With a shudder, she slipped back outside and took several deep, cleansing breaths before heading to her strawberry patch. She needed to clear her mind and consider her options instead of doing something precipitous, like marching next door or, worse, calling her father and brothers or Ernie at the police station. Berry picking, she hoped, would do the trick.
A narrow, well-traveled footpath took Clate through a break in the hedge that divided his and Piper Macintosh's property, then up through tall, wild grasses, the marsh creeping further up the gentle slope toward her house. None of the Frye House's terraced gardens and lush grass here. The marsh gave way to a yard that was more meadow than suburban lawn. He noticed wild-looking gardens of vegetables, herbs, flowers, trellises of pink roses, a grape arbor, bird feeders, a rooster weather-vane, a neatly stacked woodpile. A brightly colored windsock danced in the breeze from a low-hanging branch of an oak.
Clate spotted her in her vegetable garden, a floppy straw hat protecting her face from the strong midmorning sun. He didn't think she'd seen him. She seemed absorbed in her work. As he came closer, he saw that she was picking strawberries, her small hands moving rapidly, surely, among the low vines.
"Nice garden," he said.
Her head shot up, and her hat fell back off her head as her eyes, their green blending in with their environment, focused on him. Her hat had a long, loose, ropy tie that kept it from falling into the strawberries. The sunlight struck her chestnut hair, and she stood up and brushed her hands on her berry-stained shirt, sending an arrow of lust straight to its mark. Clate felt his throat tighten. Shapely breasts, flat stomach, taut legs. A pity the eighty-seven-year-old aunt wasn't his neighbor instead of the niece. He hadn't come north for this kind of distraction.
"Thank you." But her smile didn't quite reach her eyes, and he remembered her troubled look yesterday when he'd stopped alongside the road. "It's just enough garden for me to manage on my own."
He pushed back questions about her troubled state; it was none of his business. "It's organic?"
She nodded, some of her obvious distress easing. "A lot of it's just knowing what to plant where to discourage pests and promote growth. Synergy. That and a few of Hannah's natural remedies work fine for me. But I can always run down to the grocery if the deer and the bugs get everything."
"Your strawberries look as if they've done well. I didn't mean to interrupt."
"No problem. My back was starting to give out anyway. What can I do for you?"
Picking strawberries in the June sun, Cape Cod Bay sprawled at her feet. Clate inhaled. Life could be worse. He remembered Irma ladeling sweet, juicy strawberries onto warm biscuits, lecturing him about family and community and duty, ever the idealist, ever the believer in what he could do and who he could be, and he felt himself withdraw into a grief that had caught him by surprise. Irma Bryar's death at eighty-nine was not unexpected, and yet she had been a presence in his life for so long, she'd cared about him in a way his own parents were incapable of caring, that he simply couldn't imagine what his life was going to be like without her. Never mind that he seldom saw her, that he'd gone way beyond even what she'd imagined he could do with his life. Irma had always been there. And now she wasn't.
He saw Piper's eyes narrowing on him, knew he must look haggard and on edge.
"I came to ask your opinion, if you don't mind." He straightened, reined in his grief, his purely physical reaction to her. That had been a distraction, nothing more. "I need to leave town today."
"Business?"
"No. Personal."
"Oh." She wanted to ask more; he could see it in her expression. But his tone had cut off further questioning. "Well, I can look after your place while you're gone."
"That's not necessary. I just wanted your take on a man who stopped by yesterday and offered his services as caretaker. Tuck O'Rourke. Do you know him?"
"Sure, I know Tuck." She scooped up her basket of strawberries, snatched up a fat one and twisted off its green top, popping it into her mouth. He watched her swallow. "He's a good guy. Solid, hardworking, not a whole lot of imagination."
"Honest?"
"So far as I know. You want him just to mow and stuff like that or really do some work on the place?"
"I'm considering having some landscaping and other work done."
She frowned. "Landscaping? Like what?"
Her matter-of-fact curiosity took on a proprietary tone. Clate cursed himself for asking her opinion. He'd operated on gut instinct from the time he could walk. He could have decided about Tuck O'Rourke on his own. "I'm not sure yet. The place needs a lot of work."