High Country Fall

CHAPTER 3

The two-story weathered cedar condos were built up the side of the hill so that each had an entry that was close to ground level (or what passes for level ground in the mountains) depending on where the front door was in relation to the driveway that wound past the various units. Two shallow steps led up to a small porch in front of Beverly’s. I was unloading my car and stacking groceries and duffel bag by the railing when the door to the next unit opened and a gray-haired man emerged, carrying two large suitcases.

“Ships that pass in the night,” he said cheerfully. He pointed his remote toward the blue Grand Marquis parked in the next space and the trunk lid popped open. “You just getting here?”

I nodded. “I take it you’re leaving?”

“’Fraid so.” He set his bags in the trunk. “Are you up for the leaves?”

“Not really. You?” I put the last of my stuff on the edge of the porch, closed my trunk, and fished in my purse to find the notes and numbers Beverly had given me over the phone. One set was for the electronic keypad Beverly’s husband had installed so that they wouldn’t have to keep replacing the keys their renters lost or forgot to return to the local leasing agent.

“We come every fall,” the man said. “Forty years we’ve lived in Tampa and my wife still misses watching the seasons change.”

He smiled at the woman who now appeared in the doorway. “Not that she’s ever actually missed them.”

“He brings me back every spring and fall even if it’s just for a long weekend,” she agreed, handing him several shopping bags to stow in the trunk. “Azaleas and dogwoods in the spring, colored leaves in the fall.”

I smiled and wished them a safe trip home as I keyed in the numbers Beverly had given me.

Nothing happened.

“Are you sure you have the right place?” asked the woman. “I think that unit’s still occupied.”

I tried the combination again and this time it released the lock. Turning the knob, I pushed open the door. The inside looked as if it’d been hit by Hurricane Fran.

“Oh, my!” said the woman, who stared past me in frank curiosity at the jumbled mess.

The couch and chairs had been shoved to the center of the room and lamps and end tables were stacked on top of them, as is not unusual when a place is being painted. Instead of the usual drop cloths, though, the furniture was covered in a tangle of colorful T-shirts, jeans, sweaters, and dirty socks. A pair of high heels sat atop the entertainment center, and was that a black lace bra draped over a clump of stained sneakers? Through the archway, I saw a dining table piled high with pizza boxes and drink cups.

“I didn’t think they looked like they were leaving for good when they went out of here this morning,” said the woman. “Somebody must have messed up on your rental.”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s okay. This is my cousin’s place and her kids are painting it in their spare time. They’ll probably be back soon.”

“Don’t count on it,” said the man. “They haven’t gotten in before midnight the whole time we’ve been here.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

“And you’ve been here how long?”

“Since Friday a week ago.”

Ten days? My mind raced through the possibilities. Had the twins lent the place to some of their friends without telling their parents? I gave a mental shrug and began carrying in my things. Beverly had given me their telephone number at the college, and if they didn’t show up by the time I was settled in, I’d call and sort it all out.

As I went back to get the last bag of groceries, the man was already in his car with the motor running. His wife finished locking the door and gave me a concerned look. “I do hope everything will be all right for you.”

“It will,” I assured her. “Y’all drive safely now.”

“Don’t worry. The only time we’ve ever been stopped was for driving too slow on the interstate. Can you imagine that? A warning for going too slow? When teenagers are weaving in and out in those little red cars, going ninety miles an hour?”

“Well, you do see more little red cars pulled over than big blue Mercs,” I said, thinking how there would probably be more kids than grandparents standing before me tomorrow morning.

The car moved slowly away, then backed up. The man powered down his window and thrust a thin newspaper into my hand.

“The local news,” he said. “Only comes out on Friday and if it didn’t happen in Cedar Gap or affect Cedar Gap directly, you won’t read about it here, but it does carry ads for all the good restaurants here and in Howards Ford.”

I had to smile as I watched his car disappear down the slope, brake lights bright red all the way. People accustomed to big metropolitan dailies, like the Miami Herald or the New York Times, never seem to grasp the concept of small-town newspapers; but Linsey Thomas, who owns and edits the Dobbs Ledger back home, explained it to me once when I teased him for running a half-page account of a Scout troop fund-raiser my nephews had been involved in. “Big papers sell news,” he said. “Little papers like mine sell names. Am I gonna print the names of any little peckerwood that was there? Heck, yeah. Their mamas’ and daddies’ names, too, ’cause every doting grandma’s gonna buy at least three extra copies to send to friends and family who live somewhere else and they’re all gonna keep renewing their subscriptions.”

