High Country Fall

CHAPTER 13

TUESDAY, 9:30 A.M.

In the house at the top of Old Needham Road, Sunny Osborne paced the stone terrace outside her bedroom like a restless golden tiger.

A golden tiger tethered by a telephonic chain.

She wished that she could call Tina Ledwig or Carolyn Gimpel or any of the others whom she regularly met for tennis at the club. See if Tina was sober enough to play. Waiting had never been easy for her. She had always been a woman of impulsive physical action. She needed to be chasing after a ball, slamming it back across the net, working off the tension that had her keyed tighter than a guitar string.

From this height, she could see the tree-covered hills of three counties. All the colors of autumn blazed around her as far as any eye could see, but she had no thought for their beauty because her whole being was focused on Norman, willing him to call, willing him to come home safely. How could he have vanished so utterly and completely in the half-mile between the two houses? She had already called all the neighbors again this morning. Still nothing.

Anxiety kept her circling back and forth where the phone sat on a table just inside the open French doors. She knew she was spooking the hell out of Nellie but she couldn’t help herself. Every few minutes the housekeeper would peer anxiously around the corner, and here she was again, asking if there were anything she could bring. Tea? Coffee? A big glass of cold milk?

“Maybe you should call Miss Laura?”

“No!” she exploded. “Dammit, Nellie, go do your work and leave me alone!”

Calling their daughter would mean accepting that something dreadful, something unthinkable, something final had happened to Norman. He had always been bad for not checking in immediately when business required him to wine and dine someone unexpectedly. It was part of his good ol’ boy self-image.

“Now, darlin’, no real man calls his wife and gets permission to go out,” he would say. “Clients don’t wanna deal with a pussy-whipped jellyfish.”

Normally she didn’t mind. She loved being married to a man’s man, and his cheerful machismo didn’t bother her. Let him tell himself and the world that he was the good-timing man married to a good-hearted woman, and let them both believe it—she knew who held the narrow edge of power in this house. Besides, even on those late nights, he was usually home by midnight and he damn well did manage a discreet call every time.

Twice before in their marriage, however, there had been nights like the one she’d just endured. The first time began on a Saturday afternoon when Laura was a toddler, about a year before he finally hit it big. He had run out to pick up a gallon of milk and hadn’t come home until after seven the next morning—without the milk, and sporting a massive hangover. At the dairy case, he had run into an old Army buddy and had gone back to the buddy’s vacation condo, where they proceeded to empty every bottle in the house as they relived boot camp.

She had been terrified out of her mind and at two that morning had called the highway patrol and the local hospital to ask if there had been a wreck or if he’d been brought in half-dead.

He had acted embarrassed and repentant and swore on his mother’s memory that it would never happen again. Except that twelve years later, it did.

That time she had forced herself to wait it out, and when he came dragging in at midmorning the next day, she didn’t say a single angry word—nothing of how frightened she’d been, the tears she’d cried, the rage she’d felt when she saw his car pull into the drive and he emerged from it unscathed. She had smiled sweet acceptance of his explanation and shamefaced apology, had made him breakfast, then insisted he go sleep off his headache in an upstairs guestroom, well away from the sound of vacuum cleaners, telephones, and Laura’s stereo.

When he awoke, she and Laura were gone, along with a sizable withdrawal from their joint savings. No note, no nothing.

He called her family and his; he called all their friends, all of Laura’s friends; but she’d covered her tracks too well. She stayed away eight days, and when he came home from the office that ninth day, he found a drink waiting by his chair, their dinner in the oven, Laura upstairs talking to her friends on the phone, everything normal.

“Oh God, thank you, Jesus!” he’d said, holding her tightly as if he never meant to let her get beyond his fingertips ever again. “I was so damned scared you weren’t coming back.”

“Were you?” she’d asked. “How’d it feel, darlin’?”

From that night forward, despite his continued pronouncements about what a real man did or didn’t do, if he was going to be more than an hour late, he always found a way to call her.

Yet here it was, almost fourteen hours since anyone had seen him and not a peep. Joyce Ashe had driven her home and offered to stay the night, but Sunny had sent her off to search the house one more time. Sometime before dawn, she changed clothes and lay down on the bed. She hadn’t expected to sleep, yet she did eventually drift off for an hour or two.

