Sleep eluded Clate after he went back inside. He put on a pot of coffee and sat at his rickety antique kitchen table while it brewed. The kitchen was located in a one-story ell, a later addition to the main body of the old house. A double, small-paned window looked out on the terraced gardens bursting with late spring flowers, the early morning sun glinting on everything from creamy yellow day lilies to clumps of black-purple irises.
The smell of the strong, dark coffee eased his tension. He hadn't met Hannah Frye in person. He knew she was elderly and presumed she was eccentric, given that she'd sold him a house that had been in her husband's family for more than two centuries. Everyone in town, apparently, had assumed she would live there until her death, then the house would go to her husband's granddaughter by his first marriage. But she'd had other ideas, and the granddaughter apparently hadn't minded. Since he didn't plan to involve himself in the affairs of the people of Frye's Cove, Clate didn't care.
Nor did he care about living in an historic cightccnth-ccntury house. He knew nothing about the Fryes and little about Cape Cod. He couldn't say why he'd even picked New England, except that it was far removed from the pressures of his life in Nashville.
He poured himself a mug of coffee and returned to the drop-leaf table, staring again down across the terraced gardens toward the water. He'd opened windows when he came in late the night before, and now he could hear the gentle wash of the incoming tide, smell the salt on the breeze, hear the water and shorebirds calling. Privacy, isolation, solitude. After a long, intense winter, their promise had finally lured him to this quiet, beautiful spot.
All he had to do now was to keep his nosy neighbor at bay.
With a heavy sigh, he leaned back in his antique chair and sipped his coffee, shifting his attention to his new kitchen. New to him, at any rate. Except for minor repairs, he guessed the house in general hadn't been touched in twenty years, at least. The kitchen appliances were in reasonable working order, and the cupboards were a rich, dark cherry, built around windows and doorways that had sagged and settled with time. He doubted if there was a level square foot in the entire house. Whatever minimal work they'd done over the centuries, the Fryes had preserved the architectural integrity of their historic house: the wide pineboard floors, the stone fireplace, the post-and-beam construction, the moldings and wainscoting, the suffocatingly low ceilings. No expert in old houses, Clate knew enough about construction to realize that much more could be done to update the place without sacrificing its authentic characteristics. But he didn't expect he'd bother, not for a while, perhaps not at all.
He set down his mug. It wasn't old-lady fussy, but of sturdy, dark brown pottery. Leave it to a Yankee, he thought, suddenly amused.
And he thought of his trespasser.
Piper Macintosh. A hell of a name. Yankee to the core, no doubt about it. Green eyed and porcelain skinned, she had a fetching spray of freckles across her nose and dark, straight hair with a hint of red. She hadn't expected him and didn't like him. She'd clearly planned her herb-stealing escapade for when he wasn't around. Made sense. But he'd decided to leave Nashville suddenly, on impulse, as if running off to Cape Cod could postpone the inevitable.
But it couldn't. He'd learned that lesson early in life. Running left you with the same problems, just different scenery.
He shot to his feet, refilled his mug. Gulls swooped and swarmed down in the marsh. He'd have to get used to the lay of the land up here, the smells, the sounds, the colors. A walk on the beach and a trip to town for provisions would occupy him for the day. If necessary, he'd again remind his one and only neighbor that her aunt no longer owned the property next door. Things changed.
Eventually, he supposed, he'd have to decide what to do with Hannah Frye's weird little garden, the poisonous plants, the skull-and-crossbones markers.
But not today. Today he would feel his way into life on Cape Cod and wait for the call from home.
He hadn't lived in the tiny, hardscrabble village in the Cumberland hills where he'd grown up since he'd left at sixteen. But like it or not, it was home, and when the call came, he knew he wouldn't be ready.
* * *
Chapter 2
A hearty breakfast of homemade oat bread smeared with chunky peanut butter and honey helped clarify Piper's thinking about her new neighbor. She reluctantly decided that Clate Jackson hadn't responded that unreasonably to finding a woman digging up his garden at the crack of dawn. Perhaps she'd overreacted just a tad. She had willfully and deliberately trespassed on his property. He'd had no idea who was in his back yard at four in the morning. All in all, she supposed she was lucky he hadn't hit her over the head with a garden hoe and asked questions later.
Her defensiveness had sprung from an uneasy mix of embarrassment, irritation, and worry. Embarrassment because she'd been caught doing something truly stupid. Irritation because Clate Jackson had different ideas about property and neighborli-ness from hers.