Clate sat up late into the night watching "The Three Stooges" on the ancient black-and-white television that came with his house. It was in the library, a small, fireplaced room of musty glass-fronted bookcases, stuffed raptors, and threadbare couches and chairs. Give him a pipe and a smoking jacket, he thought, and he could pass for a turn-of-the-century gentleman, except, of course, for his choice of entertainment.
Hannah Frye had a new, nineteen-inch color television with remote control, stereo sound, and a VCR. She'd had an afternoon talk show on when he'd arrived at her townhouse. He was struck by the contrast between her elegant, modern surroundings and her hand-stitched, anachronistic attire, the wisps of white hair straying from a crocheted snood. Comfort, she explained, was the motivation for the way she dressed, not coyness, eccentricity, religious belief, or a need for attention.
In their hour together, Clate came to see Hannah Frye as a woman who would stop at virtually nothing to see her grandniece happy. "We're not the same, Piper and I," she said. "Only sometimes I think Piper believes she needs to be like me."
As content as she was with her own life, as satisfied with the choices she'd made, she didn't believe that Piper's destiny was to live alone, marry late in life, have no children.
No. She believed he was her niece's destiny.
She'd smiled at his reaction. "That makes you uncomfortable, does it?"
"You're welcome to your beliefs, Mrs. Frye."
"It's not what I believe, Mr. Jackson. It's what I know."
And how far would she go to make sure she wasn't proved wrong?
Clate shook off the uncomfortable thought. Hannah Frye would never deliberately terrify her niece, even as a means to an end. She would find other ways, like the predawn foray for valerian root, to throw him and Piper together.
Did Piper suspect her aunt, even a little?
It was possible. More likely, she would worry that someone else in town would, especially given Hannah Frye's well-known eccentricities. That would explain why she hadn't told her father and brothers by now. The Macintosh men seemed friendly enough, just wary of him, an outsider, the sole neighbor of their daughter and sister.
Clate had no doubt that between them, Piper and her aunt had given the men of the family plenty of reason to keep an eye out.
With a growl of impatience, he switched off the old television. Sitting around watching "The Three Stooges" wasn't going to get him any answers. He headed up to bed, noticing the darkness of the old house, the eerie shadows, the creaks and groans of its centuries-old beams and floorboards. He could imagine a little girl wandering these halls eighty years ago, out on this lonely strip of land, waiting for parents who would never come home.
If her elaborate tale of buried treasure and a rescued princess was a way for Hannah Frye to cope with the horror of her parents' deaths, Clate could understand. He could even understand if she truly believed it. But if it was a way to ensure her niece's so-called destiny, then she'd gone from being harmless to being manipulative and potentially dangerous.
He'd tried to impress upon Hannah Frye that he wasn't the right man for her niece. Piper had faith in family and community. She would turn to them, no matter how much her father and brothers bugged her, in times of stress, pain, suffering.
He didn't share that faith. He'd learned at a very young age that his family caused most of his pain and suffering, and his community, poor and isolated as it was, could do damned little to help him. It wasn't a question of self-pity but of taking a hard, cold look at reality and seeing it for what it was. Pure, dumb luck had thrown him in with Irma Bryar, but she couldn't change what was. She could only help him accept it and move on.
If Hannah wanted her niece to be happy, she should think up a new spell to send him back to Tennessee.
He glanced out his window, half expecting to see Piper's silhouette out under the wisteria. Instead he saw only the starlit sky, heard only the wash of the waves on the sand.
Isolation. Solitude. A retreat from the pressures of his life in Nashville, the cover articles in slick magazines, the constant speculation about his social life, his next goal, his next hill to conquer. That was what he'd expected from Cape Cod. Yet here he was, staring out his window for a woman digging treasure.
He cursed himself and climbed into bed, listening to the wind howl until sleep finally claimed him.
He cursed himself again, even more soundly, when morning came and he took his first mug of coffee out to the terrace with him. There, just inside Hannah Frye's peculiar little witch's garden, he found unmistakable signs of digging. Loose dirt, an overturned clod of weeds, a spot that looked as if it had been refilled and flattened by the back of a shovel.
"Piper."