The Legend of Smuggler's Cave (4 page)

She’d given up before Johnny had, figuring a child of her own just wasn’t going to happen, but he’d seen the failure as a personal affront, a challenge to his masculinity. His inability to get her pregnant had turned out to be one of those moments in life where adversity led to unpleasant revelations about a person’s character.

She hadn’t been happy with what she’d seen in Johnny during those months when he’d fought against the tide of reality. She hadn’t realized how much his sense of self had been tangled up with his notion of sexual virility, maybe because she’d made him wait until marriage before they slept together. She’d seen his patience and willingness to deny himself for her as a sign of his strength.

She’d begun to wonder, as he grew angrier and more resentful with each negative pregnancy test, if she’d read him right. What if he hadn’t denied himself at all? What if he’d been sleeping with other girls the whole time she was making him wait?

Then, almost as soon as they stopped trying, she’d gotten pregnant with Logan, and for a while Johnny had seemed to be his former self: happy, good-natured and loving. Until the nausea had started, and the doctor had started warning her about the possibility of not carrying the pregnancy to term.

“Mama?”

Logan’s voice held a hint of worry, making her realize how long she’d been sitting still in the middle of the road, trying to make a decision.

They were almost home. And it
was
home, after all. Two invasions of her sanctuary made her only that much more determined to reclaim its sense of peace and safety.

“We’re almost home,” she said firmly, shifting the rearview mirror until she could see her son’s sleepy face. He met her gaze in the mirror and grinned, melting her heart all over again.

She reached the cabin within a couple of minutes and parked in the gravel drive that ended at the utility shed at the side of the house. She paused for a moment, taking a thorough look around for any sign of intruders. But the night was dark, the moon fully obscured by lowering clouds that promised rain by morning. She still hadn’t changed the front-porch light bulb, she realized with dismay. The only light that pierced the gloom was from the Jeep’s headlights, their narrow beams ending in twin circles on the flat face of the shed wall.

Don’t borrow trouble, Briar Rose.
The voice in her head was her mother’s, from back when she’d been as strong and immovable as the rocky face of Hangman’s Bald near the top of Smoky Ridge.
Don’t borrow trouble—it’ll come in its own sweet time, and more than soon enough.

She cut the Jeep’s engine and walked around to the passenger side to get Logan out of his seat. He lifted his arms with eagerness, despite his sleepy yawn, and she unlatched him as quickly as she could, wanting to get inside the cabin before the Jeep’s headlight delay ran out.

She had just pulled him free of the car-seat belts when the headlights extinguished, plunging them into inky darkness.

Without the moon and the stars overhead, the darkness was nearly complete. The town center lay two miles to the south; her closest neighbor was a half mile up the mountain, invisible to her through the thicket of evergreens and hardwoods that grew between them.

Tucking Logan more firmly against her side, she reached in her pocket for her cell phone. Her fingers had just brushed against the smooth casing of the phone when she heard a crunch of gravel just behind her.

She let go of the phone and brought her hand up to the pancake holster she’d clipped behind her back before leaving work. But she didn’t reach it before hands clawed at her face, jerking her head back until it slammed against a solid wall of heat. She heard Logan’s cry and felt him being pulled from her grasp.

Clutching him more tightly, she tried to get her hand between the body that held her captive and the Glock nestled in the small of her back, but her captor’s grasp was brutally strong. His fingers dug into her throat, cutting off her air for a long, scary moment.

Then the air shattered with the unmistakable crack of rifle fire, and the world around her turned upside down.

Chapter Four

The rifle kicked in Dalton’s hands, nearly knocking him from his feet, but he tightened his grip and fired another warning shot into the ground, his pulse stuttering in his ears like a snare drum.

He’d had little hope that his desperate intervention would work, but to his relief, the two figures tugging at Briar Blackwood dived for cover at the second bark of the Remington.

