THE SECRET OF CHEROKEE COVE (14 page)

Still looking wary, Doyle pulled his laptop closer and did as she asked. “Now what?”

“Click the button that says Meet the Staff.”

Dana kept her eyes on her brother’s face as he clicked the button, wondering if he’d see what she’d seen. If Doyle saw it, then she’d know she was right. That she wasn’t just seeing what she wanted to see.

His brow furrowed, then rose. His gaze snapped up to meet Dana’s. “My God.”

“What is it?” Nix asked.

Doyle looked at Dana. “Show him that picture you keep in your wallet.”

Dana still had the photo of David tucked just inside her purse. She pulled it out and handed it to Nix. He took a look at the photo, frowning. “Where did you get this?”

“Who does it look like?” she asked.

“It looks like...” He looked up suddenly, his eyes narrowing. “This isn’t a photo of Dalton Hale, is it?”

“It’s David,” she said. “Our brother.”

Nix’s eyes darkened. “The resemblance is amazing.”

“David looked the most like Mom,” she told him. “Of the three of us, I mean. Even more than I do.”

Nix ran his hand over his chin, his frown deepening. “As far back as that first night at the community center, at the party, some of the people around the room looked shocked to see you. Some even looked angry. Like you had no right to be there.”

“Because I look like my mother.”

“That’s what I gathered.”

“Who reacted that way?” Doyle asked.

“I don’t remember exactly. But more than just one or two people.”

“How could people not realize how much he looks like my mother?” Doyle asked. “I haven’t had reason to meet him yet, but I would have known in a heartbeat.”

“Maybe they
did
realize it,” Laney said.

“And nobody said anything?” Dana shook her head. “My mother was run out of town because people believed she was a liar and a kidnapper.”

“By the time Dalton would have been old enough for the resemblance to really come into play, your mother had been gone for years.” Laney gently stroked Doyle’s hair. “Maybe they thought there was no point in stirring things up after so long. As far as Dalton knows, the Hales are his parents.”

“As far as we know, they are,” Nix said.

Dana turned to look at him. “You just said—”

“I said he looks like your brother. And I’ll admit, the evidence is stacking up in favor of his being your mother’s child. But without DNA evidence, nobody’s going to believe it based only on a photo and a lot of supposition.”

“We need to get Dalton’s DNA,” Doyle said firmly.

“Good luck with that,” Nix murmured.

“Nix is right,” Dana admitted. “We’re not in any position to demand a blood test from him. And do we have the right to throw his whole life up in the air just to prove our mother was telling the truth?”

Doyle released a long breath, looking at her with an old, familiar pain in his eyes. “So what do we do?”

“Whether or not Dalton is our brother doesn’t matter at the moment,” Dana said after a long pause. “Maybe, eventually, we’ll try to find out for sure. But his parentage is a tangential question. The main one is, who tampered with your brakes the other night? And was there some sort of tampering that led to our parents’ car crash fifteen years ago?”

“But what if those questions are related?” Doyle caught Laney’s hands in his, and some of the stress faded from his face, as if her mere touch was enough to calm his troubled soul.

Dana felt a hard rush of envy. She was happy for Doyle, thrilled that he’d found someone who gave him comfort and support. God knew, he’d needed someone like that for a long, long time.

But his happiness served as a harsh reminder of her own loneliness. She’d always prided herself on being the kind of person who didn’t need other people to be happy. But needing and wanting were very different things. She might not need to have the kind of relationship Doyle had found with Laney, but the more time she spent with the two of them together, the more she saw how they brought out the best in each other, the more she realized how unsatisfying her own life had become.

“Why don’t we concentrate on one thing at a time?” Nix laid his hand briefly on her arm. The heat of his touch poured into her, spreading slowly through her limbs and into the center of her chest. When he dropped his hand away, she felt a twinge of regret.

“What do you have in mind?” Doyle asked.

“I don’t think Derek Albertson is going to help us out,” Nix said. “After the beating he took, I’m not sure I blame him.”

“How did somebody know you’d talked to Albertson?” Dana asked, worried by the implications.

“I think maybe I’m being followed,” Nix admitted. “I haven’t exactly been looking for a tail, although you can bet I’ll be doing so now.”

“If Albertson won’t help us, and Bolen can’t, where do we look next?” she asked.

