High Country Fall

CHAPTER 18

I had told William Deeck that I wanted to adjourn at four, and he did his best, but the last case ran a few minutes past. As I gaveled the session adjourned and the handful of people who remained rose to leave, the door at the back of the courtroom opened a crack and May peeked in. Seeing that court was over, she pushed through the door and hurried up to the bench.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t get to talk to you.” She still had on her apron, and flour dusted her copper-colored hair.

“What’s up?” I asked as I finished signing some forms for Mary Kay.

May waited till she turned to go, then whispered urgently, “We heard Norman Osborne’s dead?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Did y’all know him?”

“Not us, but Carla did.” By now we were alone in the courtroom, and her voice returned to its normal level. “He and her dad used to be really tight and now he’s been killed the same way, right?”

“That’s how it’s looking,” I said.

“So the same person must have killed them both, right?”

“Not necessarily.”

“But two old guys? Friends? The same exact way? Isn’t that enough to undo what you did to Danny yesterday?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, May. It doesn’t work like that. It’s up to the district attorney to decide whether to go forward on his case.”

May drew her small frame up indignantly. “But if the same person—”

“If. That’s the operative word here.” I stepped down from the bench. “Come on back with me so I can get out of this robe.”

She trailed along behind me, arguing as we went that since Danny Freeman could prove he’d been working down in Howards Ford last night, he couldn’t have had anything to do with Norman Osborne’s death. And if he was innocent of that, then anybody with a grain of sense should agree he was also innocent of Carlyle Ledwig’s death, right?

“Well, it’s certainly another argument his attorney can present to the jury when it goes to trial,” I assured her as I unzipped my robe and hung it on a hook behind the door.

When she started huffing in frustration again, I said, “Look, May, for what it’s worth, I think you may be right.”

She brightened. “Really?”

“Coincidences can and do happen, but this is way too similar.”

“Yes!” Her fist punched the air. “I can’t wait till Carla gets out of class.”

“Don’t get too excited,” I warned. “That was a purely civilian opinion and it wouldn’t carry an ounce of weight with the DA.”

“You’re no civilian. You’re a judge.” Her dark eyes flashed with sudden mischief. “And I bet it would too carry some weight with the luscious Lucius.”

I laughed and made shooing motions with my hands. “Don’t you have some bread to make? Go!”

“Time to make the doughnuts,” she droned, mimicking a commercial that was popular when she was a kid. “See you around midnight.”

Up since daybreak, on her feet at the Tea Room since ten, and now she would go mix up the dough for tomorrow’s bread, then waitress at the Mountain Laurel Restaurant till eleven tonight; yet her steps were light as she darted down the hall. I’m still three years away from forty, but just thinking about her schedule made me feel tired.

When I got downstairs, the door to George Underwood’s office was open and I could hear him on the phone as I got closer.

“Okay, honey, let’s hear you spell black … That’s right, it starts off just like blue. Bl-bl-ack … Hey! Good! Now what about yellow? … Green? … Okay, Miss Smartypants, spell chartreuse.”

He was still laughing as I paused in his doorway, and he gave me a wave. “Gotta go now, sweetheart. Tell Mommy I’ll try to be home for supper, okay? … Love you.”

“Sorry,” I said. “That last case ran a little long.”

“It’s all right.” He grabbed his jacket from the coat-rack. “We’re not on any schedule.”

“Was that your daughter?”

“Yeah. She aced her spelling test today. When you’re in first grade, every day’s a nice adventure.” He pulled his office door to and we walked down the hall, past uniformed officers who nodded as we passed. “The nine-year-old still likes school, too, but the oldest’s in sixth grade now and it’s starting to be cool to gripe about it.”

“All girls?”

“The older two are boys.” He held the outer door for me and we stepped out into late-afternoon sunlight. “You have kids?”

“Just nieces and nephews.”

“What about Major Bryant?”

“A son. He lives with his mother in Virginia, though.”

“Rough,” Underwood said sympathetically.

I nodded.

Another one of the reasons Dwight said he wanted to get married was so he could make a real home for Cal down here and maybe get the custody agreement modified. I like Cal and I think he likes me, but for the first time, I felt a touch of apprehension. If this wedding comes off, it won’t be for weekend visits only. We’ll probably have him for holidays, certainly for several weeks every summer. I’ll be his stepmother. He’ll be part of my daily life.

A stepmother?

