"I'm using the water from a surface spring in the wildlife refuge. Your father fetched me several gallons last evening."
Robert Macintosh indulged his only aunt. Everyone in Frye's Cove did—and had, apparently, ever since Hannah had been orphaned at age seven. The deaths of her parents, Caleb and Phoebe Macintosh, eighty years ago remained one of Cape Cod's most celebrated mysteries. Phoebe had left her young daughter with the Fryes—Jason was seventeen at the time—while she went to meet her husband upon his return from fighting in the Great War. During his long absence from Cape Cod, Caleb had often expressed his deep longing to get out on the water again, and so Phoebe arranged for them to travel home from New York by boat.
What was to have been a romantic voyage turned into a nightmare. A fog bank rolled in, throwing them off course. Experienced sailors both, they might have survived, if someone hadn't decided to take advantage of their predicament, waving a lantern they assumed was meant to lead them to safety. Instead, it lured them onto a dangerous sandbar, where they were robbed and left to fend for themselves. They'd died of exposure before anyone could reach them.
Little Hannah was forced to wait nearly a year with her future husband's family until her older brother—Piper's grandfather— returned from war to raise her. Ever since, people in Frye's Cove had indulged Hannah Macintosh Frye more than most, and perhaps more than was wise.
Piper was no exception. Only her reasons were different. Having lost her own mother at two, she identified with her great-aunt in a way few others could. Hannah was mother, aunt, friend —someone who understood Piper and accepted her unconditionally. The bond they shared was unlike any Piper had with anyone else, including her father and brothers. Much as she loved them, they weren't Hannah.
Which explained why Piper had ventured out at four in the morning for valerian root.
She set her backpack on Hannah's gleaming new kitchen table and fished out the foul-smelling stuff.
Her old aunt beamed. "Wonderful! Just set it on the counter."
Piper obliged, aware of Hannah's watchful eye. She was a tiny woman, slim and snowy haired. Over the years, her fair skin had taken on the quality of crumpled crepe paper. Her eyes were as green as those of any Macintosh, infamous or celebrated, her approach to life as optimistic and impractical. She hadn't married until sixty-two. Her many years as a single woman had only further solidified the general tolerance for her eccentricities. She'd kept books for the town for forty years. Everyone in Frye's Cove knew her; she knew everyone.
Her most noticeable eccentricity was her style of dress. After her husband died, Hannah, then not quite seventy, had taken up wearing long dresses distinctly nineteenth century in design, which she sewed herself, almost entirely with needle and thread, while sitting by the fire during Cape Cod's long, cold winters. Sometimes Piper would join her and help, feeling as if she were stuck in a chapter of Little Women as the fire crackled and the winter winds howled.
Today's dress was a high-collared cornflower calico that made her look as if she'd just stepped off the stagecoach. It made no sense to Piper that a woman so attuned to the past would give up her antique house for life in a posh housing complex for the elderly.
Unless she was willing to believe Hannah's mutterings about spells and the love of a lifetime and one rich, unsociable Tennessean.
"Which I'm not," she said under her breath.
Hannah frowned. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You look tired," her aunt pronounced. "Would you care for some tea?"
Tea in Hannah's kitchen usually involved experimental concoctions and potions and odd bits of dried things floating on top. Seldom did it involve the Twinings family. Piper politely shook her head. "No, thanks. I'll just have a glass of water."
She filled a new, inexpensive glass with water from the tap—she didn't necessarily trust Hannah's springwater—and leaned against the kitchen counter as she drank. Her aunt examined the valerian root, but Piper wasn't fooled. "Hannah, I know what you're thinking."
"You met him, didn't you?"
"Yes, unfortunately, I did. He caught me red-handed. He wasn't very happy about it."
"He wouldn't be," Hannah said knowledgeably.
"You've never even met the man! How would you know how he'd—" She caught herself and held up a hand before her aunt could get started. "No, never mind. I don't want to know. Hannah, you know I love you, and you know I'd do anything in the world for you, but this notion of yours about Clate Jackson and me is just —" She struggled for the right words. "It's just plain loony."
Unoffended, Hannah settled into an oak chair at her kitchen table. "Tell me about him."
"There's nothing to tell. He heard me digging in his garden, came out to investigate, caught me, maintained I was trespassing and stealing, warned me not to do it again, and let me go."
"Let you go? He had you in his clutches?"