on the bedside lamp. Her first panic attack in months. They'd come often when she was just starting up her business, going out on her own. She'd told Ike about them. "Normal," he'd told her in that confident way of his. "Get yourself some kava. You'll be fine."

She didn't want to think about Ike.

Her digital clock switched from 4:59 to 5:00 a.m. Close enough to morning, she decided, and flopped over onto her back, staring at the ceiling, concentrating on her breathing. In for eight counts, hold for eight, out for eight. Her heartbeat slowed. Rationality returned. She flipped on her white-noise machine, her small bedroom filling with the sounds of the ocean. Not a good choice. She switched to a tropical rain forest. But it was too late, her mind already filled with images of kissing Andrew in the doorway of his daughter's bedroom, on the porch in the dark.

She hadn't conjured up the skeleton.

That was the problem. She wasn't that imaginative, or that crazy, and it wasn't a trick of the light or a damn ghost. It was a skeleton.

And now it was gone. The police had looked, she and Susanna had looked, Andrew had looked.

Davey and her father could have missed it. They'd been interested in pipes and heating ducts, not what was under their feet.

She wondered how close she'd come to catching someone charging out of the cellar Saturday night with a bag of bones.

She took herself back to that night after dinner, when she'd returned unexpectedly to lock the door. She'd meant to head straight back to Boston. Who had she told? Andrew. Harl. Dolly. But her car hadn't been in the carriage house driveway, so someone could have reasonably thought she'd cleared out.

"I'm a graphic designer," Tess muttered at the ceiling, "not a damn detective."

She rolled out of bed and pulled on running clothes, then gulped down a glass of orange juice in the kitchen and headed out into the cool, rainy Boston morning. The narrow streets of Beacon Hill were quiet at this early hour, slick with the overnight rain. It had tapered off to a chilly, steady drizzle. She jumped off the curb and ran on the street, the brick sidewalks too treacherous when wet. She went at a slow, steady pace to warm up, stopping on Beacon Street to do some stretches before crossing over to Boston Common, where she mingled with a few other early-morning joggers, working up a sweat, fighting off her demons.

When she returned to her apartment, she showered and stumbled into the kitchen in her bathrobe. She poured herself a bowl of corn flakes, cut up a banana and sat at the table below her street-level window. If she'd stayed at her corporate job, she could be above ground by now, in a bigger apartment. But Susanna had warned her about cash flow, maintaining a larger cash reserve now that she was a "sole proprietor."

She thought about lilacs and the smell of the ocean. Except for the complications, the carriage house was just what she wanted.

She finished her cereal, got dressed and headed over to Beacon Street. She loved being able to walk to work, not having to depend on a car. People were out walking their dogs now, but it was still only seven-thirty when she greeted the doorman at her building.