On the drive over, she speculated on the past Clate didn't talk about. He'd come to Nashville at sixteen. Sixteen! It had taken that second reading for it to sink in that he'd come without his parents, apparently without any family. As far as she was concerned, the reporter had dropped the ball on this one and should have dug up more on his childhood. But, then, maybe no one else cared.
Quoting from civic speeches, the article praised him for his vision and ability to balance Nashville's need for growth and livability, with an appreciation of its past and an eye toward its future. Clate Jackson was, by every measure, a concrete and logical thinker, a natural businessman who understood, on a gut level, the bottom line and the importance of focusing his energies.
Unlike Piper herself. She wasn't a natural businesswoman. She didn't do five-year plans. She didn't scope out the competition. She didn't do market research. She didn't even have a decent computer for her office, a secretary, a fax machine, or one of those multisectional, compact, specially designed appointment books. She wrote down all her appointments in a datebook featuring Audubon bird prints on the left-hand page, the days of the week on the right. She had a little drugstore spiral notebook for expenses.
Her life just wasn't that complicated. She did work she loved, she tackled new ideas as they came to her, she put in hours that seemed reasonable and didn't interfere with things like watching for piping plovers, walking on the beach at sunrise, taking in the occasional Red Sox game, and watching "Magnum" reruns.
As for money, when she had it, she spent some of it and saved some of it. When she didn't, she resisted dipping into her savings and ate dinner a little more often with her father and brothers.
It wasn't that she lacked drive or ambition, simply that they manifested themselves in different ways in her than they did in Clate Jackson.
She wondered if, deep down, he knew that all those millions didn't take the place of a dinner with friends, a heated argument with a brother, a game of Frisbee with a crowd of nine-year-olds. His money didn't fill whatever hole his childhood had left in him, and there was one, she was sure of that much.
Not that there was anything wrong with money, she thought as she negotiated Chatham's busy, pretty Main Street, hunting for a parking space. From the Fourth of July on through the summer, she'd be lucky to find one. Now, she had only moderate trouble.
She climbed out of her car, didn't bother locking up, and started up Main Street, debating how much to charge the optometrist to distinguish between what was authentic, what was historically accurate, and what was popular and fun, but not necessarily authentic or accurate.
An hour later, she was back on the road, back to speculating on Clate Jackson. The magazine article had provided pictures of his hotel, his sprawling office, the award-winning courtyard in one of his tall buildings, but none of his Nashville home. He had a place on the Cumberland River, not in a fashionable district. Apparently it had a high fence and he owned big dogs.
The man led a life completely different from her own, and it was best if she stopped kissing him in the rain.
She gave a start when her car telephone—a birthday gift from her brothers, who hated worrying she was in a ditch when they couldn't reach her—rang. She grabbed it up, welcoming the distraction.
"You won't leave it alone, will you, Piper?"
She slammed on her brake and pulled over, forcing the car behind her to swerve; the driver gave her the finger as he sped past her.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
"Someone who's lost patience."
"That makes two of us. Look, I don't know what you want me to do. I—Wait, dawn you?'
But he—or she or it—had hung up. She screeched back out onto the road, pain gathering at the backs of her eyes, her head spinning. She drove through the center of Frye's Cove in a daze, and when she came to her road, to the pretty section closest to the water, she pulled over and jumped out of her car and hurled her cell phone into the bay.
Missed.
She walked out across the sand, her car door open, sand flying up under her heels, and picked up the phone and hurled it again.
It sank beneath a wave.
And a small voice inside her said, "pollution," and without thinking, she kicked off her shoes and waded out into the water. She scooped with her hands and felt with her feet until she'd located her phone.
On her way back to her car, she dumped the phone in a trash can.
It was in this state of mind that she arrived home and found Clate in her back yard, sitting at her picnic table.
He didn't move, said nothing as he took in her wet pantyhose, the wet hem of her skirt.
Piper could taste the salt water on her mouth. "I lost my cell phone in the bay."
"I see."
"I lost my cell phone in the bay, I had to fish it out, and so I got wet."
Silence.
"It's true," she said.
"What was your cell phone doing in the bay?"
"I threw it there."
His eyes darkened. "You received another threatening call."