The darkness of the night was near total, but he’d been dozing in the car for hours, his eyes adjusting to the gloom enough for him to make out the shadowy shapes of the two men escaping into the woods. Definitely both men—he had quickly discerned that fact as soon as he’d seen them gliding out of the woods in the wake of Briar’s arrival.

He’d had no time to warn her, only enough time to unstrap the Remington 700 rifle that hung on a rack in the back window of the S-10’s cab, another gift from his campaign manager. He knew enough about rifles to check that it was loaded and to point the barrel where it would make a loud noise but have no chance of causing injury, but in truth, he was damned lucky his ruse had worked, and he was praying like crazy as he raced toward Briar’s still figure on the ground by the Jeep that the men didn’t figure out he’d been bluffing.

She stirred as he came closer, putting her son between her body and the Jeep as she rose to her knees and turned a pistol toward him.

“Don’t shoot! It’s Dalton Hale.”

She held her shooting stance for a heart-stopping moment while he froze in place. Fear flooded him, roared in his ears like a storm-tossed sea and made his hands shake as he held the rifle away in a show of surrender.

“Cover me until we reach the cabin,” she rasped, shoving her weapon behind her back and turning to scoop up her son.

He hurried behind her, keeping his eyes on the woods, looking for any sign of the intruders returning, but the gloom was absolute. He heard no sounds of movement in the underbrush, however, as they hurried up the cabin steps. With a rattle of keys, Briar unlocked the door one-handed and shoved her way inside, growling for him to hurry and come in behind her.

Once he was inside, she turned the deadbolt and slumped hard against the front door, her chest rising and falling in quick, harsh gasps.

“Are you okay?” he asked, setting the rifle aside and reaching for the little boy, who was wobbling precariously in her faltering grasp.

She tried to pull her son away from him, but her knees buckled, and he grabbed the boy quickly, keeping him from falling. With alarm, he watched her slide to a sitting position in front of the door, her breath labored.

“Mama!” The child started crying, wriggling against Dalton’s grasp.

“It’s okay, little man. Your mama’s going to be okay.” He lowered the boy to the floor, and he raced away on stubby little legs, throwing himself at his mother.

She lifted her arms and hugged him close, her face buried in his neck. “Call 911,” she said, her voice muffled against her son’s body.

Pulling out his cell phone, he reached for the light switch on the wall by the door. Golden light flooded the front room, making him squint as he punched in the numbers and crouched in front of Briar. A female voice came through the phone speaker. “911. What’s your emergency?”

He summarized the situation quickly, putting his hand on Briar’s shoulder. “I can’t tell if she’s injured—”

“I’m okay.” Briar pulled her face away from her son’s neck and met Dalton’s gaze. She was pale, and her eyes were red-rimmed and damp, but her voice sounded a little less tortured, and color was coming back into her cheeks. “Tell her to call Walker Nix.”

Dalton gave the instruction. “Do you want paramedics?” he asked.

Briar held her crying son away from her, looking him over for injuries. “Logan, are you okay? Do you have any boo-boos?”

“Mama!” he wailed, tightening his grip on her neck like a baby monkey.

She hugged him close and looked up at Dalton. “I think we’re both okay. No paramedics.”

He wasn’t so sure. Dark bruises had begun to form along the curve of her throat. “You’re injured,” he murmured, reaching out to touch the purple spots before he realized what he was doing.

She stared up at him with wide stormy eyes, a dark flush spreading up her neck into her cheeks. “I’m fine,” she said again, forcing her gaze back to her son’s tearstained face. “Just get Nix here.”

“Just get the police here,” Dalton told the dispatcher. “I’m going to hang up now.” He pocketed the phone and tried not to tumble backward out of his crouch. His knees were starting to feel like jelly.

“Can you help me up?” She reached out one hand.

He took her hand and pushed to his feet. Her fingers tightened around his as he helped her up, and she didn’t let go right away, as if afraid that she might topple over again if she let go of his grasp. She had a warm, firm grip, even in her present distress, he noticed. She apparently came from what his grandfather would have called “hardy stock,” for already she looked close to full recovery, save for the mottled contusions on her throat.

