THE SECRET OF CHEROKEE COVE by Paula Graves

the gravel lot next to the little brick church.
    By the time she’d locked her car door and turned back toward the main street, people had come out of the buildings to stand on porches and sidewalks, watching her approach. Nobody moved. Nobody smiled, either. There were men and women, old and young, all watching her through narrowed eyes as she neared the dusty walking path that led to the small grocery store.
    “Hello,” she said, quelling the urge to check the ammunition in the pistol holstered beneath her windbreaker. “My name is Dana Massey—”
    “We know who you are.” A thin man in his sixties stepped forward from the porch of the grocery store. He was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, his clothes clean but his shoes crusted with dried mud. He wore a faded baseball cap with Riddle Brothers Tractor embroidered in blue on the front. The bill shadowed his weathered face, making it hard to read the intent in his eyes.
    “Do you know why I’m here?” she asked.
    “You’re nosing around in something you ought to let lie.” That was a woman, speaking from the concrete stoop in front of the post office. She was possibly even older than the man with the baseball cap, her silver hair wispy and fluttering in the breeze. She wore a cotton house dress beneath a thick wool cardigan, with flat canvas shoes on her small feet. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but her advancing years seemed to have toughened her into steel and leather, all muscles and sinew. Here was a woman who’d worked hard all her life, and it showed.
    “I want to know more about my mother.” She had to assume, from the rapid-fire spread of information about her arrival, that the people of the community had already known she was in Bitterwood. She’d been asking a lot of questions about her mother over the past couple of days. In a town this small, it wouldn’t have taken long for word to get around.
    “Your mama brought trouble here. That’s all you need to know.” The woman turned and went back into the post office.
    But nobody else moved away. If anything, they’d formed a phalanx, as if to wall the town off from her presence.
    “What do you think she did to you?” Dana asked, frustration rising in her chest on a swell of anger. “She was a girl who lost a baby. She didn’t kill him.”
    “You don’t know anything, city girl.” The speaker’s voice came from behind her. She turned quickly and found herself face-to-face with a bearded man around her own age. He wasn’t any taller than she was, but he was built like a barn, with broad shoulders, a chest the size of a rain barrel and massive arms and thighs. There was a little flab in his gut, but the rest of him looked hard and thick, like a football lineman.
    He stood close enough that, for the first time since she’d parked in front of the store, she felt physically threatened. She might be able to outrun him, but if he got physical, she didn’t think she could outfight him.
    And the last thing she wanted to do, in the middle of this increasingly hostile crowd, was to pull her gun on him, even to save her own life.
    “I’m really not here for trouble,” she stated, backing toward her car. The man’s face cracked into a narrow-eyed smile, but he didn’t move after her.
    Reaching the edge of the church’s gravel parking lot, she turned toward her car. And swallowed a curse.
    The Chevy’s driver’s-side tires were both flat.
    She didn’t know whether to be scared or mad as hell.
    As she turned back to confront the gathered crowd, the rumble of an engine filtered past the low murmurs of the people watching her. Dana looked down the road, trying to locate the source of the noise. She saw several in the small crowd turn their heads, as well.
    Around the curve just visible about fifty yards away, a motorcycle zoomed into view, its engine noise increasing to a loud growl. The driver was dressed in black, from a worn leather jacket to tight-fitting black jeans