Night Scents (4 page)

Piper was no exception. Only her reasons were different. Having lost her own mother at two, she identified with her great-aunt in a way few others could. Hannah was mother, aunt, friend —someone who understood Piper and accepted her unconditionally. The bond they shared was unlike any Piper had with anyone else, including her father and brothers. Much as she loved them, they weren't Hannah.

Which explained why Piper had ventured out at four in the morning for valerian root.

She set her backpack on Hannah's gleaming new kitchen table and fished out the foul-smelling stuff.

Her old aunt beamed. "Wonderful! Just set it on the counter."

Piper obliged, aware of Hannah's watchful eye. She was a tiny woman, slim and snowy haired. Over the years, her fair skin had taken on the quality of crumpled crepe paper. Her eyes were as green as those of any Macintosh, infamous or celebrated, her approach to life as optimistic and impractical. She hadn't married until sixty-two. Her many years as a single woman had only further solidified the general tolerance for her eccentricities. She'd kept books for the town for forty years. Everyone in Frye's Cove knew her; she knew everyone.

Her most noticeable eccentricity was her style of dress. After her husband died, Hannah, then not quite seventy, had taken up wearing long dresses distinctly nineteenth century in design, which she sewed herself, almost entirely with needle and thread, while sitting by the fire during Cape Cod's long, cold winters. Sometimes Piper would join her and help, feeling as if she were stuck in a chapter of
Little Women
as the fire crackled and the winter winds howled.

Today's dress was a high-collared cornflower calico that made her look as if she'd just stepped off the stagecoach. It made no sense to Piper that a woman so attuned to the past would give up her antique house for life in a posh housing complex for the elderly.

Unless she was willing to believe Hannah's mutterings about spells and the love of a lifetime and one rich, unsociable Tennessean.

"Which I'm not," she said under her breath.

Hannah frowned. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You look tired," her aunt pronounced. "Would you care for some tea?"

Tea in Hannah's kitchen usually involved experimental concoctions and potions and odd bits of dried things floating on top. Seldom did it involve the Twinings family. Piper politely shook her head. "No, thanks. I'll just have a glass of water."

She filled a new, inexpensive glass with water from the tap—she didn't necessarily trust Hannah's springwater—and leaned against the kitchen counter as she drank. Her aunt examined the valerian root, but Piper wasn't fooled. "Hannah, I know what you're thinking."

"You met him, didn't you?"

"Yes, unfortunately, I did. He caught me red-handed. He wasn't very happy about it."

"He wouldn't be," Hannah said knowledgeably.

"You've never even met the man! How would you know how he'd—" She caught herself and held up a hand before her aunt could get started. "No, never mind. I don't want to know. Hannah, you know I love you, and you know I'd do anything in the world for you, but this notion of yours about Clate Jackson and me is just —" She struggled for the right words. "It's just plain loony."

Unoffended, Hannah settled into an oak chair at her kitchen table. "Tell me about him."

"There's nothing to tell. He heard me digging in
his
garden, came out to investigate, caught me, maintained I was trespassing and stealing, warned me not to do it again, and let me go."

"Let you go? He had you in his clutches?"

Piper contained an unexpected smile. "No, he just threatened to call the police."

Hannah seemed disappointed. "Why on earth would he have called the police?"

"I was trespassing, Hannah."

"Phooey."

"You sold your house to him. You can't come and go as you please anymore, and neither can I. This is the last valerian root you'll have picked before dawn unless you manage to plant some off your deck."

"The committee would consider it a weed."

The committee might have a point. "Look, Hannah, I know this isn't easy for you—"

But her aunt wasn't listening. "Was he pleasant?"

"He wasn't totally insufferable, but he was not in any sense of the word pleasant." She quickly dismissed an image of his searing eyes, his tousled dark hair, and stubble of beard. "He made it quite clear he expects to be left alone and didn't come to Cape Cod to mingle with the locals."

"You're his only neighbor—"

"He's rich enough that he doesn't need neighbors."

"Nobody's that rich," Hannah said with a sniff.

"Well, he obviously chose your house because of its isolation. I wouldn't count on him indulging the eccentricities of its former owner."

