Night Scents by Carla Neggers Page A

answering such questions. "Four or five days."
    "That's all? It's not as if your place'U go to hell in just four days."
    "Thanks for your help, Piper. I'll call Tuck O'Rourke before I leave."
    She tilted her head back, studying him. A bit of color went out of her cheeks, and she seemed to have tightened her grip on her basket of strawberries. "You didn't happen to call here a little while ago, did you?" she asked suddenly.
    Clate shook his head, saw the fresh signs of strain in her expression. He went still, sensing something was wrong. "No, I didn't. Why?"
    "It's nothing, never mind." She took a deep breath, her hat hanging down her back as the breeze caught the ends of her dark, straight hair. "Tuck'll be fine, and I'm sure you won't leave the coffeepot on. Have a good trip."
    Dismissing him, she negotiated her way through neat rows of strawberries, peas, new onions, tiny stalks of corn, and feathery carrot tops. Clate didn't move. She was barefoot, he saw. And shaken. Something about this mysterious phone call.
    Why hadn't she known who it was?
    "Are you sure you're all right?" he called.
    She glanced back at him, smiled a phony smile. "Nope. I'm crazy. I picked too many strawberries and now I have to do something with them. Maybe I'll save you a jar of jam for when you get back."
    "That would be nice."
    But his words were distracted. She wasn't telling him the whole story, not even half of it. He had a mind to call her brother, put Andrew Macintosh on the case—a notion he immediately rejected. If Piper was in trouble, she would know where to find her family, and she had an entire town of friends who would help her, even if they believed she needed a witch's spell to improve her love life.
    First she'd have to ask for their help. Piper Macintosh didn't strike him as a woman who would want to admit there was anything she couldn't handle on her own. She lived alone at the end of an isolated road, after all, and had her own woodpile, her own vegetables, her own quiet, independent life.
    Clate sucked in a breath and started back down the sloping field, onto the worn path between their houses. Whatever her troubles, Piper just wasn't his problem.
    Instead of taking her bicycle, Piper decided to drive to her three o'clock appointment with Sally Shepherd. She'd changed into nice pants and a silk blouse and was much calmer after her morning encounter with Clate Jackson. He'd already left for Tennessee. She'd driven past his house just to make sure. To accustom herself to his ideas about property, she'd even forced herself to turn around in the road, not his driveway.
    She parked behind three trucks belonging to the men of Macintosh & Sons. She hadn't seen her father and brothers in days. Luckily she'd brought along extra jars of strawberry jam, still warm from the kettle—not that they'd be pacified. They would know why she was avoiding them: Clate Jackson and Hannah Frye. Both had her confused, disturbed, frustrated. She'd practically accused her new neighbor of making a threatening anonymous call. Of course he hadn't done such a thing! She had no reason whatever to suspect him, and now she'd succeeded in alerting him to just how jittery she was.
    But something wasn't right with him, either. She suspected he'd left Cape Cod over something more serious than a business deal gone sour. Which was none of her business, of course, as he'd be the first to tell her.
    She headed up onto the inn's front porch, with its rockers and potted plants, and into the entry, where the scent of old wood, lemon polish, and potpourri immediately soothed her spirits. After completing massive structural repairs on the historic old house, Macintosh & Sons had gone to work on its individual rooms, starting with the first floor. It was a century newer than her tiny Cape, with twin chimneys on either end and a beautiful center staircase. Additions and modifications had made it less a classic colonial, more a wonderful mishmash of a century and a half of