The editor of the High Country Courier apparently practiced the same policy. The pages were folded open to an article about a patchwork quilt made by volunteers and raffled off to benefit the local hospital. It appeared to name every woman who had worked on the quilt, the winner of the raffle, and a picture of the presentation ceremony at the hospital, wherein an administrator received a check from the officers of the volunteer group. I was surprised to note that they’d raised nearly twelve thousand dollars on that one quilt. At a dollar a chance, they must have hit up every tourist that came through town this year.

I carried the paper inside with me, stepping around an open foam carryout box that contained the dried-up remnants of a sandwich. From the pillows propped against the couch, someone had apparently lounged there on the floor in front of the television to eat and then gotten up and left the box. For a moment, I was almost tempted to phone the nearest motel down in Howards Ford and throw myself on a clerk’s mercy. Instead, I picked up the kitchen phone to dial the dorm number Beverly had given me.

Unfortunately, the phone was dead. No dial tone.

Resigned, I looked a little closer and realized that the place wasn’t as dirty as it initially appeared, just a little shabby and a lot cluttered.

Beverly said they were going to junk most of the stuff and refurbish once the painting was done. “If they’re going to pay fifteen hundred a week, tourists want everything new and fresh.”

Paint buckets sat on newspapers in the middle of the hall and brushes and rollers were soaking in a bucket of water, but so far as I could tell, only the walls of the smaller bedroom appeared to have been painted. Even there, the trimwork was still untouched.

The condo consisted of living room, large eat-in kitchen, a bath off the hallway, two small bedrooms, and a slightly larger master bedroom with its own bath. Since I was the sole legitimate occupant now, I had no hesitation about moving the clothes and toiletries I found there into one of the smaller bedrooms and taking this one for myself. Fresh linens were in the closet and cleaning supplies were under the kitchen sink.

When I went to strip the bed, I stumbled over a telephone receiver on the floor between the bed and the far wall and followed the cord to the unit itself, one of those with a built-in answering machine. The red light was blinking as I pulled it out from under the bed, so I put the receiver back on the cradle, pushed the play button, and heard a young voice with a clipped New Jersey accent.

“June? Marsha. It’s Friday night. I guess you’re still at the Laurel? Your mom called. She wants one of you to call her back, something about some cousin who’s planning to spend the week there? I think you’re about to be busted. How’s she not gonna know?”

Know what?

That they were lazy slobs who’d barely hit a lick on the paint job they were supposed to be doing?

That they’d lent the condo to friends without telling Beverly?

Busted? For what?

Before I could speculate further, the second message began to play. Beverly’s exasperated voice said, “Where are you girls? Did you get my message about Deborah coming up on Sunday?”

I lifted the receiver and, as soon as I heard the restored dial tone, found the twins’ number again and called it. After four rings, an answering machine kicked in: “Sorry we’re not here. Don’t you dare hang up without leaving us a message, though, you hear?”

I heard. “June? May? It’s Deborah. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m at the condo. Call me.”

I set the phone on the bedside table and got on with changing the sheets, trying to remember how long it’d been since I last saw the twins. At Aunt Sister’s birthday party back in early August?

Beverly is Aunt Sister’s daughter, so she and Fred and the twins would certainly have been there, but we’re such a big family it’s hard to keep track of who was where when.

Twins run in my father’s family, and nineteen years ago, when Beverly knew that she was carrying twin girls, she planned to name them either Hope and Faith or Elizabeth and Letitia—Betty and Letty for short. But the twins were born fifty minutes apart in the middle of the night.

The night of May thirty-first, to be precise.

Beverly being Beverly, she naturally took that as a sign and named them May and June. Sweet girls and identical as Xerox copies. Unfortunately, there are some in the family who think they only got one brain between them. (Of course, there are some who say the same about Haywood and Herman.)

A half-hour later, I had finished doing my bedroom and bath, had kicked enough stuff aside to vacuum a path from there to the front door, and was now ready to tackle the kitchen.

Once I located where the garbage bags were kept, the table and counters were soon cleared of fast-food and drink containers. The dishwasher was full of clean dishes, and after I put those away, I began to refill it with coffee mugs and stray pieces of tableware. When I opened the refrigerator to stow my perishables, I saw several bottles of beer alongside a decent head of lettuce, orange juice, milk, and were those homemade angel rolls in the bread drawer? There hadn’t been a baking sheet nor mixing bowl in the dishwasher, nevertheless, these could very well be some the twins had made.

