Clate smiled knowingly. "Sure. You do that."
The Russian princess stuff almost had Clate on the phone with his realtor the next morning. He'd get rid of his place on Cape Cod and buy in Wyoming or Montana, find a quiet, peaceful Caribbean island. Hell, he'd do without a retreat. It was too damned complicated with his work and his dogs anyway. He belonged in Tennessee, not up here with all the sand and sea and crazy Yankees.
"Actually," Piper had said, "I doubt if she was a real Russian princess. She might have been just a baroness."
Gritting his teeth, he ducked under the rotting wisteria arbor in what purportedly was his back yard. It felt more like Hannah Frye's. He imagined her standing out on the terrace in one of her costumes, perhaps remembering yet not remembering the night her parents died.
A hell of a lot more convenient if she'd done her treasure digging before he'd moved in.
He wasn't convinced this sudden recovered memory wasn't just a ploy on the old woman's part to throw him and her niece together.
Still, here he was, under the wisteria.
The blossoms hung in thick, violet clusters, their sweet scent almost overpowering. Maybe Piper was humoring Hannah to keep her from finding someone else to dig for her buried treasure, meanwhile trying to establish some reason to believe in her recovered memory.
It wasn't treasure Hannah Frye wanted. It was clarity, answers, to what she saw that dark, terrible night eighty years ago. Clate could understand that compulsion. He remembered coming home from a solitary fishing trip when he was twelve and hearing his parents fighting, yelling, cursing, hitting, throwing things, both still just in their twenties. Alcohol, youth, ignorance, poverty, irresponsibility. They'd all taken their toll on them, on him. Yet he'd often wondered, less and less now, how it had all come to be. He'd tried to make sense where there was none to be made. In her own way, Hannah Macintosh Frye could be doing the same thing.
He breathed in the sweet smells of the wisteria, remembered the rambling wisteria Irma had on sagging trellises. He'd talked over these same issues with her on her front porch, after she'd insisted he wash up and dispose of any gum, cigarettes, and chewing tobacco. Instead of discussing his parents, she'd discussed books. Instead of answering his questions, she'd asked more. Clarity, she would say, was something one discovered, not something one had imposed upon one.
He shook off his sudden nostalgia, the nagging grief he felt for a woman he'd seen only sporadically in the past eighteen years. What if he'd seen her every day, as Piper Macintosh and Hannah Frye saw each other?
"Hell," he grunted, tearing himself back to the present. The salty breeze, the cloying wisteria, the prospect of a treasure chest buried under his feet. He saw that Piper had left her shovel behind after all. He thought of her anonymous caller. Hannah might not be interested in gems, gold, Faberge eggs, but that didn't mean someone else wasn't.
He grabbed the shovel and stabbed it into the soft ground, not sure what the devil he thought he was doing. The day was warm, a bit cooler under the wisteria. Piper's shovel was well worn, and he imagined her tilling her garden with it, imagined the tightening of the muscles in her legs, the perspiration beading on her brow.
He turned over a spadeful of dirt, then another. The soil was sandy and porous, not hard digging. He pulled off his shirt. If he'd shipwrecked, robbed, and left two people to die, he wouldn't have buried his bootie in someone's damned back yard. He'd have gone out into the woods, far away from the prying eyes of a lonely seven-year-old. And if he had been dumb enough to leave treasure buried under a wisteria, he wouldn't have left it there for eighty years.
Before long, he had a three-foot hole dug. Sweat poured down his back, bugs buzzed around him. He was breathing hard. He'd worked fast, furiously, as if physical exertion alone could keep him from applying the slightest bit of logic to what he was doing.
He threw down Piper's shovel and slipped out from under the wisteria, where the air seemed clearer, less cloying. He sat in the grass and let the sounds of sea and wind and birds soothe his raw nerves. Cape Cod was a pretty place. He'd give it that.
He checked his watch. Past noon. He had a conference call in an hour. Work beckoned. It always did. He hadn't learned the fine art of delegating. He suspected there were those in his company eagerly anticipating the day he did. He had good people, a handful he'd trust as chief executive.
He breathed a long sigh, staring at the hole he'd dug.
There was no treasure buried under his wisteria.