High Country Fall (27 page)
She pulled the door to when she left.
“What is it that Laura shouldn’t hear?” Mrs. Osborne sat down on the sofa and waved him to an adjacent chair.
“The day that Dr. Ledwig died,” he began.
“Carlyle?”
Her bright face darkened with anger. “I’ve told you and told you. Carlyle’s death has nothing to do with Norman’s. Nothing! Why do you people keep saying it does?”
“The day that Dr. Ledwig died,” he repeated firmly, “were you there on the deck?”
“I beg your pardon?” She sat very still and her blue eyes regarded him steadily.
“Were you on the deck the afternoon that Dr. Ledwig died?”
“Does someone say I was?”
“Mrs. Osborne?”
“Oh, very well. I suppose it was that UPS man?”
“Yes, ma’am. Why didn’t you mention it to us before?”
She shrugged. “No one specifically asked me.”
“You knew we were asking anyone who’d spoken to Dr. Ledwig that day to come forward.”
“And if I’d had anything to contribute, I would have. But I didn’t. I felt like a game of tennis and I stopped by to see if Tina wanted to play. When no one answered the front bell, I heard hammering and went around to the rear.”
“Dr. Ledwig was still alive?”
“Well, of course he was! I asked him about Tina. He said she was already at the club and I left.” She gave a wry smile. “At least I would have left if that UPS truck hadn’t been blocking my car. He assumed I was Tina and handed the stuff to me. It seemed like more trouble than it was worth to tell him differently, so I carried it back around and Carlyle told me to put it on the table by the door. And then I really did leave. You can ask at the club. I was there before three.”
“You saw no one else as you were leaving?”
She shook her head.
“Who do you think killed him, Mrs. Osborne?”
“That boyfriend of Carla’s, of course. He was there. He had the motive.”
“And if not him?”
She shook her head. “Then I don’t have a clue.”
“I see.” He stood to go. “Thank you, Mrs. Osborne. I’m sorry I had to bother you tonight.”
“That’s it?” she asked, surprised. “You came all the way out here just to ask if I saw Carlyle that day? What about Norman? Don’t you have anything new to tell me?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Soon as we know, you’ll know.”
“It’s not fair.” Tears filled her eyes. “Norman’s dead and the only one you worry about is Carlyle?”
“No, ma’am,” he said gently. “We worry about both of them.”
To return to the road Deborah Knott had disappeared on, Underwood had to go back almost to the main state highway, then head west up over the ridge. As he drove, he checked in with the dispatcher. “Any word yet?”
“Negative, Captain. ETA for the chopper is about another twenty-five minutes. Volunteers from two fire stations are already there, with three others on the way.”
“What’s taking the chopper so long?”
He heard a snort of laughter across the airwaves. “They were changing the oil filters on it when we called.”
Underwood pulled up at the bottom of the hill where they assumed the judge’s car had gone over just as the helicopter came over the ridge. A welcoming cheer went up from the men and women who’d turned out to help search.
Deputy Fletcher sat in a patrol car with his radio tuned to headquarters and his walkie-talkie set to the chopper’s frequency. First it made a sweep with the heat-sensing elements.
For a moment, they thought they were going to get lucky right away. Infrared showed them one warm body that didn’t bolt and run the minute they got near. They swooped lower toward it and suddenly a ten-point buck bounded up from the rhododendron bushes and raced straight down the mountain.
“So we do it the hard way,” someone said.
With the lights from above turning the mountainside into day, the volunteers fanned down across the slope, all eyes alert for a black Firebird.
They had been at it almost an hour when the Lafayette dispatcher broke in excitedly. “Captain? You there? I got her on her cell phone! Patching her through to y’all. Go ahead, ma’am.”
The signal was faint and wavering, yet Deborah Knott’s voice itself sounded strong. “I keep losing the signal so I’ll talk fast. I can see a helicopter about a half mile to the right of my position. West of me, I think. I was heading back toward Cedar Gap when that bastard Barringer ran me off the road with his truck near the top of a hill. Hey, is anybody hearing this?”
“Loud and clear, ma’am!” Underwood said happily.
