She pronounced it “holler,” an endearing holdover of her native mountain speech, much the way my daddy and older brothers still say “chimbly” for chimney or “tar arn” for tire iron, or the way our down easters say “hoi toide” for high tide. I treasure these remnants of dialects. When television finally finishes smoothing out all the regional differences, we will have lost a special part of our heritage.
“We both grew up poorer than Job’s turkey, but Bobby always had big dreams. We were thirteen years old, standing barefooted in White Fox Creek, when he told me he was going to marry me and give me diamonds and pearls.” She glanced at the diamonds on her sturdy fingers, as if pinching herself that they were really there. “It was a rough and rocky road in the beginning.” Her eyes grew dreamy as she sipped her martini.
“And now you’re the biggest real estate and management firm in Lafayette County,” I said softly.
“Bobby’s doing, not mine. I was happy where we were, but he always felt we got Norman’s crumbs. Talk about romancing! Not that he sucked up to Norman. He’s too proud for that. But he laid out all the facts and figures of how working together could do us both better than working apart, and eventually Norman came around. In fact, once he was convinced, you’d have thought it was Norman pushing the merger instead of us. He agreed to things Bobby was sure he wouldn’t just because he didn’t want to hold up the paperwork.”
She glanced at her watch, then excused herself to visit the restroom and call Bobby. “I’ll tell him we’re here. We might as well stay for dinner if you don’t have anything else going. They have great steaks.”
“Fine,” I said.
As she walked away, I signaled the waiter.
“Another round of the same, only make my Bloody Mary a virgin.”
I didn’t have a husband coming who could drive me home if I went over the limit. And if I drove off the edge of the road on the way back to town, I didn’t want it to be because I could blow an eight.
“Whoa!” said Joyce when she returned to find a fresh martini before her. “I need food if I’m going to have another drink. Bobby was already on the way. Want to split an appetizer while we wait for him?”
“Sure,” I said and steered our choice toward the fried mozzarella sticks, figuring we wouldn’t get many and that they would be salty enough to keep her sipping from that cocktail glass.
I was right on both counts. Not that I really needed to ply her with gin. Joyce was too gregarious not to talk freely.
“It must be awful for you and Bobby,” I said. “Losing two friends like this.”
“And in our own house.” Sadness mingled with indignation. “With one of my own candleholders.”
“Any ideas as to who wanted them dead?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been over it and over it in my mind and the only person who might have had it in for both of them is Simon Proffitt. Remember him from Monday night?”
I nodded. The dueling fiddler.
“Carlyle and Norman wanted to buy him out and use that lot for something more in keeping with Cedar Gap’s image since it’s right there at the town entrance. They wouldn’t take no for an answer either. He said they were worrying the heart and soul out of him and if they didn’t quit it, he was going to take ol’ Jessie to them.”
“Who’s ol’ Jessie? His dog?”
“His twelve-gauge shotgun,” she said dryly. “Simon’s a holdover from the old days, back when Cedar Gap was just another little hillbilly mountain town. Then Norman and some others got a whiff of the money that could be made if they beautified and landscaped and made it look exclusive. People were so poor out here that most of them were willing to do just about anything to attract big spenders.”
“But Proffitt wasn’t one of them?” I asked, nibbling on a cheese stick.
“To put it mildly. He rallied enough like-minded businesses to grandfather in what they had, but the rest of us —and yeah, Bobby and I were just as bad—fell right into line. And it certainly worked. The town is beautiful now, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, and said truthfully, because she’s right: Cedar Gap
“Thirty years ago, there wasn’t a house in the county worth more than fifty thousand dollars. Now you probably can’t buy a cold-water shack for that little.”
“Proffitt’s not happy with the changes?”
“And I can’t fault him for it. No, I can’t. The way they hound him over all the new rules and regulations? He can’t do squat without the town council coming down on him with a writ or a warning. He says it’s like sitting bare-assed on a hornet’s nest. Least little move and they pop him one. That’s why I could see him losing it if Carlyle or Norman said the wrong thing at the wrong time, but still …”
Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “I don’t know, Deborah. Unless it’s him, I can’t think who else it could be. Sam Tysinger had words with them both, but Sam has words with everybody sooner or later. Doesn’t mean a thing. And let’s get real. Nobody’s going to kill because they had to replace a big sign with a smaller one. Besides, that was six months ago. Now, if serious money was involved—” She hesitated, and then, with a what- the-hell shrug, said, “If Sheriff Horton didn’t know for a fact that Bobby and I were down in Asheville when Carlyle was killed, I’m sure he’d think one of us killed Norman.”
“Because of the partnership insurance on him?” Not by a flicker of an eyelash would I let on that I knew why they’d gone to Asheville that day.
Joyce nodded. “Short term, we really are worth a lot more today than we were three days ago, but long term? Norman was such a rainmaker. He charmed everybody. We don’t have a single penny now that we wouldn’t have had eventually if he’d lived.”
She had caught our waiter’s eye before and made a circular motion with her index finger. As she described the plans Osborne and Bobby had made to expand into the neighboring counties, the waiter arrived with another round of drinks. I sipped mine cautiously, unsure if this was the real thing. Joyce was now on her third martini and, except for the way she relaxed a little deeper into her wicker chair, I couldn’t tell that it had any effect on her.
