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needed to lend weight to his assessment that her aunt was a dangerous nut. But it wasn't his accusations that worried Piper, it was the possibility that her aunt could be on her way to becoming a menace to herself and her community. In which case something would have to be done to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else.
    "Piper, Piper." Hannah sighed, shaking her head, as if reading her niece's thoughts. "I'm not out where the trains don't run just yet. Now, I know you must have a million things to do today, but I do want to talk to you about something."
    Piper groaned to herself. Now what? She manufactured a smile. "Sure, Hannah. What's up?"
    "Last night was a test."
    "A test? What do you mean?"
    "I wanted to see if you could sneak onto my—onto Mr. Jackson's property at night and do a bit of digging. I needed the valerian root, so it was a good choice."
    "It didn't have to be dug before full light?"
    "Oh, it did, just not for medicinal or spiritual reasons." She smiled, pleased with herself. "For practical reasons. I wanted to see if this could be done."
    Piper was getting a bad feeling about where her aunt was going with this one. "Well, it couldn't. I was caught."
    "But you'll know what to do next time."
    "Uh-uh. There's not going to be any next time."
    Hannah shook her head, confident. "Oh, but there will be. You see, Piper, I need you to dig up my parents' buried treasure."
    "Hannah?"
    She got jauntily to her feet. "I'll make tea, dear. We'll talk."
    Clate pulled his car into a narrow space in front of the pharmacy in the village of Frye's Cove. Earlier, on his way to the grocery up near one of Cape Cod's main thoroughfares, he could have sworn he had spotted his next-door neighbor streaking along on a mountain bike. It was a weekday. Friday. She'd been up at four stealing herbs, then off on her bicycle by midmorning. Didn't the woman have a job?
    He pushed aside the thought. He didn't want to get involved with the locals. He knew next to nothing about his neighbor and would have preferred to know less than he did. He was here on a much-needed break. He meant only to get acquainted with his new property and try to understand the strange impulse that had led him to buy an eighteenth-century house on Cape Cod.
    He'd learned to rely on his instincts. They, coupled with hard work and a bit of luck, had served him well over the years. But usually he understood, if sometimes only in retrospect, the source of his impulses, the logic and rationality behind buying a rundown block in Nashville that he'd rehabilitated into prime office space, the vacant, trashy lot near Opryland where he'd built his exclusive hotel. He could trace those decisions back to concrete information, rumors he'd heard, studies he'd glanced at, musings while driving—a maze of facts and suppositions that ultimately made sense.
    Buying a sagging antique house on Cape Cod made no sense. Not even in retrospect.
    "You're Clate Jackson, aren't you?"
    A tall, dusty man with dark reddish hair approached him on the steps of the pharmacy. He had a familiar look about him. Clate said, "Yes, I'm Jackson."
    "Heard you were in town. Thought I recognized you from a description someone gave me. I'm Andrew Macintosh."
    Another Macintosh. Was everyone in town related? Clate decided not to ask who had provided the description of him. Frye's Cove, he was coming to discover, was the sort of town where talk of newcomers spread fast. He shook hands with Andrew Macintosh, who appeared to be a few years older than he was; his hands were thick and callused, as Clate's had been when he'd worked construction. "Pleased to meet you. Is Piper Macintosh—"
    "My sister. She has another brother and a father in town, too." Deep green eyes assessed Clate with remarkable frankness; Andrew Macintosh didn't smile. "We look after her."
    So, he was serving notice that his little sister wasn't just out on her isolated road all by herself; she had meaty men folk checking up on her. Clate