The Smoky Mountain Mist

She’d done okay, taking over more and more of her fa-ther’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 Deli-lah 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?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” He gave Rachel’s shoulder a light shake. She didn’t respond.

“What are you doing with her?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it inside.” He nodded toward the door she’d left wide-open.

Inside the house, he laid Rachel on the sofa and pressed his fingers against her slender wrist. Her pulse was slow but steady. She seemed to be breathing steadily.

She was asleep.

He stood up and turned to look at his sister. She stared back at him, her hands on her hips and a look of suspicion, liberally tinged with fear, creasing her pretty face.

“What the hell happened? Did you do something to her?”

Anger churned in his gut, tempered only by the bitter knowledge that Delilah had every reason to suspect him of doing something wrong. God knew she’d dug him out of a whole lot of holes of his own digging over the years until she’d finally tired of saving him from himself.

“I found her in this condition,” he explained as he pulled a crocheted throw from the back of the sofa and covered Rachel with it. “On Purgatory Bridge.”

“On the bridge?”

“On the bridge,” he answered. “Up on the girders, about to practice her high-dive routine.”

“My God. She was trying to kill herself?”

“No. She’s on something. I thought maybe you could take a look, see if you could tell from her condition—”

“Not without a tox screen.” Delilah crossed to the sofa and crouched beside Rachel. “How was she behaving when you found her?”

“Drunk, but I didn’t really smell any liquor on her.” The memory of her body, warm and soft against his, roared back with a vengeance. She’d smelled good, he remembered. Clean and sweet, as if she’d just stepped out of a bath. “She was out of it, though. I’m not sure she even knew who she was, much less who I was.”

“Was she hallucinating?” Delilah checked Rachel’s eyes.

“Not hallucinating exactly,” Seth answered, leaning over his sister’s shoulder.

She shot him a “back off” look, and he stepped away. “What, then, exactly?”

“She seemed really happy. As if she were having the time of her life.”

“Standing on a girder over a thirty-foot drop?”

“Technically, she was swaying on a girder over a thirty-foot drop.” Even the memory gave him a chill. “Scared the hell outta me.”

“You should’ve taken her to a hospital.”

Worry ate at his gut. “Should we call nine-one-one?”

Delilah sat back on her heels, her brow furrowed. “Her vitals look pretty good. I could call a doctor friend of mine back in Alabama and get his take on her condition.”

“You have a theory,” Seth said, reading his sister’s body language.

“It could be gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB.”

Seth’s chest tightened with dread. “The date rape drug?”

“Well, it’s also a club drug—lower doses create a sense of euphoria. You said you found her near Smoky Joe’s, right? She might have taken the GHB to get high.”

He shook his head swiftly. “No. She wouldn’t do that.”

Delilah turned her head to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “And you would know this how?”

“We work in the same place. If she had any kind of track record with drugs, I’d have heard about it.”

Delilah cocked her head. “Really. You think you know all there is to know about Rachel Davenport?”

He could tell from his sister’s tone that he’d tweaked her suspicious side again. What would she think if he told her he was working for her old boss, Adam Brand?

As tempted as he was to know the answer, he looked back at Rachel. “If it’s GHB, would it have made her climb up on a bridge and try to fly?”

“It might, if she’s the fanciful sort. GHB loosens inhibitions.”

Which might explain her drunken attempt at seduction in the middle of Purgatory Bridge, he thought. “How can we be sure?”

“A urine test might tell us,” Delilah answered, rising to her feet and pulling her cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans. “But it’s expensive to test for it, and it’s almost impossible to detect after twenty-four hours.” She shot her brother a pointed look. “Do you really want it on record that she’s got an illegal drug in her system?”

Delilah might look soft and pretty, but she was sharper than a briar patch. “No, I don’t,” he conceded.

“We can’t assume someone did this to her,” she said, punching in a phone number. “After all, she just buried her father. That might make some folks want to forget the world for a while.”