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.”
“Do you think your father knew about your mother’s past?”
She thought about the question for a moment. “I think so. They were best friends as well as spouses. They didn’t keep secrets from each other.”
“But they never told you or your brother anything about it?”
“No.” She hadn’t thought much about why her mother’s past was a blank. It had simply always been that way, for as long as she remembered. “I think Dad guarded her secret because that’s what she wanted. But he must have known.”
“She didn’t leave you anything, a written journal or something that might have explained the blanks in her past?”
“No. Nothing. She wasn’t expecting to die, so she hadn’t prepared.”
“My mother got real sick when I was sixteen,” Nix said after a moment of silence. “Breast cancer. She just wanted to live at least long enough to get me and my brother out of high school.” Nix’s smile was tinged with a hint of exasperation. “Lavelle had to be pushed through that final semester, kicking and screaming.”
“Younger brothers,” Dana murmured, biting back the urge to cry.
“The good news is, she beat the cancer. Twenty-year survivor as of January.”
She felt a flutter of relief. “That’s wonderful.”
He nodded. “The chief says you’re the oldest.”
“He likes to remind people of that a lot. Lucky me.”
“If it makes you feel any better, you look younger.”
“Ten years ago, I might have smacked you for saying that,” she said with a grin. “But now I’ll just say ‘thanks.’ And suggest you might want to get your eyes checked.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his scrutiny straightforward and a little unnerving. “You have to know you’re a very attractive woman.”
She supposed she knew it, although the deeper into her thirties she went, the more she had a sense of time ticking past her at a quicker rate. She’d put her career first, her personal life a distant second, and she’d been okay with that order of things, because she’d always figured there’d be time, before her youth was spent, to change her priorities.
But she was two months shy of her thirty-fifth birthday, no longer the youngest, prettiest woman in any given room, and her expectations had changed.
“Thank you, again.” She cocked her head, smiling slightly. “You’re brave, Detective Nix. Flirting with the chief’s sister.”
“Oh, sugar, this ain’t flirting,” he said in a drawl so low and sexy her cheeks started burning.
“Just as well,” she murmured, retreating to the counter, where the coffee had finished burbling. She poured the hot black liquid into a mug and crossed to the refrigerator for milk. She spotted some hazelnut liquid creamer—had to be there for Laney, she figured, since Doyle didn’t care for sweet coffee—and poured a dollop from the container into her cup.
“You’re involved with someone back in Atlanta?” Nix asked. He’d moved to the counter to pour his own cup of coffee. Like Doyle, he drank it black, no cream, no sugar.
“Not at the moment.”
He glanced up from his coffee cup, a flame flickering in his dark eyes. She felt a responding flood of heat deep in her abdomen and forced her gaze back