Night Scents (19 page)

"Any mention of staying off my property?"

"Not specifically. The general idea is for me to pay attention to previous warnings and keep quiet and mind my own business."

"Your aunt—"

Tears welled; Piper sniffled angrily. "There's a reference to crazy old bitches. I don't know if it means me or Hannah."

"Anything about treasure?"

She shook her head. "I can't even imagine this bastard's motive. Is he just guessing or does he know I've been over digging on your property? How would he know? Is he—" She gulped for air. "Is he
watching
me?"

Clate's expression hardened; he didn't move. It was as if he'd withdrawn into a cold, dark place where self-control meant the difference between life and death. "Do you want to call the police?" he asked quietly.

"Of course I do! I want to find this bastard and knock his damned head in!" She snatched up more peas, dropped them on the table, isolated one, split it, crushing half the tiny peas inside. She flung it, peas and all, into the garden. No self-control for her. She didn't care. She looked around at him and sighed, trying to penetrate the fog of emotion—fear, anger, the humiliation of having her space violated by the vile message on her machine—to the calm island of common sense. "But the police can't do anything, and neither can I. All I have is a nasty message on my machine. It could be from a kid and I'm reading into it what's just not there."

"The police might have similar incidents that they could link with this one."

"It's unlikely. I'd have heard."

"Maybe they're not confined to Frye's Cove."

She stared at him. "Clate, do you really believe these calls are a coincidence? That they have nothing to do with you, me, Hannah, or eighty-year-old Russian treasure?"

His expression didn't change. "No."

Her energy was flagging. "Somehow, I figure the police'll just end up pinning everything on Hannah."

Clate watched her with narrowed eyes, his gaze unyielding. "Are you afraid they'll be right?"

"No, I'm afraid of what everyone in Frye's Cove, from Ernie at the police station to my father and brothers, will say when they find out Hannah's talked me into digging for buried treasure. They'll think I'm crazy and she's crazier."

"But the calls are real, Piper."

"I know they are."

"If Hannah didn't place them—"

"She didn't."

"Then she has nothing to worry about. And neither do you."

"You don't know Ernie," she said lightly, as if being flip could help her make sense of what, ultimately, made no sense. She should call the police. Something in her tale of threatening calls might lead them to the culprit. But it was too slim a hope for her to risk having Hannah's deepest, most private yearnings splashed across the front page of the local newspaper.

Clate reached into her basket. Some of the hardness had gone from his expression. He seemed less stiff, less tightly controlled. His hands were bigger, more tanned, more scarred than hers. But as he pulled out a palmful of peas and started snapping off their ends, opening them up, releasing their contents into the colander, Piper noticed that his movements were sure, experienced. He worked automatically, without thinking, without awkwardness. It wasn't that it was a tough job. It wasn't that she didn't expect him, or any man, not to know how to shell peas. It was that he did it as if he'd been doing it since he was a kid, as she had. Maybe they weren't as different as she thought.

"Someone was out digging on my property last night," he said without preamble. "It wasn't you, was it?"

She watched his thumb run across the bumpy shell of an overripe pea, felt a flutter of awareness. "No," she managed. "It wasn't."

"I checked with Tuck in case I'd missed something he'd done. It wasn't him. It could have been animals, but I don't think so." He heaped his empty pods into a neat pile. "I can't imagine it was your aunt."

"Neither can I. I mean, she gets around well for her age, and she certainly knows your property—"

"And she's getting impatient with you."

"True."

"Could she have found someone else to do her digging for her?"

He was like a hound on a trail. Focused, relentless. Suddenly Piper imagined going to bed with such a man, having all that drive and concentrated energy centered on making love.

She wriggled on her bench, shook off the image. What was the matter with her? They were discussing threatening phone calls, mysterious signs of digging, and here she was, thinking about sex. It was a defense mechanism, she rationalized. Perfectly normal.

"Piper?"

"No—no, not a chance. I saw her today. She'd have told me if she'd given up on me, I can assure you. Instead, she strengthened her case." She swung her legs up over the bench and got to her feet. "Come on, I'll show you."

She led him through her keeping room back to her front parlor, where, under the watchful eye of her brothers, she was in the midst of sanding layers of paint from the original wainscoting.

