Night Scents (24 page)

But Hannah Macintosh Frye wasn't after buried treasure because she couldn't accept her parents' deaths. She wanted to find out who'd lured them onto that sandbar, and why, and if her father really had been bringing home treasure to his family. She wanted answers to questions that had haunted her since the age of seven.

Again, Clate had the nagging feeling that she was holding back something, maybe nothing crucial by his standards, but something she didn't want, or couldn't bring herself, to speak about aloud.

Piper didn't have the objectivity to see that however well intentioned her elderly aunt might be, however she might justify her actions, Hannah Frye was manipulating her.

The telephone jerked him from his dark thoughts. It was his assistant in Nashville. "I've done some checking," Mabel Porter said. She still had the sounds of the Cumberland hills in her voice. "No one's saying they called up there and talked to anyone in Frye's Cove. It's become common knowledge, though, that you have a place in one of the last undeveloped areas of Cape Cod."

"So?"

"So, why did you buy it if not to develop it?"

A good question. He could have bought dozens of other properties on Cape Cod more suited to his personality and lifestyle. He didn't have to buy a crumbling eighteenth-century house on a tidal marsh. "It seemed like a good idea at the time." And that was the truth, he realized. He'd had no other rational, logical reason. No wonder people were confused. "Anything else?"

She hesitated.

"What is it, Mabel?"

"Your daddy called."

Only someone from the same, hardscrabble town would have said those words as matter-of-factly. Clate shut his eyes, fought the image of the man in the churchyard. "Any message?"

"He just said to tell you he'd called. He didn't leave a number."

He wouldn't. He wouldn't risk having Clate call back and tell him never to bother him again. "Thank you, Mabel."

Mabel started to say something, but stopped herself. She knew all about Clayton Jackson, Sr. His supposed recovery from alcoholism. His second marriage. His second family. A boy and a girl, half-siblings Clate had never met. Even Irma Bryar had stepped carefully around that one.

His father wanted his firstborn to forgive him, but Clate didn't know if he could, or whether it mattered if he did. Neither of them could relive the past. There was no undoing what was done.

After he hung up, Clate listened to the thunder rumble, even as the sun broke through the clouds. He could see his mother's grave. If she'd lived, would she have transformed her life? Would his father have been able, with Lucinda Jackson alive, to transform his?

For no reason that Clate could fathom, he thought of Hannah Frye. He wondered how he'd feel about his parents after eighty years. Would the rawness and regret and hatred—the love—have eased by then? His father would be long dead. There'd be no more calls, no more chances.

Clate drank more iced tea and pushed on into his musty library, listening to the thunder until it faded into the distance.

Piper reread the magazine article on Clate Jackson before heading off to her appointment in Chatham, a picturesque village on the east side of the Cape. A retired New Jersey optometrist had hired her to help him create an authentic early Cape Cod menu and decor for his new restaurant, beyond, as he put it, clam chowder and watercolors of lighthouses.

On the drive over, she speculated on the past Clate didn't talk about. He'd come to Nashville at sixteen. Sixteen! It had taken that second reading for it to sink in that he'd come without his parents, apparently without any family. As far as she was concerned, the reporter had dropped the ball on this one and should have dug up more on his childhood. But, then, maybe no one else cared.

Quoting from civic speeches, the article praised him for his vision and ability to balance Nashville's need for growth and livability, with an appreciation of its past and an eye toward its future. Clate Jackson was, by every measure, a concrete and logical thinker, a natural businessman who understood, on a gut level, the bottom line and the importance of focusing his energies.

Unlike Piper herself. She wasn't a natural businesswoman. She didn't do five-year plans. She didn't scope out the competition. She didn't do market research. She didn't even have a decent computer for her office, a secretary, a fax machine, or one of those multisectional, compact, specially designed appointment books. She wrote down all her appointments in a datebook featuring Audubon bird prints on the left-hand page, the days of the week on the right. She had a little drugstore spiral notebook for expenses.

