Night Scents (26 page)

She joined him in the garden, inhaling deeply. "I can smell the mint. Can you?"

He smiled. The woman had seeped into his soul. That was the problem. An affair never touched him. "Mint and everything else."

She'd changed into jeans and an ivory cotton sweater, the fog having dragged down the temperature. She had her mug of tea. She looked steady, unrepentant about what had happened upstairs, even well pleased with herself. Clate stifled a stab of lust at the memory of how she'd moaned his name, dug her fingers into his upper arms as she'd climaxed.

He jerked himself up straight. "There's something I need to show you in my yard. Got a minute?"

She shrugged, but he could see the spark of suspicion. He remained unpredictable to her, which, he supposed, was just as well. "Sure."

They left their mugs on the picnic table and started down the path along the hedgerow. To avoid prejudicing her, Clate refused to explain what he wanted to show her until they reached Hannah's herb garden and he pointed out the scalped area. "Tuck spotted it first."

"He didn't do it?"

"He says he didn't."

"Well, I didn't. The only use I have for foxglove is as a flower, and monkshood I don't have any use for. Its flower is pretty enough, but it's nasty stuff. I think it's only use is as a cleaning agent. Hannah planted it before she really knew what she was doing. I hope whoever did this used gloves."

Clate eyed her, noted the slight loss of color in her cheeks. Lovemaking had temporarily put thoughts of her aunt's troubles out of her mind. With a sudden jolt, he realized he didn't want their lovemaking to be a mere diversion, not a way out of the moment but into it.

"What about Hannah?" he asked.

She gave a tight shake of the head. "That's not the way she harvests herbs. It's too radical. After she's done, you can hardly tell she's touched anything. And why would she do all this work when she could just get me to do it for her?" A small, uneasy smile. "Besides, one of us would have spotted that raspberry car of hers."

"You're sure?"

Her shoulders slumped. "No, I'm not sure. I'm not sure of anything right now."

Including him, he realized. Maybe especially him.

"I'll go see her." She squinted at him through the glare of the fog and her own confusion. "We mapped out a whole plan of where to look next for the treasure, you know."

"I figured as much."

"She still doesn't want to involve you."

He nodded. "That's her right."

"But it's your land."

"I didn't say I'd cooperate."

That brought a smile, but it quickly faded. "The letters in her shoebox were compelling, Clate, but I wish they'd been more conclusive, one way or the other. There's no proof there's any treasure, here or anywhere else. I think it's time I went back to the library. Maybe I'll stop on my way to see Hannah." She scanned the area of cut poisonous herbs. "I really can't imagine that this was her doing."

"I agree."

"My caller?"

"I don't know, Piper. Maybe your family—"

She cut him off, starting down his sloping lawn. "The minute my father and brothers find out about any of this, I'll lose all room to maneuver."

"They might know something."

"Uh-uh. They'd have told me."

"Maybe they're thinking the same thing about you."

She swung around, and he was surprised to see her grinning. "Are you kidding? My father and brothers would never assume I'd tell them
anything."

"I wonder why," he said dryly.

She laughed. "I'll give it some thought, okay? Meanwhile"—she took a breath—"I guess I'll see you around."

It was her signal to him. He understood. She needed to walk back to her house alone, without him.

Watching her go wasn't easy. Someone was out there who could be mean, desperate, or just plain stupid enough to do anything. If threats weren't working, what would come next?

But Piper was no fool. She knew the score, the risks. And she knew what she needed.

She stopped halfway down the path, whirled around, and yelled to him. "I have no regrets, you know." He grinned. "I know."

Piper started a small fire in her keeping-room fireplace to take the damp chill out of the air and sat on her wingback chair with a bit of knitting. The fog distorted sound, made the bay seem closer, the wind fiercer. She'd locked her doors, although her locks were totally inadequate.

She knew she had only to say the word, and Clate would be over. To deal with an intruder, to spend the night.

"Your destiny isn't my destiny, Piper. It's yours to discover and to live."

Only Hannah. How was conjuring a man up for her niece letting her discover and live her destiny?