Clate remained standing while she sat on a sheet-covered loveseat. She gestured to an ancient shoebox she'd laid atop a stack of magazines on her battered butler's table. It was so old the cardboard had softened and yellowed and the sides were splitting apart, held together only by a series of brown, brittle rubber bands. "Hannah gave me that today."

"What's inside?"

"Letters from her father and brother during World War One." She brushed a hand ineffectually through her hair. "At least that's what she told me."

"You haven't looked?"

"No, not yet." She smiled weakly. "I picked peas instead."

He seemed unsurprised. "You're afraid of what you might find."

She shook her head. "Not that. I'm just—I don't know if I can explain. I feel as if I'm a voyeur of sorts, peering into a private, personal part of Hannah's life. The lives of my grandfather and great-grandfather." She paused, her pulse quickening as she took in his muscular frame, that tousled dark hair, that constant alertness. "It's a strange feeling. These people are family. It's not like reading a letter from Woodrow Wilson."

"That's the whole point, isn't it? A letter from Woodrow Wilson wouldn't help you figure out what really happened eighty years ago."

She rubbed the tips of her fingers over the brittle ripples of old rubber bands. They'd dissolve or break apart on their own before long. "I suppose. Hannah said I should open the box, read what's inside, study, imagine. She thinks this will make that night when she was seven real to me. But it feels real enough right now. I don't know if I want what she must have suffered to feel any more real. She was just a little kid."

"And her memory of events could be skewed by her age. Seven then, eighty-seven now. The letters might help clear up whether her story of her father rescuing a Russian princess was something he told her because it was true, something he told her as a sort of fairy tale, or something she just made up to help her survive the trauma of losing her parents."

Piper nodded. "I know. I'll read them."

He relaxed his stance. "If you need an objective perspective on anything, you know where to find me."

She watched him head back to her kitchen under the low ceiling of her tiny, antique house. She didn't move from her position on the loveseat. He would go. She would read the contents of Hannah's shoebox. Alone. Maybe before she cooked up her peas, maybe after.

"Wait."

He glanced back at her from the doorway, his eyes lost in the shadows.

"I'm steaming the peas, and I've a little grilled chicken in the fridge and some of my dill-oat bread. Would you care to stay for dinner?" She jumped to her feet. "There is one more thing I should tell you."

"I'd love to stay for dinner, even if you don't have one more thing to tell me."

"It's a doozie."

A twitch of a smile. "Of course it is."

Clate watched Piper slather on bug repellent—another Hannah Frye special, apparently—just outside the back door off her kitchen. They were headed outside for a walk on the beach. He observed her with a strangled feeling, aware of every move of her fingers and palms against her bare flesh as she rubbed on her goo. It smelled spicy and sweet, an ungodly cross between perfume and aftershave. He had declined her offer to try some. He'd take his chances with the mosquitoes.

"Poisons can enter through the skin, you know," he told her.

She shrugged, matter-of-fact. "Only the right poisons, none of which are in this particular preparation since it's meant to be applied to the skin."

"You're sure?"

She lifted her mane of hair with one hand and, with the other, dabbed the goo on the back of her neck, oblivious to the effect she was having on him. "Hannah's very good at bug repellents."

Clate made no reply. He was reserving judgment on Hannah Frye's skills as an herbalist. After Piper's tale of Stan Carlucci and the tincture of bistort and agrimony—her doozie—he wasn't even convinced that her intentions were all as sweet and innocent as her niece wanted to believe. Misapplied, her knowledge of plants could be dangerous, even lethal.

Over dinner, he'd learned that a tincture was a mixture of herbs and alcohol—brandy or vodka, not rubbing alcohol—that sat for two weeks or so, with a daily shaking, and then was strained and stored in a dark bottle, just like the one Stan Carlucci had found on his doorstep.

It was straightforward herbal medicine, Piper claimed, and didn't mean Hannah was a menace or thought she was Matilda the Witch.

Clate wasn't so sure.