Now she circled back to the portable phone there on the table and willed it to ring.

When it continued silent, she pulled the cellular from her pocket and hit the redial button.

“District Attorney’s office,” said a perky voice.

“It’s me again, Suanna. Put me through to Lucius?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Osborne, but he’s down talking to Sheriff Horton about doing something now instead of waiting the whole twenty-four hours.”

“About fricking time,” said Sunny.

“Yes, ma’am. I know you must be just about worried to death. How ’bout I have him call you soon as he comes back?”

“Thanks, Suanna.”

When the house phone finally rang about twenty minutes later, she snatched it up eagerly. “Norman? Lucius?”

“Sorry, sweetie,” said Joyce Ashe. “Just wanted to see if you’d heard anything since we talked.”

“Nothing except that Lucius is trying to get Tom Horton off his fat ass and go do something. Are you at the office?”

“Yes. Norman and Bobby were supposed to show the Big Bear property this morning, so I came in to hold down the fort. You doing okay?”

“I guess so. Just going crazy with the waiting.”

“You want to come wait down here at the office? I could order in. I bet you haven’t eaten a thing since last night.”

“That’s okay, thanks. I keep thinking maybe he did try to walk home with the moon so bright last night. He’s always been a fool for moonlight. And maybe he took a tumble. He could come walking in any minute, all banged up and cussing the state for not having guardrails on this road. Right?”

“I’ll bet that’s it,” Joyce said sturdily. “Probably twisted his ankle or something. The sooner they start really looking for him, the quicker they’ll find him.”

“Thanks, Joyce. I’ll call you soon as I hear anything, okay?”

“Sure, sweetie.”

Sunny was glad to ring off. She’d always liked Joyce, liked her, that is, in that slightly condescending way of someone higher up the pecking order. The Ashes had built a good business, but Norman’s father had been buying and selling land in these hills before Bobby Ashe was a cinder in his daddy’s eye. When the big boom started, Norman had seen the opportunities first and had jumped in fast enough to get a lock on the prime pieces of Lafayette real estate. No one else came close to matching his volume of sales, although the Ashes were head and shoulders above their lesser competitors. Until recently, it had been easy to socialize with Joyce. Since the merger, though, she felt so much apprehension that it was hard to act natural around her.

“Don’t worry about it, darlin’,” Norman kept telling her. “Bobby and Joyce, it’s not like they’re going to drown. He’s a big boy, and anytime you want to swim in the big pond, you can’t whine if you get a little wet.”

TUESDAY, 10:05 A.M.

Joyce Ashe sighed as she hung up her phone. The longer Norman Osborne stayed missing, the harder it was not to expect the worst. With so many out looking for him last night, if he had indeed taken the tumble Sunny was now hoping for, he must have been knocked out pretty bad not to have heard them. She couldn’t say that to Sunny, of course, not in the state she was in. Best to keep it positive and upbeat.

How he even got out of the room without Sunny noticing was the biggest mystery. It was like they were joined at the hip these last two or three months. Sunny had been Norman’s secretary in the early years, even had her own real estate license, which she’d kept updated so she could step in when he was shorthanded; but ever since her hot flashes began, she’d started showing up with Norman every time he dropped by the office here in Cedar Gap, taking notes on her steno pad almost like she was suspicious that things were going too much her and Bobby’s way during this transition period.

“Just getting my hand back in,” she’d said. “You and Bobby seem to have so much fun working together, it makes me see what I’ve missed out there on the tennis courts and ski slopes.”

Joyce sure hoped this was just a passing phase and that Sunny would go back to the tennis courts once her hormones settled down and Norman settled in here. Right now, she was such a distraction that Bobby was complaining that Norman couldn’t seem to keep his mind on the business. “She’s always butting in, running her mouth so hard we can’t hear ourselves think.”

Lord help Bobby and me both if menopause ever turns me into such a clinging vine, she told herself. He’d probably lop me off at the root.

