But Dwight wasn’t there, and okay, I’ll admit it: curiosity has always been an itch I have to scratch. Like chigger bites.
Five-thirty is smack in the middle of Dobbs’s moderate rush hour back home, but here in Cedar Gap it seemed to bring a temporary lull. Most of the leaf lovers had dwindled with the setting sun; the rest were sitting around the monument, licking ice-cream cones and soaking up the last rays of sunshine, while the seasonal people hadn’t yet come out for dinner.
The front part of the real estate office was dark, but I could see Joyce Ashe at the back when I rapped on the glass door. She looked up with a frown that immediately changed into a professional smile of welcome even before she recognized who it was.
“Hey, Deborah!” she said, holding the door wide for me. “Looking to buy a vacation place?”
“Sorry,” I said. “What I’m actually looking for is someone to come have a drink with me. You free?”
“Now that’s the best offer I’ve had all day! Give me ten minutes to finish up this new house and I’m your gal.”
While her fingers flew across the keyboard of her computer, I looked through a photo album of properties they had listed. A prominent bulletin board labeled “Osborne-Ashe High Country Realty” was covered with various architectural renderings for the ambitious facelift they planned to give this building.
It was closer to fifteen minutes before Joyce gave a sigh of satisfaction and the laser printer came to life and began cranking out copies of the new material, complete with color photos and all specifications.
“Done!” she said. “I’ve earned that drink.”
“I’m surprised you’re so hands-on,” I said. “I should think you’d have a secretary to do all this.”
“I do have a secretary. Two secretaries, actually, and Bobby nags me to delegate more, but I like the detail work, keeping tabs on what’s happening where. I know I’ll have to change now that we’re getting so much bigger, but I also know I’m going to miss being down in the trenches.”
“You’ll still be taking on all of Norman Osborne’s properties, then?”
“Oh, yes. Bobby’s down in Howards Ford right now, going over stuff with the lawyers and the insurance people. You wouldn’t believe—” She broke off with a wry smile. “Well, yes, I guess you would believe, being a lawyer yourself once, right?”
“Right,” I said, smiling back. “Why draw up just one document when ten will impress the clients?”
She laughed and reached for the red jacket that went with her tailored navy blue dress. “Drinks. Let me think … you been to the Rock yet?”
I shook my head and she picked up the nearest phone, punched in some numbers, and said, “Kevin? Joyce Ashe. A friend and I are headed your way. Any chance you could clear us a table out on the terrace? … Great! Be there in five minutes.”
She hung up and said, “It’s right outside of town on the main road. Follow me.”
I trailed her white Plymouth four-by-four up Main Street, past the condo, and on out of town. As promised, in less than five minutes we were pulling into the busy parking lot of what looked like a rustic hunting lodge built on the side of the mountain. Joyce zoomed right over to a spot on the very edge of the downsloping lot, and although there was a space next to her and although I’ve never had any reason to doubt my emergency brakes, I waited till someone pulled out of a level space nearer the front, next to a huge granite boulder that probably gave the place its name.
“Flatlander!” Joyce gibed.
“Hey, what can I tell you?” I said sheepishly.
A middle-aged man came through the crowded room and Joyce introduced me to the owner, who led us outside. The night air was chilly and my jacket wasn’t very heavy, but I needn’t have worried. Out on the terrace, each table had an umbrella, and each umbrella shaft contained a heating element that beamed down enough warmth to keep us comfortable.
The view seemed to stretch east for a million miles, with row after row of blue mountaintops blending one into the other. It was that magical hour when the sun had sunk behind the ridge and a haze rose from the valley below. Night had not completely captured the sky, yet a couple of bright stars dotted the dark blue above us. Our drinks arrived just when the moon began to edge itself up from the horizon, like a golden swimmer pulling himself up from a dark pool.
“This is so beautiful,” I sighed.
Our drinks came—a Bloody Mary for me, a martini for her—and we raised our glasses to the harvest moon as it cleared the horizon, big and yellow.
“Is it full tonight, I wonder?” Joyce asked, draining half her glass with one thirsty swallow.
“Not till Friday,” I said.
She was amused. “You carry an almanac around with you or are you just romantic?”
“Some of both, probably,” I admitted.
She glanced at my ring. “He romantic, too?”
Dwight? Romantic?
“’Fraid not,” I said. “What about Bobby?”
“Only when he’s romancing a prospective client,” she said with a broad smile.
I told her how I’d known Dwight since infancy, then asked how she and Bobby met.
“He was the boy next door, if you can call a hollow beyond the nearest ridge next door.”
