“Not necessarily,” said June.
“Maybe,” said May, and repeated what Deborah had told them earlier this morning about looking for whose life would be easier with Dr. Ledwig gone.
“Who benefits? Besides Mom and Trish and me? Well, Mom controls everything till Trish’s twenty-five. The baby will be in first grade before we’re entitled to anything. And there was a lot of insurance—a regular policy for us and then one for his associates that covered the buyout of his share in the hospital and clinic if he died before retirement. It all goes into the estate. Guess it’s a good thing for Mom that the bartender out at the club remembers serving her a gin collins at two o’clock in the afternoon before the others showed up for doubles.”
Her young voice was bitter.
The twins looked at her compassionately, knowing how much Tina Ledwig’s alcoholism hurt.
“Nobody thinks for a moment that your mother—”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to say it.” Tears glistened again in Carla’s hazel eyes. “It wasn’t the world’s greatest marriage and they probably would’ve separated after Trish finished high school, but Dad would’ve been fair with her. He really was a good man. He didn’t just give lip service. Ethics were important to him.”
She blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her T-shirt and took a deep breath, trying to make herself stay objective. “But he did invest in real estate all over the High Country. For all I know, he could’ve pissed off a dozen Simon Proffitts. I guess I could ask Mr. Norman. He’ll know.” Then her shoulders slumped. “Or maybe not. He and Dad used to be really tight, but Trish said the funeral was the first time he’d been to the house since August.”
“Really?”
“They have a fight?”
“Who knows? Trish didn’t notice till he came, and that reminded her that she hadn’t seen him in like forever, and when she asked Mom why, Mom shrugged her off.”
“Betcha he’s somebody that could’ve walked up on that deck without your dad feeling threatened,” May said.
“I guess.”
“Will you at least ask your mother why they stopped being friends?”
“I can ask, but she’s so out of it half the time I don’t see how she can hit a ball back over the net without falling on her face.”
“All the same, maybe she or Trish heard him say something about troubles at the hospital or with patients at the geriatrics clinic.”
“And maybe Simon’s heard stuff.” June finished slicing the last of the cinnamon rolls. “When you don’t like somebody, you usually know who else has problems with him.”
For a few minutes, there was nothing but the sound of food preparation in the kitchen: Carla’s spatula as she kept the pecans moving in the skillet, the rhythmic beat of Kim’s knife against the chopping block, baking pans shuttling in and out of the ovens.
They were really getting this routine down good, May thought. Then she glanced up at the clock over the kitchen door. “Omigod! Look at the time! Half an hour till showtime, people! Did anybody fill the urns yet?”
“I did it when I first got here,” said Carla, turning the nuts into a bowl lined with paper towels to drain away any excess butter.
She hung her apron on a peg near the door, pulled off her T-shirt and hairnet, and slipped into a white blouse with ruffles at the neck and cuffs. She straightened the old-fashioned cameo on the black velvet ribbon around her neck and smoothed her long black skirt, then picked up a stack of neatly folded pink napkins beside the door and headed out to the dining room for a last-minute inspection.
“And listen, guys, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to cut out by two-fifteen today. I have a test at three and if I miss this one, I can’t make it up.”
“That’s okay,” said June. “We’ll manage.”
CHAPTER 14
TUESDAY, 11:05 A.M.
While two of Sheriff Horton’s detectives gave the Ashe home a final thorough search, several patrol officers spread out along Old Needham Road. The sheriff himself stood on the lower terrace with Lucius Burke and Captain George Underwood and looked down across the treetops into Pritchard Cove. The walkie-talkie in his hand occasionally emitted staticky bursts of speech. Somewhere down there, a couple of his men with binoculars were carefully scanning the mountainside for anything that might be a man. Already they had sent their colleagues scrambling to investigate two fallen trees and several rocks. It didn’t help that their description of Norman Osborne included brown slacks and a russet-colored sweater over a dark plaid shirt.
“Too bad he wasn’t wearing red,” said Burke as they waited.
“Wouldn’t make it any easier. Half the damn trees are red, too,” Horton said, nodding sourly toward a particularly brilliant maple.
“Yeah,” said George Underwood. As head of the detective squad, he had a pair of binoculars slung around his own neck and had already scoped out the area from here. “And even if they were all still green, you ever try to spot a cardinal singing in an oak tree?”
They agreed it was amazing the way bright-colored birds could melt into sunlit foliage.
“I keep telling the commissioners they need to let me have a bloodhound,” Horton grumbled. “God knows enough tourons get lost every year to justify the cost.”
Burke and Underwood maintained a discreet silence. Most tourists who wandered off the hiking trails usually wandered right back on again, and whenever someone did stay lost, as happened once or twice a season, they
