THE SECRET OF CHEROKEE COVE (4 page)

“Buying,” she answered. “He said it wouldn’t look good for the chief of police to rent a place. Might make it seem like he wasn’t planning to stick around for the long haul. Bad optics.”

Nix’s grimace suggested he wasn’t a fan of that sort of public-service politics. Dana didn’t like it much herself, though being a federal law enforcement agent meant that some level of politics was unavoidable.

“Thanks for cleaning up,” she added, waving her hand toward the much neater room.

“Not a problem.”

As Nix took a step toward the bedroom door, Dana caught his arm, stilling his movement. He looked down at her hand, then slowly lifted his gaze back to her face. Heat radiated from his tall, broad-shouldered body, washing over her in a flood that set her own skin tingling.

“Yes?” His voice was like silk over sandpaper.

“You know something about my mother, don’t you?”

Nix recoiled slightly, the movement clearly involuntary. Dana stared at him, watched the color suffuse his face as his gaze slid.

Her pulse notched upward, fueled by a river of dread flowing through her veins to settle in the center of her chest. She took her own step backward, until her knees hit the edge of Doyle’s bed and she sat abruptly, curling her fingers into the bedspread.

“What did my mother do?” she asked, her voice tight with alarm.

Nix made himself look at her, his dark gaze unfathomable. “If the story I’ve heard all my life is true, she killed her own baby and tried to steal someone else’s.”

Chapter Four

Dana’s face went pale with shock at Nix’s words. She stared at him, first in stunned silence, then in a slowly simmering anger that chased the pallor from her face, replacing it with splotches of high color in her cheeks.

“That’s ludicrous.”

He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t actually vouch for any of the details. All he knew was what the older people in his small community had whispered for years, quietly enough that they could pretend discretion while knowing full well that their children were listening and absorbing the cautionary tale of the teenage girl who got herself pregnant, got away with murder and eventually got herself run out of town for her sins.

“My mother was a wonderful, kind, smart and decent woman.”

“I’m sure she was,” Nix agreed, though not with enough conviction to drive the fury from Dana’s flashing eyes.

“You couldn’t possibly know anything about her. She left here before you were born.”

“Yeah, about a year before I was born,” he agreed.

She looked away from him, as if she couldn’t stand looking at him any longer. He took that as his cue to leave, backing toward the door.

“Wait,” she snapped.

He faltered to a stop.

She looked at him again, her expression more composed, though distress roiled behind her eyes. “Please sit.” She waved her hand toward the armchair by the window, next to a table holding a reading lamp and a small stack of books.

He sat in the chief’s chair and took a bracing breath before he looked at Dana again, steeling himself against her anger and pain. But she seemed to have herself completely under control now, her expression back to cool neutral, her eyes mirrors reflecting her surroundings without revealing anything that lay beneath.

“Where did you hear that story about my mother?” she asked.

She wasn’t going to let it go, he saw. Not that he should have expected her to. After all, she hadn’t chosen a career in law enforcement because she was incurious or prone to dodging conflict.

“It’s one of those stories you grow up hearing,” he answered carefully.

“Like monsters in the closet and bogeymen under the bed?” she asked, only a hint of sarcasm breaking the calm surface of her composure.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Like that.”

“So, tell me. What was the story? How did she kill her child?”

“Her baby,” he corrected. He thought he saw a quick flinch, a slight tightening in the corners of her eyes. “She was unmarried. Pregnant. Went into labor and someone took her to the hospital in Maryville for delivery. Everything went okay and the baby was born.” He faltered to a stop, knowing the worst part of the story, the part that made any normal person recoil, was yet to come.

“Did she kill the baby at the hospital or at home?” Dana asked, her tone businesslike, as if she were interviewing a witness to a crime.

“At the hospital. The nurse had brought him for feeding and left him there with her. As the story goes, she claims she fell asleep and someone switched out her live baby for an already dead one. But nobody saw anything.”

“Nobody saw anyone carrying a dead baby into the room or carrying a live one out, you mean.”

“Right.” Nix shook his head. “Dana, I don’t know that any of this is true. It’s just a story.”

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. What happened when the unmarried girl discovered the baby in the bassinet was dead?”

“She started screaming.” He swallowed a lump that had formed in his throat as he watched Dana’s face grow even stonier. “She kept screaming at the nurses that it wasn’t her baby, but of course, it had to be. Nobody had gone into her room.”

