The Legend of Smuggler's Cave

by Paula Graves

  Dalton had been the catalyst.

  It was possible, even likely, that Blake had learned of the new lead, as well. She knew Wayne Cortland’s band of rogues had included people with access to the Bitterwood P.D. Probably the county sheriff’s department, as well. Maybe even the Ridge County prosecutor’s office. If Dalton suspected Johnny had stolen something valuable from Wayne Cortland by way of his affair with Cortland’s bookkeeper, then her cousin probably suspected it, too.

  The rattle of the front-door knob sent a corresponding echo through her taut nerves. Her hand closed around the butt of her Glock, relaxing only when she saw Dalton walk through the open doorway.

  He paused midstride when his gaze met hers.

  “Are you angry at me?” she blurted, though it hadn’t been the question she’d planned.

  He shook his head. “I had coffee with my brother and sister.” A fleeting look of wonder crossed his face. “Never thought I’d say that.” He locked the door behind him and crossed to the sofa, dropping heavily onto the soft cushions. He looked so tired, Briar thought, her own muscles aching with sympathy. “Where’s Logan?”

  “He’s napping.”

  Dalton looked at his watch. “At ten-thirty?”

  She sat in the chair across from him, not quite trusting herself to sit beside him again so soon after their loss of control the night before. “Last night was a lot of excitement for a little boy. He didn’t sleep well.” She hadn’t even had to try hard to coax him into taking an early nap. “How’s your father?”

  “He’s going to be fine. The doctor is pretty sure it was a panic attack.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” She let herself breathe again. “Did you see him?”

  “I saw him.” He passed his hand over his face, as if he could wipe away the weariness lining his face. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever actually thought about my father in terms of strength or weakness. I think we assume our parents are either saints or demons, you know?”

  “We see what we want to,” she murmured.

  “Or what we need to.”

  “I think that’s probably true of most people in our lives.” She thought about Johnny, about the lies she’d fed herself with the willingness of a young girl in love for the first time. “We look past the flaws and oversell the good parts.”

  His green eyes met hers, understanding passing across the space between them through that electric clash of gazes. “My father feels sorry for himself. He can’t quite let himself come to terms with his failures. He needs to blame someone else.”

  “That’s pretty human,” she said gently.

  “It is.” He gave a brief nod. “But it’s not particularly admirable.”

  “Have you always done the admirable thing since learning the truth about your birth?”

  He looked down at his hands, his brow folding into a grim scowl. “God, no.”

  “The truth can be a real cold bitch,” she murmured.

  “You said you knew Johnny had been cheating on you,” he said after a few moments of awkward silence. “When did it start?”

  “The cheating?” She thought about it, even though the stark truth was painful even now. “I don’t know. I had made him wait until we were married to have sex. And he seemed so patient about it, even though I knew he wanted me. But now I wonder...”

  “You think he wasn’t really being patient at all?”

  “I grew up with Johnny. I’d been crazy about him since I was old enough to realize just what the difference between boys and girls really meant. When we started dating, I was utterly determined that he was the man I’d marry someday. And I was right.” She couldn’t stop a little smile at the memory of her happiness when Johnny had asked her to marry him. She had seen that moment as the beginning of her future. And it had been, though not quite in the way she’d foreseen.

  She gripped her knees to keep her restless hands still. “We were both eighteen when we married. Young, though not so young compared to our parents’ generation. Johnny already had a good job driving trucks for a mining company, and I had started as a dispatcher with Bitterwood Emergency Services. We thought we had our lives all figured out. We wanted babies. Lots of babies. But that didn’t work out so well, either.”

  He looked at her oddly. “But Logan—is he adopted?”

  “No, he’s my biological son,” she said quickly. “Johnny wouldn’t consider adoption. And we probably couldn’t have afforded it even if he’d thought differently. I think he wanted a child to prove something.”

  “Prove what?”

  “I don’t know. You’re a man. You tell me.”

  “Some men see it as proof of virility,” he said after a moment. “Like they’re real men if they can plant their seed somewhere.” Dalton didn’t sound as if he agreed. “I wonder if my father felt that way. If that’s why he covered up the truth about me.”

  “He saw you as his son. For a lot of years, he didn’t know you weren’t. Biologically, I mean.”

  “Biology,” he murmured. “Just a bunch of nucleotides on a double helix, and yet it seems to rule our destinies.”

  “God, I hope not,” she said. “I’m a Culpepper by birth, remember.”

  He looked up with a smile. “Not all Culpeppers are bad, are they?”

  She gave a rueful laugh. “Depends on who you ask, I reckon.”

  “I guess Johnny was thrilled when you got pregnant with Logan?”

  “Over the moon,” she admitted, smiling at first until she remembered the months and years leading up to that brief moment of sheer joy. “I thought everything was going to be better then.”

  “Better than what?”

  She realized that she was spilling her deepest, darkest secrets to a man she’d barely known by sight just a few days earlier. How had she let herself become so vulnerable?

  And why did the thought not scare her more than it did?

  “I’m sorry,” he said a moment later as she continued to hesitate. “I’m asking a lot of personal questions that are none of my business.”

