High Country Fall (10 page)
“Probably because you don’t want to marry his daughter,” Sunny Osborne said.
“And you’re not carrying a flag,” said Lucius Burke. “Freeman could just as easily call himself Native American or white—according to his statement, he’s descended from them on both sides, but by calling himself black he hopes to make people question what it really means to be black. He says he wants to make all racial designations irrelevant.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Liz Peters. “I don’t know why we still have them anyhow. Whenever I have to check off my race, I always check ‘other.’”
I laughed. “Me too.”
Bobby Ashe frowned. “But aren’t there legitimate reasons for people to know what race you are? Entitlement programs? Or what about medical reasons? Sickle-cell anemia, for instance?”
Sam Tysinger gave him a sardonic look. “And every Jew should write down his religion in case he develops Tay-Sachs?”
“I don’t think Dr. Ledwig was worried about sickle-cell anemia, or Tay-Sachs either,” said Liz Peters. “He was a bigot, pure and simple.”
“You’re bad-mouthing a good man who’s not here tonight to defend himself,” Norman Osborne protested. “Look at all the good he’s done for Cedar Gap. The hospital. The geriatrics clinic. He’s building a new senior center, too.”
“Another one?” asked Tysinger with a puzzled look on his face.
“He’s building
onto
the new senior center,” said Mrs. Osborne. “At least that’s what we hear that his will provides, but maybe we’re speaking out of turn till everything’s probated, right, honey?”
She squeezed his arm and he patted her hand affectionately.
“Right you are, darlin’.” He gave a rueful smile. “Always opening my mouth at the wrong time.”
“Ah, Sam’s still mad because Carlyle got the planning board to rule against his sign,” said Lucius Burke.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Joyce Ashe. “Come on, Deborah. If they’re going to start rehashing that, let me introduce you to some people with more interesting things on their minds.”
“What was that about a sign?” I asked as we filled our plates at the buffet table a few minutes later.
“Sam owns several gem mine attractions around the county.”
“Really?” I couldn’t help smiling. I still have the little half-carat ruby I’d found in my bucket of mine tailings when Mother and Aunt Zell and I tried our luck at “mining” for gemstones. It cost Daddy more than it was worth to have it cut and set in a silver ring that we gave Mother for her birthday and which came back to me at her death, but I treasure its associations and said so.
“They’re popular with the tourists,” Joyce agreed, “but some of the seasonal people think they’re tacky. They were grandfathered in when the new land use rules took effect, but Sam had a big ol’ ramshackle billboard right where this one Florida man had to look at it every time he drove out of his driveway. Sam couldn’t prove the man helped that sign fall down during a thunderstorm this summer, but it’s a fact that the man did make a big donation to the hospital’s building fund, and permission to put a big one back was denied. Now, you be sure and get you some of this chopped broccoli and raisin salad. I don’t know what the caterer puts in her dressing, but it’s delicious.”
I followed in Joyce’s wake as she worked the room, introducing me to several people along the way. It could have been a meeting of the Cedar Gap Chamber of Commerce. By the time we got out to the terrace, I had exchanged names with the owners or managers of most of the stores along Main Street. I had also met a dean from Tanser-MacLeod College who vaguely remembered the twins, the owner of an independent bluegrass label, and a heart surgeon from Long Island who was considering a second home that was listed by the newly formed Osborne-Ashe High Country Realty.
“See?” said Joyce, as we moved on. “Not all the seasonal people are from Florida.”
As we approached the edge of the terrace, she was called back inside by one of the white-jacketed servers to attend to a minor domestic crisis. Most of the nearby tables were taken by people who were already in deep conversation with one another, so I set my plate on the wide wooden railing and looked out over the tops of descending trees that were a hazy blue in the moonlight.
“Enjoyin’ the view?” drawled a voice behind me.
“It’s lovely,” I said, smiling up at Norman Osborne, who joined me with a drink in his hand. “Do you ever get tired of it?”
“Never. It’s not just about buying and selling either.”
“There’s gold in them thar hills?”
“There is. No denying that, but these hills are like the seashores. They belong to everybody in the United States and it’s up to us to develop smartly so we can preserve it for the generations to come.”
