what had happened to her tonight, or how big a part she’d played in her own troubles, but he didn’t care. Everybody made mistakes, and she’d been under a hell of a lot more pressure than most folks these past few weeks.
She could sort things out with her conscience when she was sober. He wasn’t going to add to her problems by parading her in front of other people.
He buckled her safely into the passenger seat of the Charger and slid behind the wheel, pulling the bluegrass CD from a holder attached to his sun visor. He put the CD in the player and punched the skip button until the song she’d been singing earlier came on. She picked up the tune happily, and he let her serenade him while he thought through what to do next.
Delivering her to her family was the most obvious answer, but Seth didn’t like that idea. Someone had gone to deadly lengths in the past few weeks to rip away her emotional underpinnings, and Seth didn’t know enough about her relationship with her stepmother and stepbrother to risk taking her home in this condition. She seemed friendly enough with them, but they didn’t appear particularly close. In fact, there was some speculation at work whether Paul Bailey was annoyed at being bypassed as acting CEO. He might not have Rachel’s best interests at heart.
The particulars of George Davenport’s will had become an open secret around the office ever since he’d changed it shortly after his terminal liver cancer diagnosis a year ago. Everybody at the trucking company knew he’d specified that his daughter, Rachel, should be the company’s CEO. It had been a bit of a scandal, since until that point in her life, Rachel Davenport had been happy working as a librarian in Maryville. What did she know about running a business?
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
