The Smoky Mountain Mist. Paula Graves
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split the air, making her jump. She found the offending noisemaker—her cell phone, which lay on the passenger floorboard. Grinning sheepishly, she grabbed it and checked the display. She didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Rach! Thank God, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”
“Davis?” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to her grad school boyfriend, Davis Rogers. She hadn’t heard from him in years.
“I thought maybe you regretted giving me your number and were screening my calls. Did you get home okay?” Before she could answer, he continued, “Of course you did, or you wouldn’t be answering the phone. Look, about last night—”
Suddenly, there was a thud on the other end of the line, and the connection went dead.
Rachel pulled the phone away from her face, startled. She looked at the display again. The number had a Vir-ginia area code, but Davis had spoken as if he was here in Tennessee.
She tried calling the number on the display, but it went to voice mail.
He’d said he’d been trying to call her. She checked her own voice mail and discovered three messages, all from Davis. The first informed her where he was staying—the Sequoyah House, a bed-and-breakfast inn out near Cutter Horse Farm. She entered the information in her phone’s notepad and checked the other messages.
In the last message, Davis sounded upset. “Rachel, it’s Davis again. Look, I’m sorry about last night, but he seemed to think you might be receptive. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t like leaving you in that place. Please call me back so I can apologize.”
She stared at the phone. What place? Surely not Smoky Joe’s. Why was her ex in town in the first place—for her father’s funeral? Had she seen him yesterday?
And why had his call cut off?
SEQUOYAH HOUSE WAS a sprawling two-story farmhouse nestled in a clearing at the base of Copperhead Ridge. Behind the house, the mountain loomed like a guardian over the rain-washed valley below. It was the kind of place that lent itself more to romantic getaways than lodgings for a man alone.
But maybe Davis Rogers hadn’t planned to be alone for long.
Most of the lobby furnishings looked to be rustic antiques, the bounty of a rich and varied Smoky Mountain tradition of craftsmanship. But despite its hominess, Se-quoyah House couldn’t hide a definite air of money, and plenty of it.
The woman behind the large mahogany front desk smiled at him politely, her cool gray eyes taking in his cotton golf shirt, timeworn jeans and barbershop haircut. No doubt wondering if he could afford the hotel’s rates.
“May I help you?” she asked in a neutral tone.
“I’m here to see one of your guests, Davis Rogers.”
“Mr. Rogers is not in his room. May I give him a message?”
“Yes. Would you tell him Seth Hammond stopped by to see him about a matter concerning Rachel Davenport?”
He could tell by the flicker in her eyes that she recognized his name. His reputation preceded him.
“Where can he reach you?”
Seth pulled one of the business cards sitting in a silver holder on the desk. “May I?” At her nod of assent, he flipped the card over and wrote his cell phone number on the back.
The woman took the card. “I’ll give him the message.”
He walked slowly down the front porch steps and headed back to where he’d parked in a section of the clearing leveled off and covered with interlocked pavers to form a parking lot. Among the other cars parked there he spotted a shiny blue Mercedes with Virginia license plates.
Seth looked through the driver’s window. The car’s interior looked spotless, with nothing to identify the owner. If Ivy Hawkins weren’t on administrative leave for another week, Seth might have risked calling her to see if she could run down the plate number. She’d investigated the murders that had started this whole mess, after all. She’d damned near fallen victim to the killer herself. She might be persuaded.
But her partner, Antoine Parsons, had no reason to listen to anything Seth had to say. And what would it matter, really? Seth already knew Davis was staying at Sequoyah House. Though if the car with the Virginia plates was his, it did raise the question—if he wasn’t in his room, and he wasn’t in his car, where exactly was he?
As he headed back toward the Charger through the cold rain, a ringing sound stopped him midstep. It seemed faint, as if it was coming from a small distance away, but he didn’t see anyone around.
He followed the sound to a patch of dense oak leaf hydrangea bushes growing wild at the edge of the tree line. The cream-colored blossoms had started to fade with the onset of colder weather, but the leaves were thick enough to force Seth to crouch to locate the phone by the fourth ring. It lay faceup on the ground.
Seth picked up the phone and pressed the answer button. “Hello?” he said, expecting the voice on the other end to belong to the phone’s owner, calling to locate his missing phone.
The last thing he expected was to hear Rachel Dav-enport’s voice. “Davis?”
Seth’s gaze slid across the parking lot to the car with the Virginia plates. His chest tightened.
“Davis?” Rachel repeated.
“It’s not Davis,” he answered slowly. “It’s Seth Hammond.”
She was silent for a moment. “This is the number Davis Rogers left on my cell phone. Where is he? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I heard the phone ringing and answered, figuring the owner might be looking for his phone.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside Sequoyah House.” He pushed to his feet and started moving slowly down the line of bushes, looking through the thick foliage for something he desperately hoped he wouldn’t find.
“What are you doing there?” She couldn’t keep the suspicion from her tone, and he couldn’t exactly blame her.
“I went and talked to Joe Breslin at Smoky Joe’s Sa-loon. He remembered seeing you there with a man last night. So he looked up the man’s credit card receipt and got a name for me.”
“I was at Smoky Joe’s with Davis?” She sounded skeptical. “That is definitely not his kind of place.”
“Maybe it’s yours,” he suggested, remembering her sing-along with the bluegrass CD.
“Did you talk to Davis?”
“The clerk said he wasn’t in his room, so I left him a message to call me.” He paused as he caught sight of something dark behind one of the bushes. “I used your name. Hope you don’t mind.” He hunkered down next to the bush and carefully pushed aside the leaves to see what lay behind.
His heart sank to his toes.
Curled up in the fetal position, covered in blood and bruises, lay a man. Seth couldn’t tell if he was breathing. “Rachel, I have to go. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”
He disconnected the call and put the cell phone in his jacket pocket. The tightly packed underbrush forced him to crawl through the narrow spaces between the bushes to get back to where the man lay with his back against the trunk of a birch tree. He’d been beaten, and badly. His face was misshapen with broken bones, his eyes purple and swollen shut. Blood drenched the front of his shirt, making it hard to tell what color it had been originally. One of his legs lay at an unnatural angle, suggesting a break or a dislocation.
Seth touched the man’s throat and found a faint pulse. He didn’t know what Davis Rogers looked like, but the proximity of the battered man and the discarded cell phone suggested a connection. He backed out of the bushes, reaching