Me?

I remember all the tales I’ve heard of how some of my brothers resented my mother when Daddy remarried so quickly after their own mother died. She eventually won them all over, but things must have been uncomfortable the first year or so.

Of course, Jonna’s still alive and kicking—still bitching, too, according to Dwight’s mother. (Dwight takes in stride her gripes about the size of his child-support payments, but Miss Emily’s more outspoken.) Anyhow, it’s not as if I’m going to usurp Jonna’s place in Cal’s affections. And he’s still young enough to adapt, unlike my last lover’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who never stopped scheming to get her parents back together.

And did.

But that’s all spilt milk under the bridge now, as my brother Haywood would say, and no point crying over it, although I’d certainly done my share of crying last spring and kept a good pity party going for myself halfway through the summer.

Underwood waited while I unlocked the trunk of my car and stashed my laptop.

“You sure you don’t want me to follow you in my car so you don’t have to bring me back?” I asked.

“No problem.” He held the door of a nearby unmarked car and helped me figure out the unfamiliar seat belt. “I have to come back this way to get home.”

“You live here in town?”

“On my salary?” He gave an amused snort. “No, we live down in Howards Ford. No schools up here anyhow. And most of the subdivisions have rules against toys left on the driveway.”

“No toys?”

“All bikes, trikes, and games have to be stowed in the backyard or out of sight. Goes with the rules about keeping the grass mowed and the hedges clipped. You’d be amazed how many calls we get about unmowed grass every summer.”

I shuddered. “Even without all that regimentation, it’d probably still be dull for children here. No school activities, no McDonald’s, no movies.”

“Hey, we have movies,” Underwood said with mock indignation as we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. “There’s a film festival every summer in the little park back of the library.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Art films? Foreign imports with subtitles?”

“You got it.”

“No popcorn?”

“Nope, but lots of white wine in plastic goblets.”

“And little cubes of jalapeño cheese on those long jazzed-up toothpicks?”

“Hey, I thought I’d seen you somewhere before!”

Having established our proletarian bona fides, I settled back in my seat and said, “So tell me about Deeck. How come a man his age isn’t in private practice?”

“Raking in the big bucks?”

“He seems competent enough for it.”

“He did have a private practice at one time and was well on his way to his first million from what people say.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it was before I joined the department, but the way I heard it, one week in superior court, three of his clients got acquitted—a rapist, a wife-beater, and a child molester. They say that when the final jury returned a not-guilty verdict on the child molester, he went straight back to his office and hung a ‘Closed’ sign on the door. Split every penny of the three fees he got among his staff and then applied to Mr. Burke’s predecessor for a job as a prosecutor. He probably could’ve run for DA himself, but he’s not political. They say he just wants to make sure he’s never again responsible for helping guilty scum go free.”

“I can relate to that,” I said.

“That why you ran for judge?”

“Actually, it was for the opposite reason. I was tired of seeing basically decent people get stiffed by a bigoted judge.”

“Sounds like the flip side of Mr. Deeck’s coin. He’s good people.”

“What about Norman Osborne? Was he good, too?”

Underwood shrugged. “He might’ve bent the rules a little, but I never heard that he actually broke them.”

“And Dr. Ledwig?”

“Same.” He thought about that a moment as he made a left turn off the main highway, then emended, “Or maybe a little more straight-arrow. I think he pretty much played by the rules. And made damn sure others played by them, too.”

“Yet, despite their different moral standards, he and Osborne were good friends and did business together?”

“So they say. You ask Major Bryant this many questions?”

“And he can be just as tight-mouthed as you when he wants to be.”

Underwood laughed.

“Anyhow, I’m district court,” I reminded him. “Not superior. So it’s not like he taints things or I have to recuse myself. Very few of his cases ever show up in my court.”

“And those that do?”

“We’ve never discussed them beforehand and they’re usually pretty solid.”

“Not like yesterday’s concealed weapon?”

For once, I held my tongue. Not for me to criticize his boss’s decision to go to trial for the wrong reason.

“Dava Triplett really is involved with making meth, you know.”

“Then charge her with it and show the evidence,” I said. “Don’t ask a judge to carry the water bucket for sloppy work.”

“Major Bryant must be a brave man,” Underwood said, his lips twitching.

“And not that I’m trying to second-guess you, but what about a search warrant for the Ashe house?”