“That anyone witnessed.”

He’d let his gaze drift away from her face but snapped it back at her words. “That anyone witnessed.”

“What’s the next part of this cautionary tale?” Her voice held a minute trace of sarcasm, so tiny he wasn’t sure whether it was really there or he was just reading that tone into her words.

“The hospital called in a psychiatrist to calm her down. She finally settled down and started to cooperate with the hospital staff, who were trying to make arrangements for the baby’s burial. The nurse who saw her just before all hell broke loose supposedly swore she seemed to be sad but acting normally enough for a girl who’d just lost her newborn baby.”

Dana was silent and very still for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was faint and strained. “And then?”

“The nurses supposedly heard screams coming from a room down the hall on the same floor. A woman screaming that someone had stolen her baby. The story goes, they locked down the hospital and finally found the unmarried girl and the missing baby in the hospital basement. She was trying to take him out a service exit.”

“Who were the baby’s parents?”

“You mean the baby that lived?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “That was never part of the story I heard.”

“They only identified the girl?”

He nodded. “Crazy Tallie Cumberland, mad as a hare and wicked as the rest of her family. Killed her own baby and tried to steal another. Better take care and not let a Cumberland look you in the eye, or you’ll turn out crazy and wicked, too.”

“Lovely.”

“I’m sorry. I guess it’s not so entertaining a legend when you’re on the Cumberland end of things.”

“It’s also completely impossible,” Dana said in a low, flat tone. “My mother couldn’t have killed her own child under any circumstances. She was perfectly sane, perfectly rational and as loving and protective a mother as a child could have hoped for.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Nix said.

“No, you’re not.” She pulled the collar of her robe more tightly around herself. “You never knew her.”

“No, I didn’t.” Nix stood. “It’s late. We’re tired. Let’s just get some sleep tonight while we can. Morning will make everything look better.”

At least, he hoped it would.

But long after he retreated to the guest room, he remained awake, staring at the moon-painted ceiling over the bed and wondering just how much of the story he’d told Dana was true.

And how much of it, true or otherwise, had led to Doyle Massey’s brand-new brakes failing on the curve just past Purgatory Bridge?

* * *

L
OSING
HER
PARENTS
had been one of the most devastating moments of Dana Massey’s life. She’d talked to her mother on the phone only a couple of hours before the accident, planning for a birthday party for David, the baby of the family, which was to have taken place the next month. David was turning eighteen, a significant milestone, and Tallie Massey had tasked Dana with finding a particular set of books David wanted for his birthday. They were obscure books on South American agricultural technology, in the original Spanish, and neither of her parents had a clue where to start looking.

Dana had been a junior in college, entirely too full of herself and far too certain she knew everything there was to know about any subject of importance.

Stupid, stupid girl.

The call had come in the middle of the night. It had been David, the baby, the one who felt everything like a pierce to the heart, trying so hard to be strong and adult, to break the news to her gently.

But there was no easy way to tell someone her parents were dead.

Doyle had beaten her home by an hour. She’d found him and David sitting in silence in the well-worn den of their family home, staring at the phone as if waiting for more bad news to crash down on them. They’d looked up in unison as she entered the room, just staring at her with shattered expressions and heartsick eyes. She’d opened her arms and David had run to her, a lost little boy in a young man’s body.

“Sheriff Morgan delivered the news himself,” Doyle had told Dana later, after they’d coaxed David into getting some sleep before morning came and the food-and-sympathy visits started. “David said he’d offered to stick around, but our little brother didn’t want us to think he was still a kid.”

Oh, David,
Dana thought, staring at the ceiling of her brother’s bedroom.
What kind of man would you have been?

Morning light was beginning to seep through the curtains, just a hint of pearly-gray in the otherwise unrelenting darkness, but it gave her an excuse to get out of bed and get her mind out of the bleak past for a while.

There was a light on in the kitchen, the sound of water running. Figuring an intruder wouldn’t stop for a drink of water, she decided against going back into the bedroom for her Glock and entered the kitchen to find Walker Nix scooping coffee grounds into a filter. He turned at the sound of her bare footsteps on the hardwood floor. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” She stifled a yawn and settled on one of the stools in front of the breakfast bar. “You’re up early.”

“I have to go home and get ready for work.”

“Right.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, his dark eyes hooded. “You want some coffee?”

She nodded. “Nice and strong, I hope?”