Her life just wasn't that complicated. She did work she loved, she tackled new ideas as they came to her, she put in hours that seemed reasonable and didn't interfere with things like watching for piping plovers, walking on the beach at sunrise, taking in the occasional Red Sox game, and watching "Magnum" reruns.

As for money, when she had it, she spent some of it and saved some of it. When she didn't, she resisted dipping into her savings and ate dinner a little more often with her father and brothers.

It wasn't that she lacked drive or ambition, simply that they manifested themselves in different ways in her than they did in Clate Jackson.

She wondered if, deep down, he knew that all those millions didn't take the place of a dinner with friends, a heated argument with a brother, a game of Frisbee with a crowd of nine-year-olds. His money didn't fill whatever hole his childhood had left in him, and there was one, she was sure of that much.

Not that there was anything wrong with money, she thought as she negotiated Chatham's busy, pretty Main Street, hunting for a parking space. From the Fourth of July on through the summer, she'd be lucky to find one. Now, she had only moderate trouble.

She climbed out of her car, didn't bother locking up, and started up Main Street, debating how much to charge the optometrist to distinguish between what was authentic, what was historically accurate, and what was popular and fun, but not necessarily authentic or accurate.

An hour later, she was back on the road, back to speculating on Clate Jackson. The magazine article had provided pictures of his hotel, his sprawling office, the award-winning courtyard in one of his tall buildings, but none of his Nashville home. He had a place on the Cumberland River, not in a fashionable district. Apparently it had a high fence and he owned big dogs.

The man led a life completely different from her own, and it was best if she stopped kissing him in the rain.

She gave a start when her car telephone—a birthday gift from her brothers, who hated worrying she was in a ditch when they couldn't reach her—rang. She grabbed it up, welcoming the distraction.

"You won't leave it alone, will you, Piper?"

She slammed on her brake and pulled over, forcing the car behind her to swerve; the driver gave her the finger as he sped past her.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Someone who's lost patience."

"That makes two of us. Look, I don't know what you want me to do. I—
Wait, dawn you?'

But he—or she or it—had hung up. She screeched back out onto the road, pain gathering at the backs of her eyes, her head spinning. She drove through the center of Frye's Cove in a daze, and when she came to her road, to the pretty section closest to the water, she pulled over and jumped out of her car and hurled her cell phone into the bay.

Missed.

She walked out across the sand, her car door open, sand flying up under her heels, and picked up the phone and hurled it again.

It sank beneath a wave.

And a small voice inside her said, "pollution," and without thinking, she kicked off her shoes and waded out into the water. She scooped with her hands and felt with her feet until she'd located her phone.

On her way back to her car, she dumped the phone in a trash can.

It was in this state of mind that she arrived home and found Clate in her back yard, sitting at her picnic table.

He didn't move, said nothing as he took in her wet pantyhose, the wet hem of her skirt.

Piper could taste the salt water on her mouth. "I lost my cell phone in the bay."

"I see."

"I lost my cell phone in the bay, I had to fish it out, and so I got wet."

Silence.

"It's true," she said.

"What was your cell phone doing in the bay?"

"I threw it there."

His eyes darkened. "You received another threatening call."

She fought back tears she had no intention of shedding. By God, she could take care of herself. She could stand up for Hannah. She didn't need Clate insinuating himself into her relationship with her aunt, into her problems with the anonymous caller, the treasure, her life. Anything.

She stared out at the marsh, could feel fog settling in; her wet clothes were cold against her skin. "I can see why Hannah waited eighty years to tell anyone about that night. Even if she didn't remember until recently, her subconscious could have just been trying to protect her. Telling makes it real. The calls—" Suddenly breathless, she had to gulp for air. "If I don't tell anyone, I can pretend they didn't happen."

Clate didn't respond at once. Whether he was absorbing what she'd said or just waiting for her to continue, she didn't know.

"Except I can't," she said quietly. "I have to look life straight in the eye."

Without responding, Clate got to his feet. It occurred to Piper that he hadn't explained why he was in her yard. She hadn't asked. This trespassing thing obviously wasn't going to be tit for tat.

