The Legend of Smuggler's Cave (14 page)

But right now she didn’t trust anyone. Not even Nix.

She barely even trusted herself.

To hell with letting the police call the shots this time. Her son was with people who had no trouble killing innocents. She’d seen what they’d done to Tommy Barnett. And a little boy like Logan would be so easy to harm, even if it wasn’t their intention....

“I need to be alone.” Her mind had already moved several steps ahead toward what needed to be done next. Now, before anyone tried to contact her. Before the clock truly started ticking.

Dalton’s gaze narrowed. Just a tiny twitch, but she had come to know him well enough in the last couple of days to know what it meant.

He wondered what she was up to.

Digging deep, she found the core of steel it took to lie to his face. “I just need to be away from you for a little while.”

He flinched almost as surely as if she’d slapped him with her hand instead of her words.

“Briar—” Dana looked shocked.

“My son is missing.” Briar pushed to her feet, letting her voice rise with pent-up anguish. “I think that earns me the right to feel a little anger!”

She saw Doyle and Nix both turn their heads to look at her.

Now,
she thought.
I have to move now.

She strode toward the door, her jaw set with determination. If they tried to stop her, she’d make them get out of her way.

But Nix and Doyle stepped back, giving her unhindered access to the door. When Dana came up quickly behind her, Nix shook his head.

Dalton’s voice rose from his place on the sofa. “Let her go. Give her what she needs.”

The grief in his voice burned like fire in her ears, but she didn’t let it stop her from walking out the door.

Outside, night had fallen completely, deepened by rain clouds scudding eastward toward the mountains. There would be no moon out tonight, she thought with satisfaction.

That was good. The darkness would make her approach to the cabin that much harder to detect.

They would be watching for her. She was certain of it. They must know by now she knew her son was missing. That she’d know who had taken him and why.

Maybe that’s why they were waiting to contact her. Why risk it when all they had to do was wait at her cabin for her to make her move? They could swoop in, overpower her, and take what they wanted. No mess. No real risk.

But there was something she knew about the cabin that they didn’t. Something nobody outside her family had known. Not even Johnny.

She knew a way to get into the cabin without being seen.

Chapter Fourteen

All the air seemed to rush from the room when Briar walked out. Dalton pushed up from the sofa and waited for another dizzy spell to hit, but it didn’t materialize. He moved away from the door into the kitchen and stood there for a moment, looking around. Trying to remember.

There was a bowl on the table. The remains of chicken noodle soup.
Logan,
he thought, pain ripping through him like shrapnel. Had the boy been right here with him when someone had come to see him?

Why had he let anyone in? What had he been thinking?

He needed to get out of here. He needed to go out there and start looking for Logan. He didn’t know where to start, but he couldn’t just sit here and pretend that sweet child wasn’t out there somewhere in desperate danger.

And if he couldn’t do it, he realized, his gut knotting with a fresh new wave of anxiety, neither could Briar.

She hadn’t left to get away from him. At least, that hadn’t been her only reason.

“Briar’s going to go off alone if we let her,” he warned Dana as she walked up beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.

Dana looked at him in alarm. “You think she’s going after Culpepper?”

“I don’t know. I just know it’s not like Briar to need time alone. She’d stay here and say what she thought. She left because she wants to get away from here without anybody questioning her.”

Dana looked across the room to where Doyle and Nix were talking quietly near the door. “They’re not going to just let you walk out of here.”

“There’s a back door,” he murmured.

“You can barely stand.”

“I’m good. I’m feeling clearheaded now.”

“You can’t drive.”

“You can.”

She stared at him. “You want me to sneak you out of here? Lie to my brother and the man I love so you can wander off, drug-addled, after Briar?”

“If she goes alone, she could be in serious trouble.”

“We tell Nix and Doyle or it doesn’t happen,” she said flatly.

Dalton grimaced. Neither man would be willing to let him go after Briar. Not without a long, time-eating argument.

“Okay, fine. We’ll tell them. Convince them how important it is for us to go after her. Just let me go to the bathroom first and I’ll come back. We’ll tell them together.”

He headed for the bathroom down a short hallway off the living room. But he bypassed that door and went straight out to the garage instead.

Going through the garage door would be faster, but the sound of the big door opening would bring Dana and the others running before he could get away. Instead, he grabbed the spare car key from the tool drawer where he kept it and went through the side door, hurrying around the garage.

To his surprise, Briar’s Jeep was still parked in the driveway next to his car. She sat in the driver’s seat, her head low, her white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel as if it were a lifeline.

He knocked on the passenger window, making her jump. Her gray eyes widened at the sight of him.

“I know you’re going to go find Logan. Let me go with you,” he said through the glass.

