by Bill Noel
I hesitated and then walked to the porch to speed up the introductions so we could get out of the cold. Charles and William had stepped out of the car, but I knew they were intentionally lagging behind me.
“Chris, God, it is you?” she said. Her voice was more gravelly than I remembered. “Thank God you’ve come.” She put her trembling arms around me and squeezed. The smell of alcohol was on her breath. After what seemed like an eternity, she let go and stepped back. Her eyes were red from crying.
“How are you?” was all I could think to say.
Then she noticed my friends who awkwardly stood at the bottom of the steps, clearly not knowing what to do. She waved her arm toward the door. “Please come in. How rude of me. Let’s get inside.”
That was all it took for Charles to bound up the six steps to the porch, his cane tapping each step. William took more time. Joan backed into the entry and stood aside so the three of us could squeeze past her. I introduced Charles and William. She gave each a tentative hug and welcomed them to her house. The heat from the powerful furnace felt good.
Joan turned away from us and waved for someone to come forward. “Charlene … Char … let me introduce you to Chris and his friends,” said Joan.
I stepped forward and extended my hand to the attractive, angular-featured five-three brunette. The overly sweet aroma of her perfume arrived before her hand. Char introduced herself before Joan could say my name. “Thank you for coming,” she said in the high-pitched voice I recognized from the phone.
I noticed that Joan had glanced toward William and then back to me, shrugging however slightly. She probably couldn’t remember his name, so I did the honors and introduced William and Charles.
“I hope you don’t mind my being here,” said Charlene. “I stopped to see if Joan needed anything, and she wanted me to be here when you arrived.”
The three of us nodded. Besides, how could I complain? I had dragged Charles and William along.
I looked around the room. From the entry, I could see a massive great room with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides and a deep wooden deck stretching across the entire back of the house, providing a panoramic view of the snow-covered Smoky Mountains. The celebrated mountains filled most of the background. Joan waved us toward an L-shaped beige leather sofa that faced a ski lodge–sized fireplace and a large flat-screen television above it.
Charles, William, and I sat side by side on one side of the oversized sofa, and Joan and Charlene faced us from the other side. My ex-wife sniffled, wiped back a tear from her cheek, and sat erect and quite regal.
“Charlene told me you were coming,” said Joan, breaking the ice. “But I didn’t believe it … I hoped you would but knew it was a lot to ask since … well, since it’s been so long.”
William looked around and said, “You have a lovely domicile, Mrs. … uh …”
“McCandless,” helped my ex. “Please call me Joan.”
“How long have you lived here?” asked Charles.
I knew he and William were trying to make conversation, but all I wanted to do was scream, “What do you think I can do to help? Why call? Why?”
Joan smiled at Charles. “Daniel …” She looked at the floor and then back at Charles. “Daniel and I moved here three years ago. We fell in love with this house and made an offer the first time we saw it.”
“William’s right,” said Charles. “It is lovely.”
“Here I am being rude again,” she said. “Can I get you something to drink … something to eat?” She motioned toward the ultramodern kitchen that opened to the great room. On the granite countertops were three platters covered with aluminum foil and two or three smaller clear Tupperware bowls—the kind neighbors bring after a death in a family. Her hands were trembling as she gestured, and I was afraid she’d fall if she tried to stand. She and Charlene had nearly empty glasses in front of them.
I declined for the three of us.
Joan started to stand but fell back on the couch. Charlene grabbed her before she fell sideways. She put her elbows on her knees, lowered her head, and placed her hands on the side of her head. “I should have been with him,” she mumbled. “I wish I were.”
She didn’t move for the longest time. When she slowly raised her head, her cheeks were tear covered and her eyes redder than when we’d arrived.
I leaned toward her. “What happened?”
She blinked at me. “There’s a casino across the mountain in Cherokee. It’s a little over an hour from here.” She pointed in the direction of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “We go over once a week. Daniel says … said … it was his way of giving money back to the Indians to pay for white people stealing their land umpteen years ago.”
“Indians?” said Charles.
She turned facing him. “Cherokee is an Indian reservation. They own the casino. It was sort of his joke.”
Charles and William nodded.
The lamp on the table beside the couch flickered as if it were laughing at the joke.
“It agrees,” said Charles, his head twisting toward the lamp.
Joan forced a smile. “That happens a lot lately. The electric here is erratic at best,” she explained. “Daniel’s going … was going to call an electrician … Never mind.”
“I see,” said William, as formal as ever.
“Anyway,” Joan continued, “we would go, usually on Saturdays, have supper, and then gamble for a couple of hours. Two thousand dollars was our limit, so it wasn’t a big deal.”
Charles gulped and then covered it with a deep cough. Two thousand dollars wasn’t a big deal to him either; it was a humongous deal. Up until the inheritance this year, his net worth had never approached two thousand dollars. And when I considered the casino’s odds of winning, I realized that Mr. and Mrs. McCandless could easily drop a hundred thousand dollars a year on their weekly jaunts.
