by Paula Graves
Easy lesson to forget on a day like today, she thought, battered by the familiar urge to enclose herself in his arms and let him make the rest of the world go away. She straightened her spine and resisted the temptation. “I didn’t realize you’d even heard about my father.”
“It made the papers in Raleigh. I wanted to pay my respects and see how you were holding up.” He brushed a piece of hair away from her face. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.” His touch left her feeling little more than mild comfort. “I’m sad,” she added at his skeptical look. “And I’ll be sad for a while. But I’m okay.”
It wasn’t a lie. She was going to be okay. Despite her crushing sense of grief, she felt confident she wasn’t in danger of losing herself.
“Maybe what you need is to get out and get your mind off things.” Davis cupped her elbow with his large hand. “The clerk at the bed-and-breakfast where I’m staying suggested a great bar near the university in Knoxville where we can listen to college bands and relive our misspent youth. What do you say, Rach? It’ll be like Charlottesville all over again.”
She grimaced. “I never really liked those bars, you know. I just went because you liked them.”
His expression of surprise was almost comical. “You didn’t?”
“I’m a Tennessee girl. I liked country music and bluegrass,” she said with a smile.
He looked mildly horrified, but he managed to smile. “I’m sure we can find a honky-tonk in Knoxville.”
“There’s a little place here in Bitterwood we could go. They have a house bluegrass band and really good loaded potato skins.” After the past few months of watching her father dying one painful inch at a time, maybe what she needed was to indulge herself. Get her mind off her losses, if only for a little while.
And why not go with Davis? She wasn’t still in love with him, but she’d always liked and trusted him. It was safer than going alone. The man who’d killed four of her friends might be dead and gone, but the world was still full of danger. A woman alone had to be careful.
And she was alone, she knew, bleakness seeping into her momentary optimism.
So very alone.
* * *
FOR THE FIRST time in years, Seth Hammond had a place to himself. It wasn’t much to talk about, a ramshackle bungalow halfway up Smoky Ridge, but for the next few weeks, he wouldn’t have to share it with anyone else. The house’s owner, Cleve Calhoun, was in Knoxville for therapy to help him regain some of the faculties he’d lost to a stroke five years ago.
By seven o’clock, Seth had decided that alone time wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Even if the satellite reception wasn’t terrible, there wasn’t much on TV worth watching these days. The Vols game wasn’t until Saturday, and with the Braves out of play-off contention, there wasn’t much point in watching baseball, either.
He’d already gone through the photos from the funeral he’d taken with his high-tech camera glasses, but as far as he could tell, there was nobody stalking Rachel Davenport at the funeral except himself. He supposed he could go through the photos one more time, but he’d seen enough of Rachel’s grief for one day. He’d uploaded the images to the FTP site Adam Brand had given him. Maybe the FBI agent would have better luck than he had. Brand, after all, at least knew what it was he was looking for.
He certainly hadn’t bothered to let Seth in on the secret.
You have turned into a dull old coot, Seth told himself, eyeing the frozen dinner he’d just pulled from Cleve’s freezer with a look of dismay. There was a time when you could’ve walked into any bar in Maryville and gone home with a beautiful woman. What the hell happened to you?
The straight and narrow, he thought. He’d given up more than just the con game, it appeared.
“To hell with that.” He shoved the frozen dinner back into the frost-lined freezer compartment. He was thirty-two years old, not sixty. Playing nursemaid to a crippled old man had, ironically, kept him lean and strong, since he’d had to haul Cleve Calhoun around like a baby. And while he wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants, he’d never had trouble catching a woman’s eye.
An image of Rachel Davenport’s cool blue eyes meeting his that morning at the funeral punched him in the gut. He couldn’t remember if she’d ever looked him in the eye before that moment.
Probably not. At the trucking company, he was more a part of the scenery than a person. A chair or a desk or one of the trucks he repaired, maybe. He’d become good at blending in. It had been his best asset as a con artist, enabling him to learn a mark’s vulnerabilities without drawing attention to himself. Cleve had nicknamed him Chameleon because of his skill at becoming part of the background.
That same skill had served him well as a paid FBI informant, though there had been a few times, most recently in a dangerous backwoods enclave of meth dealers, when he’d come close to breaking cover.
But looking into Rachel Davenport’s eyes that morning, he’d felt the full weight of being invisible. For a second, she’d seen him. Her blue eyes had widened and her soft pink lips had parted in surprise, as if she’d felt the same electric zing that had shot through his body when their gazes connected.
Maybe that was the longing driving him now, propelling him out of the shack and into Cleve’s old red Charger in search of another connection. It was a night to stand out from the crowd, not blend in, and he knew just the honky-tonk to do it in.
The road into Bitterwood proper from the mountains was a winding series of switchbacks and straightaways called Old Purgatory Road. Back in the day, when they were just kids, Delilah, a couple of years older and eons wiser, had told Seth that it was named so because hell was located in a deep, dark cavern in the heart of Smoky Ridge, their mountain home, and the only way to get in or out was Purgatory Road.