I must have given an unladylike snort because he grinned and said, “We don’t talk about it, Ledwig and me, but for every acre we’ve developed, we’ve put an equal parcel into the land conservancy.”
“You must really miss him,” I said.
“Who?”
“Dr. Ledwig. His death must have been a huge blow.”
He looked out over the vista for a long silent minute while the party went on noisily around us, then glanced at me with a rueful smile. “Sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your name.”
“Judge Knott,” I said. “Deborah Knott.”
“From?”
“Over in Colleton County.”
“Knott? Colleton County? You wouldn’t happen to be kin to a man down there named Kezzie Knott, would you?”
“My father,” I said, already knowing where this was going.
“Really? I’ll be damned!” He chuckled. “And you a judge!”
He wasn’t the first one to find it amusing that the man who’d once run the biggest bootlegging operation in eastern North Carolina had sired a judge for a daughter.
“Don’t worry, darlin’, your secret’s safe with me.”
I shrugged. It wasn’t something to brag about, but nothing I’d ever tried to hide either. Waste of time anyhow. Be like trying to hide a mule in a petunia patch.
“Naw, it’s okay,” Osborne insisted. “See, my daddy used to have his own little ‘still on a hill.’” A grin split his face as he softly sang the rest of the verse:
“. . . where he runs him a gallon or two.
The crows in the sky
Git so drunk they cain’t fly
From that good ol’ mountain dew.”
“Norman?” Sunny Osborne suddenly appeared at his side and laid a suntanned hand heavy with gold and diamond rings on his arm. “I wondered where you’d got to.”
“Darlin’, meet Judge Deborah Knott. She’s Kezzie Knott’s daughter.”
She pushed back a strand of straw-colored hair and smiled at me. “I’m sorry. Who’s Kezzie Knott?”
“You don’t mind if I tell her, do you?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I murmured.
“He was like my daddy,” said Osborne. “Bad for making his own whiskey. Only my daddy kept it local and hers ran it from Florida to Canada. Or so they say.”
“Or so they say,” I agreed.
“How interesting,” she said, eyeing my plate on the railing. “That looks delicious. I came to see if you were ready to eat, too, honey?”
“Sure,” he said. “Good talking to you, ma’am.”
As they walked away, I saw Osborne pull a small notebook from an inner pocket of his jacket and pause to scribble something.
Billy Ed came over to me then. “See any lights?” he asked.
I pointed with the forkful of broccoli salad that had been on its way to my mouth. “You mean that’s Pritchard Cove down there?”
“Yep.”
I looked closely and, sure enough, a scattering of lights could be seen through the trees.
“Where is the Ledwig house?”
He pointed off to the left. “You can’t really see it from here. See that outcropping of rock? It’s just on the other side.”
“On the same road as this house?”
“Old Needham? Yep. Old Needham, new money. They oughta rename it Millionaire Row. Miss Joyce and Bobby here. The Ledwigs up there. The Osbornes a quarter mile on above them.”
“And your house?”
“Oh, I’m on the other side of the ridge heading down toward Bedford.”
He lit a fresh cigarette from the tip of the old one and inhaled deeply. “Yep, Ledwig did everything except move heaven and earth to keep the cove from being developed, but the developer got his permits in under the wire before Ledwig could get to the county commissioners.”
I sampled a bit of the risotto Joyce had spooned onto my plate and looked at the tubby little man in the grimy ball cap, tie, and vest. “You wouldn’t happen to be that developer, would you?”
“Yep.” He grinned and handed me his card. “Be proud to show you around anytime you like.”
By the time folks finished with food and were ready for music, I had circulated enough to have a fairly good sense of the late Carlyle Ledwig’s standing in the community.
At least his standing in the local business community.
Everyone seemed to know that I’d conducted his killer’s preliminary hearing, and they wanted to tell me how much they applauded my finding.
“I do feel sorry for his daughter, though,” said one older woman, who recalled selling me the topaz necklace I’d fallen for the afternoon before. “To have your boyfriend kill your daddy? Poor Dr. Ledwig. He was such a fine Christian man.”
