The Legend of Smuggler's Cave (3 page)

“Understood,” he said with similar bluntness. “But my interest in your husband’s murder has nothing to do with Massey.”

“Then why are you suddenly interested in what happened to Johnny?”

He studied her, wondering if her straightforward style and “call a spade a spade” philosophy extended to her own life. “Why aren’t you
more
interested, Mrs. Blackwood?”

His question hit the mark. He saw her eyes widen slightly, and her pink lips flattened with annoyance. “What makes you think I’m not?”

“Most people who lose a loved one to murder don’t move on with their lives so easily.”

The fire returned to those gunmetal eyes. “What would you have me do? Bury myself with him? Turn the cabin into a shrine and worship his memory? I have a small son. I have bills to pay and debts to honor. I don’t have time to haunt the police station begging them to solve his case. I was there for the whole thing. I knew how hard they tried to follow leads. But there weren’t any leads to follow. Not here in Ridge County.”

“Where, then, if not here in Ridge County?” he asked softly.

Up flickered those eyes again, changing tone with quicksilver speed. Now they were hard edged and cold as hoarfrost. “What made you come to Maryville at this time of night to ask me questions about my husband? Why tonight, smack in the middle of all this uproar?”

She wasn’t going to tell him what he needed to know, he saw, unless he gave her something in return. The chief was right—she
was
tougher than she looked. But how much could he tell her without driving her further away?

“I’m investigating the Wayne Cortland crime organization. I assume, as a police officer, you have at least a passing knowledge of the case.”

She nodded quickly. “I do.”

Much of the information he’d gathered over the past few months was highly confidential, but he had a feeling he wouldn’t get far with this woman if he didn’t cough up a little new information. But the newest revelation of his ongoing investigation, the lead that had brought him to Maryville Mercy Hospital in the middle of the night, was something he didn’t think Johnny Blackwood’s widow wanted to hear.

“I’m trying to connect the dots between Cortland and some of the Tennessee groups that may have been working for him.”

“I know. My cousin Blake is part of the Blue Ridge Infantry. Tennessee division.” She spoke in a dry, humorless drawl liberally spiced with disdain. Clearly not a fan of either her cousin or his pretense of patriotism. Good. That made his work here marginally less difficult.

But only marginally.

He paused a moment to size her up again, telling himself it wasn’t an excuse to appreciate once more her tempting curves. But his body’s heated reaction demolished that lie in a few accelerated heartbeats.

He forced his focus back to the problem of her husband’s potential involvement in Cortland’s organization. “How much did you know about your husband’s job?”

She hadn’t been expecting that question, he saw. Her brows furrowed and she cocked her head slightly to one side, countering with a question of her own. “What do
you
know about my husband’s job?”

“He was a driver with Davenport Trucking.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And because Wayne Cortland was trying to take control of Davenport Trucking through a proxy, you’re wondering if Johnny might have been on Cortland’s payroll.”

“Yes,” he answered, though it wasn’t the entire truth. He hadn’t made the connection between Johnny and Cortland because of Davenport Trucking, but if she bought that reason for his questions, he’d go with it.

“That’s thin gruel,” she said with a shake of her head. “There are dozens of people driving trucks for Davenport Trucking. You have another reason for targeting Johnny.”

“He was murdered.”

“And you think it’s connected to Cortland because...?”

She wasn’t going to be mollified by half truths, he saw with dismay. Not only was she tougher than she looked; she was smarter than he’d reckoned.

Still, he gave it one more shot, not so much out of concern for her feelings as from his own bone-deep weariness of scandal and acts of betrayal. “Can you accept that I have my reasons and I’m not inclined to share them?”

The look she gave him was uncomfortably penetrating. He felt himself closing up in defense, not ready to have her poking around in his brain.

She turned suddenly and started walking away.

“Wait.” He trailed after her.

She stopped and whirled around so quickly he almost barreled into her. “I want the truth. I don’t need you to protect my feelings or try to handle me. If you can’t play fair, you can count me out of your game.”

“It’s not a game.”

“What drew your attention to my late husband? What makes you think he’s connected to Wayne Cortland?”

There was steel in her voice but also a hint of a tremor, as if she knew whatever he had to say would be bad. So she hadn’t been naive about Johnny Blackwood’s personal failings, he thought. It wouldn’t make the truth any less sordid, but she might be less injured by the blow.