“George? Is that you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I can’t get out of my car. The door’s too heavy, but—Oh, good! Finally! The chopper’s heading my way. Tell them to keep coming . . . keep coming . . . down the slope more . . .
yes!
They’re right overhead.”
“Hang on, ma’am. Somebody’ll be with you in a minute. You okay?”
“Just banged and bruised. And, George?”
“Ma’am?”
“I want to swear out a warrant against Barringer.”
“We’ll certainly talk about that, ma’am.” Underwood put his car in gear and joined the parade up the hill. Why she was going in this direction was something else to talk about. Time enough to tell her that Barringer was dead once she was back on level ground.
A rope line was stretched down to the car and an EMT team went down with a stretcher, but Judge Knott insisted on walking out by herself.
“She’s a pistol,” one of them told him later. “Made us get her sneakers out of the back and wait till she put them on. Told us if we wanted to carry something, we could grab her guitar and her laptop, but nobody was strapping her into anything unless we gave her a pair of scissors to hold.”
“Welcome back, Judge,” Underwood said, reaching out a hand to help her around a rock.
There was a bruise on her left temple that extended up from her eyebrow and another on her neck, but her smile was radiant. “If my arm didn’t hurt so bad, George, I’d hug you here and now. Please thank everybody for me.”
She waved to the television camera and to the circle of people who wanted to see her for themselves. “Thank you!” she called. “Thanks for helping. I really appreciate it.”
Underwood had a feeling she would have gone over to shake every hand there and thank each volunteer searcher individually if the EMT team hadn’t persuaded her to let them take her on down to the hospital.
“I’m fine,” I kept telling them.
“You probably are,” the medical technician agreed, “but until you get checked out thoroughly, you can’t be sure. You’ve got a contusion on the side of your head. There may be chipped bones. That arm could be fractured.”
“George!” I entreated.
He gave a heartless smile. “I’ll follow you down and see you at the hospital.”
Resigned, I lay back on the stretcher and let them strap me in.
“There’s a pair of scissors in that locker beside your head,” said one of the medics with a chuckle.
“You laugh,” I said darkly, “but I’d like to see you get out of a jammed seat belt without some.”
At the hospital, they made me strip off into one of those godawful gowns, and a doctor went over all my extremities, pushing and flexing and “This hurt? How about here?”
I was advised to put ice on my temple and left arm for the next seventy-two hours. They gave me an ointment for the belt burn on my neck and they bandaged the raw place on my finger where the key had rubbed it, otherwise, it was exactly as I’d thought: I was bruised and battered but unbroken.
“How long before this one goes away?” I asked, looking in the mirror at the side of my face. Every time I took the ice pack away and checked, the bruise seemed to be darker and was passing from purple to black even as we spoke.
“About three weeks,” said the doctor.
“What?”
“With a little luck, regular makeup will cover up the worst in about a week,” chirped the nurse.
Damn that Barringer! I could just imagine some of the things those courthouse smartmouths down in Dobbs were going to say when they saw me next.
Glumly, I went back to my cubicle and was half-dressed when I heard the nurse say, “Sir? Sir! You can’t come in here.”
“The hell I can’t,” someone snarled. “Deb’rah? You back there?”
I zipped up my slacks and poked my head out of the curtain.
“Dwight?”
He strode down to my cubicle. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, stunned to see him here.
He gently turned my face and looked at the bruise. His own face was grim.
I pushed his hand away because I couldn’t meet his eyes. Not when I was feeling so uncertain about our future together, not when it was possible we would have no future. “It looks worse than it is.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said with the first trace of normality, “’cause it sure does look like hell.”
“I’m happy to see you, too,” I said tartly as I pulled on my jersey and slipped my feet into my sneakers. My voice sounded shrewish, even to me, with none of the easy banter that usually flowed between us. “What are you doing here? I thought you weren’t due up in Virginia till Saturday.”
“Underwood called me.”
“He did? When?”
“I don’t know. Around five-thirty?”
I looked at my watch. It was only a little after ten now. Amazing.
This wasn’t Jeff Gordon or Dale Jarrett. This was Dwight Bryant, a man who drives so slow that everyone says he’s going to get T-boned by a turtle someday, yet he had made the trip in less than five hours. “How many times did you get pulled?”
