High Country Fall

CHAPTER 24

When I passed the dispatcher’s station on my way through to the lower-level parking area, George Underwood was there and he walked out into the late-afternoon sunshine with me.

“Any luck with that bartender?” I asked.

“Not really. He’s ready to swear on any Bible I want to hand him that Tina Ledwig was definitely there by five minutes past two the day her husband was killed. Says he remembers because he ran out of her favorite brand of vodka the day before and they didn’t get in another shipment till the next morning. He even showed me the invoices. And gave me the names of a foursome who were waiting for a two-fifteen tee time.”

“Sounds pretty conclusive,” I said.

“Yeah. He had to comp her a couple of free Smirnoffs to stop her bitching, which is another reason he remembers. Unless he’s a real good actor, he was still pissed about it, too, if you’ll excuse my French.”

“So when will you talk to the UPS guy again?” I asked.

“He’s not due back up here till sometime after lunch tomorrow. I left word down in Asheville for him to come by.”

“Do you suppose that automatic dater on his computer was off?”

Underwood shrugged. “Who knows? One thing’s for sure, though—somebody’s screwed up somewhere, ’cause if Mrs. Ledwig was sitting at the bar in the Rabbit Hollow Country Club at two-thirty-eight, then she certainly couldn’t have been taking delivery from a UPS driver.”

“Let me know how it comes out,” I told him as I went on over to my car.

Once I had my key in the ignition, though, I hesitated about where to go. I’d already damaged my credit card too much to embark on another round of Cedar Gap shopping, yet it was only five-thirty and much too early for dinner.

Dwight’s always telling me not to get involved in things that don’t concern me, and had he been waiting for me at the condo, maybe I’d have gone straight there.

(“Only maybe?” leered the pragmatist.)

(“Please!” said the preacher, averting his eyes as erotic images suddenly flooded my senses.)

But Dwight wasn’t there, and okay, I’ll admit it: curiosity has always been an itch I have to scratch. Like chigger bites.

Five-thirty is smack in the middle of Dobbs’s moderate rush hour back home, but here in Cedar Gap it seemed to bring a temporary lull. Most of the leaf lovers had dwindled with the setting sun; the rest were sitting around the monument, licking ice-cream cones and soaking up the last rays of sunshine, while the seasonal people hadn’t yet come out for dinner.

The front part of the real estate office was dark, but I could see Joyce Ashe at the back when I rapped on the glass door. She looked up with a frown that immediately changed into a professional smile of welcome even before she recognized who it was.

“Hey, Deborah!” she said, holding the door wide for me. “Looking to buy a vacation place?”

“Sorry,” I said. “What I’m actually looking for is someone to come have a drink with me. You free?”

“Now that’s the best offer I’ve had all day! Give me ten minutes to finish up this new house and I’m your gal.”

While her fingers flew across the keyboard of her computer, I looked through a photo album of properties they had listed. A prominent bulletin board labeled “Osborne-Ashe High Country Realty” was covered with various architectural renderings for the ambitious facelift they planned to give this building.

It was closer to fifteen minutes before Joyce gave a sigh of satisfaction and the laser printer came to life and began cranking out copies of the new material, complete with color photos and all specifications.

“Done!” she said. “I’ve earned that drink.”

“I’m surprised you’re so hands-on,” I said. “I should think you’d have a secretary to do all this.”

“I do have a secretary. Two secretaries, actually, and Bobby nags me to delegate more, but I like the detail work, keeping tabs on what’s happening where. I know I’ll have to change now that we’re getting so much bigger, but I also know I’m going to miss being down in the trenches.”

“You’ll still be taking on all of Norman Osborne’s properties, then?”

“Oh, yes. Bobby’s down in Howards Ford right now, going over stuff with the lawyers and the insurance people. You wouldn’t believe—” She broke off with a wry smile. “Well, yes, I guess you would believe, being a lawyer yourself once, right?”

