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:
“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.
