High Country Fall

CHAPTER 8

“Oh, come on, Liz,” said Joyce Ashe. “You’ll have Deborah thinking we’re nothing but a bunch of hillbilly ridge runners with a Klan robe in every closet.”

“Just stating the obvious,” said the unrepentant attorney.

As a district court judge who will never sit on a murder trial, and a flatlander to boot, I didn’t have a dog in this fight. From here on, Freeman’s guilt or innocence would play out in superior court. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist asking as innocently as possible, “What’s the problem? Aren’t there plenty of educated young people in your jury pool?”

“I’m not talking age or education,” she said. “I’m talking race. You find me twelve black people in Cedar Gap and I’ll send a donation to the Lafayette County Republican Party in your name.”

I held up my hands in mock horror. “Not in my name you won’t.”

The others rolled their eyes and Bobby Ashe grinned at his wife. “Where’d you stash Liz’s soapbox, honey?”

“I’m with Judge Knott on this,” said the younger male attorney. Dotson? Dodson? “What’s the problem? Hell, Freeman’s just about as white as anybody around.”

I couldn’t quite place his accent but clearly it hadn’t been formed in North Carolina.

“Speak for yourself, Matt Dodson,” said the woman who had joined us a moment earlier. Mid-forties, tall and tan, with sunbleached blond hair, she had the healthy outdoor look of someone who ate six servings of fruits and vegetables a day and played at least two sets of tennis or nine holes of golf every morning. From the proprietary way she tucked her arm through Norman Osborne’s, I gathered that she was Mrs. Osborne.

“I am speaking for myself,” said Dodson. “Look at me.”

We did. Black curly hair, warm brown eyes, deep olive skin.

Mrs. Osborne waved her hand impatiently. “Don’t be silly, Matt. Your skin may be a little dark, but you know you’re Caucasian.”

“I’m also Spanish. At least my mother is. Matt isn’t short for Matthew. I was christened Matteo. And the Moors of North Africa were all over Spain. You think for one minute my family didn’t mix it up with a few blackamoors along the way?”

“Well, now, if you’re gonna go back hundreds of years,” said Joyce Ashe, “we’re all out of Africa originally, right?”

“Not if you believe the Bible, darlin’.” Norman Osborne’s grin implied that he didn’t necessarily. “The Garden of Eden was in Iraq. Mesopotamia, not Africa.”

I gave a mental groan. Surely I hadn’t risked my life with a maniac driver just to spend yet another evening debating evolution and creationism?

Fortunately, Liz Peters wasn’t that easily sidetracked. “Whether he’s mostly white, Chinese, or Mesopotamian, the fact remains that Daniel Freeman calls himself an African-American, and there are precious few in Lafayette County.”

“Not my fault if they don’t want to live here,” Bobby Ashe said. “Joyce and me, we don’t care about the color of any client’s skin, long as their money’s green.”

“Have you sold a single house in Pritchard Cove to any blacks?”

“As a matter of fact, we did. Remember the Gibsons?”

“Oh right.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “One season fighting those damn flamingoes, then they gave up and bought a place outside Asheville.”

“Flamingos?” I asked.

Joyce Ashe shrugged her ample shoulders. “Someone kept planting plastic flamingos along their drive and—”

“Every lawn jockey isn’t in the shape of a pickaninny,” said Liz Peters.

“It was a joke, Liz. Not a good joke, but not racist.”

“Some things aren’t funny if you’re on the receiving end,” she snapped. Turning to me, she explained: “The implication was that the Gibsons were black Florida trash and didn’t belong in Pritchard Cove with white Floridians.”

“Floridiots!” said a short bald man, who’d been listening silently. “They can all go to hell.”

“Bite your tongue, Tysinger,” said Osborne. “They’re our bread and butter.”

“Yours maybe, not mine,” he growled.

“What do you have against Floridians?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” said Joyce. “Deborah, this is Sam Tysinger. And you didn’t meet Sunny Osborne either.”

Mrs. Osborne and I nodded to each other and murmured politely, but I was curious about Sam Tysinger’s attitude. “What’s wrong with Floridians?”

“Depends on whether they’re seasonal or tourists,” he said.

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Lord, no, child!” said Sunny Osborne. “Seasonal people have wealth and education. They buy expensive second homes here and that gives them a vested interest in preserving and maintaining our community. Tourists merely come to have fun and don’t care how much they trash up the place because they’ll be gone in a week.”

Sam Tysinger snorted. “At least the tourists spend money. Seasonal people just drive up everybody’s property taxes, and don’t add a damn thing to the local economy except for real estate commissions and cluttering up the ridges.”

“Of course they contribute,” said Bobby Ashe, stroking his outsize mustache. “We wouldn’t have such a large office staff without them.”