“Right,” I said, smiling back. “Why draw up just one document when ten will impress the clients?”

She laughed and reached for the red jacket that went with her tailored navy blue dress. “Drinks. Let me think … you been to the Rock yet?”

I shook my head and she picked up the nearest phone, punched in some numbers, and said, “Kevin? Joyce Ashe. A friend and I are headed your way. Any chance you could clear us a table out on the terrace? … Great! Be there in five minutes.”

She hung up and said, “It’s right outside of town on the main road. Follow me.”

I trailed her white Plymouth four-by-four up Main Street, past the condo, and on out of town. As promised, in less than five minutes we were pulling into the busy parking lot of what looked like a rustic hunting lodge built on the side of the mountain. Joyce zoomed right over to a spot on the very edge of the downsloping lot, and although there was a space next to her and although I’ve never had any reason to doubt my emergency brakes, I waited till someone pulled out of a level space nearer the front, next to a huge granite boulder that probably gave the place its name.

“Flatlander!” Joyce gibed.

“Hey, what can I tell you?” I said sheepishly.

A middle-aged man came through the crowded room and Joyce introduced me to the owner, who led us outside. The night air was chilly and my jacket wasn’t very heavy, but I needn’t have worried. Out on the terrace, each table had an umbrella, and each umbrella shaft contained a heating element that beamed down enough warmth to keep us comfortable.

The view seemed to stretch east for a million miles, with row after row of blue mountaintops blending one into the other. It was that magical hour when the sun had sunk behind the ridge and a haze rose from the valley below. Night had not completely captured the sky, yet a couple of bright stars dotted the dark blue above us. Our drinks arrived just when the moon began to edge itself up from the horizon, like a golden swimmer pulling himself up from a dark pool.

“This is so beautiful,” I sighed.

Our drinks came—a Bloody Mary for me, a martini for her—and we raised our glasses to the harvest moon as it cleared the horizon, big and yellow.

“Is it full tonight, I wonder?” Joyce asked, draining half her glass with one thirsty swallow.

“Not till Friday,” I said.

She was amused. “You carry an almanac around with you or are you just romantic?”

“Some of both, probably,” I admitted.

She glanced at my ring. “He romantic, too?”

Dwight? Romantic?

“’Fraid not,” I said. “What about Bobby?”

“Only when he’s romancing a prospective client,” she said with a broad smile.

I told her how I’d known Dwight since infancy, then asked how she and Bobby met.

“He was the boy next door, if you can call a hollow beyond the nearest ridge next door.”

She pronounced it “holler,” an endearing holdover of her native mountain speech, much the way my daddy and older brothers still say “chimbly” for chimney or “tar arn” for tire iron, or the way our down easters say “hoi toide” for high tide. I treasure these remnants of dialects. When television finally finishes smoothing out all the regional differences, we will have lost a special part of our heritage.

“We both grew up poorer than Job’s turkey, but Bobby always had big dreams. We were thirteen years old, standing barefooted in White Fox Creek, when he told me he was going to marry me and give me diamonds and pearls.” She glanced at the diamonds on her sturdy fingers, as if pinching herself that they were really there. “It was a rough and rocky road in the beginning.” Her eyes grew dreamy as she sipped her martini.

“And now you’re the biggest real estate and management firm in Lafayette County,” I said softly.

“Bobby’s doing, not mine. I was happy where we were, but he always felt we got Norman’s crumbs. Talk about romancing! Not that he sucked up to Norman. He’s too proud for that. But he laid out all the facts and figures of how working together could do us both better than working apart, and eventually Norman came around. In fact, once he was convinced, you’d have thought it was Norman pushing the merger instead of us. He agreed to things Bobby was sure he wouldn’t just because he didn’t want to hold up the paperwork.”

She glanced at her watch, then excused herself to visit the restroom and call Bobby. “I’ll tell him we’re here. We might as well stay for dinner if you don’t have anything else going. They have great steaks.”