“I’ll make it easier for you,” she said quietly, her gaze dropping to the collar of his shirt. “The day Johnny’s body showed up on Smoky Ridge, I’d spoken to a lawyer about filing for divorce.”

The words were spoken flatly, but Dalton didn’t miss the tremble of vulnerability that underlay them. Not a broken heart, he assessed silently, but a deeply shattered pride.

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

She gave an impatient toss of her dark curls. “Just tell me why you think Johnny was involved with Cortland.”

“Because he was involved with Cortland’s secretary,” Dalton answered. “They were having an affair. And she thinks he was using her to get closer to Wayne Cortland.”

Chapter Three

Briar didn’t flinch. She didn’t tremble or cry or do anything that Dalton Hale was clearly bracing himself to deal with as he lowered the boom.

But inside she died a little, another tiny piece of herself ripping away to join the other little scraps of soul shrapnel that had come unmoored during the slow unraveling of her marriage.

“How long?” she asked, pleased at the uninflected tone of her voice.

“She says about three months.”

That was about right, she thought, remembering the growing distance between Johnny and her in the months before his murder. In fact, she’d long suspected he might have been unfaithful during her early pregnancy, when her normally sturdy body had betrayed her with dizzy spells and five months of near-constant nausea before she’d regained her strength for the last four months.

Johnny had liked the idea of having a baby, but the process had left him feeling peevish and neglected. As if the whole thing should have been about him and not the baby she was desperately trying to carry to a healthy birth.

In fact, he’d reacted like an overgrown baby himself. It had marked the beginning of the long, tortuous end of their twelve-year romance.

“Mrs. Blackwood?”

She realized she hadn’t responded to him, hadn’t even moved a muscle, her body and mind focused inward to her own unexpected pain. She gathered the tatters of her wits to ask, “What makes her think he was using her to get to Cortland?”

“Do you really want that much detail?” he asked, not unkindly.

She supposed not. At least, not right now, when she was still processing another ugly piece of truth about the only man she’d ever loved. “Did she offer any proof other than her own feelings?” The question came out with a hint of cold disdain. Not an attractive sound, but she couldn’t unsay it.

“I’m not at liberty—”

“Get back to me when you are.” She turned and started walking away once more, this time not stopping when he called her name.

She entered the waiting room, where only Nix and Logan remained. Logan lay curled up in the chair beside Nix, fast asleep.

“Everybody else had to go,” Nix said quietly, rising as he spotted her. “Work comes bright and early in the morning.”

“For you, too,” she said with a faint smile, hoping her inner turmoil wasn’t showing. Nix was the closest thing she had to a brother, and if he thought for a moment that Dalton Hale had upset her, he might go looking to mete out a little Smoky Mountain justice on her behalf.

“This
is
my work.”

He opened his arms and she slipped into his brotherly embrace, glad that his deepening relationship with the chief’s sister hadn’t changed the warmth of their own long-standing friendship. Right now she needed a friend in her corner, someone who’d back her up without asking any hard questions. “Aunt Jenny’s probably not going to be up for any more questions tonight. You can go home and get some sleep.”

He rubbed her back. “You and Logan are coming home with me.”

She looked up at him. “Dana’s okay with that?”

“She’s making up the sofa bed as we speak.”

“Don’t screw up and let that one go,” she said. “I like her.”

“Yeah, I kind of like her, too,” Nix murmured.

As she started to pull away from his embrace, movement in the doorway caught her eye. Dalton Hale stood there, watching her and Nix through narrowed eyes. She let go of Nix and turned to face him, lifting her chin. “Later, Mr. Hale.”

He gave a short nod and walked away.

“You sure he’s not giving you trouble?”

“No trouble,” she lied, turning to ease her sleeping son out of the chair and into her arms.

* * *

D
ALTON
TRIED
TO
stretch his legs, but the cab of the Chevy S-10 pickup truck was too small to allow for much motion. He’d wanted to buy a big, spacious luxury car—he had money, damn it, and it wasn’t a sin to spend it on comfort sometimes. But his campaign manager, Bill Murphy, had pointed out that he was running for office in a county where many people still fed themselves and their families with wild game and the fruits of their homestead gardens. An American-made pickup truck said Dalton was one of them, just another homegrown Smoky Mountain boy. The smaller, more fuel-efficient S-10 said he was environmentally conscious and a protector of the land they all loved.

