High Country Fall (15 page)

“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.”

CHAPTER 14

TUESDAY, 11:05 A.M.

While two of Sheriff Horton’s detectives gave the Ashe home a final thorough search, several patrol officers spread out along Old Needham Road. The sheriff himself stood on the lower terrace with Lucius Burke and Captain George Underwood and looked down across the treetops into Pritchard Cove. The walkie-talkie in his hand occasionally emitted staticky bursts of speech. Somewhere down there, a couple of his men with binoculars were carefully scanning the mountainside for anything that might be a man. Already they had sent their colleagues scrambling to investigate two fallen trees and several rocks. It didn’t help that their description of Norman Osborne included brown slacks and a russet-colored sweater over a dark plaid shirt.

“Too bad he wasn’t wearing red,” said Burke as they waited.

“Wouldn’t make it any easier. Half the damn trees are red, too,” Horton said, nodding sourly toward a particularly brilliant maple.

“Yeah,” said George Underwood. As head of the detective squad, he had a pair of binoculars slung around his own neck and had already scoped out the area from here. “And even if they were all still green, you ever try to spot a cardinal singing in an oak tree?”

They agreed it was amazing the way bright-colored birds could melt into sunlit foliage.

“I keep telling the commissioners they need to let me have a bloodhound,” Horton grumbled. “God knows enough tourons get lost every year to justify the cost.”

Burke and Underwood maintained a discreet silence. Most tourists who wandered off the hiking trails usually wandered right back on again, and whenever someone did stay lost, as happened once or twice a season, they could always borrow a bloodhound and its handler from one of the larger neighboring counties. Cheaper to compensate the helpful authority than to fund a man and dog full-time, never mind that Sheriff Horton made it clear that he felt humiliated for the honor of Lafayette County each time he had to ask somebody else to send over a dog.

“Well, the hell with it,” said Horton, as much to himself as to the others. He was sixty-three years old and he’d already decided he wasn’t going to run again. Let his successor fight with those penny-pinching commissioners. Maybe some college-educated hotshot like Underwood here could take them on, pry loose a few more dollars. He was tired of going hat in hand every year to beg for enough money to do the job properly. From here on out, he’d do his job, but bedamned if he was going to exert himself too much. They’d get what they paid for and nothing more.

It no longer fretted him that he’d never have a house like this one. He’d done all right for someone who’d barely scraped through high school. A lot better than his brother, who’d gone all the way through college—first Horton ever to get a degree. Law enforcement might not pay much, but it sure paid more than teaching math to horny, dumbass teenagers. ’Course now, if he’d been willing to bend the law the way Bobby Ashe had when he was first starting in real estate . . . Not that anything had ever been proved, but look at the way his kids had turned out. Apples don’t roll far from the tree, do they?

“Anybody thirsty?” asked Joyce Ashe from the doorway. She carried several bottles of water.

“Now, that’s real kind of you,” Lucius Burke said. He unscrewed the cap from the pale blue bottle and drank deeply. The others followed suit, although Horton shook his head in amazement as he first studied the label.

“Who’d ever think you could get people to pay good money for plain old water?” he asked.

Joyce grinned. “Don’t you wish it was you and me?”

Horton grinned back. For all her big house and fancy car, Joyce Ashe was okay. Hadn’t got above her raising. And she’d worked hard for everything she had. Too bad there were things money couldn’t buy, because for all the money they’d made, they might as well have dug a big hole in the front yard and dumped half of it in. That’s probably what it’d cost them in lawyers and rehab over the years. He still remembered how she’d cried the first time Bob Junior got picked up for dealing and—

The walkie-talkie gave a screech.

“Yeah?”

“Sorry, Sheriff. That dark shape Carmichael saw? It was just another rock.”

Horton sighed and took a swallow of the water.

Underwood set his bottle on the dark wood railing and went back to scanning the hillside to the left of the terrace. Even though the morning had a light nip in the air, the water was cold enough to give off beads of condensation.

“Saw you talking with that substitute judge this morning,” Horton told him. “She a friend of yours?”

“Friend of a friend. Or rather girlfriend of a friend of a friend.”

“Lucky friend,” Lucius Burke said lightly.

“Sorry ’bout that,” Joyce said to him. “When I met her back in the summer, she didn’t seem to be attached to anybody.”