Night Scents (34 page)

Piper's eyes narrowed, cautious, suspicious. "Yes."

"She was. You'll understand why in a second. Piper, she saw the shadowy figure that night. Or thinks she did."

"It was in her dream?"

He nodded. "She's convinced this dream is really her memory— her seven-year-old self talking to her eighty-seven-year-old self, I guess."

"Then she recognized this figure? She knows—"

"She recognized the man who was out there that night, in her dream, burying a chest in the Frye back yard."

"Good God. Who?"

"Jason Frye."

Piper didn't respond. Clate wasn't sure she was even breathing. She simply stared at him, not a tear in either green eye.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I should have waited to tell you."

"No." She shook her head. "No, you shouldn't have waited. I'm just—I just don't know what to make of this one. I don't know if I believe Hannah more or believe her less now. I mean, she and Jason were married for seven years."

"That could be the whole point."

Piper frowned, rubbed her forehead. "Yes, she could be having this dream now that she's out of her husband's house as a way of coming to terms with some new realization that she married the wrong man. This treasure stuff could all be metaphorical."

"A trick of the mind to get her to acknowledge that she and Jason weren't happy together?"

"Exactly."

He got a filter down from the cabinet, set it in the coffeemaker, and scooped in coffee grounds. "And it's something she couldn't do until she'd moved out of here and I'd moved in."

"Apparently not. Her subconscious wouldn't let her deal with the fact that she and Jason weren't happy together while she was still living in his house."

"So why have you hunt treasure?"

Piper's shoulders sagged, making her look even smaller in his robe. She turned back to the window and his miraculous view. Some of the spark of energy had gone out of her voice. "She doesn't know if her dream's a trick of her imagination or if it's real, an event that actually happened. Maybe she wants me to prove it wasn't Jason that night. I don't know. Why didn't she just tell me?"

"To keep you objective. It's nothing that we can solve now." He flipped on the coffeemaker, half an eye on Piper. He was still worried shock would settle in. "Drink your tea. Your family will be descending at any moment."

Liddy arrived first with a suitcase of clothes and two preadolescent boys who wanted to know all about the fire. Were you really up on the roof, Aunt Piper? Did anything blow up? They pelted her with questions, and she tried to answer them, until their mother ran them outside.

"Jesus, Piper," Liddy Macintosh breathed. "The whole town's hopping over this one. Stan Carlucci flagged me down and told me to tell you he'll help you in any way he can."

"He can stop saying Hannah's trying to poison him."

Liddy managed a weak grin. "I think he was thinking more in terms of a basket of fruit. Here." She dropped the suitcase onto the floor. "I'm bigger through the behind than you, but I think most of this stuff 11 fit. I brought a couple of pairs of shorts, jeans, sweatshirts, T-shirts. I called a friend, and she's off to the store to pick you up some new underwear." She glanced at Clate, who busied himself getting down mugs, then shifted her gaze back to her sister-in-law. "No fun wearing baggy undies."

"Thanks, Liddy."

"No problem. I also grabbed an extra toothbrush and some cleansing cream Hannah gave me." She smiled encouragingly. "That should help you feel at home."

Before Piper could reply, the front doorbell rang. Liddy went off to answer it as if the place were hers, which was fine with Clate, who understood he was living in a house that the people of Frye's Cove, in general, looked upon as their own. Hannah must not have spent much of her widowhood alone. When Liddy returned, she had a box of doughnuts. A present from Mrs. Carlucci. Clate had the feeling this was only the beginning.

Liddy put the doughnuts on a plate and dug out a big Thermos that Clate didn't even know he had, poured in the coffee, and made another pot. The friend arrived with the new underwear. The boys floated back in, tried to make off with two doughnuts each, were reprimanded, and satisfied themselves with one each.

Sally and Paul Shepherd turned up with a big pot of clam chowder from the tavern at their inn. They expressed their shock and dismay at Piper's ordeal. "At least you and your father and brothers know how to fix up the place," Paul said. "It's salvageable, isn't it?"

Piper nodded. More color was returning to her face. She liked the activity, Clate thought, and appreciated the attention, the fact that people cared. "I think so. It could have been much worse. They'll be over with their report soon."

