THE SECRET OF CHEROKEE COVE (11 page)

“I can’t. I’m on the road.”

“Are you going to the prison to see Bolen?”

“I’ll go tomorrow,” he said. “Not like he’ll be going anywhere.”

“Why not today?”

“Because I just got a call from Briar,” he answered. “Someone broke into her house while she was at work.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s mad as hell, but otherwise, yes.”

Dana turned her head toward the window. Outside, the day was looking gloomy, dark clouds swallowing the sun. She sighed. “Do you think it’s connected to our stopping to see her yesterday?”

“Cherokee Cove isn’t the most crime-free area in town.”

“What did they steal?”

Nix was silent a moment.

“Did they steal anything?” Dana prodded.

“She wasn’t sure. But they made one hell of a mess.”

Dana closed her eyes, feeling a little ill. “Because she let a Cumberland into her house?”

“We don’t know that.”

She had a feeling she did know. “What the hell is wrong with the people in this town?”

“The same thing that’s wrong with people everywhere,” Nix answered, sounding a little defensive.

“I know. I’m sorry. I just—I hate thinking that someone went after Briar because of me.” She groaned. “Did they bust up all her Mason jars?” She didn’t even want to picture what kind of mess that would have made.

“I’ll help her clean up whatever happened,” he said firmly.

“I’d offer to come help,” she said, “but since I might have been the reason she was targeted in the first place...”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. We don’t know that’s the case, and even if it was, it’s damned well not your fault,” Nix said forcefully. “I’ll call you after I check things out, okay? Why don’t you go on back to your brother’s place meanwhile? Don’t you want to be there when he gets home?”

Safety in numbers, she thought. “Good idea,” she answered. “Just call me as soon as you know what’s going on at Briar’s. Promise?”

“Promise.” He said goodbye and hung up.

Dana swallowed a heartfelt profanity and shoved her phone back in her pocket, turning away from the window to look for the waitress. She gave a start. A slim, silver-haired man stood in front of her table, smiling down at her with twinkling green eyes.

“Miss Massey, I believe?”

She nodded, cocking her head. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“May I?” He gestured toward the chair across from her.

She watched with narrowed eyes as he sat without waiting for her response. He crossed his legs and leaned back as if he owned the place, looking at her with a placid smile. He was handsome and well-groomed, probably in his late seventies, although he carried himself like a man decades younger.

And suddenly, she knew exactly who he was. “Pete Sutherland, I presume?”

His smile widened. “You’re as astute as you look.”

It wasn’t hard to put the rest of the puzzle pieces together once he’d affirmed her guess. “T. J. Spencer spoke to you.”

“Not directly. But it doesn’t take long for word to move around a town this size.” Pete Sutherland lifted his hand, and a moment later, the young waitress who’d been standing near the counter was at their table, smiling down at him.

“Hey, Mr. Pete. You want your usual?”

“I do indeed, Christie.” He looked at Dana. “Miss Massey?”

She supposed it would be churlish to ask him to call her Deputy Marshal Massey. “A turkey sandwich and water,” she said to Christie.

The waitress smiled and hurried off to get their order.

“If you want to know anything about me, my dear,” Sutherland said, his expression still amiable, “you need only ask. How can I help you?”

She stared back at him, nonplussed. He had an open, friendly face and spoke in a voice that held no unkindness or condescension. His accent was broadly Southern, but without the raw, twangy edge that characterized the accents of most of the people she’d met so far in Bitterwood.

He wasn’t what she’d expected, and she hated to be surprised.

He looked at his watch, an old-fashioned pocket watch tucked into the jacket of his pin-striped suit, she noted. “I am entirely at your disposal for the next thirty minutes, but after that, I’m afraid, I have an appointment I can’t postpone. A shame, really, since I do so enjoy spending time with lovely young women. Happens so rarely these days, I’m afraid.”

“Did you know my mother?” she asked before she lost her nerve.

The look he sent her way was full of kind pity. “Not beyond the unfortunate circumstances that brought her briefly into our lives years ago.”

“When she claimed your grandson was really hers?”