“That’s right,” his wife chimed in. “We hire people to clean their houses, take care of the yards—”

“Minimum-wage crap,” the little man said scornfully. “And even that dries up during the off-season.” He took a swallow of the drink in his hand and said to me, “Seasonal people want to pull up the drawbridge as soon as they’ve got their piece of a mountain. They want to live in a quaint little old-timey setting. Stop development. Turn back the clock. They’d like it if the roads weren’t paved so the tourists would be discouraged from coming.”

“Quilt and jelly. Quilt and jelly,” said a stylish older woman who’d turned to us from a nearby conversation. “They think that’s all we mountain women do. Quilt and jelly. I was having my nails done back in the summer and some woman at the next station wanted to know where I went to pick blackberries because she wanted to make herself some authentic mountain jam. I was the only local in the shop at the time and I guess she heard my accent.” Her exasperation gave way to a nostalgic smile. “I sent her down to Potter’s Bottom, where the chiggers and the mosquitoes are thick as fleas on a hound dog. Gave her a real sample of authentic mountain life.”

“Now wait a minute,” Sunny Osborne objected. “There’re always going to be those who think we’re dumb because we speak with a twang, but most of them want second homes here because they love it. And a lot of them give as much as they take. They contribute to the library and to the hospital and—”

“Things they use,” Tysinger said with a cynical snort. “They don’t want any kind of industry here. There’s almost nothing for the young people. And—”

“And I say it’s time we stopped boring Deborah to death,” said Joyce. “She doesn’t want to hear this.”

Matt Dodson shrugged. “All I’m saying is, Freeman probably has less Negro blood than me, so why did Dr. Ledwig get so bent out of shape over it?”

“Probably because you don’t want to marry his daughter,” Sunny Osborne said.

“And you’re not carrying a flag,” said Lucius Burke. “Freeman could just as easily call himself Native American or white—according to his statement, he’s descended from them on both sides, but by calling himself black he hopes to make people question what it really means to be black. He says he wants to make all racial designations irrelevant.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Liz Peters. “I don’t know why we still have them anyhow. Whenever I have to check off my race, I always check ‘other.’”

I laughed. “Me too.”

Bobby Ashe frowned. “But aren’t there legitimate reasons for people to know what race you are? Entitlement programs? Or what about medical reasons? Sickle-cell anemia, for instance?”

Sam Tysinger gave him a sardonic look. “And every Jew should write down his religion in case he develops Tay-Sachs?”

“I don’t think Dr. Ledwig was worried about sickle-cell anemia, or Tay-Sachs either,” said Liz Peters. “He was a bigot, pure and simple.”

“You’re bad-mouthing a good man who’s not here tonight to defend himself,” Norman Osborne protested. “Look at all the good he’s done for Cedar Gap. The hospital. The geriatrics clinic. He’s building a new senior center, too.”

“Another one?” asked Tysinger with a puzzled look on his face.

“He’s building onto the new senior center,” said Mrs. Osborne. “At least that’s what we hear that his will provides, but maybe we’re speaking out of turn till everything’s probated, right, honey?”

She squeezed his arm and he patted her hand affectionately.

“Right you are, darlin’.” He gave a rueful smile. “Always opening my mouth at the wrong time.”

“Ah, Sam’s still mad because Carlyle got the planning board to rule against his sign,” said Lucius Burke.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Joyce Ashe. “Come on, Deborah. If they’re going to start rehashing that, let me introduce you to some people with more interesting things on their minds.”

“What was that about a sign?” I asked as we filled our plates at the buffet table a few minutes later.

“Sam owns several gem mine attractions around the county.”

“Really?” I couldn’t help smiling. I still have the little half-carat ruby I’d found in my bucket of mine tailings when Mother and Aunt Zell and I tried our luck at “mining” for gemstones. It cost Daddy more than it was worth to have it cut and set in a silver ring that we gave Mother for her birthday and which came back to me at her death, but I treasure its associations and said so.

“They’re popular with the tourists,” Joyce agreed, “but some of the seasonal people think they’re tacky. They were grandfathered in when the new land use rules took effect, but Sam had a big ol’ ramshackle billboard right where this one Florida man had to look at it every time he drove out of his driveway. Sam couldn’t prove the man helped that sign fall down during a thunderstorm this summer, but it’s a fact that the man did make a big donation to the hospital’s building fund, and permission to put a big one back was denied. Now, you be sure and get you some of this chopped broccoli and raisin salad. I don’t know what the caterer puts in her dressing, but it’s delicious.”

