Free High Country Fall by Margaret Maron Page A

Halloween?”), from my cousin Beverly (“Forgot to tell you that there’s no garbage pickup. You’ll have to use the county’s waste site on Ridge Road.”), and a one-liner from Dwight (“You get there okay?”).
    I had my finger poised over the delete button for a message entitled “Want to party?” when I noticed that the unfamiliar sender had an
NC.rr.com
in the server tag. It was a woman Will had brought to one of the weekly family music sessions we hold at a cousin’s barbecue house out near the farm. So many of us play the fiddle, guitar, banjo, or harmonica that even though none of us go every single week, there’re usually at least six or eight who show up after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to eat barbecue, play and sing the old songs, or, as Haywood puts it, just fellowship together.
    Your brother Will says you’re up here alone this week? I know this isn’t much notice, but we’re having a party tonight and would love to have you join us. You probably don’t remember us, but Will invited us to sit in with y’all when we were down in the Raleigh area last winter. (My husband Bobby has a big walrus mustache and plays guitar and harmonica. I don’t have a mustache, but I do play the fiddle.)
    Joyce Ashe
    As soon as I read her description of her husband, I remembered who they were—early fifties, pleasant. They laughed at our jokes and slid right into the music with no fuss. I did notice that they were better dressed than we were, though. Nothing flashy. Their jeans and loafers were almost as worn as ours, but theirs had come with designer names and upscale brands; and their instruments were quality models, not the pawnshop finds that most of ours were. Will said they were down for one of his estate sales in Raleigh and I’d wondered at the time what his motive was in bringing them out to the country.
    With Will, there’s usually a motive.
    He’s three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four children, and he’s usually got a spare ace or three tucked in his sock or up his sleeve. A fast talker in both senses, Will earns a decent living as an auctioneer and appraiser, two callings that allow him to set his own hours; and although he knows how houses are put together and taken apart, which is why I let him supervise the building of my house, he’s much more interested in the market value of a house’s contents. He has Mother’s charm and Daddy’s streak of lawlessness. Everybody likes Will as long as they’re not the ones he’s messing over. It was not like him to be concerned about whether or not I had a social life while I was up here in the mountains, so he probably had an ulterior motive for strengthening the ties between the Ashes and himself.
    Nevertheless, I
was
at loose ends this evening and I’ve always been up for a party.
    “Wonderful!” said Joyce Ashe when I called the number she’d included in her e-mail. “We’re up so many twisty roads you’d never find us. Why don’t I have somebody pick you up? Say seven-thirty?”
    “That’ll be fine,” I agreed and told her where I was staying.
    “Casual dress and—hey! You didn’t happen to bring your guitar, did you?”
    “Actually, I did.” There was a tricky chord change on a song I was learning and I’d stuck it in the trunk of my car thinking I’d get a chance to work it out. “Does this mean there’ll be playing tonight?”
    She laughed. “Always. Unless you want to sing for your supper?”
    Dogs don’t exactly howl when I open my mouth, but I’d as soon play Beethoven sonatas on the spoons as sing alone in front of strangers.
    “Miss Deborah?” asked the man who knocked on my door an hour later. “I’m William Edward Johnson. Miss Joyce said you could use a lift out to their place?”
    My driver proved to be a tubby little man pushing seventy-five like it was fifty. With his gray tie and black pants and a black vest buttoned over a long-sleeved maroon shirt, he looked like