As soon as I read her description of her husband, I remembered who they were—early fifties, pleasant. They laughed at our jokes and slid right into the music with no fuss. I did notice that they were better dressed than we were, though. Nothing flashy. Their jeans and loafers were almost as worn as ours, but theirs had come with designer names and upscale brands; and their instruments were quality models, not the pawnshop finds that most of ours were. Will said they were down for one of his estate sales in Raleigh and I’d wondered at the time what his motive was in bringing them out to the country.
With Will, there’s usually a motive.
He’s three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four children, and he’s usually got a spare ace or three tucked in his sock or up his sleeve. A fast talker in both senses, Will earns a decent living as an auctioneer and appraiser, two callings that allow him to set his own hours; and although he knows how houses are put together and taken apart, which is why I let him supervise the building of my house, he’s much more interested in the market value of a house’s contents. He has Mother’s charm and Daddy’s streak of lawlessness. Everybody likes Will as long as they’re not the ones he’s messing over. It was not like him to be concerned about whether or not I had a social life while I was up here in the mountains, so he probably had an ulterior motive for strengthening the ties between the Ashes and himself.
Nevertheless, I
“Wonderful!” said Joyce Ashe when I called the number she’d included in her e-mail. “We’re up so many twisty roads you’d never find us. Why don’t I have somebody pick you up? Say seven-thirty?”
“That’ll be fine,” I agreed and told her where I was staying.
“Casual dress and—hey! You didn’t happen to bring your guitar, did you?”
“Actually, I did.” There was a tricky chord change on a song I was learning and I’d stuck it in the trunk of my car thinking I’d get a chance to work it out. “Does this mean there’ll be playing tonight?”
She laughed. “Always. Unless you want to sing for your supper?”
Dogs don’t exactly howl when I open my mouth, but I’d as soon play Beethoven sonatas on the spoons as sing alone in front of strangers.
“Miss Deborah?” asked the man who knocked on my door an hour later. “I’m William Edward Johnson. Miss Joyce said you could use a lift out to their place?”
My driver proved to be a tubby little man pushing seventy-five like it was fifty. With his gray tie and black pants and a black vest buttoned over a long-sleeved maroon shirt, he looked like management. But his cowhide work boots and the tufts of gray hair that curled up around the edges of a grease-stained Ford Motors ball cap suggested he might be the help.
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?”