But the Infiniti M35 he’d wanted to buy instead of the S-10 would have said he was a tall man with a good income who could afford not to have cramps in his legs to appear as if he were something he wasn’t.

Serving the people of his county shouldn’t have been so damned hard. Whatever people like Doyle Massey and Briar Blackwood thought, his motives for wanting the job of head county prosecutor weren’t entirely self-serving. He supposed it might be seen as a stepping-stone to state office and maybe national office one day, but if that were his only reason for wanting the job, he would have given up a long time ago. He wasn’t a politician by nature. He supposed, in a sense, that trait was one he and Briar Blackwood shared in common.

Sugarcoating things had never come naturally to him.

Her house was dark and quiet. She wasn’t there, of course; she worked the five-to-midnight shift at the police station—rookie hours, his clerk had called it with a laugh when he’d asked the man to learn her work hours.

Her absence was why he had come here at night to keep watch over her cabin, to see if the people who’d broken in the night before were of a mind to give it another try. He wasn’t even sure she was staying here tonight; she’d stayed the previous night with Walker Nix at his Cherokee Cove cabin about a mile up the mountain. He assumed, though he couldn’t know for sure, that Dana Massey had stayed there, as well, marking her territory.

That’s unfair,
a small voice in the back of his head admonished him. His mother’s voice, he recognized—not the troubled girl who’d apparently given birth to him but the sweet-natured, softhearted woman named Nina Hale who’d raised him from infancy.
She
was his mother. Tallie Cumberland was an inconvenient fact of biology.

He hadn’t talked to his mother in a couple of days. He needed to remedy that fact, because of all the people involved in the Tallie Cumberland scandal, she was the most fragile and innocent of all. She’d lost as much as Dalton had—her husband and father were in jail, looking at spending years behind bars, and she’d learned that the son she’d loved even before his birth had died in his hospital bassinet thirty-seven years ago.

He checked his watch. Only a little after nine. She’d probably be awake still, all alone in that big rambling house in Edgewood. He pulled out his cell phone and hit the speed dial for her number.

His mother answered on the second ring. “Dalton?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“I’ve been meaning to call you all day,” she said, her voice soft with badly veiled anxiety. “Your father’s lawyer called this morning. He wants me to talk to Paul about taking the plea deal. Your father doesn’t want to do it. You know how he can be when he sets his mind on something.”

Like covering up a fifteen-year-old murder and taking potshots at a woman asking inconvenient questions, he thought. He’d never speak those thoughts aloud, of course. He loved his mother dearly, but she was no Briar Blackwood, able to take emotional body blows without batting an eye.

“I know you want him out of prison as early as possible,” he said gently. “But I respect that he feels the need to pay for what he did.”

“He was just trying to protect us,” she said softly. “You know that’s all he cared about. Tell me you know that, Dalton.”

“I know that,” he said, and hoped she didn’t hear the doubt.

“Please talk to him. He won’t let me visit him at the jail, but he’ll talk to you. I know he really wants to talk to you.”

Guilt sliced another piece out of his conscience. He hadn’t gone to see his father or his grandfather in a month, ever since the truth about what they’d done had finally gotten past his denial. Outrage at Doyle and Dana Massey destroying his family hadn’t gone away; he’d just added fury at his father and grandfather to the toxic mix.

It wasn’t healthy, feeling so angry all the time. He just hadn’t yet figured out how to let go of the anger. He was beginning to wonder if he ever would.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, because he didn’t think he could sell a lie on that particular topic, not even to his mother, who wanted to believe they could somehow patch up their shattered lives and move forward as if none of it had ever happened.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing you soon, too,” she added softly.

“I’ll come by soon,” he promised. “We’ll have dinner.”

“I’ll make shrimp creole. Your favorite.”

It hadn’t been his favorite since he was eight years old and discovered the joy of Italian-sausage pizza, but he kept that fact to himself. “Can’t wait.”

“I love you, Dalton.”

He closed his eyes, swallowing the ache in his throat. “Love you, too, Mom. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll figure out when I can make it for dinner.” He slid his phone back in his pocket and settled down to watch Briar Blackwood’s darkened cabin.