She turned back to the architect’s plans for remodeling two of their properties a few doors down Main Street to make one large modern office interior that could house both aspects of their newly combined businesses. Their sales office would still front onto Main Street. The architect proposed a facelift that blended a recognition of old-fashioned virtues with modern efficiency yet kept within the guidelines drafted by the planning board. New windows would allow them to display pictures of their most enticing properties as if they were jewels. The management aspects would be handled from the adjoining rear building, which they wanted to raise so as to provide a well-designed and suitably camouflaged parking deck underneath.

Once the leaves had fallen and the seasonal people were gone back to Florida or wherever, finding men in the building trades was never a problem. With a little luck and the promise of a completion bonus, the work might actually be finished by the first of the year so that Norman could move his records and his staff up from his Howards Ford office. And damned if Sunny hadn’t come along for every meeting with the architect as well, claiming she was too nervous to stay home alone, even though the Osbornes had a live-in housekeeper in their garage apartment.

She should take a page out of Tina Ledwig’s book and get herself a dog. Tina had always joked that if Carlyle died before her, she’d buy a little yippy dog the next day and sell that big house on Old Needham Road the next week.

True to her word, Tina had been in last week with her new King Charles spaniel and had asked them to list the house.

Her speed had startled Joyce. Weird to realize that it was only two weeks ago Sunday that she and Bobby had stopped by for a quick drink. She remembered how they had rolled their eyes at each other as Carlyle stomped around snorting so much fire over little Carla getting herself knocked up by some colored boy—as if that was the worst thing a kid could do to her parents—that Bobby’d told him about the merger just to take his mind off the baby. Next day, she and Bobby had driven down to Asheville to see about Bob Junior, and when they got back and heard that Carlyle was dead, it was hard to take in.

Yet, a week later, there was Tina sitting in her office, telling Joyce to sell the house.

“You sure you want to do something this serious this fast?” Joyce had asked her. “Most grief counselors advise waiting a year.”

“A year? Hell, no! I’ve hated that damn house from the beginning. Like living in a stone barn. Carla’s in a dorm at Tanser-Mac, Trish’ll be there or someplace else next year. What am I going to do with five bedrooms? I want y’all to find me a cozy little three-bedroom condo right next to the fairway at Rabbit Hollow, not an inch over twenty-five hundred square feet, you hear?”

“I don’t know if they come that small in Rabbit Hollow,” Joyce had said dryly, “but we’ll certainly find out.”

Like Bobby, she had grown up on White Fox Creek in a cold-water cabin with an outhouse out back. Five kids in a house whose entire four rooms would fit in the one room she’d used for the party last night, with space to spare. Even with all they’d spent on their children, the two of them sometimes looked around at how far they’d come, how much they’d acquired, and could hardly believe it.

And now—ta-da!—Rabbit Hollow!

If Carlyle had died a week earlier, she’d have had to send Tina to Norman, who held the exclusive on it. With the partnership a six-day-old done deal, though, she could show Tina any house there, and she’d immediately made an appointment to stop by the Ledwig house to take pictures and write up the specs, although Bobby and Norman both thought it was hardly worth going to that much trouble when she told them.

“Hell, it won’t stay on the market long enough to get the pictures developed unless you put them in the one-hour box,” they’d said.

“New neighbors?” said Sunny, who of course was there that day. “Let’s try to find a buyer that’ll be here year-round.”

With both Norman and Sunny facing her, only Joyce had seen Bobby make his gag-me face, but maybe Sunny was right to suggest it. Seasonal people weren’t as involved in the community and they didn’t care whether or not the roads ever got plowed. Some developments in the county were like ghost towns from the end of October to the first of May and the streets never saw a snowplow all winter long because no one was there.

Of the eight houses on the half-mile stretch of Old Needham Road between the Ashes’ house at the bottom and the Osbornes’ at the top, three had already been closed for the winter and the other two would be by the middle of October. Nice to have the caretaker accounts, but sometimes those empty houses made Joyce feel awfully isolated.

The bell on the outer door jingled, abruptly interrupting her musings on all that had happened these last two weeks. Joyce looked through the glass front of her office to see one of their staff get up to greet the arrival. Almost immediately, it registered who he was and she went out to him.

“Hey, Sheriff! You finally ready to put a bid on that house Shirley likes?”

“Wish I could, Miss Joyce. You get the county commissioners to vote me a raise and we’ll sure talk about it.”

