Night Scents (3 page)

Chapter 2

A hearty breakfast of homemade oat bread smeared with chunky peanut butter and honey helped clarify Piper's thinking about her new neighbor. She reluctantly decided that Clate Jackson hadn't responded that unreasonably to finding a woman digging up his garden at the crack of dawn. Perhaps she'd overreacted just a tad. She
had
willfully and deliberately trespassed on his property. He'd had no idea who was in his back yard at four in the morning. All in all, she supposed she was lucky he hadn't hit her over the head with a garden hoe and asked questions later.

Her defensiveness had sprung from an uneasy mix of embarrassment, irritation, and worry. Embarrassment because she'd been caught doing something truly stupid. Irritation because Clate Jackson had different ideas about property and neighborli-ness from hers.

And worry because of Hannah.

"Valerian root," Piper muttered, shaking her head as she started up the steep stairs in the small vestibule to her tiny, traditional half-Cape with its side entrance and massive brick chimney. Unlike many antique houses throughout New England, hers hadn't been expanded over the centuries. The first floor consisted of a small front parlor, a fair-sized keeping room across the back, off of which were a tiny borning room and buttery. The keeping room, with its large, open-hearth fireplace, served as her kitchen and main living area. She'd converted the borning room, where in past centuries women gave birth, into her office and had kept the buttery as a pantry; it had its own trapdoor down to the dirt cellar. A cozy bedroom and bathroom under low, slanted ceilings comprised the upstairs. The chimney served fireplaces in the parlor and bedroom as well as the keeping room, a plus on frigid, damp winter days.

Putting thoughts of her elderly aunt out of her mind for the moment, Piper pulled on shorts and an old polo shirt one of her brothers had thrown out two years ago. It wasn't one of her dress-mirror above a battered pine bureau that had come with the house. Dark circles under her eyes, freckles standing out in her pale face, worry etched in her brow. Hannah would see the worry and be annoyed. She hated having anyone fretting about her, although it seemed as if everyone in Frye's Cove did.

Piper quickly brushed and braided her hair. Given its weight and straightness, the braid wouldn't last past noon.

Two minutes later, she was on her mountain bike with the valerian root tucked in her knapsack and the breeze in her face. It was a warm, beautiful morning with low humidity and not a puff of fog in sight. Only a few fair-weather clouds dotted the sky. Every oak leaf, every pine needle, every blade of marsh grass was in sharp focus, and the air smelled clean and fresh, scrubbed by yesterday's rain. The only sounds were of birds, the wind, the tide, and a few distant boats.

Slowly, Piper relaxed as she pedaled along her narrow, winding, isolated road, a rarity on Cape Cod. It dead-ended behind her, just past the Frye House, at the back of a wildlife refuge that was accessible only at its opposite side, which was actually within the boundaries of the next town over; visitors were discouraged from making it that far out. Tourists would sometimes drive out her road, missing or ignoring the dead-end signs, then have to turn around and head back through the protected marshes and meadows to the village of Frye's Cove.

Frye's Cove wasn't a tourist town by Cape Cod standards. It didn't have spectacular beaches or cute, upscale shops and restaurants or even that many places to stay. There were beaches, if not miles of them, and there was breathtaking scenery, and there was potential, a lot of it, for Frye's Cove to become a favored tourist destination. It had its share of summer people who preferred a quieter retreat and didn't mind its shortcomings, but the year-round residents of what was just, in their view, another historic village on Cape Cod Bay had simply never given much thought to tourism. Frye's Cove was where they lived, worked, and usually died. That was it. They had exploited and battled both land and sea for centuries, but now, for the most part, had made their peace.

Piper paused at the sliver of a town green to catch her breath. There were a post office, a pharmacy, a hardware store, a bank, an iffy antiques shop, and—the big news in town—the almost-restored Macintosh Inn. A Macintosh had built the place as a tavern back in the 1840s, only to lose it, in true Macintosh fashion, to mounting debts and another failed moneymaking scheme. In their three hundred years on Cape Cod, the Macintosh family had made and lost fortunes in shipping, salt making, cranberries, whaling, and who knew what else. Theirs was a history filled with tragedy, bad decisions, shortsightedness, and relentless optimism buoyed by an occasional bit of glory. Having a notorious whaling captain in the family tree would have been plenty for Piper, but every manner of hero, victim, and scoundrel seemed to lurk in the Macintosh past.

