High Country Fall dk-10

by Margaret Maron

He’s three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four children, and he’s usually got a spare ace or three tucked in his sock or up his sleeve. A fast talker in both senses, Will earns a decent living as an auctioneer and appraiser, two callings that allow him to set his own hours; and although he knows how houses are put together and taken apart, which is why I let him supervise the building of my house, he’s much more interested in the market value of a house’s contents. He has Mother’s charm and Daddy’s streak of lawlessness. Everybody likes Will as long as they’re not the ones he’s messing over. It was not like him to be concerned about whether or not I had a social life while I was up here in the mountains, so he probably had an ulterior motive for strengthening the ties between the Ashes and himself.

  Nevertheless, I was at loose ends this evening and I’ve always been up for a party.

  “Wonderful!” said Joyce Ashe when I called the number she’d included in her e-mail. “We’re up so many twisty roads you’d never find us. Why don’t I have somebody pick you up? Say seven-thirty?”

  “That’ll be fine,” I agreed and told her where I was staying.

  “Casual dress and—hey! You didn’t happen to bring your guitar, did you?”

  “Actually, I did.” There was a tricky chord change on a song I was learning and I’d stuck it in the trunk of my car thinking I’d get a chance to work it out. “Does this mean there’ll be playing tonight?”

  She laughed. “Always. Unless you want to sing for your supper?”

  Dogs don’t exactly howl when I open my mouth, but I’d as soon play Beethoven sonatas on the spoons as sing alone in front of strangers.

  “Miss Deborah?” asked the man who knocked on my door an hour later. “I’m William Edward Johnson. Miss Joyce said you could use a lift out to their place?”

  My driver proved to be a tubby little man pushing seventy-five like it was fifty. With his gray tie and black pants and a black vest buttoned over a long-sleeved maroon shirt, he looked like management. But his cowhide work boots and the tufts of gray hair that curled up around the edges of a grease-stained Ford Motors ball cap suggested he might be the help.

  A classic BMW convertible idled in the drive. The top was down and the creamy leather seats gleamed beneath the streetlight. Cool ride, right? Did I mention that the fenders were dented, the paint was chipped, the upholstery was in tatters, and the motor roared like a Mack truck?

  “This is very kind of you, Mr. Johnson,” I said and handed him my guitar case while he held the car door for me.

  “Aw, call me Billy Ed,” he said, slinging my guitar into the backseat. “And I guess you’re Miss Debbie, right?”

  “Wrong. Sorry. It’s either Deborah or hey you.”

  Before I could get my seat belt fastened, he was peeling rubber, headed down that steep drive like a downhill skier trying to make time to the first slalom. The rear end fishtailed slightly as he braked and then made an immediate left turn to head up Main Street away from the center of town. He seemed totally oblivious to the people he’d cut off, just gunned on up the hill for about three miles, before making another left.

  My hair kept whipping all around my face in the cool night air and Billy Ed glanced over. “Want me to stop and put up the top, Miss Deborah?”

  “No,” I said. “I love it.”

  “Good, ’cause the top’s so tore, wouldn’t do us much good anyhow.” He reached under the seat and handed me a slightly cleaner ball cap.

  With one hand on the steering wheel, the other fumbled to extract a cigarette from a crumpled pack.

  I held my breath as he touched the glowing lighter to the tip of his cigarette, then returned the lighter to its hole, all the while negotiating a road that twisted worse than a black snake climbing a light pole. Every time we met a car from the opposite direction, I was uncomfortably aware that the road had no guardrails and that the narrow shoulders seemed to drop off into a dark abyss, despite the moon that was trying to break through some thin clouds.

  “Dim your Gee-dee lights!” Billy Ed shouted when he brushed by a large vehicle with its headlights on high.

  The other car was barely moving and its brake lights lit up the night.

  “Turons!” he said derisively as he shifted gears. “Know how you can tell tourists from the natives?”

  “No.”

  “By the smell of their burnt-out brakes. Ought not to be allowed out at night, scared as they are.”

  I was glad he couldn’t see my white knuckles.