“Bolen may have been the lead detective on the accident investigation, but he wasn’t the only person on the case,” Nix answered. “If there’s anyone in the world besides Derek Albertson who’d know who was doing what in this department fifteen years ago, it’s Alvin Pitts. He retired from the police force a few years back.” Nix pushed to his feet, pulled the jacket off the back of the chair where he’d draped it and shrugged it on. “I’m going to see what he remembers. And this time, I’m sure as hell not going to let anyone follow me.”

Chapter Fourteen

“I’ve been wondering when someone was going to finally ask me about Tallie Cumberland’s wreck.” Alvin Pitts rose from a crouch over his bed of yellow crookneck squash and squinted against the bright afternoon sun. Nix had caught him in the middle of weeding the small vegetable garden growing beside his neat little bungalow on Old Purgatory Road.

Nix struggled to keep a rush of excitement in check. “Why’s that?”

Pitts picked up the canvas bag he’d been using to discard the weeds and slung it over his shoulder, nodding for Nix to follow him to the front porch. He dropped the bag of weeds there and opened the screen door. “Have a seat. You want some iced tea? Martha’s gone shopping with her sister, but she left a big pitcher in the fridge.”

“Sure.” Nix was relieved that Pitts’s wife was out. He had a feeling Pitts might be more forthcoming without an audience.

Nix settled on one of the two faded cane rocking chairs that flanked the front door. The porch eaves tempered the afternoon warmth, aided by a light breeze from the west. Pitts’s house was surrounded by the lush woods that lined Old Purgatory Road for miles, giving a sense of isolation even though the next house down the road was only a quarter mile away.

“The wreck happened a couple of miles down the road, you know.” Alvin Pitts returned to the porch with a couple of glasses of sweet iced tea.

“I know.” Nix took the glass Pitts offered. “Did you know the new chief had a wreck in almost the same place?”

Pitts nodded. “So I heard. You know he’s Tallie’s son, don’t you?”

“I do. Her daughter’s in town, too.”

Pitts gave him an interested look. “I heard that, too. What’s she like?”

Nix wondered how to answer that question without giving away too many of his own secrets. “She looks a bit like her mother, from all accounts. In her mid-thirties but looks about ten years younger when she smiles. She’s a deputy U.S. marshal out of Atlanta.”

Pitts sipped his tea and gave Nix a long, considering look. “She gettin’ any guff around town?”

“Why would she?” Nix asked carefully.

“On account of lookin’ like her mama.” Pitts set his glass on the flat arm of his rocking chair, holding it loosely to keep it from sliding off as he rocked slowly, each roll of the rockers making the porch floor creak. “You’re from Cherokee Cove, Walker. I reckon you’ve heard all the stories by now.”

“You sound as if you don’t believe them.”

Pitts laughed. “Never believe more than half the stories you hear around these parts. And even those you need to investigate closely.”

“Were you involved in the investigation of the car crash that killed Tallie and her husband?”

The porch floor creaked a few more times before Pitts answered. “I was there that night. Helped winch them up out of the gorge.”

“Did you know the files on that accident are missing from the file room at the station?”

Pitts shot Nix a quick, narrow-eyed look. “No, I didn’t.”

“There would have been files on the accident, wouldn’t there?”

“Of course. I added some of the information myself.”

“Did you ever go back and look at them?”

Pitts shook his head. “I did not.”

“You sound as if you wish you had.”

The older man released a long breath before he spoke again. “I wish I’d done a lot of things differently when I was on the force. But back then, I tried to get along, not make too many waves. Benton was still alive then, and we were up to our eyeballs in hospital bills all the time. I couldn’t afford to lose the job.”

The wistful sound of Pitts’s voice touched an answering chord in Nix’s chest. Benton Pitts had been one of Nix’s best friends in elementary school. A bright, active kid with sandy-blond hair, blue eyes and a face full of freckles, Benton had always been a daredevil, sometimes tempting Nix into the kind of trouble he remembered with a mixture of fondness and horror.

Five days after his thirteenth birthday, Benton, Nix and several of their schoolmates had gone swimming in Blackbow Creek in the middle of a long, hot July. Benton, always one to look for excitement, had coaxed several of the boys, including Nix, into diving into a deep part of the creek from Bald Rock, a big granite outcropping that rose nearly ten feet over the water.

