Free High Country Fall by Margaret Maron Page B

management. But his cowhide work boots and the tufts of gray hair that curled up around the edges of a grease-stained Ford Motors ball cap suggested he might be the help.
    A classic BMW convertible idled in the drive. The top was down and the creamy leather seats gleamed beneath the streetlight. Cool ride, right? Did I mention that the fenders were dented, the paint was chipped, the upholstery was in tatters, and the motor roared like a Mack truck?
    “This is very kind of you, Mr. Johnson,” I said and handed him my guitar case while he held the car door for me.
    “Aw, call me Billy Ed,” he said, slinging my guitar into the backseat. “And I guess you’re Miss Debbie, right?”
    “Wrong. Sorry. It’s either Deborah or hey you.”
    Before I could get my seat belt fastened, he was peeling rubber, headed down that steep drive like a downhill skier trying to make time to the first slalom. The rear end fishtailed slightly as he braked and then made an immediate left turn to head up Main Street away from the center of town. He seemed totally oblivious to the people he’d cut off, just gunned on up the hill for about three miles, before making another left.
    My hair kept whipping all around my face in the cool night air and Billy Ed glanced over. “Want me to stop and put up the top, Miss Deborah?”
    “No,” I said. “I love it.”
    “Good, ’cause the top’s so tore, wouldn’t do us much good anyhow.” He reached under the seat and handed me a slightly cleaner ball cap.
    With one hand on the steering wheel, the other fumbled to extract a cigarette from a crumpled pack.
    I held my breath as he touched the glowing lighter to the tip of his cigarette, then returned the lighter to its hole, all the while negotiating a road that twisted worse than a black snake climbing a light pole. Every time we met a car from the opposite direction, I was uncomfortably aware that the road had no guardrails and that the narrow shoulders seemed to drop off into a dark abyss, despite the moon that was trying to break through some thin clouds.
    “Dim your Gee-dee lights!” Billy Ed shouted when he brushed by a large vehicle with its headlights on high.
    The other car was barely moving and its brake lights lit up the night.
    “Turons!” he said derisively as he shifted gears. “Know how you can tell tourists from the natives?”
    “No.”
    “By the smell of their burnt-out brakes. Ought not to be allowed out at night, scared as they are.”
    I was glad he couldn’t see my white knuckles.
    “So how you know Miss Joyce and Bobby?” he asked above the roar of the motor.
    “My brother introduced them to me, but I don’t really know them,” I said, leaning toward him to counterbalance the centrifugal force that wanted to sling me out of the car as he cornered sharply. “What about you?”
    “I took on their old house up on the other side of the ridge about four or five years ago.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah, their kids were grown and they wanted something smaller, closer to their work.”
    “What sort of work do they do?”
    “Real estate. Property management. They have exclusive rights to Pritchard Cove.”
    “Pritchard Cove? Isn’t that where Dr. Ledwig lived?”
    “Ledwig?” He snorted. “Nope. I did hear tell he wanted to dynamite it off the face of the mountain, though.”
    “Why?” Not that I cared, but anything to distract me from this headlong hurtle into hell. “What
is
Pritchard Cove anyhow?”
    “Well, some folks would say it’s the best-planned community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Others like Ledwig’ll tell you it’s a desecration of unspoiled land. Pritchard Cove was a mote in his eye. And not a teeny-tiny little mote either—it was a Gee-dee two-by-four beam. Wrecked his view.”
    I thought back to the pictures I’d seen in court today. Admittedly, the focus was on the deck and on the victim’s body, not the view from that deck, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything except a long vista of