“Did you always go with him?” I asked.
“Most of the time. I missed twice this year—I wasn’t feeling well the other night, and he didn’t want to go without me.” Tears began to flow again. “I almost pushed him out the door. If he stayed home … if I had gone with him … if …”
Her head was back down between her hands. William sat stoically on the front of the supple leather couch. Charles nervously wiggled, and I had no idea what to say.
Charlene put her arm around Joan. “This has been a terrible time for us,” she said, nodding toward Joan.
Joan reached for her near-empty glass and asked Charlene if she could get her a refill. I noticed that Charlene hesitated and knew that Joan had had enough. Thinking food might help, I said, “Come to think of it, we could use a snack if it’s no trouble.”
Joan twisted her head toward the kitchen. “There’s no shortage of food. Help yourself.”
“That’s so kind,” said Charles. He got up and indicated to William that he should follow him.
“What would you like to dring … drink,” she slurred.
“A soft drink or water would be fine,” I said.
She managed to get to her feet, and she reached for my arm. “Let me show you something,” she said, leading me to the far side of the kitchen. Charles and William stood at the counter and watched me go.
She led me to a room off the kitchen and turned on the light. Because we were on the first floor, it wouldn’t qualify as a wine cellar, but it would have fooled even the most astute wine connoisseur. Three of the walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with dark wooden wine racks and must have held six or seven hundred bottles. The racks were the same color as the floors in the great room, and, most likely, throughout the rest of the house.
“Daniel fandies … fancies himself a collector of fine wines,” she said. “The shelves are Indonesian mahogany. He said that was good for several reasons, none of which I understood. I favor bourbon.” She smiled. “Red win
e, right? Have a favorite?”
I didn’t argue. She was in enough turmoil without my insisting on a soft drink. “Anything already open,” I said. I didn’t think she needed to hear that I favored anything with a screw top over wine from a box, but I was surprised that she had remembered my color of wine.
She poured a glass of Cabernet from a nearly full bottle on the three-by-three-foot butcher-block table in the center of the room. The long-stemmed Riedel glass was a vast upgrade from the plastic containers I usually drank from. She treated herself to a generous helping of Blanton’s single barrel bourbon and took a sip. I started back to the great room, but she held her arm out to stop me.
“I should have been with him,” she said—the same message and tone she had used earlier.
Clearly, she wanted to talk to me alone, so I leaned against the wine racks. “What happened?” I asked.
She took another sip. “Newfound Gap Road is the way to Cherokee. It twists and turns and goes over the mountain like a giant anaconda.” She cringed as if the analogy frightened her. “In the winter, it’s often closed because of snow. They’re usually quick to clear it since it’s a major road from here to North Carolina. It can still be dangerous.”
I remembered making the trip one summer and told her I understood.
“They said he was going too fast—much too fast, they said—and must have not seen the curve.” She looked down at her trembling hands. I waited patiently. “Not see the curve! They said he didn’t hit the brakes. They said he went over the cliff without slowing down. They said his car burst into flames when it hit the bottom of the gulley.”
Her cadence was frightening. She said it from rote. “They said” was like a kettledrum pounded on by a sledgehammer.
She then whispered, “They said he was burned beyond recognition. They said it was a terrible accident—terrible accident.”
She took another sip of bourbon. Voices from the couch were the only sounds I could hear.
“What?” I said.
She slammed her glass down on the table. Bourbon sloshed out and ran down the side of the table.
“He was murdered!”
She picked up her glass and a bottle of wine and abruptly turned, leading me back to the butter-soft couch in the family room. The log fireplace gave the room a warm glow. Lights from cabins twinkled in the distance from the nearby mountains. William was telling Char something about his classes, and Charles glanced over at me. I could almost see the question marks in his eyes. They all had paper plates on their laps, filled with food from the kitchen.
I had lost my appetite.
CHAPTER 11
When we were in college, Joan had thought that a friend had stolen her term paper and used it in another class. Nothing came of it, and she never had more than a suspicion. She had a flat and was convinced that a guy who kept asking her out had sabotaged the tire. A tech at the tire store found a roofing nail in the tread, but Joan remained certain it was no accident. She also believed that her father was cheating on her mother. She couldn’t present a shred of evidence, but it didn’t stop her from believing it. Her older sister, who tragically died in her midthirties of a brain hemorrhage, had constantly teased that Joan was paranoid and was the first to believe anything bad said about anyone. I was never certain how much of her sister’s comments were actually teasing.
Those memories stormed back to me when she said “murdered.”
She plopped down beside Char, eyeing each of us seriously. “My husband was murdered,” she repeated.
“Is that what the police said?” asked Charles.
“A terrible accident,” she repeated. “The police called it a terrible accident.”
