Read Deceived (A Hannah Smith Novel) for Free Online Page B

bay.
    “Pay Day Road,” locals still called the shell lane. The name dated back to the 1990s when off-loading marijuana bales required a remote place that was hard to find by land or water.
Pot hauling
, as it was known, had saved some fishermen from going broke, had made a few others wealthy, but had spelled trouble for the Helms family, particularly their young children, who had learned the trade too early to save themselves.
    I thought about getting out and calling to Levi but decided against it. The decision wasn’t purely selfishness, but my eagerness to get to Sanibel Island played a role. By truck, it was several miles to Sulfur Wells, but there was also an old horse trail through the backcountry that cut the distance in half. Walkin’ Levi would know the trail, so he’d probably be home long before me.
    But what was it about Pay Day Road that had scared the poor man? The Helms family had once kept pit bulls, I remembered. Not fighting dogs—not since old Mr. Helms had died, anyway—but for protection.
    Levi’s afraid of dogs,
I thought. Shy people who traveled on foot had every reason to fear pit bulls. It made sense.
    Even so, I felt a creeping uneasiness that caused me to take a precaution. My cell phone showed only one bar, but it was enough to include a locator map when I messaged Marion Ford and another friend, Nathan Pace, who is a bodybuilder but a sweet man nonetheless.
    Here checking on Loretta’s friend. Will text again in 30.
    I signed the note
H4
, a signature I reserve for friends, and also to remind myself I’m the fourth Hannah Smith in my family, so have more reasons than most to be cautious. My great-great-grandmother—known as Big Six because of her height and strength—and my wild aunt, Hannah Three, had both come to violent ends due to their own recklessness and their poor judgment in men. The history inherited with my name, although I’ve never admitted it, is a secret reason I’m careful about dating. The fear that history repeats itself is silly and superstitious, I suppose, but I’m also aware that my own judgment is often less than perfect.
    I sent the text, waited for the message to clear, then put the truck in gear.
    Ahead, mangrove trees leaned in to form a tunnel that sprinkled sunlight on the windshield. The shell road became sand and showed tire tracks coming or going. Both maybe. Definitely fresh.
    A UPS truck, I hoped, delivering the wig Loretta had mentioned.

The house where Rosanna Helms’s husband, Dwight, had been born, and where
his
mother had been born, resembled a tobacco barn on pilings that, for a hundred years, had been jettisoning the junk that now surrounded the place. Oil drums, trailers, crab traps, pieces of Mica’s Harley-Davidson scattered around a hot-water heater, rusting near a satellite dish, and a bicycle frame perched trophylike atop a sheen of glass fishing net—Crystal’s bike, I remembered the pink streamers.
    Crystal and I had played in this yard as children. She had been a shy, big-boned girl who enjoyed Barbie dolls, which I’d tolerated out of boredom more than politeness. But she was also game enough to paddle a canoe I’d found in the mangroves, then patched with roofing tar. We had never been close, but childhood is a powerful link, so it felt strange to be here alone, an adult woman sent to check on a playmate’s mother, a mother who had chosen to live amid the wreckage of her own shattered family. I had never liked the feel of this place. I didn’t like being here now.
    Like a few other outposts on the coast, the Helms property had prospered when commerce was conducted by water, but the first roads had bypassed it, and better roads had left it as isolated as an island, the acreage not worth much because it was the only high ground in a tract of mangroves now protected by law. Yet the house remained as I remembered, a resolute structure two floors high, wood black as creosote, with four small holes cut for windows and a fifth