Nix had gone first, landing belly-first and nearly sucking a gallon of creek water into his lungs as he fought to breathe again after the force of impact. Benton had gone next, entering the water with a clean, perfect swan dive.

But the bottom was closer than he’d expected. He’d hit creek bed, breaking his neck. Nix and the other boys had managed to keep him from drowning, but the damage to Benton’s spine had been done. He’d been a quadriplegic for the rest of his life, dying too young at the age of twenty-five.

“I still miss Benton,” he murmured, lifting his glass slightly in a toast.

“He was real proud you became a marine,” Pitts said with a faint smile. “You know he always wanted to be one himself.”

Nix squelched a hard rush of regret and got to the point of his visit. “Why do you reckon someone bothered to remove the files on Tallie Cumberland’s car crash?”

Pitts gave him a considering look. “I’d say you must already have a pretty good idea why, or you wouldn’t have come out here to see me.”

“Was there any indication of tampering on the vehicle?”

Pitts looked out across the yard toward the woods. “There wasn’t any fluid in the brakes when the mechanic examined it. He said it looked like the line was cut, although he said it could have happened when the car went off the bridge and down into the gorge.”

Nix heard hesitation in his old friend’s voice. “But?”

“But there was brake fluid on the road that night.”

“On the road?”

Pitts nodded. “I collected it myself. Turned it over as evidence.”

“And you’re sure it was brake fluid?”

“I’ve been working on cars my whole life. I know brake fluid.”

Anger hissed low in Nix’s chest. “Which means the brake fluid was leaking out before they went over the bridge.”

Pitts nodded. “That was my conclusion. Not that anybody wanted to hear it.”

A woman and her husband had died, Nix thought, and people in the police department hadn’t followed up on all the clues suggesting it was a homicide, not an accident? “Why would the cops ignore that evidence?”

Pitts didn’t speak. But Nix could tell he knew the answer. His determination hardened. “Pitts, who wanted Tallie dead?”

Pitts took a long drink from his tea glass, as if needing time to organize what he was about to say. “If you’d like to know who in town would just as soon have never seen Tallie again, I can give you a few names. Startin’ with old Pete Sutherland.”

Nix shouldn’t have been surprised, he supposed, considering what they’d learned about Tallie’s time at Maryville Mercy Hospital and the allegations she’d made against Sutherland’s daughter and son-in-law. But he couldn’t reconcile the smiling man who’d been playing Santa at the community center for the past three decades with the sort of malignance that would rip a newborn baby from his mother.

“Don’t let his smiles fool you,” Pitts said quietly. “A man don’t get where Pete Sutherland has in life without a ruthless streak.”

“What about Paul Hale?” Nix asked.

“He’s a possibility, too,” Pitts conceded.

“Because Tallie tried to take his son?”

Pitts’s sharp blue eyes met Nix’s. “No. Because they took
her
son.”

* * *

D
ANA
SLUMPED
IN
the chair across from her brother’s desk and stared at David’s photo, her heart so tangled up with conflicting emotions she could barely breathe. He was almost twenty-two when he’d taken his senior photo, on the cusp of the exciting, meaningful life he’d been planning since he was sixteen.

Had he known it could end so soon? Or, like so many people his age, had he thought himself immortal?

“I miss him, too.”

Dana looked up to find her brother’s warm gaze watching her. “He was the best of us.”

Doyle smiled sadly. “He was.”

“Do you ever wonder what he’d be like now?”

“All the time.”

She felt the hot sting of tears behind her eyes. She blinked hard to hold them back. “I have these dreams sometimes. Where I’m trying to talk him out of going to the jungle. And he just smiles at me and tells me we’re already there. I look around, and there’s nothing but jungles and rebels all around us. I wake up sweating and so full of guilt I can barely breathe.”

“It’s not your fault, Dana.”

“He wanted my advice about going. I told him to follow his heart.”

“I told him he was an idiot, putting his neck on the line for people who’d probably just hate him for it,” Doyle said. “Want to take a bet as to which one of us really spurred him into going?”

She closed her eyes. “You’re such an idiot, Doyle.”

“I know.”

“David did what he wanted,” she said after a long, painful moment. “Nothing you or I said would have made any difference.”

“I know. But it’s taken me all these years to figure it out.”

