Read Online THE SECRET OF CHEROKEE COVE by Paula Graves - Free Book Online

not sure if she’s on duty today.”
    “What floor does she work on?”
    “Seventh.” The nurse smiled suddenly. “That’s the nursery.”
    “Thank you.” Dana went back into Doyle’s room to retrieve her purse and headed for the seventh floor.
    It didn’t take long to pick out a likely suspect. Plump and motherly-looking, with short gray hair that fell in curls around her smiling face, the nurse was wheeling a newborn down the hall to one of the maternity rooms when Dana stepped out of the elevator and almost directly into her path.
    Dana pulled up quickly before she collided with the bassinet. “Oops!”
    The nurse smiled at her. “No harm.”
    Before she made it all the way past, Dana took a stab. “Are you Doris?”
    The nurse pulled up and looked more closely at her. Her brow furrowed, and a look of puzzlement came over her round face. “Do I know you?”
    “No, but if you’re Doris Kingsley, it’s possible you knew my mother. Tallie Cumberland.”
    Doris’s expression changed immediately, but not to scorn or dismay. Instead, her eyes seemed to light up with pleasure. “Bless her heart. So she had herself another baby, then.”
    “Three of us,” Dana answered with a smile of her own, then looked down at the wriggling baby. Blue cap, blue booties. Must be a boy. “I know you need to get this little fellow to his mother, but when you have a spare moment, could we talk? I need to ask you a few questions about my mother.”
    “I go on a break as soon as I deliver little Jordan here to his mama. There’s a break room just down the hall, right before you get to the waiting area. Go on in there, and if anyone asks why you’re there, you tell ’em you’re waiting for me.”
    Dana did as she asked, settling at the small break-room table. Nobody else entered until Doris showed up about five minutes later.
    “I’ve wondered about your mama for over thirty years,” Doris said without preamble, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the carafe warming on a nearby burner. “She was so sad, so troubled after her baby died. I really worried she wasn’t ever going to be able to get over it. How’s she doing?”
    “I’m afraid my mother died in a car accident fifteen years ago.”
    Doris sank into the chair across from Dana, her expression falling. “Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that.”
    “She had a lot of happiness before that. Three kids who loved her like crazy and a husband who thought she hung the moon,” Dana assured her, blinking back tears of her own. “But she never told us about her experience here all those years ago, and I need to know all I can about what happened to her.”
    Doris reached across the table and patted Dana’s hand. “Honey, I don’t know that digging up old bones that way is going to make you feel any better.”
    Dana knew the woman was probably right. But she needed to know about her mother’s past for more reasons than just assuaging her own curiosity and sense of unease about what she’d learned. It was possible, though perhaps not likely, that Doyle’s attempts to find out what had happened to their mother all those years ago had put him in danger. If the story Nix had told her was true, their mother had tried to take a baby that she believed had been stolen from her. That baby was probably still alive. His parents were probably still alive.
    And if her mother’s version of the story, however wild it might seem, was true, the other couple would have a pretty good reason to want Doyle and his sister to disappear and stop dredging up history.
    Reason enough to make sure the nosy chief of police met with an unfortunate accident?
    “I understand if you don’t want to talk about it,” she said to Doris. “But I need a place to start looking.”
    “I didn’t say I wouldn’t talk about it,” Doris said. “I just wanted to be sure you’re ready to hear what happened.”
    Dana’s stomach turned a flip at the serious look in the nurse’s eyes. But she stiffened