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
(
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A little after nine, those who’d brought instruments started drifting over to the big stone fireplace to begin tuning up. I knew I must have eaten off all my lipstick, and my fingers were sticky. I looked around for a lavatory but the one on this level was occupied and Joyce Ashe invited me to go downstairs. “Second door on the left.”
Like the other staircases, this one was also built of black wrought iron and slabs of granite, and it curved down into a smaller space than the one I’d just left. Although this room too opened onto a terrace directly beneath the one overhead, its indirect lighting and cheerful patchwork accents gave it the look and feel of an intimate family den. There was no fireplace per se, but a waist-high rough oak shelf ran from one side of the rock wall to the other. It was at least eight inches thick, more than two feet wide, and looked as if it had been hewn with a hand ax out of the heart of a huge, majestic tree.
The shelf held a collection of wrought-iron candleholders of every shape and size, from a four-foot column suitable for a medieval cathedral to dainty slender sticks. Each was fitted with an appropriate white candle, whether thick and squat or tall and tapered. There had to be at least fifty clustered along the length of the shelf.
On the wall above the candles hung a large assortment of family snapshots, each in a different black wire frame. The central photograph was an eighteen-by-twenty-four of Joyce and Bobby Ashe surrounded by at least a dozen young children.
“Our grandchildren,” said Joyce as she came down the steps behind me. “They’re what it’s all about. Do you have children, Deborah?”
“No,” I answered. “But lots of nieces and nephews.”
“Not the same,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll see. Bobby fusses at me all the time for spoiling them, but he’s just as bad and it’s hard not to want to give them everything.”
“Do they all live around here?”
“I wish! Bob Junior and his family are down in Asheville, but the rest are scattered from Manteo to Murphy.”
“What about the Osbornes?” I asked. “Do they have children here?”
“No. Their one daughter’s the assistant choral director for a big church up in Washington. Lives in Georgetown now.”
There was a music stand over by the terrace doors and several instruments propped against the wall. Joyce picked up a guitar and a fiddle. “I’m so pleased you could make it tonight. You’ll have to come back with your brother sometime.”
“You mean Will?”
“Didn’t he tell you? We heard him auction off some furniture in Raleigh the last time we were down. He’s funny and sharp and really knows how to work a crowd, doesn’t he?”
“He does that,” I agreed.
“So we’ve asked him to come do next year’s auction. We have a huge one for charity every September.”
“Oh?”
“Oh yes. See, that’s when a lot of our older seasonal people decide to move into retirement homes or assisted living. Instead of carting everything back to Florida or wherever, half the time they’ll just give it to us and take the tax deduction.” She touched the most massive of her iron candlesticks. “This originally came out of a twelfth- century castle near Madrid. You can’t believe the quality of the goods. Brings people in from all over the Southeast. We cleared close to forty thousand this year.”
A man emerged from the lavatory down the hall in time to hear Joyce’s last remarks.
