The Legend of Smuggler's Cave

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.

* * *

DALTON 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.

* * *

BY 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.”