“And so good with old folks.” Her elderly tablemate nodded in agreement. “When my Henry got Alzheimer’s, Dr. Ledwig spotted it right away. Told us what to expect during every stage and helped us get him into a decent nursing home when the time came. I do hope they find someone who’ll continue his ministry in geriatrics, because my time’s surely coming.”
“He was always looking what was good for the county,” said the owner of a lumberyard between Cedar Gap and Howards Ford. “A lot of tree-huggers care more about woodpeckers or snail-darters than the families who’ve been trying to scrabble out a living in these hills for two hundred years. He was real open-minded about development, ’specially if it was clean and meant jobs for blue-collar workmen. Look at how he fought for KinderKuntry’s easement.”
“KinderKuntry?” I remembered the cutesy name from a week I’d spent in High Point during the spring furniture market last year.
Misunderstanding my interest, the lumberyard owner explained that the company made wooden tables and chairs for schools and day care centers. “They ship all over the country and employ about thirty workers full-time.”
“I did hear Dr. Ledwig wasn’t happy about Pritchard Cove,” I said.
“Well, maybe not at first. Not with it coming in right under his nose, but once it was finished and he saw how unintrusive smart growth could be when it was done right, he stopped automatically saying no the minute something new was proposed.”
“Yeah?” someone else said cynically. “Try getting a testimonial about his open mind from Ten Star.”
“Come on, now, bo. You’re not going to say an asphalt company’s as environmentally friendly as a gated community, are you?”
“Gives more year-round jobs,” the other said stubbornly.
“Yeah, but look at what it does to our air and water. You want to live next to something spitting out more than twenty known toxic pollutants?”
When they moved into EPA guidelines and federal restrictions, I moved on.
I heard a couple of covert racist slurs against Daniel Freeman and blacks in general, but overall, people acted surprised that a basically decent man like Ledwig should be such a bigot as to goad a black man into killing him. To most of them, he’d seemed to treat all his elderly patients equally whether they were rich or poor, indigenous mountaineers or seasonal transplants, white-collar professionals or Latino day laborers; and they were finding it hard to reconcile his bigotry to the man they thought they knew.
In the end, though, I was left with no reason to change my mind from the first impression I’d gathered when I read about him in the
High Country Courier
yesterday: a flawed man who tried to do good.
(
“Long as it was his conscience and his values that defined what ‘good’ actually meant,”
said the pragmatic voice in my head.)
(
“And how’s that any different from the rest of us?”
the preacher asked quietly.)
A little after nine, those who’d brought instruments started drifting over to the big stone fireplace to begin tuning up. I knew I must have eaten off all my lipstick, and my fingers were sticky. I looked around for a lavatory but the one on this level was occupied and Joyce Ashe invited me to go downstairs. “Second door on the left.”
Like the other staircases, this one was also built of black wrought iron and slabs of granite, and it curved down into a smaller space than the one I’d just left. Although this room too opened onto a terrace directly beneath the one overhead, its indirect lighting and cheerful patchwork accents gave it the look and feel of an intimate family den. There was no fireplace per se, but a waist-high rough oak shelf ran from one side of the rock wall to the other. It was at least eight inches thick, more than two feet wide, and looked as if it had been hewn with a hand ax out of the heart of a huge, majestic tree.
The shelf held a collection of wrought-iron candleholders of every shape and size, from a four-foot column suitable for a medieval cathedral to dainty slender sticks. Each was fitted with an appropriate white candle, whether thick and squat or tall and tapered. There had to be at least fifty clustered along the length of the shelf.
On the wall above the candles hung a large assortment of family snapshots, each in a different black wire frame. The central photograph was an eighteen-by-twenty-four of Joyce and Bobby Ashe surrounded by at least a dozen young children.
“Our grandchildren,” said Joyce as she came down the steps behind me. “They’re what it’s all about. Do you have children, Deborah?”
“No,” I answered. “But lots of nieces and nephews.”
“Not the same,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll see. Bobby fusses at me all the time for spoiling them, but he’s just as bad and it’s hard not to want to give them everything.”
“Do they all live around here?”
“I wish! Bob Junior and his family are down in Asheville, but the rest are scattered from Manteo to Murphy.”