Sally sat at the table, turning down Liddy's offer of coffee and a doughnut. "It's true, then, that you ran back inside to shut down the dampers?" She seemed amazed, and she struck Clate as a woman with a certain strength of character, an almost prudish sense of propriety, but without real courage.

"I acted without thinking."

"Oh, Piper! You could have passed out with all the smoke."

"I know. It was dumb."

"But you probably saved your house," Paul said, standing above his wife.

Piper nibbled at a honey-covered doughnut. Rising, Sally laid a hand on her husband's elbow, ladylike, utterly composed. "We should go, Paul." She smiled kindly at Piper. "If you need anything, please don't hesitate to call on us. We certainly have room at the inn if you need a place to stay."

"Thank you." Again, tears threatened. "Everyone's been great."

As the Shepherds left, the Macintosh men arrived. They smelled of smoke and had splotches of soot on their hands, arms, faces, clothes. Andrew looked as if he'd crawled up the fireplace. He retreated to Clate's downstairs bathroom to wash up. The other two washed up at the kitchen sink, much to Liddy's irritation. Benjamin grinned at his wife. "Pour us coffee, woman, and keep quiet."

She kneed him in the thigh, muttered something to him that sounded pretty much like "go to hell," and they both laughed. Benjamin did, however, pour his own coffee. Liddy offered him and her father-in-law doughnuts.

They were eating, all talking at once, when Hannah made her entrance. She'd gone home for a jar of a greenish tea that she insisted Piper drink immediately, without benefit of a cup, heat, or sugar. Piper opened the jar and sniffed. "What is it?"

"A restorative mixture."

"Of what?"

"I don't remember, exactly. I wrote it down somewhere. Oh, for heaven's sake. I drank some myself last night, and I'm still here." She gave a haughty toss of her head. "I didn't poison myself. That, presumably, was the work of whoever set fire to your house."

Andrew emerged from the hallway. "What was that?"

They were off and running. Poisons, arson, threatening phone calls, who hadn't told whom what, who was still holding back pertinent information. This last was reiterated by each Macintosh man, eyes on Piper and Hannah, who ignored them. Listening carefully, Clate gathered that Piper's house was salvageable, but unlivable at the moment. Part of the roof had burned, and the wall around the chimney on the second floor had caught fire, forcing the fire fighters to rip it up. Smoke damage had probably ruined most of what Piper owned, although some stuff downstairs, especially closer to her kitchen and back rooms, might be okay.

Liddy Macintosh dipped chowder into mugs and bowls. She smiled at Clate. "You'll get used to it. The more worried they are, the louder they shout."

He leaned against the counter, watching Piper hold her own with her father and brothers. They never crossed the line with her, and in their own way, they treated her as an equal. She'd have to bear up under their scrutiny and high standards, just like anyone else. And they under hers.

"She'd be right there yelling with Benjamin," Liddy said, "if Andrew had just nearly gotten himself killed trying to keep his house from burning down."

"Tight-knit family."

She laughed. "Don't I know it."

When they launched into a rehash of everything they'd just gone over, Clate took his mug of coffee outside. The boys were rampaging through his yard with a familiarity that was disconcerting him less and less. Hannah, perhaps, had done a disservice to them all by selling this place.

She materialized next to him; he hadn't even heard the door open. Wisps of white hair floated around her gently wrinkled face. She said, "I assume you've told Piper it was Jason I saw that night, out here."

"I told her."

"And you're both even more uncertain of my memory now." She wandered down from the terrace, through the lush grass toward her enclosed herb garden. Tall flowers—pale pink, dark purple, frothy white, creamy yellow—glinted in the last of the evening sun. She glanced back at Clate, and he noticed there was no kerchief or crocheted snood today, just pins and cloisonne combs. "If Jason was responsible for my parents' deaths, I want to know. I
have
to know. What I saw that night could have been coincidence. Maybe he was burying something that had nothing to do with the shipwreck. Maybe I'm misinterpreting what I remember."

"Is that what you believe?"

"This isn't about what I believe. It's about what really happened here. The truth."