Of course, later he’d learned that Purgatory was actually a town about ten miles to the northeast, and the road had once been the only road between there and Bitterwood, but Delilah’s story had stuck with him anyway. Even now, there were times when he thought she’d been right all along. Hell did reside in the black heart of Smoky Ridge, and it was all too easy for a person to find himself on a fast track there.
Purgatory Road flattened out as it crossed Vesper Road and wound gently through the valley, where Bitterwood’s small, four-block downtown lay. There was little there of note—the two-story brick building that housed the town administrative offices, including the Bitterwood Police Department, a tiny postage stamp of a post office and a few old shops and boutiques that stubbornly resisted the destructive sands of time.
Bitterwood closed shop at five in the evening. Everything was dark and shuttered as Seth drove through. All the nighttime action happened in the outskirts. Bitterwood had years ago voted to allow liquor sales by the drink as well as package sales, hoping to keep up with the nearby tourist traps. While the tourist boom had bypassed the little mountain town despite the effort, the gin-guzzling horse was out of the barn, and the occasional attempts by civic-minded folks to rescind the liquor ordinances never garnered enough votes to pass.
Seth had never been much of a drinker himself. Cleve had taught him that lesson. A man who lived by his instincts couldn’t afford to let anything impair them. Plus, he’d grown up dodging the blows of his mean, drug-addled father. And all liquor had done for his mother was dull the pain of her husband’s abuse and leave her a shell of a woman long after the old bastard had blown himself up in a meth lab accident.
He’d never have gone to Smoky Joe’s Saloon for the drinks anyway. They watered down the stuff too much, as much to limit the drunken brawls as to make an extra buck. But they had a great house band that played old-style Tennessee bluegrass, and some of the prettiest girls in the county went there for the music.
He saw the neon lights of Smoky Joe’s ahead across Purgatory Bridge, the steel-and-concrete truss bridge spanning
Bitterwood Creek, which meandered through a narrow gorge thirty feet below. The lights distracted him for only a second, but that was almost all it took. He slammed on the brakes as the darkened form of a car loomed in his headlights, dead ahead.
The Charger’s brakes squealed but held, and the muscle car shuddered to a stop with inches to spare.
“Son of a bitch!” he growled as he found his breath again. Who the hell had parked a car in the middle of the bridge without even turning on emergency signals?
With a start, he recognized the vehicle, a silver Honda Accord. He’d seen Rachel Davenport drive that car in and out of the employee parking lot at Davenport Trucking every day for the past year.
His chest tightening with alarm, he put on his own emergency flashers and got out of the car, approaching the Honda with caution.
Out of the corner of his eye, he detected movement in the darkness. He whipped his gaze in that direction.
She stood atop the narrow steel railing, her small hands curled in the decorative lacework of the old truss bridge. She swayed a little, like a tree limb buffeted by the light breeze blowing through the girders. The air ruffled her skirt and fluttered her long hair.
“Ms. Davenport?” Seth’s heart squeezed as one of her feet slid along the thin metal support and she sagged toward the thirty-foot drop below.
“Ms. Davenport is dead,” she said in a faint, mournful tone. “Killed herself, you know.”
Seth edged toward her, careful not to move too quickly for fear of spooking her. “Rachel, that girder’s not real steady. Don’t you want to come down here to the nice, solid ground?”
She laughed softly. “Solid. Solid.” She said the word with comical gusto. “‘She’s solid.’ What does that mean? It makes you sound stiff and heavy, doesn’t it? Solid.”
Okay, not suicidal, he decided as he took a couple more steps toward her. Drunk?
“Do you think I’m cursed?” There was none of her earlier amusement in that question.
“I don’t think so, no.” He was almost close enough to touch her. But he had to be careful. If he grabbed at her and missed, she could go over the side in a heartbeat.
“I think I am,” she said. Her voice had taken on a definite slurring cadence. But he decided she didn’t sound drunk so much as drugged. Had someone given her a sedative after the funeral? Maybe she’d had a bad reaction to it.
“I don’t think you’re cursed,” Seth disagreed, easing his hand toward her in the dark. “I think you’re tired and sad. And, you know, that’s okay. It means you’re human.”
Her eyes glittered in the reflected light of the Charger’s flashers. “I wish I were a bird,” she said plaintively. “Then I could fly away over the mountains and never have to land again.” She took a sudden turn outward, teetering atop the rail as if preparing to take flight. “She said I should fly.”
Then, in heart-stopping slow motion, she began to fall forward, off the bridge.
Chapter Two
He wasn’t going to reach her in time.
A nightmare played out in his head as he threw himself toward her. His hands clawing at the air where she’d been a split second earlier. His body slamming into the rail that stopped him just short of throwing himself after her over the side of the bridge. He could see her plummeting, her slender body dancing like a feather in the cold October breeze until it shattered on the rocks below.
Then his fingers met flesh; his arms snaked around her hips, anchoring her to him. Though she was tall and thin, she was heavy enough to fill the next few seconds of Seth’s life with sheer terror as he struggled to keep her from tumbling into the gorge and taking him with her.
He finally brought her down to the ground and crushed her close, his heart pounding a thunderous rhythm in his ears. She pressed closer to him, her nose nuzzling against the side of his neck.