"Let's go inside," he said. "I'll fix you something to drink. We'll figure out where to go from here."

She nodded, not just because she was too confused and upset to argue. She appreciated having him there.

He followed her into her tiny office adjoining her keeping room and waited while she checked her messages. She could feel him surveying her small office from the doorway, taking in her cluttered antique rolltop oak desk, her drop-front bookcase, her old side-by-side oak filing cabinet, her oak swivel chair. She had sewed a cushion for the chair herself, refinished the furniture, and framed the cross-stitched sampler that hung on the wall, stitched in a careful hand by an Abigail Macintosh in 1803, perhaps an ancestor, perhaps not.

The message tape whirred as it rewound. "Most of my work is hands-on. I don't spend hours and hours at a time in here. I like the view of the flower garden."

"It's pretty," he said.

"Thanks. This house hasn't had as many additions and updates as the Frye—as your house. The kitchen fireplace was plastered over, and the place had been ranchified to a degree, but that's it." She glanced at him, aware of how sexy he was slouched against the door frame. She couldn't remember the last man, other than her father and brothers, and Stan Carlucci and Paul Shepherd, she'd had over. Her social life, somehow, had dried up in recent months. Hannah maintained it was all part of her destiny. "Your house in Nashville is new, isn't it? You built it?"

"That's right. Piper—"

"I know, I know. You're not going to be distracted from tales of threatening phone calls and hurled cell phones." She sighed. "You are nothing if not relentless, Mr. Jackson."

He smiled. "Remember it."

The tape started on its six messages. Tension gripped her neck and shoulders, made her breathing shallow. She had to concentrate to keep from shaking. Clate remained in the doorway, apparently calm.

The first three messages were inquiries about her various classes, the fourth from a friend about sailing next week, the fifth from Andrew, the sixth from her father.

Andrew wanted to know when she planned to come clean about "whatever the hell else you've got going on." Her father wanted to know if she had any idea why her brothers ground their teeth whenever her name came up.

"Well." She rolled her shoulders in an effort to uncrick the muscles. "Nothing nasty at least. But whoever's harassing me has been careful not to let his voice be recorded."

Clate drew himself up from the doorjamb. He looked every inch the hard, competent, I'11-take-charge-now male that Piper had long vowed she would avoid. "That's why you got the charming rap excerpt yesterday. What did he say in this last call?"

"Nothing much, just that he was losing patience."

"That's enough."

"I still can't be sure it's a man."

"Understood."

His quiet tone, his easy stance, were not to be misjudged. He was alert, processing every nuance of what she said, how she looked, what his next move ought to be. And he wasn't happy about what he was hearing. No question. But he was controlled, measured in his responses. He wasn't the sort of man who exploded.

Piper bit back a touch of panic at the image—it was almost like watching herself from a camera—of her in her car, driving along in her business outfit, feeling okay about her ability to handle her family, Clate, her work. Until the call. Until she'd heard that unrecognizable, mean, insidious voice on the other end of the line and knew the calls weren't going to stop just because she wanted them to stop.

She shivered in her wet clothes. "I could use a cup of hot tea."

Without a word, Clate returned to her keeping-room kitchen. Piper followed, feeling a bit steadier. It was her favorite room. It had a warm, cheerful, homey feeling whether she was alone or had a crowd in. Clate was a crowd all by himself. He got the copper kettle off her stove while she stood by the huge fireplace. On chilly days, she kept a kettle of water simmering on the fire. She'd hung handmade pot holders on hooks, had set her favorite wingback chair close to the fire, and had a soft-cushioned loveseat for guests and times when she wanted to stretch out with a book, relishing her quiet life. She would imagine herself living out her days here, alone.

"Go on upstairs and change," Clate said in that quiet drawl. "I'll make tea."

"The tea bags are in that little brown crock, and a mug—"

"I'll manage, Piper." He walked over to her, grabbed her by the elbows, turned her back to him, and whispered in her ear from behind. "Go upstairs."