Eighteen months ago, Paul and Sally Shepherd had stunned Frye's Cove when they purchased the crumbling colonial, which had become a village eyesore. Sally was the only grandchild of Hannah's late husband, Jason Frye. He and Hannah had married late in life. Jason, who'd lived in the Frye House his entire life, had a grown daughter by his first marriage. She'd stayed in Boston after college, married, and raised Sally in an upscale suburb. No one, apparently least of all Sally, ever expected she'd come to live on Cape Cod year round. But she and her new husband, Paul, a Boston attorney, couldn't resist the charm and potential of the Macintosh Inn.

Ironically, the Shepherds had called upon the expertise of the descendants of the original owners of their Cape Cod inn to help in its renovation and restoration. Macintosh & Sons, experts in old houses, did the carpentry and construction work; Piper, an expert in early American crafts, consulted on the decor. She was emphatically not in business with them. Life in the same town with them was claustrophobic enough without having to work side-by side with her father and two older brothers.

Macintosh Inn had opened for limited business Memorial Day weekend while work continued. Piper recognized the Macintosh trucks out front, signaling another day on the job. They liked the work, they liked the Shepherds, and any hard feelings a Macintosh had had about losing the inn had been dealt with a hundred and fifty years before.

She decided not to pop in to say hello. Andrew and Benjamin, and maybe even her father, would sniff out the foul-smelling valerian root or ask about her obvious lack of sleep or otherwise guess that Hannah had put her up to another wacky scheme. She could never explain her encounter with Clate Jackson. They simply wouldn't understand.

Or maybe they would, she thought dryly, remembering Jackson's expression as he'd stared at her in the milky darkness. Nope. Her overprotective father and brothers didn't need to know about that particular predawn escapade.

She climbed back onto her bike and pedaled along the green and out to the main road, following it to the edge of town where a full-care, upscale housing complex for elderly people had gone in two years before. Few locals lived there or knew anyone who did. Nestled amidst lilacs and rhododendrons, with trim shrubs and decorative maples and oaks, the complex was determinedly Cape Cod with its clusters of cedar-shingled, white-shuttered townhouses and its small, tasteful nursing home. Strict rules about plantings, exterior decorations, and curtains were enforced by a committee of residents. To Piper's surprise, her independent-minded aunt, who ordinarily balked at anyone telling her what to do, didn't object. She'd even cheerfully removed a pot of peppermint from her doorstep when it didn't meet the committee's standards. As far as Piper was concerned, this was just another sign that Hannah Frye's mental state needed watching. Her aunt just wasn't herself these days.

Piper stood her bicycle in the short, smoothly blacktopped driveway and took the stone walk to Hannah's brass-trimmed front door. She hated the creeping doubts about her aunt. If she reached eighty-seven, she wouldn't want people thinking she'd gone daffy just because of a few odd incidents.

But there had been more than a few, chief among them selling the Frye House to a cranky, reclusive Tennessean. Grimacing, Piper pressed the doorbell, which was just a courtesy. Hannah had presented her with a key when she'd moved into her new home, insisting she was long past getting into compromising positions and never had cared if anyone caught her in her skivvies.

Without waiting, Piper unlocked the door and pushed it open. "Hannah? You up and at it?"

There was no answer. Hannah's hearing wasn't the best. Piper slipped inside and shut the door hard behind her, her usual way of alerting her aunt that she had company.

The pungent odor of some concoction drifted in from the kitchen. The townhouse was a one-floor design: two small bedrooms down the hall to the left; combination living-dining room to the right; den and kitchen in back, where sliding glass doors led out to a shaded deck. The interior was traditional Cape Cod with its muted, gray colors, tab curtains, and mix of Queen Anne and Shaker furnishings, every stick of it fresh off a furniture showroom floor. Hannah hadn't kept so much as a silver teaspoon as a memento of her twenty-five years in the Frye House, eighteen of them after her husband's death. All the Frye family antiques, such as they were, now belonged to Tennessean Clate Jackson.

As Piper approached the kitchen, the smell of whatever Hannah was brewing got stronger and nastier.

"I have your valerian root," she said from the doorway. The kitchen was done in white and gray-green, pleasant, sunny, fresh, everything sparkling and new, a radical departure from the old Frye kitchen with its views of the bay.

Hannah glanced up from the steaming, shiny pot she was stirring with a long-handled spoon. "Excellent. You didn't wash it, did you?"

"It's fresh out of the ground."

"Good. I have special springwater I want to use."

"Hannah, I could have rinsed it off at home. I have a well."

"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.