“This is nice,” she said, her fingers playing over the muscles of his chest. “You smell nice.”
His body’s reaction was quick and fierce. He struggled to regain control, but she wasn’t helping him a bit. Her exploring hands slid downward to rest against his hips. His heart gave a jolt as her mouth brushed over the tendon at the side of his neck, the tip of her tongue flicking against the flesh.
“Taste good, too.”
He dragged her away, holding her at arm’s length in a gentle but firm grip. “I need to get you home.”
She smiled at him, but he could see in the dim light that her eyes were glassy. Clearly she had no idea where she was or maybe even who she was. Whatever chemical had driven her up on the girder was still in control.
“Rachel, do you have the key to your car?” He didn’t want to leave her car there to be a hazard to other drivers trying to cross the bridge.
She shook her head drunkenly.
Keeping a grip on one of her arms, he crossed and checked the vehicle. The key was in the ignition. At least she hadn’t locked the door, so he could move it off the bridge. But did he dare let Rachel go long enough to do so?
“Rachel, let’s take a ride, okay?”
“’Kay.” She got into the passenger seat willingly enough when he directed her there, and she was fumbling with the radio dials when he slid in behind the steering wheel. “Where’s the music?”
“Just a minute, sugar.” He started the car. A second later, hard-edged bluegrass poured through the CD speakers—Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson. He had that album in his own car.
She started singing along with no-holds gusto, her voice a raspy alto, and complained when he parked the car off the road and cut the engine.
“Just a minute and we’ll make the music come back,” he promised, keeping an eye on the road. There had been no traffic so far, but his luck wouldn’t hold much longer. He needed to get her out of there before anyone else saw the condition she was in.
He almost laughed at himself as he realized what he was thinking. He’d been a cover-up artist from way back, trying to hide the ugly face of his home life from the people around them. He’d gotten good at telling lies.
Then he’d gotten good at running cons.
Still, he thought it was smart to protect Rachel Davenport from prying eyes until she was in some sort of condition to defend herself. He didn’t know what had happened to her tonight, or how big a part she’d played in her own troubles, but he didn’t care. Everybody made mistakes, and she’d been under a hell of a lot more pressure than most folks these past few weeks.
She could sort things out with her conscience when she was sober. He wasn’t going to add to her problems by parading her in front of other people.
He buckled her safely into the passenger seat of the Charger and slid behind the wheel, pulling the bluegrass CD from a holder attached to his sun visor. He put the CD in the player and punched the skip button until the song she’d been singing earlier came on. She picked up the tune happily, and he let her serenade him while he thought through what to do next.
Delivering her to her family was the most obvious answer, but Seth didn’t like that idea. Someone had gone to deadly lengths in the past few weeks to rip away her emotional underpinnings, and Seth didn’t know enough about her relationship with her stepmother and stepbrother to risk taking her home in this condition. She seemed friendly enough with them, but they didn’t appear particularly close. In fact, there was some speculation at work whether Paul Bailey was annoyed at being bypassed as acting CEO. He might not have Rachel’s best interests at heart.
The particulars of George Davenport’s will had become an open secret around the office ever since he’d changed it shortly after his terminal liver cancer diagnosis a year ago. Everybody at the trucking company knew he’d specified that his daughter, Rachel, should be the company’s CEO. It had been a bit of a scandal, since until that point in her life, Rachel Davenport had been happy wor
king as a librarian in Maryville. What did she know about running a business?
She’d done okay, taking over more and more of her father’s duties until his death, but would Paul Bailey have seen it that way?
The song ended, and the next cut on the album began, a plaintive ballad that Rachel didn’t seem to know. She hummed along, swaying gently against the constraints of the seat belt. She was beginning to wind down, he noticed with a glance her way. Her eyes were starting to droop closed.
Maybe he should have taken her straight to the hospital in Maryville to get checked out, he realized. What if she’d overdosed on whatever she’d taken? What if she needed treatment?
He bypassed the turnoff that would take him to the Edgewood area, where Bitterwood’s small but influential moneyed class lived, and headed instead to Vesper Road. Delilah was housesitting there for Ivy Hawkins, a girl they’d grown up with on Smoky Ridge.
A detective with the Bitterwood Police Department, Ivy was on administrative leave following a shooting that had left a hired killer dead and a whole lot of questions unanswered. Ivy had taken advantage of the enforced time off to visit with her mother, who’d recently moved to Birmingham, and had offered Delilah a place to stay while she was in town.
“Rachel, you still with me?” he asked with alarm as he noticed her head lolling to one side.
She didn’t answer.
He drove faster than he should down twisty Vesper Road, hoping the deer, coyotes and black bears stayed in the woods where they belonged instead of straying into the path of his speeding car. He almost missed his turn and ended up whipping down Ivy Hawkins’s driveway with an impressive clatter of gravel that brought Delilah out to confront him before he even had a chance to cut the engine.
“What the hell?” she asked as she circled around to the passenger door.
“You did some medic training at that fancy place you work, right?”
Delilah’s eyebrows lifted at the sight of Rachel Davenport in the passenger seat. “What’s wrong with her?”