* * *

B
Y
THE
TIME
her patrol shift ended at midnight, Briar had begun to wish she’d taken up the chief’s offer of a night off to recover from the previous evening’s excitement. Despite the recent rise in crime in the county, the Bitterwood P.D. night shift wasn’t exactly a date with danger.

She’d answered exactly two calls during her seven-hour shift, and one of them had been a false alarm. The other had been a car crash on Old Purgatory Road near the bridge, but even that had turned out to be more paperwork than a daring rescue. Two patrons at Smoky Joe’s Tavern had tried to turn out of the parking lot at the same time, crashing fenders. Neither had registered as high as .08 on the Breathalyzer, so she’d written up a report and left it to them to sort out the insurance issues.

When she dropped by Nix’s cabin to pick up her son and the bag of clothes she’d packed for the overnight stay, Nix was waiting up for her. “You can stay here another night,” he said when he opened the door for her.

“No, I can’t.” She squeezed his arm and smiled. “Got to get back on the horse again.”

“A cabin break-in isn’t exactly the same thing as getting tossed from a pony. Plus, you’ll have to wake up the little man.”

“Too late to worry about that,” she murmured as she heard her son calling her name from down the hall. She followed the sound to the spare room, where Nix had set up the sofa bed for Logan, piling pillows around him to keep him from rolling too close to the edge. Logan looked sleepy and cranky, but the watery smile he flashed when he caught sight of her face made her heart melt into a sticky little pool of motherly love in the center of her chest. “Mama.”

“You ready to sleep in your own bed tonight?” She plucked him from the tangle of sheets and buried her nose in his neck, reveling in the soft baby smell of him.

“Yep,” he answered with an exaggerated nod that banged his little forehead against her chin. “Ow!” He giggled as he rubbed his forehead.

“Watch where you put that noggin, mister,” she answered with a laugh of her own, pressing a kiss against his fingers. “Let’s go home, okay?”

“I’ll get his things.” Nix picked up the scattered toys she’d packed for Logan while she carried him out to the front room. Nix carried the two small backpacks for her and put them in the front seat of the Jeep while she strapped Logan into his car seat in the back.

“If you decide you’d rather come back here, no matter what time it is, you pack up the little fellow and come on back. I’ll keep the sofa bed ready.” Nix reached through the open back door and gave Logan a head ruffle. Logan grinned up at him and patted his curls back down.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, although nothing short of a full-on assault was going to drive her out of her own house. She wasn’t going to play the damsel in distress, not even for someone like Nix, who had only her best interests at heart.

She’d made too many decisions in her life already based on what other people wanted her to do. She wasn’t going to ignore her own instincts any longer.

Still, her steely resolve took a hit when Logan’s sleepy voice piped up from the backseat as she turned onto the winding road to her cabin. “Mama, are the mean men gonna be there tonight? I don’t like them.”

She put the brakes on, slowing the Jeep to a standstill in the middle of the deserted road. “I don’t like them either,” she admitted, beginning to question her motives for taking her son back to the cabin so soon after the break-in. Was she willfully putting him in danger just to bolster her own desire to stand on her own two feet?

But she couldn’t tuck her tail and run away from their home. It was one of the few things she could call her own in the whole world. Her great-grandfather had built the cabin over a hundred years ago with wood he’d chopped himself and the sweat of his own brow. Her grandfather had added to it over the years—indoor plumbing, extra rooms as the family had expanded. When he had died, he’d left the place to Briar’s mother, who’d deeded it to Briar as a wedding gift.

It was one of the few things she had left now of her mother. That cabin and twenty-four years of good memories.

She couldn’t let fear drive her away from that legacy. For her own sake and especially for Logan’s.

“I won’t let the bad men scare you anymore,” she said firmly, hoping she was telling the truth. Because as much as she’d tried to hide it the night before at the hospital, Dalton Hale’s words had weighed heavily on her. Not the thought of Johnny’s infidelity—she may have been dismayed by the information, but she hadn’t been surprised. But the idea that he might have gotten himself tangled up in Wayne Cortland’s criminal activities—that was the notion that had nagged her every waking hour since Hale first brought up the subject.

Johnny hadn’t turned out to be the strong, solid man of honor she’d thought he would be. They’d married too young, she supposed, right out of high school. They’d started trying to have a family before either of them had reached their twenties, and the lack of success for the first few years had been an unexpected strain on their bond.