Paula Graves - The Secret of Cherokee Cove

“Did she kill the baby at the hospital or at home?” Dana asked, her tone businesslike, as if she were interviewing a witness to a crime.

“At the hospital. The nurse had brought him for feeding and left him there with her. As the story goes, she claims she fell asleep and someone switched out her live baby for an already dead one. But nobody saw anything.”

“Nobody saw anyone carrying a dead baby into the room or carrying a live one out, you mean.”

“Right.” Nix shook his head. “Dana, I don’t know that any of this is true. It’s just a story.”

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. What happened when the unmarried girl discovered the baby in the bassinet was dead?”

“She started screaming.” He swallowed a lump that had formed in his throat as he watched Dana’s face grow even stonier. “She kept screaming at the nurses that it wasn’t her baby, but of course, it had to be. Nobody had gone into her room.”

“That anyone witnessed.”

He’d let his gaze drift away from her face but snapped it back at her words. “That anyone witnessed.”

“What’s the next part of this cautionary tale?” Her voice held a minute trace of sarcasm, so tiny he wasn’t sure whether it was really there or he was just reading that tone into her words.

“The hospital called in a psychiatrist to calm her down. She finally settled down and started to cooperate with the hospital staff, who were trying to make arrangements for the baby’s burial. The nurse who saw her just before all hell broke loose supposedly swore she seemed to be sad but acting normally enough for a girl who’d just lost her newborn baby.”

Dana was silent and very still for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was faint and strained. “And then?”

“The nurses supposedly heard screams coming from a room down the hall on the same floor. A woman screaming that someone had stolen her baby. The story goes, they locked down the hospital and finally found the unmarried girl and the missing baby in the hospital basement. She was trying to take him out a service exit.”

“Who were the baby’s parents?”

“You mean the baby that lived?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “That was never part of the story I heard.”

“They only identified the girl?”

He nodded. “Crazy Tallie Cumberland, mad as a hare and wicked as the rest of her family. Killed her own baby and tried to steal another. Better take care and not let a Cumberland look you in the eye, or you’ll turn out crazy and wicked, too.”

“Lovely.”

“I’m sorry. I guess it’s not so entertaining a legend when you’re on the Cumberland end of things.”

“It’s also completely impossible,” Dana said in a low, flat tone. “My mother couldn’t have killed her own child under any circumstances. She was perfectly sane, perfectly rational and as loving and protective a mother as a child could have hoped for.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Nix said.

“No, you’re not.” She pulled the collar of her robe more tightly around herself. “You never knew her.”

“No, I didn’t.” Nix stood. “It’s late. We’re tired. Let’s just get some sleep tonight while we can. Morning will make everything look better.”

At least, he hoped it would.

But long after he retreated to the guest room, he remained awake, staring at the moon-painted ceiling over the bed and wondering just how much of the story he’d told Dana was true.

And how much of it, true or otherwise, had led to Doyle Massey’s brand-new brakes failing on the curve just past Purgatory Bridge?

* * *

LOSING HER PARENTS had been one of the most devastating moments of Dana Massey’s life. She’d talked to her mother on the phone only a couple of hours before the accident, planning for a birthday party for David, the baby of the family, which was to have taken place the next month. David was turning eighteen, a significant milestone, and Tallie Massey had tasked Dana with finding a particular set of books David wanted for his birthday. They were obscure books on South American agricultural technology, in the original Spanish, and neither of her parents had a clue where to start looking.

Dana had been a junior in college, entirely too full of herself and far too certain she knew everything there was to know about any subject of importance.

Stupid, stupid girl.

The call had come in the middle of the night. It had been David, the baby, the one who felt everything like a pierce to the heart, trying so hard to be strong and adult, to break the news to her gently.

But there was no easy way to tell someone her parents were dead.

Doyle had beaten her home by an hour. She’d found him and David sitting in silence in the well-worn den of their family home, staring at the phone as if waiting for more bad news to crash down on them. They’d looked up in unison as she entered the room, just staring at her with shattered expressions and heartsick eyes. She’d opened her arms and David had run to her, a lost little boy in a young man’s body.

“Sheriff Morgan delivered the news himself,” Doyle had told Dana later, after they’d coaxed David into getting some sleep before morning came and the food-and-sympathy visits started. “David said he’d offered to stick around, but our little brother didn’t want us to think he was still a kid.”

Oh, David, Dana thought, staring at the ceiling of her brother’s bedroom. What kind of man would you have been?

Morning light was beginning to seep through the curtains, just a hint of pearly-gray in the otherwise unrelenting darkness, but it gave her an excuse to get out of bed and get her mind out of the bleak past for a while.

There was a light on in the kitchen, the sound of water running. Figuring an intruder wouldn’t stop for a drink of water, she decided against going back into the bedroom for her Glock and entered the kitchen to find Walker Nix scooping coffee grounds into a filter. He turned at the sound of her bare footsteps on the hardwood floor. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” She stifled a yawn and settled on one of the stools in front of the breakfast bar. “You’re up early.”

“I have to go home and get ready for work.”

“Right.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, his dark eyes hooded. “You want some coffee?”

She nodded. “Nice and strong, I hope?”

“Of course.” His lips twitched as he reached into the cabinet over the coffeemaker and pulled out a couple of large mugs. “Did you get any sleep?”

She grimaced. “That obvious, huh?”

“You look fine.” He actually sounded as if he believed what he was saying.

“You’re a better diplomat than you look,” she murmured with a smile.

He left the coffee percolating and pulled up the stool beside hers, resting one arm on the bar and turning to face her. “I want you to forget what I told you last night about your mother. I have no proof that any of it happened, and what passes as truth, in these hills, can be as flexible as taffy.”

“I know it didn’t happen the way you heard it,” she said with confidence. “But something happened to my mother when she was living here in Bitterwood. There’s no other reason why she would’ve hidden her past so thoroughly from us for all these years.”

“You didn’t even know she was from here?”

“I knew she was from the Smoky Mountains. That she was born in Tennessee and didn’t meet my father until she was nearly twenty and working at a bait shop in Terrebonne. She told us she didn’t have any family left, and no reason to go back to Tennessee for visits. That’s why we were sort of surprised when she and my dad decided to drive to Tennessee for their vacation.”