“Of course.” His lips twitched as he reached into the cabinet over the coffeemaker and pulled out a couple of large mugs. “Did you get any sleep?”

She grimaced. “That obvious, huh?”

“You look fine.” He actually sounded as if he believed what he was saying.

“You’re a better diplomat than you look,” she murmured with a smile.

He left the coffee percolating and pulled up the stool beside hers, resting one arm on the bar and turning to face her. “I want you to forget what I told you last night about your mother. I have no proof that any of it happened, and what passes as truth, in these hills, can be as flexible as taffy.”

“I know it didn’t happen the way you heard it,” she said with confidence. “But something happened to my mother when she was living here in Bitterwood. There’s no other reason why she would’ve hidden her past so thoroughly from us for all these years.”

“You didn’t even know she was from here?”

“I knew she was from the Smoky Mountains. That she was born in Tennessee and didn’t meet my father until she was nearly twenty and working at a bait shop in Terrebonne. She told us she didn’t have any family left, and no reason to go back to Tennessee for visits. That’s why we were sort of surprised when she and my dad decided to drive to Tennessee for their vacation.”

“Do you think your father knew about your mother’s past?”

She thought about the question for a moment. “I think so. They were best friends as well as spouses. They didn’t keep secrets from each other.”

“But they never told you or your brother anything about it?”

“No.” She hadn’t thought much about why her mother’s past was a blank. It had simply always been that way, for as long as she remembered. “I think Dad guarded her secret because that’s what she wanted. But he must have known.”

“She didn’t leave you anything, a written journal or something that might have explained the blanks in her past?”

“No. Nothing. She wasn’t expecting to die, so she hadn’t prepared.”

“My mother got real sick when I was sixteen,” Nix said after a moment of silence. “Breast cancer. She just wanted to live at least long enough to get me and my brother out of high school.” Nix’s smile was tinged with a hint of exasperation. “Lavelle had to be pushed through that final semester, kicking and screaming.”

“Younger brothers,” Dana murmured, biting back the urge to cry.

“The good news is, she beat the cancer. Twenty-year survivor as of January.”

She felt a flutter of relief. “That’s wonderful.”

He nodded. “The chief says you’re the oldest.”

“He likes to remind people of that a lot. Lucky me.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you look younger.”

“Ten years ago, I might have smacked you for saying that,” she said with a grin. “But now I’ll just say ‘thanks.’ And suggest you might want to get your eyes checked.”

He looked at her for a long moment, his scrutiny straightforward and a little unnerving. “You have to know you’re a very attractive woman.”

She supposed she knew it, although the deeper into her thirties she went, the more she had a sense of time ticking past her at a quicker rate. She’d put her career first, her personal life a distant second, and she’d been okay with that order of things, because she’d always figured there’d be time, before her youth was spent, to change her priorities.

But she was two months shy of her thirty-fifth birthday, no longer the youngest, prettiest woman in any given room, and her expectations had changed.

“Thank you, again.” She cocked her head, smiling slightly. “You’re brave, Detective Nix. Flirting with the chief’s sister.”

“Oh, sugar, this ain’t flirting,” he said in a drawl so low and sexy her cheeks started burning.

“Just as well,” she murmured, retreating to the counter, where the coffee had finished burbling. She poured the hot black liquid into a mug and crossed to the refrigerator for milk. She spotted some hazelnut liquid creamer—had to be there for Laney, she figured, since Doyle didn’t care for sweet coffee—and poured a dollop from the container into her cup.

“You’re involved with someone back in Atlanta?” Nix asked. He’d moved to the counter to pour his own cup of coffee. Like Doyle, he drank it black, no cream, no sugar.

“Not at the moment.”

He glanced up from his coffee cup, a flame flickering in his dark eyes. She felt a responding flood of heat deep in her abdomen and forced her gaze back to her own coffee.

“Not in the market?”

“I don’t consider myself a commodity,” she answered a little more tartly than she’d intended.

Nix’s eyebrows twitched slightly, but he didn’t seem particularly offended by her response. “I’ll take that as a no.”

Still, she felt bad about snapping at him just for showing mild interest in her availability. She should feel flattered. Hell, she
was
flattered; Walker Nix was an attractive man. It wasn’t his fault that she didn’t care to involve herself in a short-term, dead-end fling.

She pushed her hair back from her face, meeting his gaze. “Sorry. I’ve spent a long time trying to get my fellow marshals to treat me like one of the guys. I forget my social graces sometimes.”