Her aunt blinked in surprise. "I've never been an eccentric."

There wasn't a person in Frye's Cove and probably not on Cape Cod who didn't think Hannah Frye was an eccentric, one of the few things saving her from having her mental fitness openly challenged. As it was, there were stirrings. Worrisome stirrings. Piper pushed them aside. "I'm sorry you were wrong about Clate Jackson."

"Wrong? Oh, I'm not wrong. He's the man for you, Piper. What does he look like?"

Piper hesitated, a mistake.

Her aunt pounced, smiling. "Ah."

"It was still dark, I wasn't really paying attention, I couldn't—"

"Nonsense."

But Piper didn't want to admit that she'd paid very close attention to Clate Jackson in his tattered jeans and unbuttoned denim shirt. "He's not particularly good looking, I can tell you that much."

"He wouldn't be. According to my vision—"

"Hannah." Piper gritted her teeth. "You know I don't believe in that stuff."

Hannah calmly tucked wisps of white hair into a hand-crocheted bun cover. "It doesn't matter what you believe. Your destiny is your destiny. And so is his."

"I don't believe you put a spell on him."

She snorted. "This isn't 'Bewitched,' Piper. I don't put spells on people. I merely appeal to the life force and—well, I won't get started."

"Thank you."

Hannah had been muttering about romance, destiny, vision, and the stars for weeks. In Piper's estimation, it was all an attempt to justify selling her house to the first buyer willing to meet her price and set her up with a microwave, new dishes, new furniture, good wiring, town water, and a bathroom with a whirlpool tub.

"Fate and destiny don't have anything to do with Clate Jackson buying the Frye House," Piper said. "You just got tired of dealing with extension cords."

"I have at least one outlet on every wall. Do you want to see?"

Piper laughed in spite of her frustrations and concerns. Okay, so her aunt was not only incorrigible and maybe dotty, but she was also very happy in her new life. That had to count for something. "I'll pass, thank you."

Hannah grinned. "Come, Piper, sit down. I have a nice peppermint tea that will soothe your nerves. You need to calm down after your first encounter with your Mr. Jackson."

"He's not my Mr. Jackson. He just wants to be left alone."

"No." She spoke with certainty, her faith in her vision, or whatever it was, unshakable. "On the contrary. That's the last thing he wants."

"You haven't even met him!"

"Not in this life, no."

That did it. Piper headed for the doorway. "I've got a full day ahead. Enjoy your valerian root, Hannah. Don't do any mischief with it."

"Mischief? Me? What do you mean, Piper?"

She glanced back and saw, amazingly, that her aunt was truly mystified. "I mean Stan Carlucci."

Hannah waved a bony hand. "That fool. I served him a perfectly ordinary medicinal tea that was meant to benefit him and everyone else in town. We'd all have an easier time of it if Stan Carlucci had improved digestion."

Carlucci was a recently elected member of the board of selectmen whose ideas about the future of Frye's Cove differed from Hannah's. She generally considered people who disagreed with her narrow-minded and dead wrong, but at least she would grudgingly acknowledge their right to hold an opinion different from hers. Stan Carlucci, however, tested her ability to agree to disagree, particularly when he sneered at the way Frye's Cove used to do things, namely when Hannah was keeping the town's books. She'd taken his comments as a personal affront. Possibly they had been meant as such. A relative newcomer to town, Stan Carlucci didn't have the benevolent view of Hannah-as-orphan that so many did.

"He said he had cramps for three days," Piper pointed out.

"If he had a more settled temperament, he would have been fine. He was even crankier than I had anticipated. The tea helped bring his system into balance."

"Maybe so, Hannah, but he's telling anyone who'll listen that you tried to poison him."

She snorted. "If I'd tried to poison him, I'd have succeeded, make no mistake about it."

"Hannah—"

"Oh, Piper, stop fretting. I am in full possession of my faculties. I despise Stan Carlucci's know-it-allness and his disdain for others and his politics. But I gave him that particular tea because I believed it would help him and for no other reason."

