"No—no, not a chance. I saw her today. She'd have told me if she'd given up on me, I can assure you. Instead, she strengthened her case." She swung her legs up over the bench and got to her feet. "Come on, I'll show you."
She led him through her keeping room back to her front parlor, where, under the watchful eye of her brothers, she was in the midst of sanding layers of paint from the original wainscoting.
Clate remained standing while she sat on a sheet-covered loveseat. She gestured to an ancient shoebox she'd laid atop a stack of magazines on her battered butler's table. It was so old the cardboard had softened and yellowed and the sides were splitting apart, held together only by a series of brown, brittle rubber bands. "Hannah gave me that today."
"What's inside?"
"Letters from her father and brother during World War One." She brushed a hand ineffectually through her hair. "At least that's what she told me."
"You haven't looked?"
"No, not yet." She smiled weakly. "I picked peas instead."
He seemed unsurprised. "You're afraid of what you might find."
She shook her head. "Not that. I'm just—I don't know if I can explain. I feel as if I'm a voyeur of sorts, peering into a private, personal part of Hannah's life. The lives of my grandfather and great-grandfather." She paused, her pulse quickening as she took in his muscular frame, that tousled dark hair, that constant alertness. "It's a strange feeling. These people are family. It's not like reading a letter from Woodrow Wilson."
"That's the whole point, isn't it? A letter from Woodrow Wilson wouldn't help you figure out what really happened eighty years ago."
She rubbed the tips of her fingers over the brittle ripples of old rubber bands. They'd dissolve or break apart on their own before long. "I suppose. Hannah said I should open the box, read what's inside, study, imagine. She thinks this will make that night when she was seven real to me. But it feels real enough right now. I don't know if I want what she must have suffered to feel any more real. She was just a little kid."
"And her memory of events could be skewed by her age. Seven then, eighty-seven now. The letters might help clear up whether her story of her father rescuing a Russian princess was something he told her because it was true, something he told her as a sort of fairy tale, or something she just made up to help her survive the trauma of losing her parents."
Piper nodded. "I know. I'll read them."
He relaxed his stance. "If you need an objective perspective on anything, you know where to find me."
She watched him head back to her kitchen under the low ceiling of her tiny, antique house. She didn't move from her position on the loveseat. He would go. She would read the contents of Hannah's shoebox. Alone. Maybe before she cooked up her peas, maybe after.
"Wait."
He glanced back at her from the doorway, his eyes lost in the shadows.
"I'm steaming the peas, and I've a little grilled chicken in the fridge and some of my dill-oat bread. Would you care to stay for dinner?" She jumped to her feet. "There is one more thing I should tell you."
"I'd love to stay for dinner, even if you don't have one more thing to tell me."
"It's a doozie."
A twitch of a smile. "Of course it is."
Clate watched Piper slather on bug repellent—another Hannah Frye special, apparently—just outside the back door off her kitchen. They were headed outside for a walk on the beach. He observed her with a strangled feeling, aware of every move of her fingers and palms against her bare flesh as she rubbed on her goo. It smelled spicy and sweet, an ungodly cross between perfume and aftershave. He had declined her offer to try some. He'd take his chances with the mosquitoes.
"Poisons can enter through the skin, you know," he told her.
She shrugged, matter-of-fact. "Only the right poisons, none of which are in this particular preparation since it's meant to be applied to the skin."
"You're sure?"
She lifted her mane of hair with one hand and, with the other, dabbed the goo on the back of her neck, oblivious to the effect she was having on him. "Hannah's very good at bug repellents."
Clate made no reply. He was reserving judgment on Hannah Frye's skills as an herbalist. After Piper's tale of Stan Carlucci and the tincture of bistort and agrimony—her doozie—he wasn't even convinced that her intentions were all as sweet and innocent as her niece wanted to believe. Misapplied, her knowledge of plants could be dangerous, even lethal.
Over dinner, he'd learned that a tincture was a mixture of herbs and alcohol—brandy or vodka, not rubbing alcohol—that sat for two weeks or so, with a daily shaking, and then was strained and stored in a dark bottle, just like the one Stan Carlucci had found on his doorstep.
It was straightforward herbal medicine, Piper claimed, and didn't mean Hannah was a menace or thought she was Matilda the Witch.