“Fine,” I said.

As she walked away, I signaled the waiter.

“Another round of the same, only make my Bloody Mary a virgin.”

I didn’t have a husband coming who could drive me home if I went over the limit. And if I drove off the edge of the road on the way back to town, I didn’t want it to be because I could blow an eight.

“Whoa!” said Joyce when she returned to find a fresh martini before her. “I need food if I’m going to have another drink. Bobby was already on the way. Want to split an appetizer while we wait for him?”

“Sure,” I said and steered our choice toward the fried mozzarella sticks, figuring we wouldn’t get many and that they would be salty enough to keep her sipping from that cocktail glass.

I was right on both counts. Not that I really needed to ply her with gin. Joyce was too gregarious not to talk freely.

“It must be awful for you and Bobby,” I said. “Losing two friends like this.”

“And in our own house.” Sadness mingled with indignation. “With one of my own candleholders.”

“Any ideas as to who wanted them dead?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been over it and over it in my mind and the only person who might have had it in for both of them is Simon Proffitt. Remember him from Monday night?”

I nodded. The dueling fiddler.

“Carlyle and Norman wanted to buy him out and use that lot for something more in keeping with Cedar Gap’s image since it’s right there at the town entrance. They wouldn’t take no for an answer either. He said they were worrying the heart and soul out of him and if they didn’t quit it, he was going to take ol’ Jessie to them.”

“Who’s ol’ Jessie? His dog?”

“His twelve-gauge shotgun,” she said dryly. “Simon’s a holdover from the old days, back when Cedar Gap was just another little hillbilly mountain town. Then Norman and some others got a whiff of the money that could be made if they beautified and landscaped and made it look exclusive. People were so poor out here that most of them were willing to do just about anything to attract big spenders.”

“But Proffitt wasn’t one of them?” I asked, nibbling on a cheese stick.

“To put it mildly. He rallied enough like-minded businesses to grandfather in what they had, but the rest of us—and yeah, Bobby and I were just as bad—fell right into line. And it certainly worked. The town is beautiful now, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, and said truthfully, because she’s right: Cedar Gap is beautiful—as beautiful as a Disney World re-creation of yesteryear and just about as authentic.

“Thirty years ago, there wasn’t a house in the county worth more than fifty thousand dollars. Now you probably can’t buy a cold-water shack for that little.”

“Proffitt’s not happy with the changes?”

“And I can’t fault him for it. No, I can’t. The way they hound him over all the new rules and regulations? He can’t do squat without the town council coming down on him with a writ or a warning. He says it’s like sitting bare-assed on a hornet’s nest. Least little move and they pop him one. That’s why I could see him losing it if Carlyle or Norman said the wrong thing at the wrong time, but still …”

Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “I don’t know, Deborah. Unless it’s him, I can’t think who else it could be. Sam Tysinger had words with them both, but Sam has words with everybody sooner or later. Doesn’t mean a thing. And let’s get real. Nobody’s going to kill because they had to replace a big sign with a smaller one. Besides, that was six months ago. Now, if serious money was involved—” She hesitated, and then, with a what-the-hell shrug, said, “If Sheriff Horton didn’t know for a fact that Bobby and I were down in Asheville when Carlyle was killed, I’m sure he’d think one of us killed Norman.”

“Because of the partnership insurance on him?” Not by a flicker of an eyelash would I let on that I knew why they’d gone to Asheville that day.

Joyce nodded. “Short term, we really are worth a lot more today than we were three days ago, but long term? Norman was such a rainmaker. He charmed everybody. We don’t have a single penny now that we wouldn’t have had eventually if he’d lived.”

She had caught our waiter’s eye before and made a circular motion with her index finger. As she described the plans Osborne and Bobby had made to expand into the neighboring counties, the waiter arrived with another round of drinks. I sipped mine cautiously, unsure if this was the real thing. Joyce was now on her third martini and, except for the way she relaxed a little deeper into her wicker chair, I couldn’t tell that it had any effect on her.