  “Johnny’s personality seemed to change when we kept trying to have a baby and couldn’t,” she said, making herself ignore his tacit offer to change the subject. She’d kept Johnny’s secrets for years, preventing his friends, his family and especially her own family from seeing the growing cracks in their young marriage.

  But there was no marriage to protect any longer. And Johnny had been dead for a while now. The secrets burned in her gut like acid, and maybe it was time to get them out of her system before they destroyed her.

  “At first we just thought it was bad luck. Bad timing. We started reading books about things like ovulation and biological timetables. It was a lark at first. We laughed about it a lot. Johnny had never been a big reader, but he tackled those books like they were instructional manuals.” She laughed aloud at the memory. “We’d make naughty jokes about screws and nails and putting the right tabs into the right slots.”

  Dalton’s smile almost made it to his eyes.

  “But when all the reading and all the jokes and all the sex never produced a baby, he stopped smiling about it.” The mood change had been palpable, she remembered. Joy had become dread. Sex had ceased to be communication and became instead an act of desperation. “We couldn’t afford fertility treatments or expensive tests, and I sometimes wonder if he didn’t prefer it that way. Easier to blame me than himself. And if we couldn’t test to see who was really to blame—”

  “Then he could keep believing it wasn’t his fault.”

  “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. That’s not how it works. Nature gives us what it gives us, and assigning blame about it is stupid and cruel.”

  “My parents tried forever to have a baby, without luck. When they had me—” Dalton stopped, a rueful grimace of a smile touching his lips as he
started again. “When they had their son, they considered it a miracle.”

  “I guess your grandfather didn’t want to rip that miracle away from them,” she said. “When the baby died.”

  “I guess so. But his motives don’t excuse his actions.”

  “No.”

  He looked up at her, raw emotion burning in his green eyes. “I don’t know how to feel about any of it. It’s like I woke up one day, looked in the mirror and saw a stranger.”

  “You’re the same person,” she said quietly, wanting desperately to cross the space between them and take him in her arms. Comfort the lost little boy that stared out from those pain-filled eyes. But she didn’t trust herself to stop with comfort. “It’s the world around you that’s changed.”

  “Then maybe I need to quit whining and just get on with changing myself to adapt?”

  She smiled. “I think I’d have put it more delicately.”

  He laughed. “You’re a lot of things, Briar Blackwood, but delicate is not one of them.” After a moment, when she didn’t join in the laughter, he added, “That’s a good thing, you know. Delicate things end up trampled to dust sooner or later. In my line of work, I’ve seen it happen too often.”

  “You can’t afford to be soft living in the mountains,” she said. “You have to be tough, or the hills will eat you alive.”

  He gave her a thoughtful look. “I guess this would be a bad time, then, to suggest you and Logan should leave Bitterwood.”

  She stared at him, her mind rebelling against the thought. Life in these mountains had been hard, just as she’d said. Painful at times. But the mountains were her home. She’d carved a life out of these rocks and trees and smoky hills, and she didn’t want to leave this place in fear.

  “I have a friend who lives in Colorado. In the mountains. It’s beautiful there, especially during the snowy season. You and Logan could learn to ski. Or snowboard. No one would find you there.”

  “You think we should run away? Leave everyone we know?”

  He looked down at his hands for a long moment before his gaze snapped up, blazing with raw energy. “I could go with you. You’re right about the world around me being different. So maybe it’s the perfect time to change my world on purpose. Go somewhere, start fresh.”

  “With me?” She couldn’t believe that was what he was suggesting.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, finally looking away. She felt a strange sort of relief not having those burning eyes gazing into her as if he could read the secrets of her soul. At the same time, she felt as if a cord connecting them for a brief electric moment had snapped, leaving her floating in some cold and lonely void. Her head ached with confusion.

  “I’m not finished fighting,” she said when it was clear he’d say nothing more. “Not yet. We don’t even know what we’re looking for, do we? Blake seems determined to get some sort of leverage over me before he even tells me what he wants.”

  “That reminds me. I stopped by the office on the way home to pick up some files I had copied for you, but I left them in the car. Be right back.” He went outside and came back in a minute with a large manila file folder stuffed with papers. “Come over here and I’ll go through them with you,” he suggested, laying the folder on the coffee table and sitting on the sofa, making room for her to join him.

  She settled beside him on the sofa, allowing herself the small pleasure of his solid warmth against her side, even though their bodies didn’t quite touch. “This is a lot of information,” she said, unable to contain her surprise. It was certainly more information than the Bitterwood P.D. seemed to have on the Cortland organization.

  “I have access to a lot of jurisdictions, even outside Tennessee,” Dalton told her. “I’ve tried to organize things into the groups we think are working together.” Within the file folder, she saw, he’d divided the papers into sections. One section was labeled Police Agencies. Another bore the label Anarchists/Antigovernment Radicals. A third was called Meth/Pot/Oxy. That, Briar supposed, would be all they’d gathered on the hodgepodge of drug cookers, pot growers and narcotics dealers Cortland had used as informants and sometimes hired killers to do his dirty work.

