The Legend of Smuggler's Cave

by Paula Graves

  And for what? For a lie told years ago and a truth buried for over three decades. The vindication of a woman long dead and the total destruction of a man whose name had once meant something, not just here in Tennessee but all the way to the steps of the United States Capitol.

  In a world where very little in life was fair, Dalton had spent his own life trying to even the odds for people without power or privilege.

  People like the woman who had given birth to him.

  And now he was angry at her, too. For having existed. For having come back here nearly fifteen years ago for one last look at the son she’d left behind. For becoming, with her husband, a victim of his grandfather’s steely will and his father’s emotional weakness.

  And for giving birth to another son and a daughter who had invaded his well-planned world and asked inconvenient questions about a truth that should have remained buried.

  They had made him into a man he didn’t recognize anymore.

  And he was angry at himself, most of all, for letting them.

  Maybe if he’d been brought up by earthy, straight-talking mountain folk like his birth mother, he could have vented all this rage in one rip-roaring, glass-smashing, fist-flying explosion. Gone on a tear and let the fury have reign. Got it out of his system and been done with it.

  But he’d been raised by Nina Hale, not Tallie Cumberland. And Hales didn’t throw angry fits. They kept their emotions under control, functioning on reason and behaving at all times with civility and good manners.

  Except when they were killing inconvenient people, he reminded himself as he faced his half brother with clenched fists and fought the urge to take a swing.

  “What evidence do you have to support your theory about Johnny Blackwood?” Doyle’s calm tone was deceptive. Dalton didn’t miss the dangerous gleam of anger in the chief’s green eyes, eyes so like his own that he’d all but given up hoping the past couple of months had all been one nightmarish mistake.

  “I’m not prepared to try my case before you, chief.”

  “In other words, you’re talking out your—”

  Laney put her hand on Doyle’s arm, stopping him midsentence. “Dalton’s been looking into the Wayne Cortland case,” she told her fiancé. “He’s been trying to unravel the Tennessee side of the organization, see if he can build criminal cases against everyone involved.”

  Doyle’s expression took on a slight grudging hint of admiration that caught Dalton by surprise. Even worse, he felt an answering flutter of something that might be satisfaction deep in the pit of his gut, as if the chief’s approval actually mattered. He beat back the sensation with ruthless determination.

  “I have to confess, I don’t know a lot about Johnny Blackwood,” Doyle said in a less confrontational tone. “I know he was murdered several months ago, and the case went cold pretty quickly.”

  “It’s not his murder that interests me,” Dalton answered before he remembered he didn’t want to share any information with the chief. He sighed, knowing what he’d said would only make Massey more, not less, interested in Johnny Blackwood’s possible connection to Cortland.

  Fortunately, Briar Blackwood chose that moment to return to the waiting room. She looked tired and angry, her black curls spilling into her face from her untidy ponytail as she strode into the room. Her storm-cloud eyes locked with his, and she gave a curt backward nod of her head, a silent invitation to join her outside. She murmured something to Nix and then walked out of the waiting room again.

  “I have to go,” Dalton murmured, already moving toward the door.

  “Be careful. She’s tougher than she looks.” Doyle’s words sounded more like a taunt than a warning.

  His back stiffening, Dalton left the waiting room and looked up and down the corridor for the Blackwood woman.

  She stood at the window at the far end of the hall, her back to him. She had a neat, slim figure accentuated by snug jeans and a curve-hugging long-sleeved T-shirt. The messy ponytail had almost given up, gathering only a small clump of curls at the back of her neck while the rest of her hair spilled free across her shoulders. As he walked toward her, she reached back and pulled the elastic band free, letting the rest of her hair loose to tangle and coil around her neck.

  An unexpected tug in his groin caught Dalton by surprise. His steps faltered before he caught himself.

  Not an option, Hale. Not even close to an option.

  Unfortunately, the more he tried not to think about Briar Blackwood as a woman, the more of her feminine features he noticed. Like the perfect size of her breasts, neither too large nor too small for her compact frame. Or the flare of her hips and curvy contours of her bottom.

  She had a fine face, too—more interesting than conventionally pretty, with lightly tanned skin splashed with small cinnamon freckles and large black-fringed eyes currently the color of antique pewter.

  Fire flashed in those gray eyes as she turned to look at him. “Mr. Hale, I don’t know what you think you know about my husband or his murder, but if you think it’s a way to get back at your brother and sister—”

  “Don’t call them that.”

  Her dark eyebrows notched slightly upward. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. I don’t sugarcoat the truth. You and the chief share a mother. You don’t have to like it. I don’t reckon he likes it much himself, but there you are anyway. And if you’re messing around in my life because you think it’ll piss off your brother, you can just move along and find somebody else to use. I won’t be party to it.”

  He wanted to be angry at her for her bluntness, but in truth, he found it something of a relief. Everybody else he knew, friends and colleagues he’d known for years, seemed to walk around on eggshells around him, as if they feared speaking plainly about the train wreck his life had become. He might not like what Briar Blackwood had to say, but at least she was saying it aloud and without apology.

  “Understood,” he said with similar bluntness. “But my interest in your husband’s murder has nothing to do with Massey.”

  “Then why are you suddenly interested in what happened to Johnny?”

  He studied her, wondering if her straightforward style and “call a spade a spade” philosophy extended to her own life. “Why aren’t you more interested, Mrs. Blackwood?”

  His question hit the mark. He saw her eyes widen slightly, and her pink lips flattened with annoyance. “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “Most people who lose a loved one to murder don’t move on with their lives so easily.”