He'd also learned that Piper Macintosh had eclectic tastes in music and books, had done much of the work on her house herself, was a die-hard Red Sox and Bruins fan, didn't like basketball, and had a keen appreciation for the fragility of the environment in which she lived. She also worked hard, teaching, consulting, crafting. Her idea of a vacation was a long weekend skiing in Vermont. During the summer, she found no reason to leave Cape Cod, except for the occasional trip to Fenway Park.

She had never ventured south of the Mason-Dixon Line. She failed to convince him that her three trips to Florida, one to Disney with her nephews, counted.

He found himself wondering about her dreams. He sensed in her a desire for adventure and excitement, for challenge. Maybe it was projection. He would find her day-to-day routines stifling after a while. When he tried to push her on her future goals, on what she wanted from her work, her life, she frowned at him and declared, "I have no desire to be Martha Stewart. I'm happy with my life the way it is."

She left her bottle of goo just inside the back door, and they headed across her yard. The air was still and warm, and shorebirds swooped and wheeled, hunting food at dusk. They took the path through the marsh, walking in silence, until Piper grabbed his wrist, stopping him short. She leaned toward him as she pointed out over a stand of dwarf red oak, whispering, "There—a roseate tern."

He would have to learn his Cape Cod birds. He noted a streaking bird and assumed he'd seen his first roseate tern.

"They're endangered," she said.

They continued down to the strip of narrow, isolated beach, unsuitable for beachgoers because of the encroaching marsh, the tufts of beach grass, the wildlife that didn't distinguish the boundaries of their nearby refuge. Ducks, gulls, terns, songbirds, deer, fox, all used the area. Piper moved with the casual assurance of a woman who'd lived her entire life amidst dunes, marshes, tide pools, and the pounding surf. She'd tossed a deep red cotton twill shirt on over her T-shirt and shorts, trim legs moving gracefully, feet digging into the shifting sand.

She walked out onto the hard, damp, packed sand where the tide hadn't come back in and kicked off her sandals, scooping them up and hooking them on one finger as she let the water seep over the tops of her feet. She yelped, laughing. "It's so cold!"

Clate eased in behind her. "Then get out."

"Oh, I'll get used to it." She plunged in up to her knees, shuddered at the cold, and ran back out again. She gave him an evil grin. "It feels good. Really. You should try it."

"I might in a bit."

A huge swell caught her by surprise, nearly knocking her off her feet. Water swirled up to the hem of her shorts. She gave a soft moan and a shiver that derived more from pleasure than pain. A sharp, hot jolt of awareness nearly had him tumbling into the water with her. He shifted his stance, but it did no good. His throat ached, his breathing was ragged, and an arrow of fire shot straight through his loins.

Piper took no notice. "Take your shoes off and get yourself anointed as a real Cape Codder."

"Now why would I want to do that?"

"Chicken?"

She had the devil in her eye, did Piper Macintosh. She'd lived a life surrounded by people who'd loved and protected her, hadn't had to face the kind of deprivation and hardship he had as a child. Physical and emotional neglect, the helplessness and unspeakable pain of watching two young, vibrant people he loved slowly destroy themselves. An old woman had saved him, had helped him learn from his parents' mistakes or not, shown him that he had choices. But in the process, he'd come to believe that warm, nurturing families were a myth. He expected a dark side to Piper's relationship to her family and community. She wouldn't even think to look for one.

Her teeth were chattering, her lips purple, but she splashed out to catch the next wave. She hooted and hollered and whooped, as if there were no ancient box of letters waiting to be read, as if townspeople weren't worried her beloved aunt was a nut, as if she'd never received a single nasty phone call. She'd played him the message left on her machine. There was no mistaking its intent to unsettle, unnerve, make her feel exposed and vulnerable in her own home.

This was her answer, he thought.

She was out deep enough that the next powerful swell soaked her up to the waist, and the thought of the cold salt water coursing over her hips and thighs, swirling between her legs, was almost more than Clate could stand.

"You're missing a real treat," she called, teasing him, no idea how he was twisting her words to suit his tortured state. Her twill shirt had slipped off her shoulders and was halfway down her upper arms, its hem skimming the water. The cold had her nipples pebbled against the fabric of her T-shirt. "There's nothing like a nice, cold dip in the bay after a long day."