  The fourth section, labeled Militias, was thinner than the others, Briar saw with some dismay. Even calling it Militias in the plural was clearly a bit of wish casting, for everything inside that section of Dalton’s notes was about one particular militia—the Blue Ridge Infantry.

  “What do you know about the BRI?” Dalton asked.

  “It started with a little moonshine and a whole lot of bitterness,” she answered slowly, thinking back on the stories she’d heard from her mother, a woman with little love for any Culpeppers beyond her own husband and children. “I don’t know how well versed in mountain genealogy you folks here on the Edgewood side of town are, but there are Culpeppers up and down these hills from Alabama to the Maryland state line. And about thirty-five years ago, some of the Culpeppers got sucked into the militia movement. Now, some of them had fairly honorable reasons for it. They thought the government was getting too big for its britches, and it was up to regular folks to remind the government just who served who.”

  “That’s not the Blue Ridge Infantry’s goal at the moment,” Dalton countered.

  “No, it’s not. And that’s why you’ll find a whole lot of folks round here who’d just as soon spit on the ground the BRI walks on as anything. Some of the militia members left started using the whole ‘government is the devil’ excuse to run moonshine, cook meth, grow pot—anything they could call government overreach, they made it into a BRI cause.”

  “How did Blake Culpepper get involved?”

  “He’s like a lot of folks in these hills. Chip on his shoulder the size of Chimney Rock. Thinks the world owes him something better than he has, but he’s not willing to work for it.” She shook her head, pressing her mouth flat as if to suppress the anger rising in her chest. “Or maybe he just likes hurtin’ people. Seems like he works hard enough doin’ bad when he’s looking to make life miserable for somebody else.”

  “Did he and Johnny ever have reason to cross paths?”

  “Sure. Johnny grew up here. On our side of the tracks, you don’t get to pick and choose your neighbors. Or lock yourself up inside some gate.”

  He gave her a thoughtful look that made her feel churlish for having said what she had. Maybe Blake wasn’t the only one with a chip on his shoulder.

  “Johnny liked everybody, and he wasn’t one to judge. He once told me that if he had to cut people out of his life for breaking the law, he wouldn’t have any friends left.” She flipped through the list of names Dalton had compiled, names of men and women the prosecutor’s office believed were connected, either directly or indirectly, to the BRI.

  “We went to school with half the people on this list. Went to church with some of ’em. Johnny probably played football with several.” With a sigh, she pushed the folder away, feeling tired and out of sync with the world around her, as if there was no place that felt like home anymore.

  “What could Johnny have taken that would be worth terrorizing you to get?” Dalton asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that all morning, ever since you left. And the only thing that seems clear is that you’re the catalyst that set everything into motion.”

  Dalton’s dark eyebrow rose. “I’m the catalyst?”

  “Johnny died months ago. But nobody gave me a minute’s worry until just a few days ago. Why? What happened a few days ago to make Blake and his crew think Johnny had given me something incriminating?”

  Dalton’s brow furrowed.

  “Why did you come to the hospital that night? Why would you do that?” she asked.

  “Because I thought—” He stopped short, looking down at the file, the creases in his forehead deepening.

  “You thought I
might know something about what Johnny took from Wayne Cortland.”

  His gaze snapped up to meet hers.

  “Why did you think that?” she asked. “Because you found out Johnny had been having an affair with Cortland’s former bookkeeper?”

  “That was part of it,” he admitted.

  “But there was more?”

  He looked down at the file again, a pained look on his face as if he knew something he didn’t want to tell her.

  “For God’s sake, Dalton. I’m not going to crumble if you tell me something unpleasant about Johnny.”

  He took a long deep breath and slowly met her gaze. “She said he liked to take risks.”

  A finger of dread scraped its way down her spine, trailing cold tremors. “What kind of risks?”

  “Like sneaking her into Cortland’s office for sex.”

  She looked at Dalton through narrowed eyes, almost feeling sorry for him. She could see how much he disliked having to say such things to her, his regret etched in fine lines and dark shadows all over his face. “They had sex in Cortland’s office? With Cortland there in the building?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask for details.”

  “Maybe you should have.” An idea began to form, one she didn’t particularly want to have. One, in fact, that she dreaded intensely.

  But it made a grim sort of sense. And it just might give them the answers they were looking for.

  “Tell me where I can find the Cortland bookkeeper,” she said after a long, tense silence. “I want to meet her.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Working as a bookkeeper for a now-notorious crime boss couldn’t have given Leanne Dawson much of a career boost, Briar thought as she walked across the gravel parking lot in front of Pinter Construction in Wytheville, Virginia. The building housing the offices was a small cinder-block structure once painted a sunny yellow that had long since faded into a dusty dun color. The name Pinter Construction was barely legible in peeling blue paint over the front door.

  Inside, there were no cubicles, only a central desk at the front and a handful of desks lining the walls. Most of those were unoccupied, save for one near the back, occupied by a dark-haired man in his forties who was typing something in a series of painfully slow pecks, and another on the right-hand wall where a slim blonde was writing something onto a notepad from time to time as she consulted a book lying open on her desk.