“How’s Sunny doing?” I asked. “She must be devastated.”

“Yes and no.”

I raised an inquiring eyebrow and Joyce gave a baffled, palms-up gesture.

“It’s weird. The way she’s practically lived in his pocket these last two or three months, you’d expect her to fall apart completely now that he’s gone.”

“And yet?” I encouraged.

Again that baffled look. “Well, on one level she has. You saw them Monday night. That duet they sang wasn’t just an act. They were crazy about each other and she’s wild with grief that he’s gone. At the same time, she goes ballistic whenever anybody tries to link his death with Carlyle’s. It’s like she thinks it somehow demeans Norman’s death, if that makes any sense.”

Her face suddenly brightened and she half stood to wave. “There’s Bobby!”

Bobby Ashe’s progress across the wide terrace was slowed by the many people who spoke to him and whose hands he paused to shake. His sandy hair and droopy sand-colored mustache reminded me of that big goofy cartoon sheepdog that was so popular when I was a kid. You had to smile just looking at him.

“Hey, purty ladies,” he said, taking my hand and leaning over to kiss Joyce at the same time. “Y’all looked awful serious when I first came in.”

“We were talking about Sunny Osborne,” I said. “How she doesn’t think her husband and Dr. Ledwig were killed by the same person.”

His good-natured smile faded and he nodded thoughtfully. “I’m wondering if she’s afraid Horton will think Norman found out who killed Carlyle and that’s why he had to die.”

“Now that makes a little more sense,” said Joyce. “If Norman has to be dead, Sunny would want it to be that he was killed for who he was, not because he happened to get mixed up in whatever reasons there were for killing Carlyle.”

“That would be Sunny all right,” Bobby said as our waiter came over to see what he wanted to drink. He was the type of man who instantly becomes the host as soon as he sits down with two women, and he made sure that Joyce and I were fine for the moment before telling the waiter to bring him a Jim Beam on the rocks. “A double, straight up.”

Then he noticed that Joyce’s glass was nearly empty and said, “Hold up a minute there, son, till I find out whose turn it is to drive home.”

Joyce smiled. “Your turn, honey.”

“Better make that a single then,” he told the waiter. “With a splash.”

“How’s it going down there?” Joyce asked.

“It’s going.” He brushed the ends of his mustache away from the edge of his mouth. “Norman’s people are still in shock, but they’re savvy folks and they’ve got it in gear.”

I couldn’t let it alone. “I don’t suppose Sunny will have anything to do with the partnership once all the paperwork’s done?”

“Lord, no,” said Bobby. “She hasn’t worked real estate since their daughter was born.”

“She said she wanted to get back in it,” said Joyce, “but that was just because she got to where she couldn’t stand not to be with Norman every minute. She was always such a take-charge person—athletic, played tennis or golf two or three times a week, sat on boards, volunteered at the hospital, and then, bang! Almost overnight, she turned into a kudzu vine. Like to’ve worried us to death, right, hon?”

“Oh, she was all right,” Bobby said. “Y’all order yet?”

“All right?” Joyce rolled her eyes. “The way she was always there, asking questions, writing everything down? You were ready to strangle her.”

“Now, Joyce, baby—”

“Well, you were, Bobby. No point in pretending you weren’t just because you feel sorry for her now.” She turned back to me. “I feel sorry for her, too, but you can’t imagine what a nuisance she was. She wouldn’t just sit and watch and listen, she kept jumping in the middle. There were a million details to take care of with this merger and Norman couldn’t concentrate for her running her mouth every minute.”

“And I say let’s stop boring Deborah and get this young fellow here to tell us about tonight’s specials.” He took a swallow of the drink the waiter had brought and leaned back in his chair. “What you got good, son?” he asked.

