“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.”
CHAPTER 9
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.)