She opened her eyes to look at her brother. “You’re really happy now, aren’t you?”

“At the moment, not so much,” he admitted with a grimace. “But overall, yeah. I am.”

“Laney’s wonderful.”

He smiled. “She’s way too good for me.”

“Well, yeah, of course, but I wouldn’t say that aloud too often or she might believe it.” Dana scrounged up a lopsided grin and shot it his way.

“I wish you weren’t going back to Atlanta.”

She felt a hard tug in the center of her chest. “I have a life there.”

“You have an apartment and a job. That’s not a life.”

“I have friends.”

“That you never talk about. Have you called anyone in Atlanta since you’ve been here?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been a little busy.”

“All the more reason to call a friend for a little moral support.”

“My work keeps me on the go all the time.” Even to herself, the excuse sounded lame.

“You could ask for a transfer to the Knoxville office.”

She cocked her head sideways, looking at him suspiciously. “Why do you care where I work? You’ve been fine with my being hundreds of miles away for a long time now.”

“I haven’t been fine with it,” he admitted. “I’ve missed you like hell.”

She stared at him. “You practically cut yourself off from me, Doyle. You went off and did your own thing and didn’t seem to give a damn what I was up to.”

He gave her a pained look. “I know. Like you said, I’m an idiot. But I did miss you. Every damned day. We’re all we have left, and I guess maybe I was running hard from that thought, because you—” He stopped short, looking as if someone had gut-punched him. “I thought if I went my own way, made my life away from you—”

“Then if something happened to me, it wouldn’t destroy you?”

He chewed his lower lip. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so selfish.”

The tears she’d tried to stanch spilled down her cheeks. “I thought you blamed me for David’s death.”

He stared at her with horror. “My God. No. Never.”

She pressed her hand over her mouth, fighting a sob.

Doyle levered himself to his feet, grabbing at the crutches leaning against the desk. He sent one flying and growled a profanity, dropping back in his seat.

Dana retrieved the crutch and set it against the desk, then crouched in front of her brother’s desk chair. She cradled his face between her hands. “I love you. I don’t tell you that nearly enough.”

He tugged her into a fierce hug. “I love you, too. Always have, always will. No matter what.”

She laid her head against her brother’s heart, listening to the strong, steady beat, and felt as if a lifetime of poison was slowly seeping out of her body, leaving her feeling light and free. Even remembering why she was still here in town wasn’t enough to break through that sudden sense of relief.

“What are we going to do if we prove that Dalton Hale is our brother?” She eased out of her brother’s embrace and settled on the edge of his desk, looking down at him.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I guess it depends on whether or not we find out someone in his family is behind the attack on me.”

“And what happened to Mom and Dad,” she added soberly.

“We still don’t have any proof it was anything but an accident.”

She sighed. “No proof, but a lot of questions.”

“Another good reason for you to stick around Tennessee for a while longer?” he said, his eyebrows rising.

She smiled. “We’ll see.”

His grin in response made him look fifteen again, still the smart aleck who took delight in turning her orderly life into chaos.
God,
she thought,
I’ve missed you, little brother.

* * *

“Y
OU
DON
’
T
LOOK
SURPRISED
,”
Alvin Pitts observed.

Nix met the older man’s suspicious gaze. “There have been some developments in the stolen-baby case.”

“The case? What case? As far as anyone in this town is concerned, the stolen-baby case was closed over thirty years ago.”

“Dana Massey met Dalton Hale today.”

Pitts shot him a troubled look. “And?”

“Dana says Dalton Hale looks just like her younger brother. Who looked just like their mother. She showed me a photo of her younger brother. She’s right. Hale looks just like him.”

Pitts slumped lower in his rocker. After a long moment of silence, he asked, “Do you know how Tallie Cumberland was able to afford a bus ride out of town?”

“No,” Nix answered. The question had never occurred to him.

“I gave her the money. And told her where to go. I have a cousin in south Alabama who runs a bait shop. Lester was always needin’ good help, and I figured Tallie would fit the bill. Honest girl, hardworkin’. Not a bit like most of the rest of the family.”

“So you gave her bus fare to Alabama.”

“I’d check on her now and then, for several months. Ask Lester how she was doin’ at the job. He liked her fine. Last time I spoke to him about her, years and years ago, he said she was seeing a nice young man. A state trooper.”