The Legend of Smuggler's Cave

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.”

“Too late to worry about that,” she murmured as she heard her son calling her name from down the hall. She followed the sound to the spare room, where Nix had set up the sofa bed for Logan, piling pillows around him to keep him from rolling too close to the edge. Logan looked sleepy and cranky, but the watery smile he flashed when he caught sight of her face made her heart melt into a sticky little pool of motherly love in the center of her chest. “Mama.”

“You ready to sleep in your own bed tonight?” She plucked him from the tangle of sheets and buried her nose in his neck, reveling in the soft baby smell of him.

“Yep,” he answered with an exaggerated nod that banged his little forehead against her chin. “Ow!” He giggled as he rubbed his forehead.

“Watch where you put that noggin, mister,” she answered with a laugh of her own, pressing a kiss against his fingers. “Let’s go home, okay?”

“I’ll get his things.” Nix picked up the scattered toys she’d packed for Logan while she carried him out to the front room. Nix carried the two small backpacks for her and put them in the front seat of the Jeep while she strapped Logan into his car seat in the back.

“If you decide you’d rather come back here, no matter what time it is, you pack up the little fellow and come on back. I’ll keep the sofa bed ready.” Nix reached through the open back door and gave Logan a head ruffle. Logan grinned up at him and patted his curls back down.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, although nothing short of a full-on assault was going to drive her out of her own house. She wasn’t going to play the damsel in distress, not even for someone like Nix, who had only her best interests at heart.

She’d made too many decisions in her life already based on what other people wanted her to do. She wasn’t going to ignore her own instincts any longer.

Still, her steely resolve took a hit when Logan’s sleepy voice piped up from the backseat as she turned onto the winding road to her cabin. “Mama, are the mean men gonna be there tonight? I don’t like them.”

She put the brakes on, slowing the Jeep to a standstill in the middle of the deserted road. “I don’t like them either,” she admitted, beginning to question her motives for taking her son back to the cabin so soon after the break-in. Was she willfully putting him in danger just to bolster her own desire to stand on her own two feet?

But she couldn’t tuck her tail and run away from their home. It was one of the few things she could call her own in the whole world. Her great-grandfather had built the cabin over a hundred years ago with wood he’d chopped himself and the sweat of his own brow. Her grandfather had added to it over the years—indoor plumbing, extra rooms as the family had expanded. When he had died, he’d left the place to Briar’s mother, who’d deeded it to Briar as a wedding gift.

It was one of the few things she had left now of her mother. That cabin and twenty-four years of good memories.

She couldn’t let fear drive her away from that legacy. For her own sake and especially for Logan’s.

“I won’t let the bad men scare you anymore,” she said firmly, hoping she was telling the truth. Because as much as she’d tried to hide it the night before at the hospital, Dalton Hale’s words had weighed heavily on her. Not the thought of Johnny’s infidelity—she may have been dismayed by the information, but she hadn’t been surprised. But the idea that he might have gotten himself tangled up in Wayne Cortland’s criminal activities—that was the notion that had nagged her every waking hour since Hale first brought up the subject.

Johnny hadn’t turned out to be the strong, solid man of honor she’d thought he would be. They’d married too young, she supposed, right out of high school. They’d started trying to have a family before either of them had reached their twenties, and the lack of success for the first few years had been an unexpected strain on their bond.

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?”