“Then I reckon you’re here about Norman Osborne?”

He nodded. “Me and some of my men are fixing to start an official search along Old Needham Road between your place and his, but I was wondering if we could search your house, too?”

“Well, sure,” she said, “but there must’ve been thirty of us that already did that last night.”

“I know. Mr. Burke told me about y’all’s party, but for it to be official, I’d feel better doing it myself if that’s all right with you?”

“Give me five minutes and I’ll be right behind you.”

She signaled to their office manager and looked around for her camera and measuring meter. As long as she was up there, she might as well keep her afternoon appointment with Tina.

TUESDAY, 11 A.M.

“You’re going to do what?” asked Carla Ledwig as she changed into an apron and hairnet at the Three Sisters Tea Room. “That’s crazy! You aren’t detectives, for God’s sake.”

May looked at her twin and sighed.

“We already got this from our cousin,” said June. “We don’t need it from you. She’s a judge. She has to be official, but you—”

“—you should jump on this like white on rice. It’s Danny’s hide we’re trying to save,” May reminded her.

“Yes, but—”

“Answer me this: can y’all afford a real detective?”

“You know we can’t. And Mother won’t even discuss it. She thinks Danny did it and she half blames me, too, and every time I ask her to help me hire one, she throws it in my face that I blew my trust fund.”

“So go with the flow. What can one professional detective do that a bunch of us can’t?” May gently shaped the soft dough into long rectangles as she spoke. A smear of flour dusted her cheek. “Between us, we must know most of the people, and we certainly know Cedar Gap better than any strange detective you could bring up from Asheville or Charlotte.”

Carla frowned as May sprinkled the dough with cinnamon and brown sugar and rolled it up. “But you don’t own a gun and you don’t have a license.”

“What the hell do we need a gun for? And who needs a license just to ask some questions?” After rolling each rectangle, May passed them on to June, who sliced them into thick rounds and laid them into buttered baking trays.

Carla added the tray to the cart parked in the warmest part of the big kitchen, where more rolls were rising, and she checked on the loaves baking in the oven, loaves made from dough that had been mixed the afternoon before and set to rise overnight in the cooler. Today’s pumpkin and deep-dish apple pies were already cooling on a second cart. Here at the Tea Room, the kitchen was aswirl with spicy aromas.

At a nearby counter a middle-aged Mexican woman separated cooked chickens from their skin and bones while a young Korean woman diced celery and apples. At the deep sink in the rear, a skinny little white woman was washing a huge pile of fresh mixed greens and spinning them dry. Except for Carla, who had two morning classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they had been working since nine-thirty, and bowls of watercress and thinly sliced cucumbers were chilling in the big cooler beside a container of whipped butter.

“Should I start the pecans?” Carla asked now.

“Just waiting for you,” May said.

Carla dumped a bowl of pecan bits into a large iron skillet, added a chunk of unsalted butter, and began stirring immediately so that the nuts would brown without burning. One of the things that set their chicken salad apart from other cafés was a generous sprinkle of fried pecans. And that reminded June.

“Hey, Kim,” she called. “Could you ask Maria to please be more careful about the gristle? Some woman really freaked over a piece in her sandwich Friday. I thought for a minute there we were going to have to comp her whole lunch.”

“Sure,” said the Korean and burst into colloquial Spanish. The other woman looked over at June.

“Por favor?” asked June. A purple curl had escaped from her hairnet and she pushed it away from her eyes with the back of her slender wrist.

The woman nodded and gave an apologetic shrug.

“I really wish we’d paid attention in that Spanish class last semester,” May sighed for about the hundredth time since the Tea Room opened in September.

Carla echoed her sigh. “I wish I’d taken Spanish instead of French.”

“And I wish you’d think who else could’ve killed your dad,” said June.

“I have thought,” Carla protested. “I don’t know!” Her eyes brimmed in sudden tears. It had been more than two weeks, yet she still wasn’t used to his loss. And yes, he could be autocratic and demanding as hell, but until Danny, he’d also been loving and supportive.

“Everybody liked him—other doctors and nurses at the hospital and the clinic, the volunteers at the senior center, everybody at church. They all loved and respected Dad.”