When our steaks came, mine was just the way I like it: charred on the outside and rare on the inside. Conversation became more general. Bobby clearly didn’t want to gossip about Sunny and Norman Osborne. Instead, he’d heard rumors about the Tuzzolino trial and wanted to know if it was true that they’d really hired somebody to steal for them.

Joyce thought it was funny. “An ex-con for your personal shopper?”

I nodded. “She said that her husband was so down over his Parkinson’s that beautiful and expensive things were the only antidepressant that worked.”

“Sounds like they got screwed by his partner,” said Bobby.

“Well, to be fair, he couldn’t afford the buyout and the insurance only covered the senior partner’s death.”

“Isn’t Parkinson’s a death sentence?”

“Eventually, maybe, but these days drugs can keep you going for years. Clearly he wasn’t going to die soon enough to take the burden off the younger guy.”

“If the practice was that good, he should’ve sucked it up and worked his tail off to keep it going,” Bobby said.

“Maybe he would’ve,” I said, “except that Mrs. Tuzzolino was trying to hold him to the partnership’s buyout agreement right away and he simply didn’t have the money.”

“Wow!” said Joyce as a personal application hit her. “God, Bobby! Think what it would’ve done to us if that’d happened to Norman.”

“That’s exactly why we both went for complete physicals, remember? The insurance people were a little worried about my cholesterol, but Norman was in perfect health.”

“Was Ledwig your doctor?” I asked.

“Carlyle?”

“Oh, no,” said Joyce. “Carlyle wasn’t an internist. His specialty was geriatrics.”

She passed me the bread basket, but when I turned back the napkin, all those hot rolls were gone. I’d already had one and knew I shouldn’t have a second, but I didn’t protest when Bobby caught our waiter’s eye and held up the basket.

I asked them what it was like growing up here in the mountains, and it sounded a lot like my daddy’s tales of his childhood—privations, yes, but a sense of rootedness. Hard work, where even children were expected to carry their share of the load, but time for music and storytelling, too.

When I asked if they knew Richard Granger or Hank Smith, Bobby began to laugh.

“Hell, yes! You hear about Dick shooting Hank’s ear off last month?”

“They were both in my courtroom today,” I said. Since Granger’s trial, like the trial of the Tuzzolinos, was now public record, I could speak freely about it.

“I hope you went easy on Dick,” Joyce said in quick sympathy. “He and his wife are having it rough since he got hurt at the chip mill. They’re too proud to take charity, but when she brought one of her mother’s quilts to ask me what I thought it should fetch at the craft gallery, I did manage to convince her to sell it to me for about twice what it was really worth.”

Bobby looked at her quizzically. “Did I know this?”

“Oops!” she said with a smile.

“They don’t have to live that close to the bone,” he said. “Dick and Sarah Granger are living on one of the prettiest pieces of land on Laudermilk Creek. They could sell out tomorrow and live in ease the rest of their lives.”

“Live where?” asked Joyce. “You know they’d die if you took them off that mountain.”

“All the same,” he said, “I believe I’ll take a ride out there next week, see if I can interest him in selling.”

“Bobby, no!” she protested.

“I know, honey, I know,” he said soothingly, “but if not me, it’ll be somebody else. Somebody who might not give him as good a price.”

When I got back to the condo, all it really needed to be ready to rent were fresher curtains and a carpet cleaning. The kitchen cabinets sparkled with new enamel, and all traces of paint buckets, brushes, and drop cloths were gone. Fred and Beverly should be pleased about this much, at least.

I checked my e-mail again. Still nothing from Dwight. Well, what did I expect?

There was also nothing on television, nothing in the condo’s selection of videos that I wanted to watch, and nothing I wanted to do.

Nobody to talk to either.

“Good thing, too,” said the pragmatist. “The way you’re feeling right now, you’d just be spoiling for a fight.”

“Go to bed,” said the preacher.

“Go to hell!” I told them both.

And went to bed.