The Legend of Smuggler's Cave

“I’m okay.” Briar pulled her face away from her son’s neck and met Dalton’s gaze. She was pale, and her eyes were red-rimmed and damp, but her voice sounded a little less tortured, and color was coming back into her cheeks. “Tell her to call Walker Nix.”

Dalton gave the instruction. “Do you want paramedics?” he asked.

Briar held her crying son away from her, looking him over for injuries. “Logan, are you okay? Do you have any boo-boos?”

“Mama!” he wailed, tightening his grip on her neck like a baby monkey.

She hugged him close and looked up at Dalton. “I think we’re both okay. No paramedics.”

He wasn’t so sure. Dark bruises had begun to form along the curve of her throat. “You’re injured,” he murmured, reaching out to touch the purple spots before he realized what he was doing.

She stared up at him with wide stormy eyes, a dark flush spreading up her neck into her cheeks. “I’m fine,” she said again, forcing her gaze back to her son’s tearstained face. “Just get Nix here.”

“Just get the police here,” Dalton told the dispatcher. “I’m going to hang up now.” He pocketed the phone and tried not to tumble backward out of his crouch. His knees were starting to feel like jelly.

“Can you help me up?” She reached out one hand.

He took her hand and pushed to his feet. Her fingers tightened around his as he helped her up, and she didn’t let go right away, as if afraid that she might topple over again if she let go of his grasp. She had a warm, firm grip, even in her present distress, he noticed. She apparently came from what his grandfather would have called “hardy stock,” for already she looked close to full recovery, save for the mottled contusions on her throat.

“Did you hit either of them?” she asked, rocking slightly from side to side as she rubbed her whimpering son’s back.

He shook his head. “Didn’t aim for them. I’m not a great shot, and I wasn’t going to risk hitting you or the kid.”

“Logan,” she said with a hint of a smile. “His name is Logan.”

The little boy had settled down to a series of soft hitching sniffles. “Can I get something for him?” Dalton asked, trying to remember what he’d found comforting as a little boy. “A cookie or a toy or something?”

“There’s ice cream in the freezer. Strawberry—it’s his favorite.”

Dalton headed for the kitchen. He noticed, in passing, that she’d cleaned the place up sometime between the night before and now. Even the torn sofa cushions had been mended.

As he reached for the refrigerator’s freezer compartment, Briar said, “No, not that one. The one in the corner.”

He spotted a chest freezer nearby and pulled open the top. Inside, instead of the brand-name carton he was expecting, he found a large plastic tub labeled Strawberry Ice Cream in neat, clear handwriting. He pulled out the tub, uncovering what looked to be stacks and stacks of vacuum-packed cuts of some sort of meat. Looking closer, he saw that, like the ice cream, they were labeled in the same strong handwriting. Venison Shoulder, read one of the packages, with a date—December of the previous year—inscribed below. Another nearby contained pork—wild pig, to be exact—apparently put in the freezer only four weeks ago.

He closed the freezer and set the container of ice cream on the small kitchen table. “Hey, Logan, how about some ice cream?”

The little clinging monkey turned his tearstained face toward Dalton, his big gray eyes wide with a mixture of caution and curiosity.

Dalton tried again. “Ice cream, Logan. You want some?”

Logan looked up at his mother as if to seek her permission. She lowered him to the floor. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can have some.”

Logan crossed the distance to the kitchen with small cautious steps, still watching Dalton with a healthy dose of distrust.

But when Dalton plopped a hearty scoop of homemade strawberry ice cream into the bowl in front of his chair, he climbed up and grabbed the spoon, ready to dig in. By the time Dalton put away the ice-cream container and turned back to the kitchen, Logan was half-bathed in the sticky sweet stuff.

His mother stood at one of the front windows, peering out through a narrow gap in the curtains.

“Do you see anything?” Dalton asked, walking toward her.

She let the curtains fall closed and turned to look at him. “It’s dark out.”

Not quite the question he’d asked, but he let it go. “How’s your throat?”

“Why are you here?”

Yeah, he’d figured that question would occur to her sooner or later. “I don’t suppose you’d buy it if I said I was just driving by?”

Her dark eyebrows twitched in reply.

“I was staking out the place. In case the intruders returned.”

The tiniest hint of a smile curved one corner of her mouth. “And what did you plan to do if they did?”

“Call the cops.”

She nodded toward the Remington 700 propped by the door. “Where’d you get the rifle?”

“It’s mine.”

“You hunt a lot, do you?”

He took a stab at changing the subject. “Somebody around here does. Freezer’s full of game.”

“I bag as much as I can during the hunting seasons. We’ll live off that meat for the rest of the year.” She waved her hand toward the rifle. “May I?”

He nodded, and she picked up the weapon, first checking for ammunition. “I heard two rounds. Where did you aim?”

“At the ground.”

She looked up at him. “You have the rest of your ammo on you?”

He didn’t know if there was any other ammunition for the rifle at all, he realized. He’d been lucky it had been loaded—he wasn’t sure what he’d have done if he’d pulled the trigger and nothing had happened.

“Have you ever shot this rifle before?” She sounded as if she knew the answer.

“No.”

“Why do you have it, then?”

“Emergencies,” he answered, the truth too humiliating to admit.

From the look on her face, she saw through his answer anyway. She set the empty rifle against the wall. “If you’d like shooting lessons, I can help you out with that.”

“For a fee?”

Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “You saved us tonight. I reckon I could let you have a lesson for free.” Her voice tightened. “One, at least.”