"Pissed as hell, probably. If what you heard were true."
"Isn't it?"
He shook his head.
"Why should I believe you?"
Using both hands, he straightened her helmet. "You shouldn't."
Without another word of explanation, he walked back to the front of his car, climbed in behind the wheel, and drove off, leaving her cursing in his dust. Next time, she could damned well ask him if a rumor she'd heard was true, before she jumped to conclusions and made accusations.
Except it was a hell of a lot easier to believe he was—what had she called him? A rogue, a cad, an arrogant S.O.B. Yeah. If he was a rotten bastard, it took her off the hook. It put her back on familiar ground. Piper Macintosh had crummy taste in men. Piper Macintosh couldn't trust herself to fall in love with someone who wouldn't lie to her. Piper Macintosh would end up like her eighty-seven-year-old aunt who'd married, briefly, late in life and had never had children.
Suddenly her face was in his window. He almost had a wreck. He pounded on his brake, and she came within inches of sideswiping him with her bike. He smashed the button to his automatic window, his heart pounding. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Catching up with you. I must have done a world-record sprint." Indeed, she was panting, sweating. "I wanted to tell you I'm off to Hannah's. Then later this afternoon I have an appointment in Chatham. Thought you'd want to know." She gulped in a breath. "In case you worried."
Because of the calls. Because somehow, deep down, she knew he'd passed an uneasy night, alert to every sound, every shadow. If a car had ventured down their dead-end road, he'd have pounced.
"Is this your way of apologizing?"
The muscles in her forearms tensed as she gripped the handlebars. "For what?"
"For believing rumors instead of checking with me first."
But in just a slight shift in her steady gaze, he saw that that wasn't it. The rumors about him wanting to develop his land on Cape Cod were just a convenient outlet for her volatile mood. Something else was wrong. "I've got to go," she said, sliding up onto her bicycle seat.
He kept his foot on the brake. "You went through Hannah's shoebox, didn't you?" His voice was quiet. He knew he'd landed on the real source of her dangerous mood, could imagine her sitting up late last night, poring over those decades-old letters.
She blinked back sudden tears, eased off the seat. "There was nothing—no smoking gun, no proof of treasure, no disproof. I don't even know for sure if my greatgrandfather ever rescued a Russian princess. He talks about it in his letters." She swallowed, her eyes pinned straight ahead. "But it could just be a story he told her. He was so lonely, and he loved her so much. And my grandfather—his letters—" She swallowed. "He was so young when he found himself at war, then as sole guardian of his little sister."
"Maybe you can trace something through the dates of the letters."
"Maybe." She squeezed her eyes half-shut in an obvious effort to concentrate, to think beyond the emotions she'd felt as she'd gone through her aunt's ancient shoebox. "They don't say so outright, but you can tell neither my grandfather nor my greatgrandfather expected to make it home alive. They were horrified by war. Fear, longing, a sense of duty, a love of home and family." She brushed back tears with her fingertips. "They permeate every line of every letter."
"If Hannah was just seven," Clate said, gently steering Piper back on course, "someone must have read their letters to her. Maybe her father's tale of rescuing this Russian princess wasn't so secret. Someone else could have known about it eighty years ago."
"And planned to rob him when he came home?"
"It's possible."
"They were off course. Nobody could have predicted that."
"Maybe they were drawn off course. Maybe this guy just took advantage of the moment, of coincidence, and lured your great-grandparents onto a sandbar, robbed them, and left them to their fate."
She swung around at him. "And then what? Passed down the information to the next generation? Anyone old enough to have lured my great-grandparents onto that sandbar would be a hundred by now, at the youngest. I can't imagine some hundred-year-old guy making those calls to me. Besides, I know all the hundred-year-old people on Cape Cod, and none's even remotely a possibility."
"All right. Fair enough."
But she was on a roll. "If someone else knows about the treasure, it's because Hannah let something slip. If it was some secret that's been lurking around Frye's Cove for eighty years, I assure you, we'd have known about it."
"You meaning you Macintoshes."
"Yes. And I've been thinking—"