The Smoky Mountain Mist

A sliver of dismay cut a path through the center of his chest. He tried to ignore it. “Thanks anyway.” He left the office before Paul Bailey started to wonder why one of his fleet mechanics was suddenly asking a lot of nosy questions.

He stopped in the fleet garage, where he and the other mechanics shared a small break room. The three mechanics working in the garage today were out in the main room, so he had the place to himself.

Grabbing the phone book they kept in a desk drawer, he searched the hotel listings, bypassing the cheaper places. Joe Breslin had described Davis Rogers as a slicked-back frat boy, which suggested he’d stay at a nice hotel.

Was that Rachel’s type? Preppy college boys with their trust funds and their country club golf games?

Drop it, Hammond. Not your concern.

She wasn’t exactly what he considered his type, either. She was attractive, clearly, but quiet and reserved. And maybe if he hadn’t begun to put clues together that suggested the recent Bitterwood murders were connected to Davenport Trucking, he might never have allowed himself to think about Rachel Davenport as a person and not just a company figurehead.

But ever since he’d given up the con game for the straight and narrow, he’d shown an alarming tendency to take other people’s troubles to heart. And Rachel Daven-port’s life was eaten up with trouble these days.

An old twelve-step guy he knew had told him overcompensation was a common trait among people who felt the need to make amends for what they’d done. They tended to go overboard, wanting to save the whole damned world instead of fix the one or two things they could actually fix.

And here he was, proving the guy right.

Using his cell phone, he called Maryville hotels with no luck. He was about to start calling Knoxville hotels when he remembered there was a bed-and-breakfast in Bitterwood that offered the sort of services a guy like Davis Rogers would probably expect from his lodgings. The odds were better that he was staying in Knoxville, but Sequoyah House was a local call, so what would it hurt?

The proprietor at Sequoyah House put him right through to Davis Rogers’s room when he asked. Nobody answered the phone, even after several rings, but Seth had the information he needed.

He had a few tough questions for Davis Rogers, and now he knew where to find him.

Chapter Four

On the ride back to Bitterwood, Rachel realized she had no idea where her car was parked. Seth had said he’d found her on Purgatory Bridge, so it made sense that she’d left her car somewhere in the area. Delilah agreed to detour to the bridge to take a look.

Sure enough, as soon as they neared the bridge, Deli-lah had spotted the Honda Accord parked off the road near the bridge entrance, just as Seth had said.

“Do you have your keys?” Delilah asked as she pulled the truck up next to Rachel’s car.

“Yeah. I found them in my pocket.” God, she wished she could erase the last twenty-four hours and start fresh. But then, she’d have to face her father’s funeral all over again. Feel the pain of saying goodbye all over again. The stress of staying strong and not breaking. Not letting anyone see her crumble.

What would those mourners at the funeral have thought, she wondered, if they’d seen her acrobatics on the steel girders of Purgatory Bridge last night?

She shuddered at the thought, not just the idea of making a spectacle of herself in front of those people, but also the idea of Purgatory Bridge itself. Crossing the delicate-looking truss bridge in a car was nerve-racking enough. Standing on the railings with land a terrifying thirty feet below?

Unimaginable.

The morning rain had gone from a soft drizzle to sporadic showers. Currently it wasn’t raining, but fog swirled around them like lowering clouds. As Rachel crunched her way across the wet gravel on the shoulder of the road, Delilah rolled down the passenger window. “You sure you feel up to driving?”

“I’m fine,” she said automatically.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” Delilah smiled gently as she rolled the window back up, shutting out the damp coolness of the day. Rachel watched until the truck disappeared around the bend before she slid behind the wheel of the Honda.

The car’s interior seemed oppressively silent, her sudden sense of isolation exacerbated by the tendrils of fog wrapping around the car. Outside, the world looked increasingly gray and alien, so she turned her attention to the car itself, hoping something would jog her missing memory.

What had she done the last time she was in her car? Why couldn’t she remember anything between standing at her father’s gravesite and waking up in a strange room with Seth Hammond watching her with those intense green eyes?

A trilling sound split the air, making her jump. She found the offending noisemaker—her cell phone, which lay on the passenger floorboard. Grinning sheepishly, she grabbed it and checked the display. She didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Rach! Thank God, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

“Davis?” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to her grad school boyfriend, Davis Rogers. She hadn’t heard from him in years.

“I thought maybe you regretted giving me your number and were screening my calls. Did you get home okay?” Before she could answer, he continued, “Of course you did, or you wouldn’t be answering the phone. Look, about last night—”

Suddenly, there was a thud on the other end of the line, and the connection went dead.

Rachel pulled the phone away from her face, startled. She looked at the display again. The number had a Vir-ginia area code, but Davis had spoken as if he was here in Tennessee.

She tried calling the number on the display, but it went to voice mail.

He’d said he’d been trying to call her. She checked her own voice mail and discovered three messages, all from Davis. The first informed her where he was staying—the Sequoyah House, a bed-and-breakfast inn out near Cutter Horse Farm. She entered the information in her phone’s notepad and checked the other messages.

In the last message, Davis sounded upset. “Rachel, it’s Davis again. Look, I’m sorry about last night, but he seemed to think you might be receptive. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t like leaving you in that place. Please call me back so I can apologize.”

She stared at the phone. What place? Surely not Smoky Joe’s. Why was her ex in town in the first place—for her father’s funeral? Had she seen him yesterday?

And why had his call cut off?

SEQUOYAH HOUSE WAS a sprawling two-story farmhouse nestled in a clearing at the base of Copperhead Ridge. Behind the house, the mountain loomed like a guardian over the rain-washed valley below. It was the kind of place that lent itself more to romantic getaways than lodgings for a man alone.

But maybe Davis Rogers hadn’t planned to be alone for long.

Most of the lobby furnishings looked to be rustic antiques, the bounty of a rich and varied Smoky Mountain tradition of craftsmanship. But despite its hominess, Se-quoyah House couldn’t hide a definite air of money, and plenty of it.

The woman behind the large mahogany front desk smiled at him politely, her cool gray eyes taking in his cotton golf shirt, timeworn jeans and barbershop haircut. No doubt wondering if he could afford the hotel’s rates.

“May I help you?” she asked in a neutral tone.

“I’m here to see one of your guests, Davis Rogers.”

“Mr. Rogers is not in his room. May I give him a message?”

“Yes. Would you tell him Seth Hammond stopped by to see him about a matter concerning Rachel Davenport?”

He could tell by the flicker in her eyes that she recognized his name. His reputation preceded him.

“Where can he reach you?”

Seth pulled one of the business cards sitting in a silver holder on the desk. “May I?” At her nod of assent, he flipped the card over and wrote his cell phone number on the back.

The woman took the card. “I’ll give him the message.”

He walked slowly down the front porch steps and headed back to where he’d parked in a section of the clearing leveled off and covered with interlocked pavers to form a parking lot. Among the other cars parked there he spotted a shiny blue Mercedes with Virginia license plates.