“Precisely.” There was no anger in his response, no enmity at all. Only a benign sort of sadness that tugged at the corners of his bright eyes.

No, Dana thought with sinking heart, Pete Sutherland was not what she’d expected at all.

Chapter Eleven

“He was completely friendly and charming.” Dana looked almost disappointed, Nix thought. He supposed he could understand her frustration, at least; she’d thought she had a prime suspect in the brake-tampering case in the Sutherland family, only to find Pete Sutherland held no grudge.

“People around here love the old guy, and for a reason.” Nix unlocked his front door and let her inside.

“I thought people around here didn’t lock their doors,” she murmured.

“I’m a cop. I know better.” He closed the door behind him and helped her out of her jacket. “Remember, I just got back from a break-in.”

“How bad was it?” Dana turned to look at him, worry crinkling her brow. “Is she freaked out?”

“It takes a hell of a lot to freak out Briar,” he said with a smile. “She’s mostly furious, since they didn’t seem to take anything.”

Dana frowned. “They just busted up the place for kicks?”

“I’m not sure it was quite that random,” Nix admitted, hanging her jacket on the coat tree by the door and shrugging off his own.

“I know you said it probably had nothing to do with my going there yesterday, but...did it have anything to do with my going there yesterday?”

“I honestly don’t know.” He waved in the general direction of the sofa and headed into the kitchen. “Want something to drink? I don’t have much in the way of alcohol here. My parents aren’t drinkers, so I never picked up the habit.”

“Same here, same reason.” Her voice was closer than he expected; he turned and found she’d followed him into the kitchen and settled in one of the chairs at the small breakfast nook. “Wouldn’t mind a sandwich, though. I was a little too thrown by meeting Pete Sutherland to actually eat much of my order at the diner, and I’m starving.”

“I can do better than that. I have a couple of nice fat rainbow-trout fillets in the freezer. Caught last fall right out of Blackbow Creek.”

“I’ll pretend I know where that is,” she said with a smile.

“Just over the hill from here,” he told her. “I’ll see what vegetables I can come up with.”

“Mind if I use your bathroom?”

He nodded toward the narrow hallway off the kitchen. “First room on the right.”

While she headed for the bathroom, he looked through his pantry to see what he had in the way of vegetables. He decided on a jar of green beans and a smaller jar of peaches that his mother had put away from her surplus last summer. He had some cream in the refrigerator that hadn’t expired yet. Maybe he’d get all fancy and whip up a topping for the peaches himself.

He put the plastic bag of trout fillets in a bowl of hot water to start them thawing and turned his attention to the green beans, trying to remember how his mother cooked them. She usually started with sautéed onions, he remembered, so he pulled out a skillet and started the oil heating.

By the time the onions were beginning to grow translucent, he realized Dana still hadn’t come back from the bathroom. Adding the green beans to the pan and lowering the burner flame, he headed into the back of the house. “Dana?”

The bathroom door was open, the light off. But the door to his study was open a few inches.

“Dana?”

“In here.” Her voice came from the study.

He pushed the door open all the way and found her standing in the middle of the small room, making a slow 360-degree turn to take everything in. She paused when she caught sight of him, her eyes wide with surprise.

“I thought I smelled turpentine, so I followed my nose.” She waved her hand around. “You painted these?”

He felt heat rise up his neck. “Yeah.”

She turned back to the paintings that covered all four walls. There were more than two dozen canvases, hung wherever he’d been able to find an empty spot. “They’re beautiful.”

He tried to see them from her perspective, taking in the shadings and colors. Landscapes, for the most part, images of the ancient hills that lay all around them, silent and secretive. He’d painted them in full autumn splendor and bleak winter chill, bright with spring’s promise and slumbering in the steamy luxuriance of thick summer foliage.

There were specific places, too, like the dilapidated remains of an old barn, the frothy fury of water slamming into rounded boulders at the base of Crybaby Falls, even the lacy ironwork of Purgatory Bridge framed against a perfect blue summer sky.

Dana touched the painting of Purgatory Bridge, her fingers moving slowly over the rough texture of the acrylic paints he’d used to capture the old truss bridge. “Why do you hide them in here?”

