"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."