“C’mon, Carla,” May protested. “That’s not what Duc told us. One of the therapists said he was impossible to please.”

“I know who he means and she’s a total slacker.” Butter sizzled around the pecan pieces and she stirred them angrily. “The rest of the staff adored him.”

“Well, what about the way he tried to bully Simon into selling him the Trading Post? We were there, for crissakes. You heard how mad Simon got.”

“You don’t think Simon—?”

May gave an impatient wave of her sticky hand. “Of course not. Everybody knows he’s an old sweetie underneath. I could see him punching somebody out in the store, but he wouldn’t go charging up to y’all’s house.”

Except that even as she was saying it, May could indeed see Simon Proffitt getting an official notice about some pesky little violation and, with that firecracker temper of his, storming off to the source of the citation. She looked up and saw that Carla and June were picturing the same scenario.

The true reality of murder hit them at the same time.

Carla stirred the pecans slowly. “It could be somebody we know and like, couldn’t it?”

“Not necessarily,” said June.

“Maybe,” said May, and repeated what Deborah had told them earlier this morning about looking for whose life would be easier with Dr. Ledwig gone.

“Who benefits? Besides Mom and Trish and me? Well, Mom controls everything till Trish’s twenty-five. The baby will be in first grade before we’re entitled to anything. And there was a lot of insurance—a regular policy for us and then one for his associates that covered the buyout of his share in the hospital and clinic if he died before retirement. It all goes into the estate. Guess it’s a good thing for Mom that the bartender out at the club remembers serving her a gin collins at two o’clock in the afternoon before the others showed up for doubles.”

Her young voice was bitter.

The twins looked at her compassionately, knowing how much Tina Ledwig’s alcoholism hurt.

“Nobody thinks for a moment that your mother—”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to say it.” Tears glistened again in Carla’s hazel eyes. “It wasn’t the world’s greatest marriage and they probably would’ve separated after Trish finished high school, but Dad would’ve been fair with her. He really was a good man. He didn’t just give lip service. Ethics were important to him.”

She blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her T-shirt and took a deep breath, trying to make herself stay objective. “But he did invest in real estate all over the High Country. For all I know, he could’ve pissed off a dozen Simon Proffitts. I guess I could ask Mr. Norman. He’ll know.” Then her shoulders slumped. “Or maybe not. He and Dad used to be really tight, but Trish said the funeral was the first time he’d been to the house since August.”

“Really?”

“They have a fight?”

“Who knows? Trish didn’t notice till he came, and that reminded her that she hadn’t seen him in like forever, and when she asked Mom why, Mom shrugged her off.”

“Betcha he’s somebody that could’ve walked up on that deck without your dad feeling threatened,” May said.

“I guess.”

“Will you at least ask your mother why they stopped being friends?”

“I can ask, but she’s so out of it half the time I don’t see how she can hit a ball back over the net without falling on her face.”

“All the same, maybe she or Trish heard him say something about troubles at the hospital or with patients at the geriatrics clinic.”

“And maybe Simon’s heard stuff.” June finished slicing the last of the cinnamon rolls. “When you don’t like somebody, you usually know who else has problems with him.”

For a few minutes, there was nothing but the sound of food preparation in the kitchen: Carla’s spatula as she kept the pecans moving in the skillet, the rhythmic beat of Kim’s knife against the chopping block, baking pans shuttling in and out of the ovens.

They were really getting this routine down good, May thought. Then she glanced up at the clock over the kitchen door. “Omigod! Look at the time! Half an hour till showtime, people! Did anybody fill the urns yet?”

“I did it when I first got here,” said Carla, turning the nuts into a bowl lined with paper towels to drain away any excess butter.

She hung her apron on a peg near the door, pulled off her T-shirt and hairnet, and slipped into a white blouse with ruffles at the neck and cuffs. She straightened the old-fashioned cameo on the black velvet ribbon around her neck and smoothed her long black skirt, then picked up a stack of neatly folded pink napkins beside the door and headed out to the dining room for a last-minute inspection.

“And listen, guys, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to cut out by two-fifteen today. I have a test at three and if I miss this one, I can’t make it up.”

“That’s okay,” said June. “We’ll manage.”