Even if she was telling the truth as she saw it, everyone in town still believed that she'd intended to give Stan Carlucci cramps and diarrhea. He was ruthless, divisive, and insulting, and many rued the day they'd voted him into office and couldn't wait to vote him out again. But that didn't mean anyone would touch anything Hannah Frye offered in the way of food and drink. Right now, most were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt because it was Stan Carlucci calling her a menace. A few more similar incidents, however, and people would start seriously wondering about the state of Hannah Frye's mental health.

That scared Piper. Conjuring up a Tennessean for her niece and compelling her to dig valerian root at the crack of dawn were just the sort of incidents that Stan Carlucci needed to lend weight to his assessment that her aunt was a dangerous nut. But it wasn't his accusations that worried Piper, it was the possibility that her aunt could be on her way to becoming a menace to herself and her community. In which case something would have to be done to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else.

"Piper, Piper." Hannah sighed, shaking her head, as if reading her niece's thoughts. "I'm not out where the trains don't run just yet. Now, I know you must have a million things to do today, but I do want to talk to you about something."

Piper groaned to herself. Now what? She manufactured a smile. "Sure, Hannah. What's up?"

"Last night was a test."

"A test? What do you mean?"

"I wanted to see if you could sneak onto my—onto Mr. Jackson's property at night and do a bit of digging. I needed the valerian root, so it was a good choice."

"It didn't have to be dug before full light?"

"Oh, it did, just not for medicinal or spiritual reasons." She smiled, pleased with herself. "For practical reasons. I wanted to see if this could be done."

Piper was getting a bad feeling about where her aunt was going with this one. "Well, it couldn't. I was caught."

"But you'll know what to do next time."

"Uh-uh. There's not going to be any next time."

Hannah shook her head, confident. "Oh, but there will be. You see, Piper, I need you to dig up my parents' buried treasure."

"Hannah?"

She got jauntily to her feet. "I'll make tea, dear. We'll talk."

Clate pulled his car into a narrow space in front of the pharmacy in the village of Frye's Cove. Earlier, on his way to the grocery up near one of Cape Cod's main thoroughfares, he could have sworn he had spotted his next-door neighbor streaking along on a mountain bike. It was a weekday. Friday. She'd been up at four stealing herbs, then off on her bicycle by midmorning. Didn't the woman have a job?

He pushed aside the thought. He didn't want to get involved with the locals. He knew next to nothing about his neighbor and would have preferred to know less than he did. He was here on a much-needed break. He meant only to get acquainted with his new property and try to understand the strange impulse that had led him to buy an eighteenth-century house on Cape Cod.

He'd learned to rely on his instincts. They, coupled with hard work and a bit of luck, had served him well over the years. But usually he understood, if sometimes only in retrospect, the source of his impulses, the logic and rationality behind buying a rundown block in Nashville that he'd rehabilitated into prime office space, the vacant, trashy lot near Opryland where he'd built his exclusive hotel. He could trace those decisions back to concrete information, rumors he'd heard, studies he'd glanced at, musings while driving—a maze of facts and suppositions that ultimately made sense.

Buying a sagging antique house on Cape Cod made no sense. Not even in retrospect.

"You're Clate Jackson, aren't you?"

A tall, dusty man with dark reddish hair approached him on the steps of the pharmacy. He had a familiar look about him. Clate said, "Yes, I'm Jackson."

"Heard you were in town. Thought I recognized you from a description someone gave me. I'm Andrew Macintosh."

Another Macintosh. Was everyone in town related? Clate decided not to ask who had provided the description of him. Frye's Cove, he was coming to discover, was the sort of town where talk of newcomers spread fast. He shook hands with Andrew Macintosh, who appeared to be a few years older than he was; his hands were thick and callused, as Clate's had been when he'd worked construction. "Pleased to meet you. Is Piper Macintosh—"

"My sister. She has another brother and a father in town, too." Deep green eyes assessed Clate with remarkable frankness; Andrew Macintosh didn't smile. "We look after her."

So, he was serving notice that his little sister wasn't just out on her isolated road all by herself; she had meaty men folk checking up on her. Clate didn't blame the man. In Andrew Macintosh's place, he'd do the same. "Tight family?"

"Very."

"That's nice. I doubt if I'll be seeing much of your sister. I'll be in and out of town. I have no intention of becoming a permanent resident."