What have I gotten into? “Why do you think he was murdered?”
“I don’t think—I know,” she said. She set her goblet on the coffee table, gazed down at it, and then picked it up and downed what little was left in the glass. She stood, walked to the wall of windows, and peered out.
“Okay,” I tried again. “How do you know he was murdered?”
She went back to the kitchen and poured another glass of Blanton’s, holding the Cabernet bottle in the air and motioning to me. By now, I needed a refill, but I declined. She called over to William and Charles and asked if they wanted something stronger to drink. They declined. Char had served them beer while Joan and I were in the wine room.
She took a seat on the couch. “Before we moved here,” she said, “Daniel and a partner owned a group of luxury auto dealerships across California. They sold Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and a few Aston Martins. They had showrooms in San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Santa Barbara, and Carmel, where we lived.” She paused and turned to smile faintly at us. “We met three years after I left Kentucky. I was at a fund-raiser to help save some small fish with a name I couldn’t pronounce. He was tall, had a mustache and stylishly long hair, and was dressed in an expensive three-piece suit.” Her eyes were far away, almost as if she were reliving their meeting in her head. “Dashing was how I described him. He was a little older than I. That night he talked about ballet, opera, and fine wines. To use an old-fashioned term, I was smitten.”
She had met Daniel three years after I had had any contact with her, but the description of that night still bothered me a little. I also wondered what her story had to do with the accusation that his death wasn’t an accident. I chose the safest way to continue and remained silent. Wisely, so did Charles and William.
She continued. “He told me he was a car salesman. That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear from the charming gentleman who was in the process of sweeping me off my feet. He could tell I wasn’t thrilled to hear his occupation, and he explained that he wasn’t exactly what one would call a car salesman—saying that he owned the dealerships and in reality was more of a broker of ultra-luxury vehicles.”
“Ultra-luxury?” I asked.
“Selling for more than a hundred thousand dollars each,” she explained.
“Oh,” said Charles.
I thought it but didn’t say anything. The combined cost of my last four vehicles may have reached that number.
“He did quite well,” she said. “He often teased that he would be happy brokering deals until he died at the ripe young age of one hundred and seven. I was stunned when he came home two days before Memorial Day three years ago and said he had sold the dealerships and thought we ought to buy a home in the mountains of east Tennessee.”
“Did he say why he’d changed his mind?” I asked.
“No, never.” She shook her head. “Never.”
“Why move here?” asked Charles.
“I’m not certain. We had vacationed in the area three or four years earlier, and he said he loved the mountains and being relatively close to the ocean and the cities on the East Coast. To be honest, that didn’t make sense—we were on the Pacific; we had San Francisco and LA close by and the mountains a short hop away.”
“Do you think selling the dealerships and moving had something to do with his death?” I was reaching.
She continued to sip bourbon. “Not long after we moved, Daniel was contacted by two men he’d met at a car dealers’ convention in Las Vegas. They had recently bought Jaguar of Knoxville. The men owned two other dealerships—sold Nissans and Kias. They were great with volume sales of new and used cars but didn’t have experience selling higher-end vehicles. Somehow, they learned that Daniel was here and asked if he wanted to become a partner. They said they desperately needed his expertise.”
“What did you think of that?” I asked.
Her eyes became slits. “It bothered me. The reason we were here was for him to retire. I guess it bothered me so much … so much that I ignored anything to do with the Jaguar dealership.”
Her eyes were half-closed, and her head nodded a couple of times. She asked if we wanted anything else. I said no, and Cha
rles and William shook their heads. Then she appeared ready to return to her story—I began to wonder if it would ever get around to why she thought he was murdered … and why I was here.
“Chris, we had all the money we needed. He made a mint when he sold the California dealerships, so I was dumbfounded when he accepted their offer. Anyway, he jumped in with both feet and elevated it to one of the top Jaguar dealerships in North America.” She paused and then shook her head. “Six months ago, he abruptly walked away from it.”
“Why was that, Ms. McCandless?” asked William.
“My degree’s in math,” she said with a small laugh. “Chris knew that, of course. I was a cost analyst for years. I’ve dealt with figures and business models all my adult life, yet Daniel never let me in his business world. He took great care of me, buying me anything I wanted; we traveled around the world. But I had to take it on faith that our finances were in order.” She shook her head, her eyes continuing to narrow. “I have no idea why he sold.”
“Did he get along with his partners?” I asked.
“Guess so … not certain,” she said. “I only met one of them a couple of times. I never met the other one. I was so mad that he joined the dealership that I ignored anything about it. Petty, I guess. Well, they—”
Joan jumped and nearly fell off the couch. A large icicle had fallen from the roof overhanging the deck and crashed into a snow-covered rocking chair.
I had little confidence that we would get any useful information, but I gave it another try. “So why do you think he was murdered?”