She continued looking at him, unblinking, for so long he almost forgot to breathe again. Then she reached over and unlocked the door.

He pulled himself into the passenger seat and turned to look at her. “I thought you’d already be gone.”

“I thought I would be, too,” she admitted.

“There are so many things I want to say to you. How sorry I am that I failed you and Logan. But in a minute Dana’s going to realize I’ve been in the bathroom too long. A few minutes after that, they’ll come looking for us. So if we’re going, we need to go now.”

She gazed solemnly at him for a few seconds longer, then put the Jeep in Neutral. The vehicle began to roll quietly backward down the gently sloping driveway. Wrestling with the wheel, she turned the Jeep onto the street and started the engine.

Dalton glanced back at the house. So far the front door remained closed. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long. “They’ll be coming after us.”

“I know. I just need to get there first.”

“To the cabin?” he asked.

“Yes. Although I should warn you—they’ll have it staked out.”

“The police? Or the kidnappers?”

“The kidnappers.” She glanced at the rearview mirror and pulled suddenly down a side road.

“But we’re going there? Just the two of us?” He grabbed the seat belt and wrapped it around him, even as she took another curve at a scary rate of speed, threatening to send him sliding into the floorboard. His stomach roiled at the thought of walking into an ambush. He was still feeling a little woozy, as much as he didn’t want to admit it. Hardly in any condition to fight his way out of a mess.

“I think I know where Johnny hid what he stole from Cortland.”

Dalton stopped in the middle of buckling the belt. “You know what he took? Was it Cortland’s cooked books?”

“I didn’t say I knew what he took. Only that I think I know where he hid it.” She told him about her conversation with Leanne Dawson.

“He hid something in a jar of preserves?”

“Or pickles or stewed tomatoes. Something like that.”

“Can’t be physical files,” Dalton said, trying to hide his sense of deflation.

“Could be photographs of files stored on a flash drive or a memory card,” Briar said, making him feel like an idiot.

Of course, she was right. In fact, it made much more sense that Johnny Blackwood might make some sort of copy than try to steal the files themselves. If he’d taken the books, they’d have been missed. “Wouldn’t putting them into something like preserves risk ruining the storage disk? I mean, I know he’d have stored them in something airtight, but—”

“I don’t think he considered it to be a place of long-term storage,” she said, whipping around another corner. He finished buckling his seat belt quickly, bracing his feet on the floorboard to keep from sliding into her. “I’m obsessive about using my canned goods by a certain date. So I know they haven’t had a chance to go bad on us. He’d have put the disk in one of the newer jars, since I’d use them last. But he knew how I did things. He knew that if something happened, I’d open the jar within a year. Either to eat what was stored inside or to dispose of it.”

“But what if you threw away the jar unopened?”

She shot him a look. “You don’t throw away a jar. You sterilize it and use it again.”

“Ah.” He was beginning to understand the brilliance of using Briar’s food stores as a hiding place. The average person wouldn’t think to look inside a jar of pickles for a computer storage disk. But Briar would open the jar sooner or later because she wasn’t the sort to waste anything. Resourceful woman, his Briar.

My Briar,
he reiterated silently, a strange thrill running through his body like a jolt of electricity.

Mine.

“He probably thought he could keep rehiding the thing as long as he needed to,” she said as they pulled onto Cherokee Road. “Of course, he didn’t know I was planning to divorce him.”

“So if the kidnappers have the cabin staked out, how are we going to get inside it to look for the file?”

Her lips curved upward at the corners. Not quite a smile, but it gave him hope to see something besides harsh lines of fear and anger on Briar’s face. “You’ll see.”

* * *

D
URING
P
ROHIBITION
in the 1920s and 1930s, liquor sales hadn’t ended in the mountains any more than they had anywhere else in the country. They’d simply gone underground. Instead of the speakeasies and organized-crime control of liquor production and sales found in the bigger cities, bootleggers and moonshine stills had ruled the day in the mountains, even after the Twenty-First Amendment had ended Prohibition in the United States. After all, many of Tennessee’s counties were still dry counties.

And people still liked to get hammered now and then.

For Briar’s maternal great-grandfather, distilling moonshine had paid his bills and fed his kids long after 1933, when the rest of the country went back to drinking as usual. But the revenuers could be ruthless in their quest to shut down any distillery not putting money into the government coffers, so old Bartholomew Meade had come up with his own way of protecting his home-brew business from government scrutiny.

He’d learned, literally by accident, that his cabin was built very close to an underground cavern. His eldest son, Lamar, had fallen through an opening in the cave while hunting for rabbits in the woods about fifty yards from home. Unable to climb back up the hole, he’d followed the narrow cave to its exit deep in the mountains. When Bart Meade had realized he had a natural tunnel not fifty yards from his house, he saw the advantage it would give him over other moonshiners, who had to risk carrying their contraband over ground.