But no one could have conjured up Clate Jackson. Not even Hannah Frye.

Finally, Piper laid down her knitting needles and headed up to bed. She peered out her dormer window, but saw only the fog. When she climbed between her sheets and pulled her quilt up to her chin, she stared at her ceiling. What time did Clate go to bed? What would he think when he did?

It was a long time before sleep overtook her, her thoughts filled with images of how explosive and wild and free she'd felt that afternoon.

No one needed to warn her about Clate Jackson.

By morning the fog had burned off, the sun was shining, and after a morning class in making beeswax candles, Piper set out on her bicycle. Bypassing everyone and everything she knew in town, she ensconced herself in a remote corner of the Frye's Cove Public Library. If she ever hoped to sort out her relationship with Clate, she needed to sort out her business with Hannah. Plainly, she was getting on someone's nerves. Maybe it had to do with buried treasure, maybe not. But she meant to find out.

She checked every article, every mention she could find, of the mysterious shipwreck of Caleb and Phoebe Macintosh. She read up on the Russian royal family tree. She dug into princesses and baronesses and other wealthy upper-class women whose escape from revolution in Russia might have coincided with her greatgrandfather's time in Europe. There were a few possibilities, none concrete, none she could examine with any precision from an old Cape Cod library on an early summer morning.

As facts and tidbits came to her, she jotted down everything that had happened, everything she knew, on a spiral notepad. She hoped that putting it all together, right there in front of her, would help her make sense of what, on the face of it, made no sense. An old woman who claimed she'd lured a Tennessean to Frye's Cove as the love of her niece's life. Disturbing phone calls. Recovered memory of treasure. Rumors of the Tennessean wanting to develop his newly purchased land. Signs of digging. Hacked poisonous herbs. Piper wrote it all down in chronological order.

She skipped the parts about midnight kisses and afternoon lovemaking. Relevant or not, she needed no reminders about when, where, and how they fit into her time line of events.

Had the caller known she'd been on Clate's property or just guessed? If he'd known, how? Was he spying on her, on Clate? From where?

Piper shut her eyes and let the questions wash over her. Maybe some insight would come just from formulating the right question.

"There you are."

Andrew's voice.

Piper's eyes flew open. Both brothers loomed over her. Her first impulse was to cover up her table of articles, books, notes, scratchings of card-catalog numbers. But that would only alert them that she was working on something she didn't want them to know about.

"We recognized your bike out front," Benjamin said, and Piper could feel her stomach lurch as she recognized his expression for what it was: masked fear. She turned to Andrew and saw that mix of irritation and gravity that she'd always known—probably since the day their mother died—hid his fear.

"Hannah?" She almost couldn't get it out.

"She passed out at the wheel." Benjamin kept his tone crisp, businesslike, as if that would keep his sister from panicking, himself from panicking. "She ran off the road and smashed into a trash can. Just missed a couple of old people out for their afternoon walk. They called an ambulance, the police."

"She's okay," Andrew said. "A few bumps and bruises. Liddy and Pop are at the hospital with her now."

Benjamin nodded. "We thought you'd want to go see her."

They didn't ask about her notepad, her time lines, her books on the Russian revolution, her histories of Cape Cod, and stacks of old magazines, although she noticed Andrew's flicker of interest. But he restrained himself as she scooped everything up, shoved it in her knapsack, and nodded, her pulse racing, her stomach twisted, that she was ready.

Twenty minutes later, they were at the hospital.

Hannah had been admitted with dizziness and nausea; her few bruises were of little concern. Doctors wanted to run tests to find out what had caused her to pass out.

She, of course, had her own ideas, which she articulated to Piper the moment her brothers, father, and sister-in-law had grudgingly left them alone together. Andrew retreated, muttering that this was what always got the two of them into trouble in the first place.

"I was poisoned," Hannah announced.

Piper immediately glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot, but Hannah looked so green and frail that Piper couldn't even summon up a good warning glare. "It was warm today. Maybe you had too much sun."

"I wasn't even in the sun. No, I was poisoned. I'm not sure what it was, but the doctors will never find it in my blood because they won't know to look for it. It's probably dissipated by now anyway."