He gave a sheepish grin. “Only once. He was cool about it.”
I.e., no ticket.
He held my jacket for me and we walked out into the waiting room. To my surprise, George Underwood was still there.
“I need food and drink,” I told them both. “And not necessarily in that order.”
Five minutes later, we were in a booth in a little Mexican place on the far side of the hospital.
I was running on adrenaline between my harrowing evening, Dwight’s sudden appearance, and the conclusions I’d reached about Ledwig’s death. Most of all, though, I was still furious about my own near death. George kept putting me off whenever I asked, but as soon as we were seated, I said, “So what about Barringer? Did you arrest him yet?”
George looked at Dwight, who put his hand on mine and said gently, “He’s dead, shug.”
“
What?
How?”
The bottom fell out of my stomach as George told me about the dead buck they’d found and how it must have happened right after he ran me off the road. I felt my eyes fill up with tears. The waste of it. Yes, he had been full of the arrogance of privileged youth. Yes, he had almost killed me. All the same, he was still just a kid. Okay, a stupid kid. But he’d had a whole lifetime before him, time to learn, time to change. And now in the blink of an eye, all his time was up.
“He didn’t deserve to die,” I said shakily.
“Neither did you,” said George.
Our drinks came and they left me alone to deal with my thoughts while they talked of mutual acquaintances across the state, each getting a feel for the other by whom they admired or considered a showboater or thought was abusing his power.
Eventually, I came back to them and looked around the restaurant. It was neat and clean but decidedly downscale in appearance. The frozen margaritas were pleasantly tart, though, and the nachos supremo were wheat-flour nachos, not cornmeal. The clientele seemed to be mostly Mexican—day laborers, domestics, and hospital custodians—yet I did see several white doctors and nurses sprinkled around.
“How did a place like this slip under the zoning radar?” I asked.
“Dr. Ledwig,” George said. “He argued that if these people were going to come up here and work for us, they deserved a place they could relax in, a place they could afford. As you see, though, no garish neon outside, no calling attention to itself. He wasn’t that liberal.”
“I’m pretty sure Sunny Osborne killed him,” I said, licking a fleck of salt from my fingertip.
Underwood almost choked on his drink. “Huh?”
“I had plenty of time to think about things while I was sawing my way through that seat belt,” I told him. “What did the UPS driver tell you?”
“That the woman was driving a vanity plate with ‘SUN’ on it.”
“Sunny, right?”
His nod confirmed my theory. “Yeah. And tonight she admitted it.”
“She admitted killing Ledwig?”
“No. Just that she was there. Stopped by to see if Mrs. Ledwig wanted to play tennis and left him alive and well.”
I shook my head. “I really, seriously doubt that.”
“But you’re her alibi for Osborne’s death,” he protested.
“Yes.”
“Who’s Osborne?” asked Dwight. “And how did you get to be somebody’s alibi? I thought you said you weren’t going to get involved.”
“I’m not involved,” I said. “Not really. But people tell me things.”
He gave me a sardonic look. “Maybe if you didn’t go poking around, asking questions . . .”
George smiled and Dwight just shook his head. “Okay, tell me.”
Anything to take my mind off Jason Barringer. Together, George and I brought him up to speed on the two deaths.
“What you might not know,” I told George, “is that Ledwig called Norman Osborne the night before he was killed and warned Osborne that he wouldn’t stand by and let him do something that was legal but unethical.”
“Which was?”
“Ledwig and Osborne used to be tight, right?”
George popped a nacho in his mouth and nodded.
“Then sometime late in the summer, Osborne started avoiding him. At the same time, though, he decided to accept Bobby Ashe’s offer of a merger. In fact, he pushed it through so fast that the Ashes got a better slice than they expected, according to Joyce. They kept the merger so quiet that even Ledwig didn’t get wind of it till the day before he was killed, two days before the final papers were signed that would make the partnership a done deal. Bobby and Joyce had stopped by the Ledwig house, and she told me Bobby let it slip. Trish Ledwig says that as soon as the Ashes were gone, her dad called Osborne and said, ‘I can’t let you do this to them.’”
“Do what?” George asked. “The merger? Hell, that was good business for both of them.”