  The fire returned to those gunmetal eyes. “What would you have me do? Bury myself with him? Turn the cabin into a shrine and worship his memory? I have a small son. I have bills to pay and debts to honor. I don’t have time to haunt the police station begging them to solve his case. I was there for the whole thing. I knew how hard they tried to follow leads. But there weren’t any leads to follow. Not here in Ridge County.”

  “Where, then, if not here in Ridge County?” he asked softly.

  Up flickered those eyes again, changing tone with quicksilver speed. Now they were hard edged and cold as hoarfrost. “What made you come to Maryville at this time of night to ask me questions about my husband? Why tonight, smack in the middle of all this uproar?”

  She wasn’t going to tell him what he needed to know, he saw, unless he gave her something in return. The chief was right—she was tougher than she looked. But how much could he tell her without driving her further away?

  “I’m investigating the Wayne Cortland crime organization. I assume, as a police officer, you have at least a passing knowledge of the case.”

  She nodded quickly. “I do.”

  Much of the information he’d gathered over the past few months was highly confidential, but he had a feeling he wouldn’t get far with this woman if he didn’t cough up a little new
information. But the newest revelation of his ongoing investigation, the lead that had brought him to Maryville Mercy Hospital in the middle of the night, was something he didn’t think Johnny Blackwood’s widow wanted to hear.

  “I’m trying to connect the dots between Cortland and some of the Tennessee groups that may have been working for him.”

  “I know. My cousin Blake is part of the Blue Ridge Infantry. Tennessee division.” She spoke in a dry, humorless drawl liberally spiced with disdain. Clearly not a fan of either her cousin or his pretense of patriotism. Good. That made his work here marginally less difficult.

  But only marginally.

  He paused a moment to size her up again, telling himself it wasn’t an excuse to appreciate once more her tempting curves. But his body’s heated reaction demolished that lie in a few accelerated heartbeats.

  He forced his focus back to the problem of her husband’s potential involvement in Cortland’s organization. “How much did you know about your husband’s job?”

  She hadn’t been expecting that question, he saw. Her brows furrowed and she cocked her head slightly to one side, countering with a question of her own. “What do you know about my husband’s job?”

  “He was a driver with Davenport Trucking.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And because Wayne Cortland was trying to take control of Davenport Trucking through a proxy, you’re wondering if Johnny might have been on Cortland’s payroll.”

  “Yes,” he answered, though it wasn’t the entire truth. He hadn’t made the connection between Johnny and Cortland because of Davenport Trucking, but if she bought that reason for his questions, he’d go with it.

  “That’s thin gruel,” she said with a shake of her head. “There are dozens of people driving trucks for Davenport Trucking. You have another reason for targeting Johnny.”

  “He was murdered.”

  “And you think it’s connected to Cortland because...?”

  She wasn’t going to be mollified by half truths, he saw with dismay. Not only was she tougher than she looked; she was smarter than he’d reckoned.

  Still, he gave it one more shot, not so much out of concern for her feelings as from his own bone-deep weariness of scandal and acts of betrayal. “Can you accept that I have my reasons and I’m not inclined to share them?”

  The look she gave him was uncomfortably penetrating. He felt himself closing up in defense, not ready to have her poking around in his brain.

  She turned suddenly and started walking away.

  “Wait.” He trailed after her.

  She stopped and whirled around so quickly he almost barreled into her. “I want the truth. I don’t need you to protect my feelings or try to handle me. If you can’t play fair, you can count me out of your game.”

  “It’s not a game.”

  “What drew your attention to my late husband? What makes you think he’s connected to Wayne Cortland?”

  There was steel in her voice but also a hint of a tremor, as if she knew whatever he had to say would be bad. So she hadn’t been naive about Johnny Blackwood’s personal failings, he thought. It wouldn’t make the truth any less sordid, but she might be less injured by the blow.

  “I’ll make it easier for you,” she said quietly, her gaze dropping to the collar of his shirt. “The day Johnny’s body showed up on Smoky Ridge, I’d spoken to a lawyer about filing for divorce.”

  The words were spoken flatly, but Dalton didn’t miss the tremble of vulnerability that underlay them. Not a broken heart, he assessed silently, but a deeply shattered pride.

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  She gave an impatient toss of her dark curls. “Just tell me why you think Johnny was involved with Cortland.”

  “Because he was involved with Cortland’s secretary,” Dalton answered. “They were having an affair. And she thinks he was using her to get closer to Wayne Cortland.”

  Chapter Three

  Briar didn’t flinch. She didn’t tremble or cry or do anything that Dalton Hale was clearly bracing himself to deal with as he lowered the boom.

  But inside she died a little, another tiny piece of herself ripping away to join the other little scraps of soul shrapnel that had come unmoored during the slow unraveling of her marriage.

  “How long?” she asked, pleased at the uninflected tone of her voice.

  “She says about three months.”

  That was about right, she thought, remembering the growing distance between Johnny and her in the months before his murder. In fact, she’d long suspected he might have been unfaithful during her early pregnancy, when her normally sturdy body had betrayed her with dizzy spells and five months of near-constant nausea before she’d regained her strength for the last four months.

  Johnny had liked the idea of having a baby, but the process had left him feeling peevish and neglected. As if the whole thing should have been about him and not the baby she was desperately trying to carry to a healthy birth.

  In fact, he’d reacted like an overgrown baby himself. It had marked the beginning of the long, tortuous end of their twelve-year romance.

  “Mrs. Blackwood?”

  She realized she hadn’t responded to him, hadn’t even moved a muscle, her body and mind focused inward to her own unexpected pain. She gathered the tatters of her wits to ask, “What makes her think he was using her to get to Cortland?”

  “Do you really want that much detail?” he asked, not unkindly.

  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 mot
ion. 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.