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dispatching you instead of calling the police. My parents were murdered, and I think it's because of the gems and Faberge egg—the treasure—the Russian princess gave to Father. Piper, someone else must have read my letters and known about the treasure, and then deliberately set out to rob him and Mother that night."
    There were a million holes in Hannah's story. Caleb and Phoebe were off course. How could the perpetrator have known where to find them? Even if they hadn't been that far off course, how could he have known it was their boat in the fog? Premeditation made little sense—not, Piper thought, that happenstance made any sense, either.
    And treasure buried for eighty years in the Frye back yard made no sense whatsoever. Why risk being seen by a Frye, never mind a seven-year-old?
    Even if Piper indulged Hannah and chose to believe in her conveniently recovered memory, any treasure would have to be long gone by now. Whoever had buried it surely would have dug it up some time during the past century.
    But Hannah was visibly tired and shaken after telling her story, and Piper didn't have the heart to blow holes in her theory. "Well, I just wish you'd thought of digging up this treasure of yours during the umpteen years you lived in the Frye house."
    She sniffed. "I didn't think of it then."
    Piper had sighed, exasperated, worried, haunted by the palpable horror of that night almost a century ago.
    "I know nobody's going to believe me," she said calmly. "That's why you have to find the treasure first, Piper. Discreetly. Then I'll know for sure. You do see, don't you? I have to know what happened to my parents. Before I die, I have to know."
    Getting morbid had always been one of Hannah's last-ditch ploys to persuade Piper to do her bidding. This time, it had the ring of authenticity. She'd convinced herself the notorious mystery of her parents' deaths was within her power to solve—with Piper's help, of course.
    "It's as if I couldn't let myself remember while I was living in that house."
    "But you didn't live there until you and Jason were married. You were sixty-two! You had a lot of years you could have remembered—"
    "Ah, but I was in love with Jason from the time I was seven. His hold on me was staggering."
    Piper had lurched forward in her chair. "You don't think a Frye killed your parents, do you?"
    "I only know what I know."
    Drama—or evasiveness. Hannah wasn't above holding back pertinent information as a ploy to get her way. "Are you sure you didn't recognize this shadowy figure?"
    "I never saw his face."
    "But it was a man?"
    Suddenly her bony shoulders sagged, and she seemed little more than a pile of bones in cornflower calico. "I don't know. I've told you everything. After a lifetime, I finally remember that night, the scent of roses and the sea, the sound of digging—" She'd swallowed, tears in her eyes. "The shock of losing my parents must have blocked my memory all these years. But now—now, Piper, I remember."
    And so it was that Piper had agreed to check into the possibility of treasure buried in her neighbor's back yard.
    She breathed in the cool June air as she pedaled toward home, noticed the scent of roses and the sea even as she tried not to think of a seven-year-old girl staring out into the night while her parents died together on the other side of the windswept peninsula.
    Unless the whole story was a tactical move on Hannah's part to throw her grandniece and the Tennessean together. But as devious as Hannah Frye could be, Piper didn't believe she'd stoop that low. Hannah really believed she'd seen someone in the Fryes' back yard that night.
    Still, with any luck, her aunt would move on to something else before Piper got to the point of digging under Clate Jackson's wisteria.
    Clate squinted out at the tall hedges dividing his property from that of his closest and only neighbor. He couldn't see her house from the stone terrace where he stood. On his way home, he'd slowed in front of her