"Did you try a new tea?"

Hannah scowled. "I didn't poison myself. Someone else poisoned me."

Piper suppressed a groan of disbelief, frustration, exasperation. She was at her wit's end. Her aunt was driving her insane.

"Hannah, how on earth could someone poison you?"

"Very easily. A few drops of the right poison in my springwater, and here I am, nauseated and dizzy. I don't keep an armed guard at my townhouse, Piper. A clever sort could easily have slipped in and done the deed. Perhaps it was even a guest."

"Hannah."

"You mustn't be shocked, dear. We know someone's trying to stop you from digging up my father's treasure."

"No, we don't know that. We know I've been receiving nasty phone calls warning me off date's land, but that's all. Besides, you said nobody knows about the treasure."

"I said I didn't tell anybody about it. That doesn't mean someone didn't already know." She took a shallow breath, her eyes clear and sparkling green, a contrast to the sickly green of her skin. "Possibly the killer."

The killer? It took a moment, but Piper finally realized what her aunt was saying. "Oh, Hannah. The person who lured your parents onto the sandbar would be even older than you are by now! I can't see some old codger slipping you a mickey and leaving lines from rap songs on my message machine."

"Old codger, Piper? Oh, I see. You can believe everyone in town will blame me for making those calls to you,
me
for sneaking out behind your back to dig treasure. I'm eighty-seven. Why not someone ninety-seven or a hundred?"

Piper stared at her old aunt. She was so slim that her body barely made a lump in the thin hospital blanket. "Okay. Name me a ninety-seven-year-old candidate."

Hannah snorted, annoyed. "Always such a pragmatist. Maybe he's not alive."

"What do you mean, a ghost is responsible for the call on my cell phone? Oh, come on, Hannah, even you can't believe that."

"I'm keeping an open mind," she said airily. "And now that I've had a chance to think about it, I'm sure the poison was in the springwater your father delivered yesterday."

"Hannah!" Piper quickly lowered her voice before her father and brothers heard her and burst through the door. She leaned forward, her voice shaking she was so upset. "Hannah, are you suggesting my father poisoned you?"

"Heavens, no. He's always been such a sweet boy. I remember when—"

"Hannah."

She sighed. "Oh, all right. Someone must have gotten to the water before him. It's the only sensible option. I'll have to speak to him."

"No, don't." Piper could just imagine the results of that conversation: a straitjacket for her aunt. "Let me handle this, okay? You just concentrate on feeling better."

She looked as if her last drop of energy had drained out of her. "I have a lovely sage tea I don't suppose the doctors would let me near. They'll be pushing pills and needles at me."

"If you want sage tea, Hannah, I'll bring you sage tea."

"You won't worry about me, will you, dear? I've had a long, long time to think about what I'd do when I got old." She managed a thin, wretched-looking smile. "And here I am."

Piper fought back tears. Yes, here was her aunt, this solid, unwavering presence in her life, finally undeniably old. Who knew how much time she had left?

How much time
they
had left, Piper thought, pushing back any image of her own life without her aunt.

Hannah lifted a hand, and Piper took it, felt how cold and skinny it was. "Now don't you cry," her aunt said. "That won't accomplish anything. We all die, my dear. Some sooner, some later."

"Don't talk like that!"

"Phooey. I'll talk any way I please. It's no mystery to the elderly that they're old, you know. And death—I'm sorry, but it just doesn't scare me. I've seen too many go before me to worry about the great beyond." Another wan smile. "Now. I threw out the springwater. I didn't like the taste. Your father fetched me another bottle. I want you to confiscate it before anyone else can get into my townhouse and replace it, in case it's poisoned, too."

"You want me to have it tested?"

A spark of pleasure in her eyes. "Now you're catching on. And have the empty bottle tested. There might be enough residue of the poison to identify it."

"I'll do it," Piper said quickly. "I'll do anything for you, Hannah. You know that."

"You're a dear girl." Her eyelids were drooping. "I think those damned doctors gave me a chemical sedative. I have that nice valerian decoction at home..."