Like Mother, like every other woman in her generation, Aunt Sister had tried to pass the art of breadmaking down to her daughters and granddaughters. I can make decent biscuits, but that’s about it for me; and Beverly’s not much better. For some reason, though, the twins took to baking like hogs to a mud bath. Whole wheat breads, rye loaves, pumpernickel, sourdough, Irish soda bread, puff pastry—if flour is involved, the twins can make it.

The yeasty fragrance when I opened the plastic bag made my mouth water and reminded my stomach that it hadn’t had lunch. I fixed myself a salad, snitched two of those rolls, and carried my food and the High Country Courier out to the deck off the dining room. The view was so amazing that for several long minutes I just sat on the lounge chair and stared. Through the hemlocks, looking due east, I could see almost the whole length of Main Street. The sun had begun its slide toward the crest of the ridge behind me, causing long dark shadows in the far hollows down below, but straight ahead, all the near mountaintops blazed in flaming, sunlit colors. Further out, the colors muted until they melded together into a blue smoky haze so that I couldn’t tell where the hills ended and sky began.

I will forever be more partial to the coast, but as always happens each time I do venture west, I start to understand again why so many are drawn to the mountains.

Eventually I turned back to my food and to the front page of the little newspaper. A full half of that page was taken up by a single story. The heavy black headline read “Family Friend Charged in Doctor’s Death.” Beneath were two pictures. The first was a studio portrait of a pleasant-faced man who appeared to be in his early fifties. The second was a candid picture of two uniformed officers as they led a young man in handcuffs into the sheriff’s department here in Cedar Gap.

According to the paper, it was originally thought that Dr. Carlyle Ledwig, fifty-six, had accidentally fallen to his death about two weeks ago while repairing a deck that overlooked Pritchard Cove, wherever that was. “Working with wood helped Dr. Ledwig relax,” the paper informed me, lest I should think the late doctor couldn’t afford a carpenter.

From the deck to the first rocks below was a thirty-foot drop. His body had been discovered by a Daniel Freeman, twenty-one, a student at Tanser-MacLeod and a friend of the family. He had immediately called 911, but it was too late.

An autopsy disclosed that the doctor’s fatal head wound had come not from his fall but from a hammer blow, and a search of the ravine eventually located the hammer, its head still caked with blood. A week later, Daniel Freeman was arrested when a bloody fingerprint from the deck proved to be his. Traces of Dr. Ledwig’s blood were also found on the trousers and sneakers he’d been wearing. If the sheriff’s department had a theory as to Freeman’s motive, they had declined to share it with the High Country Courier. Freeman had been released on a $25,000 bond.

Having no hard facts about Freeman other than that he was from Durham, was a senior at Tanser-MacLeod, and had been dating Dr. Ledwig’s older daughter, the Courier fell back on recapping Dr. Ledwig’s life.

I read of his birth in Florida, his degrees from universities in Chicago and New York, his early practice in Florida, his decision twenty years ago to relocate to Cedar Gap, where he headed up the geriatrics department at the local hospital and founded a geriatrics clinic in association with the hospital. His civic involvements seemed to include everything from town and county commissions to sitting on boards here and in Howards Ford. Among other things, he had funded the newly opened Carlyle G. Ledwig Senior Center, had taken active stands on environmental issues, and, according to the reporter, “had possessed the ability to persuade opposing sides to compromise and work together for the common good of Cedar Gap. Even those who disagreed with his stand on certain issues always agreed that he truly loved his adopted town.”

I’ve seen enough of small-town life to read between those lines. The Courier evidently considered Dr. Ledwig basically decent, a man who involved himself in community affairs, a man who contributed time and money to good causes, yet also a man who thought he knew what was best for everyone and wasn’t above using his influence to get folks to go along with him.

But to be hit with a hammer and thrown from his deck? I cast an uneasy look at the railing where my feet were propped. Was this something else the twins were supposed to be working on? I gave it a good push with my foot.

Rock solid. Well, that was one good thing.

The rest of the paper was the usual assortment of local announcements, ads for rental property (exorbitant!) and real estate (half a million for that dumpy little clapboard house?), and for several restaurants. Eating this late, I could skip the restaurants, but images of that hand-dipped ice-cream shop down on Main Street kept floating through my mind.

Surely a single scoop wouldn’t be too self-indulgent?

“Not if you’re gonna be walking up and down mountains,” said the preacher, for once in complete agreement with the pragmatist.