It had taken nearly two years of backbreaking labor for Bart and his three sons and two daughters to dig a tunnel between the root cellar beneath his cabin and the natural cave fifty yards away, but they’d done it, and the Meade family had thrived on their law-defying industry for several decades to come, until the 1960s, when Bitterwood had voted to allow the sale of liquor in hopes of drawing in tourists headed for the national park.

The still had been long gone by the time Briar’s mother had deeded the cabin to her as a sort of dowry. But the tunnel was still there, mostly unused but still in good shape. And still a secret known only to descendants of Bartholomew Meade. Not even Johnny had known about the tunnel. Briar had never even thought to tell him about it.

Strange that she felt no qualms in telling Dalton about it now.

“It’s called Smuggler’s Cave by the Cherokee Cove locals,” she told him as they made their way up the mountain toward the cave entrance. “My great-granddaddy made sure all the locals heard lurid tales about how the place was haunted. Fear of haints kept all but the most intrepid away. And the ones who didn’t fall for the legend of Smuggler’s Cave found themselves picking buckshot out of their backsides if they got too close to the place.” She flashed him a wry grin.

“So your great-granddaddy was a moonshiner?” he asked as he followed her up the side of the mountain toward the cave entrance. A storm was brewing, lightning snapping and crackling on the western horizon. Clouds had begun to obscure the moon, making the last quarter mile of their trek up the mountain more difficult than Briar had hoped.

At least the hours that it had taken her to drive back from Virginia had helped dilute the effects of whatever drug Dalton had ingested. He was keeping up with her surprisingly well as they climbed the steep hillside.

“Technically,” she reminded him, “yours was, too. On Tallie Cumberland’s side. The Meades and the Cumberlands were bootlegging rivals back in the day.”

“But wouldn’t Blake know about this secret passageway already, since he’s your cousin?”

“He’s a cousin on my daddy’s side. The Meades were my mama’s people. Culpeppers and Meades were nearly as bitter rivals as the Meades and Cumberlands.”

“Ah, a Romeo and Juliet story.”

“Well, except my parents weren’t fool enough to kill themselves over it,” she said flatly. “Lucky for me.”

It was strange to hear her own voice so calm and uninflected, considering the violent storm of terror ripping around inside her gut. The thought of Logan being held even for a moment in the rough and ruthless custody of her cousin Blake and his band of cutthroats had damned near paralyzed her earlier as she sat in her Jeep trying to figure out what to do next. If Dalton hadn’t knocked on her window...

As if he sensed the turn of her thoughts, Dalton touched her arm as they neared the mouth of the cavern. “Briar, we’re going to find Logan. I won’t stop until we do.”

She looked up at him. He was barely visible in the gloom, but the fierce determination in his eyes was impossible to miss, even in the dark. “I don’t know what’s going to happen once we get to the root cellar. They may have people already positioned inside the cabin. We could walk straight into an ambush.”

“They’re not going to hurt you as long as they think you can give them those files.”

“I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to them that I could have already made a dozen copies.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Dalton told her as he followed her through the dark mouth of the cavern. What little ambient light had illuminated their path outside disappeared, the darkness swallowing them completely.

Briar went still, just listening for a moment. She felt Dalton at her back, the heat of his body close and comforting. Quelling the urge to lean back into his solid warmth, she turned on the small flashlight she’d brought with her from the Jeep.

Damp stone walls continued for several yards ahead before twisting out of sight. She realized with a sudden flutter of alarm that she hadn’t been in this tunnel for over a year. There could have been a cave-in she didn’t know about. But the tunnel had remained solid and unshakable for decades. She had no reason to think it would fail on her now, did she? God knew, her day had already seen sufficient trouble without borrowing any more.

“You’ve been thinking about what?” she asked a moment later, when she was satisfied no pressing danger lurked ahead of them in the cavern tunnel.

“About why they don’t care if we make a copy.”

She looked back at him, shining the flashlight toward his face so she could read his expression. He squinted but didn’t look away. “Why don’t they care?” she asked.

“Because they don’t have the information themselves. Cortland died in the blast. Merritt Cortland is almost certainly dead himself, whether we can find his body or not. I’m betting those two may have been the only people in the whole organization who knew all the connections. Blake Culpepper doesn’t give a damn whether or not the police scoop up the people Cortland had working for him. He’d probably thank us for it.”

“But he needs to know who they are. Who might turn state’s evidence,” Briar realized, following his thoughts. “Who to eliminate as a rival.”

“It’s a crash course in mountain crime,” Dalton said. “If we want to understand how Cortland ran his crew, we need to get our hands on his files. Blake and I both want the same thing. For very different reasons.”