“June? Marsha. It’s Friday night. I guess you’re still at the Laurel? Your mom called. She wants one of you to call her back, something about some cousin who’s planning to spend the week there? I think you’re about to be busted. How’s she not gonna know?”
Know what?
That they were lazy slobs who’d barely hit a lick on the paint job they were supposed to be doing?
That they’d lent the condo to friends without telling Beverly?
Before I could speculate further, the second message began to play. Beverly’s exasperated voice said, “Where
I lifted the receiver and, as soon as I heard the restored dial tone, found the twins’ number again and called it. After four rings, an answering machine kicked in: “Sorry we’re not here. Don’t you dare hang up without leaving us a message, though, you hear?”
I heard. “June? May? It’s Deborah. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m at the condo. Call me.”
I set the phone on the bedside table and got on with changing the sheets, trying to remember how long it’d been since I last saw the twins. At Aunt Sister’s birthday party back in early August?
Beverly is Aunt Sister’s daughter, so she and Fred and the twins would certainly have been there, but we’re such a big family it’s hard to keep track of who was where when.
Twins run in my father’s family, and nineteen years ago, when Beverly knew that she was carrying twin girls, she planned to name them either Hope and Faith or Elizabeth and Letitia—Betty and Letty for short. But the twins were born fifty minutes apart in the middle of the night.
The night of May thirty-first, to be precise.
Beverly being Beverly, she naturally took that as a sign and named them May and June. Sweet girls and identical as Xerox copies. Unfortunately, there are some in the family who think they only got one brain between them. (Of course, there are some who say the same about Haywood and Herman.)
A half-hour later, I had finished doing my bedroom and bath, had kicked enough stuff aside to vacuum a path from there to the front door, and was now ready to tackle the kitchen.
Once I located where the garbage bags were kept, the table and counters were soon cleared of fast-food and drink containers. The dishwasher was full of clean dishes, and after I put those away, I began to refill it with coffee mugs and stray pieces of tableware. When I opened the refrigerator to stow my perishables, I saw several bottles of beer alongside a decent head of lettuce, orange juice, milk, and were those homemade angel rolls in the bread drawer? There hadn’t been a baking sheet nor mixing bowl in the dishwasher, nevertheless, these could very well be some the twins had made.
Like Mother, like every other woman in her generation, Aunt Sister had tried to pass the art of breadmaking down to her daughters and granddaughters. I can make decent biscuits, but that’s about it for me; and Beverly’s not much better. For some reason, though, the twins took to baking like hogs to a mud bath. Whole wheat breads, rye loaves, pumpernickel, sourdough, Irish soda bread, puff pastry—if flour is involved, the twins can make it.
The yeasty fragrance when I opened the plastic bag made my mouth water and reminded my stomach that it hadn’t had lunch. I fixed myself a salad, snitched two of those rolls, and carried my food and the
I will forever be more partial to the coast, but as always happens each time I do venture west, I start to understand again why so many are drawn to the mountains.
Eventually I turned back to my food and to the front page of the little newspaper. A full half of that page was taken up by a single story. The heavy black headline read “Family Friend Charged in Doctor’s Death.” Beneath were two pictures. The first was a studio portrait of a pleasant-faced man who appeared to be in his early fifties. The second was a candid picture of two uniformed officers as they led a young man in handcuffs into the sheriff’s department here in Cedar Gap.
According to the paper, it was originally thought that Dr. Carlyle Ledwig, fifty-six, had accidentally fallen to his death about two weeks ago while repairing a deck that overlooked Pritchard Cove, wherever that was. “Working with wood helped Dr. Ledwig relax,” the paper informed me, lest I should think the late doctor couldn’t afford a carpenter.
From the deck to the first rocks below was a thirty-foot drop. His body had been discovered by a Daniel Freeman, twenty-one, a student at Tanser-MacLeod and a friend of the family. He had immediately called 911, but it was too late.
An autopsy disclosed that the doctor’s fatal head wound had come not from his fall but from a hammer blow, and a search of the ravine eventually located the hammer, its head still caked with blood. A week later, Daniel Freeman was arrested when a bloody fingerprint from the deck proved to be his. Traces of Dr. Ledwig’s blood were also found on the trousers and sneakers he’d been wearing. If the sheriff’s department had a theory as to Freeman’s motive, they had declined to share it with the
Having no hard facts about Freeman other than that he was from Durham, was a senior at Tanser-MacLeod, and had been dating Dr. Ledwig’s older daughter, the
I read of his birth in Florida, his degrees from universities in Chicago and New York, his early practice in Florida, his decision twenty years ago to relocate to Cedar Gap, where he headed up the geriatrics department at the local hospital and founded a geriatrics clinic in association with the hospital. His civic involvements seemed to include everything from town and county commissions to sitting on boards here and in Howards Ford. Among other things, he had funded the newly opened Carlyle G. Ledwig Senior Center, had taken active stands on environmental issues, and, according to the reporter, “had possessed the ability to persuade opposing sides to compromise and work together for the common good of Cedar Gap. Even those who disagreed with his stand on certain issues always agreed that he truly loved his adopted town.”