He hadn’t consciously hidden the paintings, he realized, though it must certainly appear that way. “I like to have them around me.”

“Do you sell them?”

He shook his head, horrified by the thought. “And become one of those Smoky Mountain folk artists you find painting for hire in all the tourist traps? No, thank you. I can’t paint on demand that way.”

“These paintings are amazing.” She turned to look at him, her green eyes shining with delight. An answering flood of pleasure filled his chest, warming him inside out, as she slowly closed the distance between them. “Will you let me buy one?”

He shook his head. “But I’ll give you one. Which would you like?”

“You pick. I don’t want to take one that you’d miss when I’m gone.”

He felt that bubble of pleasure inside him burst. He kept letting himself forget that she’d be leaving, sooner rather than later.

“Take any one you want,” he said.

She walked slowly around the room, studying each painting carefully as she went. He drank in the kaleidoscope of expressions playing over her face as she puzzled out the nuances of the images. She seemed to be listening to them, as if they spoke to her the same way they had spoken to him in his mind, long before he’d committed them to paint and canvas.

She stopped, finally, at one of the more understated paintings in the room, a dead Fraser fir standing in the middle of a copse of still-living evergreens, its spindly white limbs bare of foliage. “It looks like a skeleton,” she said. “The other trees don’t seem to notice it in their midst. But the tree knows it’s different. Still, it stands there with a sort of sad dignity, like it refuses to bow to its death.”

She understood exactly what he’d seen in the dead tree, he realized. “Blight has killed a lot of the trees, but they don’t just crumble and fall down. They keep standing, and in a forest full of lush green trees, those skeletons are the ones you notice.”

“Ghosts find a way to make themselves known,” she murmured. He supposed she spoke from experience, given her own past. She turned to look at him, her expression serious. “Can you bear to part with this one?”

“It’s yours.”

She looked as if she wanted to cry, but she managed to stay dry-eyed as she turned back to the painting. “Have you given it a name?”

“No. You can name it if you want.”

Her throat bobbed as she swallowed hard. “I’ll give it some thought.”

“I think the beans are probably burning by now, so I have to get back to the kitchen. But stay here as long as you like.”

Fortunately, he got back to the pan of beans before they’d boiled off all the liquid. The fish fillets were thawed enough to pop them in the oven for a few minutes to cook, so he took care of that task quickly and turned his attention to making whipped cream.

Dana returned to the kitchen to find him grimacing over his less-than-successful culinary efforts. “What are you doing to that poor cream?”

“Trying to whip it.”

“Your whisk skills are sadly lacking.” She took the whisk from him and started beating the cream with lightning speed, slanting a sly look at him. “And here I thought you were good with your hands.”

He looked at the stiffening peaks of cream forming in the bowl and thought of at least two responses he didn’t dare utter before he finally gave up. Everything running through his mind at the moment would catapult them right into that dangerous territory they’d agreed to avoid the last time they were alone together off the clock.

“No comeback?” she murmured.

“I thought you didn’t like playing with fire,” he said.

She set down the bowl on the counter and turned to face him, her mouth opening to reply. But the oven timer started to buzz, and she made a face. “Nice timing.”

Indeed, he thought.

* * *

D
INNER
TURNED
OUT
better than Dana had expected, given how clumsy Nix had seemed in the kitchen. The trout was crisp on the outside, flaky on the inside, and the green beans were tender and full of flavor, thanks to the onions and a few dashes of seasoning. Finally, he’d heated peaches in the microwave and let the whipped cream melt over them for dessert.

“Those green beans and peaches were homegrown, weren’t they?” Dana asked as she helped him load the dishes in the dishwasher, amused that in his otherwise rustic cabin, he’d seen a dishwasher as an appliance priority.

“Straight out of my mama’s garden.” He put detergent in the washer and closed the door, setting it to run.

“Do they have a big garden?” Dana followed him into the small living room and sat beside him on the sofa, not bothering to keep her distance.

Maybe she wasn’t as afraid of playing with fire as she thought.