“Did you hit either of them?” she asked, rocking slightly from side to side as she rubbed her whimpering son’s back.

He shook his head. “Didn’t aim for them. I’m not a great shot, and I wasn’t going to risk hitting you or the kid.”

“Logan,” she said with a hint of a smile. “His name is Logan.”

The little boy had settled down to a series of soft hitching sniffles. “Can I get something for him?” Dalton asked, trying to remember what he’d found comforting as a little boy. “A cookie or a toy or something?”

“There’s ice cream in the freezer. Strawberry—it’s his favorite.”

Dalton headed for the kitchen. He noticed, in passing, that she’d cleaned the place up sometime between the night before and now. Even the torn sofa cushions had been mended.

As he reached for the refrigerator’s freezer compartment, Briar said, “No, not that one. The one in the corner.”

He spotted a chest freezer nearby and pulled open the top. Inside, instead of the brand-name carton he was expecting, he found a large plastic tub labeled Strawberry Ice Cream in neat, clear handwriting. He pulled out the tub, uncovering what looked to be stacks and stacks of vacuum-packed cuts of some sort of meat. Looking closer, he saw that, like the ice cream, they were labeled in the same strong handwriting. Venison Shoulder, read one of the packages, with a date—December of the previous year—inscribed below. Another nearby contained pork—wild pig, to be exact—apparently put in the freezer only four weeks ago.

He closed the freezer and set the container of ice cream on the small kitchen table. “Hey, Logan, how about some ice cream?”

The little clinging monkey turned his tearstained face toward Dalton, his big gray eyes wide with a mixture of caution and curiosity.

Dalton tried again. “Ice cream, Logan. You want some?”

Logan looked up at his mother as if to seek her permission. She lowered him to the floor. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can have some.”

Logan crossed the distance to the kitchen with small cautious steps, still watching Dalton with a healthy dose of distrust.

But when Dalton plopped a hearty scoop of homemade strawberry ice cream into the bowl in front of his chair, he climbed up and grabbed the spoon, ready to dig in. By the time Dalton put away the ice-cream container and turned back to the kitchen, Logan was half-bathed in the sticky sweet stuff.

His mother stood at one of the front windows, peering out through a narrow gap in the curtains.

“Do you see anything?” Dalton asked, walking toward her.

She let the curtains fall closed and turned to look at him. “It’s dark out.”

Not quite the question he’d asked, but he let it go. “How’s your throat?”

“Why are you here?”

Yeah, he’d figured that question would occur to her sooner or later. “I don’t suppose you’d buy it if I said I was just driving by?”

Her dark eyebrows twitched in reply.

“I was staking out the place. In case the intruders returned.”

The tiniest hint of a smile curved one corner of her mouth. “And what did you plan to do if they did?”

“Call the cops.”

She nodded toward the Remington 700 propped by the door. “Where’d you get the rifle?”

“It’s mine.”

“You hunt a lot, do you?”

He took a stab at changing the subject. “Somebody around here does. Freezer’s full of game.”

“I bag as much as I can during the hunting seasons. We’ll live off that meat for the rest of the year.” She waved her hand toward the rifle. “May I?”

He nodded, and she picked up the weapon, first checking for ammunition. “I heard two rounds. Where did you aim?”

“At the ground.”

She looked up at him. “You have the rest of your ammo on you?”

He didn’t know if there was any other ammunition for the rifle at all, he realized. He’d been lucky it had been loaded—he wasn’t sure what he’d have done if he’d pulled the trigger and nothing had happened.

“Have you ever shot this rifle before?” She sounded as if she knew the answer.

“No.”

“Why do you have it, then?”

“Emergencies,” he answered, the truth too humiliating to admit.

From the look on her face, she saw through his answer anyway. She set the empty rifle against the wall. “If you’d like shooting lessons, I can help you out with that.”

“For a fee?”

Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “You saved us tonight. I reckon I could let you have a lesson for free.” Her voice tightened. “One, at least.”