“Right here.” He patted the front of his jacket. “Had our magistrate sign it before we went up there this morning. Even though Sheriff Horton had the owner’s verbal permission, I like to get the paper, too.”

“Good,” I said. “And as long as we’re dotting all the i’s, you’re not scheduled to testify in district court again this week, are you?”

He shook his head. “If I was, I wouldn’t have eaten your sweet rolls and somebody else would be driving you up here right now.”

Which only confirmed my opinion that Underwood was another one who followed the rules and that it’d been Horton’s decision to let the Triplett matter go to court, not his.

This was the third time I’d been driven over this route and by now I was starting to recognize most of the turns. The ditches next to the rockface were overgrown with wild asters whose deep blue echoed the sky above, and I discovered that I could look over the side of the road into sheer dropoffs without the dizziness I’d felt on Sunday. Part of it, of course, was that, unlike last night, we were moving at a moderate speed, slowed down by out-of-state drivers who clogged both lanes on this beautiful sunny afternoon.

“You ever get impatient with all the tourists?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Not really. The tourists are fine. They can get a little rowdy at times, drink too much, toss their trash out the car windows, even throw a few punches at each other. It’s the seasonal people that can wear you down. People like the Tuzzolinos, who think their money entitles them. Life can get pretty hardscrabble up some of these dirt roads, then you turn around and see people putting up million-dollar houses on land your granddad used to hunt over, see the county running water lines where your grandma used to tote buckets up from a spring, paving the dirt roads they never bothered to pave when the houses were four-room log cabins.

“Take Pritchard Cove. The last Pritchards sold out three years after the first concrete drive was poured. Couldn’t afford the taxes on the homeplace. Took the money and moved on over into Tennessee. They keep on driving up the price of real estate and my kids’ll never be able to live in these hills.”

“It’s not just here,” I told him. “Same thing’s happening down in Colleton County. Only it’s not seasonal people, but people who’ve relocated.”

“At least they support a year-round economy,” said Underwood. “Half our businesses close down in the winter. Cedar Gap’s normal population’s about eleven hundred. From May to mid-October, it’s closer to eight thousand on any given day.”

“And on this given day, they all seem to be out here looking at leaves.” No sooner had I spoken than the road swung out around a huge boulder and I caught my breath at the spectacular vista of hill after rolling hill set on fire by the afternoon sun as it drifted down the western sky. “What a fantastic view!”

“Can’t fault people for wanting to live here,” he agreed.

“Or real estate agents like Osborne and the Ashes for capitalizing on that want.”

Abruptly, it hit me all over again why I was in this car.

“How did Sunny take it?” I asked.

“’Bout like you’d think,” he said somberly. “Mrs. Ashe went up with Mr. Burke and me to tell her.”

It said something to me that the sheriff would send Underwood rather than go inform a new widow himself. Either he didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news in case it became a matter of kill the messenger on election day, or he wanted his chief of detectives to see Sunny Osborne’s reaction for himself.

“She took it hard,” Underwood told me. “Mrs. Ledwig was there and the first thing she said after she heard was, ‘Well, thank God my Carla’s not sleeping with a killer.’”

“They have any idea who would have wanted both men dead?”

“Nope.” He made a final turn into the long drive that led up through the trees to the Ashe home. “Mrs. Osborne isn’t buying the idea that the two are connected. In fact, she almost lost it when Mrs. Ledwig kept going on and on about it. But Mrs. Ledwig says they’d planned to buy out the Trading Post and redevelop that lot together. Wishful thinking according to Mrs. Ashe, and knowing ol’ Simon—”

“Who?”

“Simon Proffitt. Owns the Trading Post. You know.”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I know the name, but I never met him.”

“Old guy? Plays a mean banjo? They say he was dueling with you at the party last night.”

“That was Simon Proffitt?”

“Yeah. They also say he and Norman Osborne had a talk down in the den right before Osborne went missing, not a particularly friendly talk either. I plan to stop by and question him this evening.”

I found myself remembering the twins’ spirited defense of the old man when they were casting about for alternate killers. They said he’d waved a shotgun at Osborne and Ledwig.

If George Underwood had also heard about that incident, he didn’t mention it now. He parked on the gravel landing behind several patrol cars. As we got out, he asked the uniformed officer who was keeping a two-man TV crew at bay, “They find it yet?”

“No, sir. Not that I heard.”

Like last night, the massive oak door stood ajar again and we walked in.