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treasure."
    Piper's shoulder sagged. It was nuts.
    "Try under the wisteria first," Hannah had advised. "That's my best guess."
    Naturally, the wisteria in question was in Clate Jackson's back yard. There would be no asking his permission. Not only did Hannah forbid it, but Piper would have refused. This latest mission made her elderly aunt look goofier than ever, something her aunt couldn't afford these days. Being known as a harmless eccentric was one thing, a dangerous nut was something else.
    No matter how hard she tried, Piper just couldn't dismiss Hannah's haunting tale of her parents' deaths. She couldn't pretend she'd forgotten their conversation that morning or simply dig in her heels and refuse to act. After eighty years, Hannah believed she had the long-denied answers to the deaths of her parents within her grasp, and she needed Piper to help her reach them.
    Piper climbed onto her bike and pedaled slowly toward home. As she'd listened to her aunt talk, the pain of her terrible loss seemed so fresh. Piper could imagine a seven-year-old child waiting up late into the night, eager to see her father again after his long months at war.
    "Father wrote to me every week while he was away." Her face was old and worn now, decades later, her voice quiet and steady as she spoke, but Piper could see in her eyes the hint of the little girl Hannah had been, vivid and curious, determined to see life as it was, not just as she wanted it to be. "He told me an elaborate tale of how he'd saved a Russian princess from certain death at the hands of a roving gang of miscreants. She had already escaped the Russian Revolution, and here she was about to die on a lonely French road, when my father appeared on the scene and rescued her, bringing her to safe quarters. She was so impressed by his courage that she insisted upon rewarding him. She had no money, only gemstones and a Faberge egg."
    Piper had been skeptical. "Hannah, that sounds like the sort of fanciful story a father would tell a precocious seven-year-old daughter to keep her from worrying about him getting killed in battle."
    "I know. For years that's what I thought. But now"—she'd exhaled deeply, fixing her gaze on her only niece—"now, I'm not so sure."
    And so she'd explained.
    In the weeks since she'd moved out of the Frye House, new details of her memory of that night eighty years ago had emerged from deep within her subconscious. "It's as if they've lain dormant all these years, and only now, free of that house, could I bring myself to remember. And now that I do, Piper, I remember so clearly!"
    In her excitement at the prospect of seeing her father, she'd been unable to sleep. She reread his letters to her, which she'd kept in an iron box, and played in bed, until the scent of roses and the sea in the cold night air drew her to her window.
    "The wind had shifted, as it often does. I thought nothing of it at the time. But now—I don't know if I can explain. It's as if my parents were sending those scents to me as they died, enticing me to the window so that I would see what I saw, knowing that I was too young to understand, that it would be many decades before I would seek the answers I'm now seeking." She'd paused, her jaw setting. "It all comes back to destiny."
    Afraid Hannah would drift back to the subject of Clate Jackson, Piper had steered her aunt back on course. "What did you see?"
    "A shadowy figure. It was dark and cold, the wind was gusting. I heard digging. Then the clouds shifted, and in a quick ray of moonlight, I saw a small trunk sitting on the ground."
    "A trunk," Piper repeated.
    "Correct."
    "Did you mention this trunk to anyone at the time?"
    "I told you, I've only remembered seeing in the past few weeks."
    "So after eighty years, you suddenly, out of the blue, recall a scene you witnessed on the most traumatic night of your life." Piper didn't bother hiding her skepticism. "Hannah, repressed memory is a tricky thing."
    "Of course it is. That's why I'm