Great. He’d insulted her. “I didn’t mean—”

“What do you think you’re going to find here?” She leaned her back against the front wall and crossed her arms, looking at him through narrowed eyes. “Or maybe you’re here because those men were working for you?”

He stared at her a moment, wondering if she was joking. The look on her face suggested otherwise. “You think I would put you and your son at risk? For what possible reason?”

“To play hero? To worm your way into my life so you could use me for whatever it is you’re up to.”

“What do you think I’m up to?”

She shrugged. “Hell if I know. Maybe you just want to punish your brother for existing.”

He wouldn’t mind knocking the smug smile off Doyle’s face now and then, but he wouldn’t use someone else to do it. He’d knock it off himself.

“I told you the truth last night at the hospital. I think your husband’s involvement with Wayne Cortland may have gone beyond sleeping with the man’s bookkeeper. I even think his murder wasn’t as random as the police believe.”

She was silent for a long moment, as if letting that thought sink in. Finally, she pushed herself away from the wall, rubbing her eyes with both hands. “What do you want from me? What do you think I can give you?”

It was a good question, and until just a few minutes ago, he’d have said all he wanted was a few minutes of her time, a chance to pick her brain for anything in her husband’s last few months of life that might offer a new lead in the Cortland case. But two attacks on the woman in a row went far beyond coincidence. Apparently he wasn’t the only person who thought Briar Blackwood could aid in the investigation, and unlike Dalton, the others didn’t care who got hurt in the process.

“I think the more pressing question is, why did someone break into your house last night? And why did someone attack you again tonight?”

The sound of a truck engine began to filter through from outside the cabin, and a moment later, headlights flashed through the window, bouncing off the walls. Briar turned to the window. “It’s Nix and Dana.”

Dalton’s heart sank. Dana. Of course she’d be with Nix. They were practically inseparable these days. Walker Nix was one of the reasons she’d decided to stick around Bitterwood instead of heading back to Atlanta.

“If you want to go without seeing your sister,” Briar said quietly, “you can always go out the back.”

Was his dismay so obvious? “I’m not sneaking out like a criminal.”

She shrugged and opened the door at the first sound of footsteps on the front porch. Dana Massey entered first, her eyes widening a notch at the sight of Dalton. Walker Nix followed on her heels, the look he shot at Dalton tinged less with surprise and more with suspicion.

“What are you doing here?” Nix asked.

“He came to my rescue,” Briar answered, locking the door behind them. “Don’t ask why. He doesn’t seem inclined to share his secrets.”

She made him sound like a foot-stomping adolescent, Dalton thought. Hell, maybe that’s what he’d been acting like for the past few months. He’d be the first to admit he hadn’t taken well the earthshaking change in his life history.

“I saw what transpired,” Dalton said. “I’ll tell you what I remember, though I’m afraid it was too dark for me to have seen anything I could testify to in a court of law.”

Nix looked him up and down once, then nodded toward the sofa. “Well, we’ll start with what you can tell us and worry about prosecution later. How about that?”

As Dalton followed the detective to the sofa, he spared one last look at Briar Blackwood standing by the door, her arms crossed defensively over her breasts, her thundercloud gaze following him relentlessly across the room.

* * *

“W
HAT
DO
YOU
think he wants with you?” Dana’s voice was little more than a whisper as she walked with Briar into the kitchen.

“He thinks Johnny was part of Cortland’s crew,” Briar answered just as quietly, moving past the now-sticky kitchen table to grab a clean dishcloth. She drenched the cloth with water from the tap and headed for the table to clean up the mess, starting with Logan’s hands and face.

He was grinning now, a strawberry-stained show of little-boy joy that made her heart swell with love. If he was traumatized by what had nearly happened outside only a short while ago, the ice cream had sent it into remission for the time being.

But she couldn’t forget as easily. The men who’d accosted her outside her Jeep had tried to pull Logan away from her. In fact, the more she went over events in her mind, the more convinced she was that this attack, at least, had been all about taking Logan.