I followed in Joyce’s wake as she worked the room, introducing me to several people along the way. It could have been a meeting of the Cedar Gap Chamber of Commerce. By the time we got out to the terrace, I had exchanged names with the owners or managers of most of the stores along Main Street. I had also met a dean from Tanser-MacLeod College who vaguely remembered the twins, the owner of an independent bluegrass label, and a heart surgeon from Long Island who was considering a second home that was listed by the newly formed Osborne-Ashe High Country Realty.

“See?” said Joyce, as we moved on. “Not all the seasonal people are from Florida.”

As we approached the edge of the terrace, she was called back inside by one of the white-jacketed servers to attend to a minor domestic crisis. Most of the nearby tables were taken by people who were already in deep conversation with one another, so I set my plate on the wide wooden railing and looked out over the tops of descending trees that were a hazy blue in the moonlight.

“Enjoyin’ the view?” drawled a voice behind me.

“It’s lovely,” I said, smiling up at Norman Osborne, who joined me with a drink in his hand. “Do you ever get tired of it?”

“Never. It’s not just about buying and selling either.”

“There’s gold in them thar hills?”

“There is. No denying that, but these hills are like the seashores. They belong to everybody in the United States and it’s up to us to develop smartly so we can preserve it for the generations to come.”

I must have given an unladylike snort because he grinned and said, “We don’t talk about it, Ledwig and me, but for every acre we’ve developed, we’ve put an equal parcel into the land conservancy.”

“You must really miss him,” I said.

“Who?”

“Dr. Ledwig. His death must have been a huge blow.”

He looked out over the vista for a long silent minute while the party went on noisily around us, then glanced at me with a rueful smile. “Sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your name.”

“Judge Knott,” I said. “Deborah Knott.”

“From?”

“Over in Colleton County.”

“Knott? Colleton County? You wouldn’t happen to be kin to a man down there named Kezzie Knott, would you?”

“My father,” I said, already knowing where this was going.

“Really? I’ll be damned!” He chuckled. “And you a judge!”

He wasn’t the first one to find it amusing that the man who’d once run the biggest bootlegging operation in eastern North Carolina had sired a judge for a daughter.

“Don’t worry, darlin’, your secret’s safe with me.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t something to brag about, but nothing I’d ever tried to hide either. Waste of time anyhow. Be like trying to hide a mule in a petunia patch.

“Naw, it’s okay,” Osborne insisted. “See, my daddy used to have his own little ‘still on a hill.’” A grin split his face as he softly sang the rest of the verse:

“… where he runs him a gallon or two.

The crows in the sky

Git so drunk they cain’t fly

From that good ol’ mountain dew.”

“Norman?” Sunny Osborne suddenly appeared at his side and laid a suntanned hand heavy with gold and diamond rings on his arm. “I wondered where you’d got to.”

“Darlin’, meet Judge Deborah Knott. She’s Kezzie Knott’s daughter.”

She pushed back a strand of straw-colored hair and smiled at me. “I’m sorry. Who’s Kezzie Knott?”

“You don’t mind if I tell her, do you?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I murmured.

“He was like my daddy,” said Osborne. “Bad for making his own whiskey. Only my daddy kept it local and hers ran it from Florida to Canada. Or so they say.”

“Or so they say,” I agreed.

“How interesting,” she said, eyeing my plate on the railing. “That looks delicious. I came to see if you were ready to eat, too, honey?”

“Sure,” he said. “Good talking to you, ma’am.”

As they walked away, I saw Osborne pull a small notebook from an inner pocket of his jacket and pause to scribble something.

Billy Ed came over to me then. “See any lights?” he asked.

I pointed with the forkful of broccoli salad that had been on its way to my mouth. “You mean that’s Pritchard Cove down there?”

“Yep.”

I looked closely and, sure enough, a scattering of lights could be seen through the trees.

“Where is the Ledwig house?”

He pointed off to the left. “You can’t really see it from here. See that outcropping of rock? It’s just on the other side.”

“On the same road as this house?”

“Old Needham? Yep. Old Needham, new money. They oughta rename it Millionaire Row. Miss Joyce and Bobby here. The Ledwigs up there. The Osbornes a quarter mile on above them.”

“And your house?”

“Oh, I’m on the other side of the ridge heading down toward Bedford.”

He lit a fresh cigarette from the tip of the old one and inhaled deeply. “Yep, Ledwig did everything except move heaven and earth to keep the cove from being developed, but the developer got his permits in under the wire before Ledwig could get to the county commissioners.”

I sampled a bit of the risotto Joyce had spooned onto my plate and looked at the tubby little man in the grimy ball cap, tie, and vest. “You wouldn’t happen to be that developer, would you?”

“Yep.” He grinned and handed me his card. “Be proud to show you around anytime you like.”