“They till the whole side yard. That gives them about four rows of plants each season.” He propped his boots up on the scuffed coffee table, smiling at her as she followed suit, nudging his foot with hers. He nodded at her attire—trim-fitting wool-blend trousers, a pearl-gray blouse and sensible flat shoes. “Is this how you dress for work?”

“Unless I’m on a fugitive hunt. Then it’s usually jeans and sneakers. The better to chase down the perps.”

“Was it hard to get this much time off work?”

She grimaced. “They forced me to take the time, remember? I have a ton of leave piled up, and my boss told me if I didn’t take it, he was going to recommend a psych eval. Needless to say, I took the time off.” She sighed. “Good thing I did, huh?”

“Except the point of taking time off was to get away from the job.” He waved his hand at her attire. “And here you are, working on your vacation.”

“My brother was nearly murdered.”

“I know.” He nudged her lightly with his shoulder. “But why do I get the feeling that even if nothing had happened to your brother, you’d still have figured out a way to get in on an investigation?”

“I like my work.” She sounded defensive, she thought. He’d touched a sore spot.

“Do you like it? Or do you like to lose yourself in it?”

“There’s a difference?”

“I think there is.”

She frowned, giving the idea serious thought. “I’m good at what I do. I know who I am when I’m on the job. What’s expected of me.”

“And when you’re not on the job?”

She leaned her head back against the sofa cushion and stared up at the ceiling, part of her wanting desperately to change the subject and the other part of her swamped with the need to tell Nix the awful truth about herself.

She took a deep breath and made the plunge. “When my parents died, I became the head of the family. I was the oldest. I was nearly out of college and about to start my life. So I became the decision-maker.”

“And?”

“And Doyle practically ran away from home as fast as he could. He decided he wanted to be a casino security guard
and
a high roller. He was pretty good at the former and terrible at the latter, blowing about half his college money in one sitting before he wised up.” She shook her head. “I thought that job was a terrible idea and told him so. I threatened to find a way to cut him off from what our parents had left us if he did something so stupid, but he just cut himself off from me and David and did what he wanted.”

“But you were proved right.”

“Not before I damned near split the family apart.”

“Sounds more like Doyle’s the one who did the splitting,” Nix said.

He was being entirely too kind, she thought. “I shouldn’t have forced him to dig in his heels and do the exact wrong thing. My parents would have handled it better.”

“I don’t know. I get the feeling your brother is pretty hard to handle in any circumstances.”

“I thought I’d be glad when he had to come back with his tail tucked between his legs,” she admitted. “I was going to tell him I told him so. But he only came back because of David’s death.”

Nix twined his fingers through hers, giving her hand a squeeze.

She wanted to pull away, to close up and protect herself from the rest of the story. But she’d already started this process of self-exposure. It was only fair to finish it, to tell him the rest.

“David came to me before the trip, looking for my advice. He knew it was a dangerous area. He knew I’d be worried about him, but he felt this profound urge to go. The poor farmers and laborers in Sanselmo had been political pawns for so many years. Manipulated by autocrats, then exploited by rebels. They just wanted food on the table and roofs over their heads. They didn’t know about things like Marxism and fascism and democracy. Those were just words to them. David wanted to help them learn ways to provide for themselves whatever finally happened to their country. He just wanted to make a difference.”

“Did you try to stop him, too?” Nix asked quietly.

She looked at him, feeling as if she were bleeding from the inside out. “No. I told him I couldn’t make that choice for him. I still remembered the mistake I made with Doyle, see? I’d driven him to the wrong choice by being so inflexible. I didn’t want to make the same mistake with David.”

She saw the exact moment when Nix realized what she’d done. She saw the horror dawn in his dark eyes, saw the crease of his forehead and the sudden paleness creeping beneath his olive skin. “Dana, no.”

“I sent him off to die.”

Nix shook his head sharply, reaching for her. She resisted at first, loath to take his comfort when she didn’t deserve it, but his determination overwhelmed her. He crushed her close, his mouth warm against her temple as he whispered in her ear, “You didn’t kill your brother.”

“Close enough.”

He caught her face between his large hands, making her look up at him. “You couldn’t live his life for him. For either of them. All you could do, all anyone could have done, was love them and welcome them home once they found their way back.”