She should take a page out of Tina Ledwig’s book and get herself a dog. Tina had always joked that if Carlyle died before her, she’d buy a little yippy dog the next day and sell that big house on Old Needham Road the next week.
True to her word, Tina had been in last week with her new King Charles spaniel and had asked them to list the house.
Her speed had startled Joyce. Weird to realize that it was only two weeks ago Sunday that she and Bobby had stopped by for a quick drink. She remembered how they had rolled their eyes at each other as Carlyle stomped around snorting so much fire over little Carla getting herself knocked up by some colored boy—as if that was the worst thing a kid could do to her parents—that Bobby’d told him about the merger just to take his mind off the baby. Next day, she and Bobby had driven down to Asheville to see about Bob Junior, and when they got back and heard that Carlyle was dead, it was hard to take in.
Yet, a week later, there was Tina sitting in her office, telling Joyce to sell the house.
“You sure you want to do something this serious this fast?” Joyce had asked her. “Most grief counselors advise waiting a year.”
“A year? Hell, no! I’ve hated that damn house from the beginning. Like living in a stone barn. Carla’s in a dorm at Tanser-Mac, Trish’ll be there or someplace else next year. What am I going to do with five bedrooms? I want y’all to find me a cozy little three-bedroom condo right next to the fairway at Rabbit Hollow, not an inch over twenty-five hundred square feet, you hear?”
“I don’t know if they come that small in Rabbit Hollow,” Joyce had said dryly, “but we’ll certainly find out.”
Like Bobby, she had grown up on White Fox Creek in a cold-water cabin with an outhouse out back. Five kids in a house whose entire four rooms would fit in the one room she’d used for the party last night, with space to spare. Even with all they’d spent on their children, the two of them sometimes looked around at how far they’d come, how much they’d acquired, and could hardly believe it.
And now—ta-da!—Rabbit Hollow!
If Carlyle had died a week earlier, she’d have had to send Tina to Norman, who held the exclusive on it. With the partnership a six-day-old done deal, though, she could show Tina any house there, and she’d immediately made an appointment to stop by the Ledwig house to take pictures and write up the specs, although Bobby and Norman both thought it was hardly worth going to that much trouble when she told them.
“Hell, it won’t stay on the market long enough to get the pictures developed unless you put them in the one-hour box,” they’d said.
“New neighbors?” said Sunny, who of course was there that day. “Let’s try to find a buyer that’ll be here year-round.”
With both Norman and Sunny facing her, only Joyce had seen Bobby make his gag-me face, but maybe Sunny was right to suggest it. Seasonal people weren’t as involved in the community and they didn’t care whether or not the roads ever got plowed. Some developments in the county were like ghost towns from the end of October to the first of May and the streets never saw a snowplow all winter long because no one was there.
Of the eight houses on the half-mile stretch of Old Needham Road between the Ashes’ house at the bottom and the Osbornes’ at the top, three had already been closed for the winter and the other two would be by the middle of October. Nice to have the caretaker accounts, but sometimes those empty houses made Joyce feel awfully isolated.
The bell on the outer door jingled, abruptly interrupting her musings on all that had happened these last two weeks. Joyce looked through the glass front of her office to see one of their staff get up to greet the arrival. Almost immediately, it registered who he was and she went out to him.
“Hey, Sheriff! You finally ready to put a bid on that house Shirley likes?”
“Wish I could, Miss Joyce. You get the county commissioners to vote me a raise and we’ll sure talk about it.”
“Then I reckon you’re here about Norman Osborne?”
He nodded. “Me and some of my men are fixing to start an official search along Old Needham Road between your place and his, but I was wondering if we could search your house, too?”
“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.