  “So how you know Miss Joyce and Bobby?” he asked above the roar of the motor.

  “My brother introduced them to me, but I don’t really know them,” I said, leaning toward him to counterbalance the centrifugal force that wanted to sling me out of the car as he cornered sharply. “What about you?”

  “I took on their old house up on the other side of the ridge about four or five years ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, their kids were grown and they wanted something smaller, closer to their work.”

  “What sort of work do they do?”

  “Real estate. Property management. They have exclusive rights to Pritchard Cove.”

  “Pritchard Cove? Isn’t that where Dr. Ledwig lived?”

  “Ledwig?” He snorted. “Nope. I did hear tell he wanted to dynamite it off the face of the mountain, though.”

  “Why?” Not that I cared, but anything to distract me from this headlong hurtle into hell. “What is Pritchard Cove anyhow?”

  “Well, some folks would say it’s the best-planned community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Others like Ledwig’ll tell you it’s a desecration of unspoiled land. Pritchard Cove was a mote in his eye. And not a teeny-tiny little mote either—it was a Gee-dee two-by-four beam. Wrecked his view.”

  I thought back to the pictures I’d seen in court today. Admittedly, the focus was on the deck and on the victim’s body, not the view from that deck, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything except a long vista of colorful treetops and I said as much.

  “Well-planned,” Billy Ed said again. “The houses were designed to blend into the shape of the land. Most of the trees weren’t touched, and even when the leaves drop off it’s hard to see ’em ’cause their covenant prohibits big grassy lawns. ’Course now, the houses are there and if you look hard enough—”

  “I take it Dr. Ledwig looked?”

  “With a magnifying glass.”

  By now we had made so many turns, there was no way I could have found my way back to Cedar Gap. All the turns ran together, except that each was onto a narrower road, until we finally pulled into a long graveled driveway that ran up a steep grade between trees that met overhead. We circled a thicket of hemlocks, then the ground abruptly leveled and the drive broadened into a huge circle of gravel in front of a long low house built of rough gray stones. From Jeeps and pickups to a couple of Land Rovers and one bright yellow Hummer, at least forty vehicles were parked beneath the trees.

  The gravel drive turned to flagstones that led directly to a massive wooden door that stood ajar so that anyone could walk in. We passed through a large reception room, where the entire opposite wall was nothing but glass that looked out into the dark night. To one side was a three-foot-tall pottery jar filled with long branches of bright orange bittersweet berries. Overstuffed couches and chairs were clumped in conversational groupings before a stone wall with a fireplace spacious enough to roast an ox. A log fire snapped and crackled on the hearth. Above it hung a big oil painting that looked like it could be a Bob Timberlake original. It pictured an old-fashioned kitchen table during jam-making—gleaming jars of jellied fruit capped with squares of colorful calico, a copper kettle and ladle, and an earthenware bowl of luscious blackberries awaiting their turn in the kettle.

  An oversize quilting frame and several chairs stood in front of the windows and a brilliant king-size patchwork quilt was a work in progress. Beautiful hand-thrown mountain pottery glowed beneath individual baby spotlights in the ceil
ing.

  More patchwork quilts were draped over the backs of the couches, and I had an impression of space and rustic luxury. If this was the “smaller place” the Ashes had bought when they downsized, how big was their previous house that Billy Ed “took on”?

  There was no time to speculate, though. This level was empty, and Billy Ed was already disappearing with my guitar case down a flight of iron and stone steps at the end of the room, so I hurried after him.

  Like the courthouse back in town, the Ashes’ house was built down the side of a mountain. I saw another large room almost identical to the one above, complete with stone fireplace and a cheerful fire, except that here the wall of glass was punctuated with French doors that opened onto a wide stone terrace, and the painting over the fireplace was a romantic mountain vista. Unlike the first, this level buzzed with laughter, talk, the clink of silverware against plates, and the tinkle of ice in a variety of glasses. I smelled hot yeast rolls and the aroma of something savory that probably came from the copper chafing dishes on the loaded buffet table in the middle of the room. A bar backed onto the staircase and seemed to be better stocked than some I’d seen in restaurants. Two white-jacketed Latinos were busily filling drink orders.

