The Secret of Cherokee Cove

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“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.”

“I’d rather you just say what you’re thinking, straight out. Honesty goes a long way.”

“Okay. Then, honestly, I’m here in Bitterwood for two weeks. I’m not sticking around after that.”

“And you’re not interested in a short-term fling?” The corner of his mouth twitched as he cut to the chase.

“Not that you were offering?”

“No,” he said, the twitch becoming a whisper of a smile. “I wasn’t offering. For pretty much the same reason.”

She let out a long, slow breath. “Well, then.”

He walked slowly across the narrow space between them, reaching past her to put his mug of coffee on the breakfast bar. The move brought him so close she felt his heat pour over her, igniting another blaze of heat in her center. He bent his head, his breath hot against her ear. “Not that it ain’t mighty damn tempting.”

He stepped back, flashed her a smile that she felt right down to the tips of her toes and headed out of the kitchen toward the front door.

“You’re leaving already?” she asked, her voice embarrassingly hoarse.

He turned in the open doorway. “You may be on vacation, Marshal. But I’m not.” He lifted his hand in a brief, stationary wave, then pulled the door shut behind him.

She forced herself to stay where she was rather than trail him to the door and watch him leave. She might be feeling like a giddy schoolgirl right down to her tingling toes, but she had her pride.

And more important, she reminded herself sternly, she had a mystery to unravel. She just had to figure out where to start.

As she was walking back to the bedroom, the house phone started ringing. She picked up the bedroom extension, bracing herself to explain to the caller that her brother wasn’t available.

But it was Nix. “Sorry—I meant to mention this before I left. I don’t know how much truth there is to that story about your mother, but there’s a way you can find out.”

“Yeah?”

“In the story I’ve always heard, your mother was penniless, a charity case. And the couple whose baby boy she tried to take were well-off and reputable, which made what she did that much more scandalous.”

“If it really happened.”

“If it happened,” he conceded. “But if even a germ of the story is true, then what you’re looking for is a hospital that would treat both indigent and wealthy patients.”

“In other words, not a charity hospital or a low-income care facility.”

“Right. And there’s really only one hospital close that fits that description. Maryville Mercy Hospital.”

“That’s the hospital where Doyle is.”

“That’s right. Good luck.” He hung up the phone.

Good luck, she repeated silently. She had a feeling she was going to need all the luck she could find to cut through the years of rumor and innuendo to get to the truth about her mother’s secret life in Bitterwood.

But Maryville Mercy Hospital was as good a place to start as any.

Chapter Five

Nix walked slowly across the narrow two-lane street that bisected tiny Purgatory, Tennessee, wondering how long Alexander Quinn planned to keep him waiting. He hadn’t even taken his seat in the detectives’ office at the police station when his phone rang, and a low voice informed him that Merritt Cortland had been spotted in Purgatory.

It had been a few years since Nix had spoken to the old spymaster, but even with the man’s voice disguised, there was a certain tone to it that Nix found unforgettable. Many things had changed since the last time they’d met—Nix now carried a badge, not an M-16, and Quinn had recently left the CIA to start his own investigative agency in Purgatory. But Nix had a feeling Quinn would never fully give up his secret-agent ways.

Case in point—luring Nix to Purgatory with an anonymous tip. Nix doubted anyone had spotted Merritt Cortland anywhere near Purgatory. Which meant Quinn wanted him to come to Purgatory for some other reason but didn’t want to approach him directly.

On the other side of the road, Laurel Park was little more than a scenic overlook, a narrow strip of grass and trees that ended about thirty yards off the road where Little Black Creek meandered through the foothills just west of the Smokies. In the late nineteenth century, Purgatory had been a company town for a nearby Tennessee marble quarry, but by the end of the Second World War, the company had gone bankrupt as the demand for less expensive building materials drove most of the state’s marble quarries out of business.

Fortunately, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was in business by then, and Purgatory, like other towns near the park’s border, had made a trade out of tourism for a couple of decades before other towns closer to the park and more easily accessible by interstate highway had lured most of the tourists away.

Now Purgatory was limping along on the back of a large auto parts plant that had opened in Barrowville. Corporate bigwigs at the plant had looked east to Purgatory for land on which to build large homes and estates that would provide them with both an easy commute and the pristine beauty of living in the mountains.

The town’s name was unfortunate, but some folks around Ridge County would argue that it was well-enough earned, since the little town had struggled more than thrived for most of its existence.

Nix settled on a wooden bench to wait for Quinn to make himself known. That he was watching from some hiding place was a given. Nix couldn’t imagine Quinn waiting in the open for someone to approach him first.

A man with long sandy-brown hair strolled slowly toward him. His knee-length hiking shorts, round, red-lensed sunglasses, grimy baseball cap and well-worn backpack were the typical uniform of a section hiker, one of hundreds of thousands who hiked the Appalachian Trail section by section over the course of several years.

Of course, even if Nix hadn’t recognized the long-haired man as the former CIA agent he’d come to see, he’d have been suspicious, since the Appalachian Trail was several miles to the east of Purgatory, winding along the Tennessee/North Carolina state line.

The hiker otherwise known as Alexander Quinn sat at the other end of the bench from Nix and pulled a water bottle from his backpack. “Warm weather’s finally here,” he said with just enough of a hipster vibe to make Nix bite back a laugh.

“That’s a new look for you,” Nix murmured.

“Recycled from about twenty years ago,” Quinn said in his normal accent, a neutral tone that had a chameleon-like ability to sound as if it could originally have come from almost any English-speaking country. “Thanks for coming.”

“Was there really a Merritt Cortland sighting?”

“Actually, there was, although I can’t vouch for it personally,” Quinn answered. His gaze moved lazily from side to side, as if he were just a tourist enjoying the view. But Nix knew the old spymaster never did anything casually.

“Are you expecting company?”

“Expecting? No.” He took another swig from his water bottle, then slipped it into the backpack that sat on the bench between them. “But it never hurts to stay alert.”

“Are you planning to get to the point of my summons?”

Quinn’s eyes met his briefly. “My agency has been looking into Cortland’s disappearance. That’s how we got the tip that someone may have seen him just north of here, near the old marble quarry.”

“How valid a tip?”

“Remains to be seen. But we haven’t come across any proof that Cortland is dead, either. So we have to proceed on the assumption that he could still be alive and kicking. And if so, he’s probably working overtime to solidify his control of his father’s criminal enterprise.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Nix asked.

“Seemed like something you’d want to know.”

“It’s something a lot of people would like to know. The FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service—”

“I hear someone tried to kill your chief of police.” Quinn leaned back, crossing his ankle on top of his knee. The soles of his hiking boots were muddy and well-worn, Nix noticed. When the man donned a disguise, he didn’t miss a beat.

“That’s still under investigation,” Nix said carefully.

Quinn laid his head back, as if enjoying the morning sun that angled through the trees overhead to bathe his face with warm light. “Check with your office. I believe you’ll find the mechanic’s assessment is in.”

Nix stared at Quinn. “I thought you were out of the spy business.”

He shrugged. “I don’t spy for the government anymore.”

“Just for yourself?”

“Let’s just say I haven’t lost the ability to uncover sensitive information when necessary.”

“Do the people you employ know you’re still playing head games?”

“They know me,” Quinn said simply.

Nix supposed that response answered the question about as well as anything would. “So, you’ve told me there may or may not have been a Cortland sighting in the area. A phone call would have sufficed.”