"What about what's happening now? The calls, the rest of it."

"They're related." She spoke with conviction. "I just don't know how. But Jason's dead. He didn't set Piper's house on fire."

"So you really do believe the fire was set?"

She eyed him. "Don't you?"

He didn't answer at once. He could hear the boys whooping as they raced down through the marsh, the family inside talking more quietly now, occasional laughter punctuating their conversation. His head ached. He hadn't noticed before. It was the tension, he knew. It was caring about these people. About Piper. He wasn't accustomed to these sorts of complications in his life.

"Yes," he said at last. "I do."

The screen door banged open and shut, and Piper burst out onto the terrace in baggy jeans, an oversized sweatshirt, and, presumably, new underwear delivered by Liddy's friend. She was carrying a fresh mug. "Hannah, this tea is swill. Absolute swill. I'm not going to dump it on the grass because it'll probably kill it."

"I never said it had a pleasant taste."

"I'd rather drink out of a mud puddle." She fastened her eyes— a vivid, lively green now—on Clate and thrust the mug up at him. "You want to try?"

He laughed. "Thank you, I'll pass."

"You're looking much better," her aunt said. "I think the tea's working."

"I had two sips."

"Perfect."

Piper let that one go and turned to Clate. "Did you show her the missing herbs?" When he nodded, she waved her mug at her great-aunt. "Come, Hannah, and tell me what misery the missing herbs can cause and cure. I want to be ready, just in case someone poisons
my
water."

Clate left them to it, and he walked down his sloping lawn, trying to get some space around him. He could hear car doors shutting, more people arriving. Who the hell would show up with chowder and doughnuts if his place in Tennessee burned down? Nobody he didn't ask to show up, that was for sure. Another indication of how different Piper's world was from his own.

She eased in beside him, not quite touching him. "My family and friends tend to hover in a crisis. When it gets claustrophobic, I send them home." She sighed out at the view. "I hate being in the position of needing their support."

"You'd rather be the one bringing the chowder."

She smiled, turning to him. "It was good chowder. Did you have any?"

He shook his head. He wanted to slide his arm around her, hold her close, ease the last edges of panic and shock out of her, but he could feel her restraint. Leaning against him at the picnic table, in the thick of the crisis, was one thing. Now the shock had receded, and her family and friends were watching, on alert. In spite of her straightforwardness about almost everything else, she was reserved, even self-conscious, about her romantic life, even when it was uncomplicated and unconfiised, which, with him, it wasn't. Clate understood. Enough, for now, that they just walk together.

"You must be climbing the walls," she said. "All these people, everyone making themselves right at home. Getting a little claustrophobic yourself, Clate?"

"Just carving out some space for a few minutes."

"I can leave you alone."

"No." He glanced at her and smiled. "I like having you in my space."

She almost managed a laugh. "You're a devil, Clate Jackson. Well, I told them I was going to look at my house. I declined all offers to join me. I don't need a lecture right now on eighteenth-century chimney construction and plaster replacement. I just want to see the place."

He gave her a long look, saw past the fatigue, the shock. "Bullshit." He drawled it out, lightened it with a wryness in his tone. "You want to check on Hannah's shoebox and your research notes."

She grinned up at him, unrepentant. "Don't you?"

He laughed. "Lead the way, Miss Macintosh."

The shoebox was there, smoky smelling but uncharred. All her notes—her notebook, scraps of paper, printouts, copies—were gone.

Her throat raw from the residual effects of the smoke, Piper stared down at her desk. Her mind had gone numb. Clate was checking the rest of the house, just to make sure she hadn't put them somewhere else and, in all the hoopla of the day, forgotten. But she hadn't forgotten. She'd brought everything into her office and left it on her rolltop desk, and now it was gone.

"Why not take the letters, too?" She was musing out loud, trying to force herself into clear, logical thinking. One step at a time. That was all she needed to manage.

But Clate was there, in the doorway. "Because he wanted to know how much you knew. You said yourself the stuff in the shoebox doesn't prove there's any treasure or give any clues where it might be." He was silent a moment; Piper, who hadn't turned around, could sense his concentration. He went on, "I'm wondering if he already knows where it is."