  As I paused near the bottom of the steps, my hostess detached herself from a group and came over with outstretched hands and a welcoming smile. “So pleased you could come, Judge Knott! Love your hat!”

  “Call me Deborah,” I said, belatedly remembering that I was still wearing the grimy cap Billy Ed had handed me in the car. I pulled it off, laughed at the raunchy logo, which I hadn’t noticed before, and stuffed it into my shoulder bag. At least my jeans, white broadcloth shirt, and red wool cardigan were in sync with what everyone else here was wearing. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “Not at all. Let’s get you a drink and then come meet some of your colleagues.”

  Joyce Ashe was as I’d remembered her: an easygoing, big-boned woman carrying about twenty-five extra pounds and comfortable with it. She had one of the bartenders build me a Bloody Mary (I hadn’t eaten anything since my chicken salad at noon and Bloody Marys always feel like food), refreshed her own bourbon and branch, then led me over to a group warming themselves by the fireplace.

  “I hear you already know Lucius Burke,” she said as the circle opened to admit us.

  “Yes,” I said, taking the hand the district attorney offered and trying not to fall into those incredible green eyes. The names of the two attorneys and someone who owned a ski lodge just on the other side of the Tennessee border went in one ear and out the other. To cover my lapse, I moved closer to the hearth to examine the picture. According to the little brass plate attached to the simple wood frame, it had been painted in 1903 by an artist named Genevieve Carlton. I read the title out loud: “In Nature’s Realm.”

  Joyce Ashe laughed. “Well, that’s what the artist called it. Bobby and I call it The Mountains of Florida.”

  I looked at the painting with renewed interest. “I didn’t know Florida had any mountains,” I said, stepping right into it.

  “Oh, Lord, yes! Florida’s got beautiful mountains.” She paused two beats. “They just happen to lie in North Carolina.”

  I still didn’t get it.

  “Floridians think they own our mountains,” the fortyish attorney—Liz Peters?—explained with a kindly smile.

  “Think?” said a jovial silver-haired man who’d come up behind me. He was accompanied by a tall, heavyset man who sported a thick bushy mustache—Bobby Ashe. “There’s no think about it, Liz darlin’. Joyce and Bobby and me, we’ve personally sold about half of Lafayette County to ’em, so damn straight they own our mountains, right, Bobby?”

  Bobby Ashe hoisted his glass to the man and grinned broadly. “I never argue with a partner.”

  “Partner?” asked Ms. Peters, raising her eyebrows in surprise.

  “Yep,” said Bobby Ashe. He put one arm around Joyce, the other around the man. “It took us two months to hammer out the details, but we signed the last of the papers last week. You’re looking at all three partners of the newly formed Osborne-Ashe High Country Realty.”

  “Wow!” said the young male attorney whose name hadn’t registered on me.

  “Wow is right,” said Liz Peters, looking impressed.

  “Congratulations,” said Lucius Burke. He turned to me with a smile. “I may have to get you to refresh my memory on the statutes governing monopolies, though. Between ’em, they probably account for seventy percent of the property sales in this county.”

  “More like eighty,” said the silver-haired man, giving me a puzzled look. “Have we met? You a new attorney here?”

  “This is Judge Knott,” said Bobby Ashe, flashing me a welcome smile. “She’s sitting in for Tim Rawlings while he’s down east on a fishing trip.”

  “Norman Osborne,” said the man. “Nice to meet you, Judge.”

  “My pleasure. And please. Tonight, I’m just Deborah.”

  “Lucius tells us you found the kid that killed Carlyle Ledwig guilty today,” said Joyce.

  “Not guilty,” Burke and I said together. I smiled at him and explained to the rest that all I’d done was find probable cause to bind that young man over for trial in superior court.

  “Same thing, isn’t it?” asked Norman Osborne.

  “I hope so,” said Burke.

  I shook my head. “Not necessarily. He’s still innocent until declared guilty by a jury of his peers.”

  “Gonna be hard to find one of those up here,” Liz Peters said tartly.

  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.