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 ceiling.
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.”