High Country Fall Read online

Dwight’s mother, his two sisters, and his sister-in-law had already booked a luncheon date at the University Club in Raleigh for all the women in both families.

  Even Daddy. He didn’t say much, but his blue eyes twinkled whenever someone mentioned the wedding.

  Dwight just laughed and took it all in stride.

  I was starting to freak.

  “They act like this is the love match of the century instead of a sensible arrangement,” I told Minnie.

  Minnie is married to my brother Seth. She’s also my campaign manager. It was Minnie who advised me that it would be politically expedient to quit looking for the moon and settle down with someone respectably earthbound instead. She was surprised as hell that I’d taken her advice and as pleased as the rest that the someone turned out to be Dwight Bryant.

  “Won’t hurt you at the polls to be married to a well-regarded deputy sheriff like Dwight,” she said, but when she started cooing like our nieces, I immediately disillusioned her.

  “Romantic love has nothing to do with this,” I told her. “It’s pure pragmatism. Sure, we’re fond of each other, but it’s love based on friendship and mutual history, not romance. He’s as tired of channel surfing as I am, so it just makes sense.”

  “Oh, honey,” Minnie said, looking bereft. “No real passion?”

  “I didn’t say there was no passion,” I told her, unable to repress a grin.

  “Well, thank goodness for that much,” she said, smiling back.

  “But it’s turning into a three-ring circus. Even at the courthouse. Clerks go out of their way to stop me in the halls and tell me how nice Dwight is. Like he’s got a halo and they don’t think I’m good enough for him. It’s bad enough that Aunt Sister and Nadine and Doris think like that, I don’t need it at work, too. Paul Archdale even had the nerve to ask me if I was letting personal considerations color my judgment when Dwight testified against his client this afternoon.”

  “Were you?”

  “Of course not,” I huffed. “Paul knows his client’s guilty as sin. He was just trying to get a lighter sentence. I may be thinking about marrying Dwight, but that doesn’t mean I’ve quit thinking.”

  “Dwight’s ring on your finger means you’re more than just thinking about it,” Minnie said gently.

  We both glanced down at the ring, an old-fashioned square-cut diamond flanked by two smaller stones. I pulled it off and balanced it on the palm of my hand, where it gleamed and shot out sparks of color in the sunshine.

  “I don’t know, Minnie. I’m beginning to think this marriage is going to cause more problems than it’ll solve.”

  “No, it won’t,” she soothed. “You and Dwight will be good for each other, and it would embarrass him to death if you back out now, so you put that ring right back on your finger where it belongs. A lot of people care about both of you, so the two of y’all getting together’s bound to be a nine-days’ wonder. They’ll settle down once they get used to the idea.”

  “Another week?” I asked glumly. “I don’t know if I can take it.”

  Happily, I didn’t have to.

  That very evening, there was a message from Roger Longmire, Chief District Court Judge in our district. When I returned his call, he said, “Got anything sensitive or pressing on your calendar?”

  “Not that I know of,” I told him.

  “Good. I’ve been asked if I could spare someone to hold court up in Cedar Gap.”

  “Here am I, Lord, send me,” I said prayerfully. Cedar Gap is ’way the other side of the state, a good five-or six-hour drive from Colleton County.

  Longmire snorted. He knows the Bible even better than I do. “When did you turn into Isaiah?”

  “The minute you offered me a legitimate reason to head for the hills.”

  “Getting a little hot for you down here in the flatlands?”

  Was that a chuckle in his voice? I considered for a moment. “Minnie called you, didn’t she?”

  “Good woman, your sister-in-law,” he said blandly. “I owe her a lot. Did you know she was head of the Colleton County Democratic Women the first year I ran for the bench?”

  CHAPTER 2

  After Judge Longmire’s call on Friday evening, Dwight and I spent half of Saturday walking around my small two-bedroom house out here on the family farm, trying to decide where to add on a new and larger master bedroom so that we could keep my old one in permanent readiness for his son. I hadn’t seen Cal since Dwight told him about us, but he’s a nice little boy and we get along just fine every time Dwight brings him out to swim in the pond or to ride the horses or the four-wheelers my nieces and nephews are variously addicted to.

  Even though my house sits a half-mile off the nearest road, I’ve never had a chance to feel isolated. The farm is crisscrossed with dirt lanes that the whole family use as shortcuts or racetracks, and April spotted us on her way over to Daddy’s with a sweet potato pie still warm from the oven. April moves walls the way other women move furniture, and my brother Andrew grumbles that he never knows from one month to the next whether he’ll get up some night to go to the bathroom and find their bedroom moved to the other side of the house before he can get back. Nevertheless, she made some sensible suggestions about water lines and septic tanks before she left, and so did Seth and Will when they came by after lunch looking for Haywood, who showed up a few minutes later on one of the farm’s smaller tractors.

  Will’s the one who actually built my house, and Seth can find his way around a blueprint, too, but Haywood knows precious little beyond the basics. Didn’t stop him from telling us what he’d do if it was him, though. Or Robert either, who had tired of waiting for Haywood to bring the tractor over and had come to find him.

  I excused myself to go do laundry and they were still at it two loads later.

  Carrying a fresh jug of iced tea and a half-dozen plastic cups, I rejoined them in time to hear Robert say, “—and build it from right there.”

  “Or we could just build a new house in Maine,” I said, setting the jug and cups on the back of the tractor.

  Will and Dwight laughed as I perched cross-legged on the open tailgate of Dwight’s pickup to pour them tea. Robert and Haywood didn’t get it.

  “Maine?” said Haywood. “Now why would you want to build a house ’way up yonder?”

  “Get your cup and let’s go,” Seth told him with a big grin. “I’ll explain it to you over at Robert’s.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said as the last of my brothers disappeared down the rutted lane.

  “Why?” Dwight asked. “Think I don’t know the way they like to help and give advice? Besides, you didn’t have anything special planned, did you?”

  “Well, when you called this morning, you said something about wanting to wet a line and I had my mouth set for pan fish.”

  “Really?” He moved closer and brushed my hair back from my face with both hands so he could examine my mouth with exaggerated care. “Nope, that’s not how it looks to me.”

  His lips were mere inches from mine and I didn’t need a second invitation to put my arms around his neck and let him swing me down from the tailgate, although I could have taken him right there on the back of the truck. Summer had been long and celibate for both of us; and my house here, his apartment in Dobbs, on a couch, on a bed, on a floor or table, we had spent these past ten days making up for lost time. Hard to remind myself that I’d spent my whole life treating him like another one of the boys—not when the mere touch of his hand on my hair was now enough to unleash every hormone in my body.

  It was full dark by the time we were ready to think about food again. Much too late to try to catch our supper out on the pond. Instead, we went over to Jerry’s Steak & Catfish House and had a waitress bring it to us with a side dish of onion rings and a basket of hushpuppies.

  Big mistake.

  Every third person who passed by our table was someone who’d known Dwight or me from birth or grade school, and they each had to stop and tell us how surprised
they were when they heard we were engaged, “but we’re wishing y’all lots of luck and happiness.” Whenever I lifted my eyes from my plate, I saw beaming faces watching us.

  “Thank God for Cedar Gap,” I said when we were back in Dwight’s truck, headed for home. “Don’t you wish you could get out of Dodge, too?”

  “Why?” he asked, sounding honestly puzzled.

  “The way everybody’s burbling over us? It’s not making you crazy?”

  He grinned. “Nope.”

  “Well, it is me. I feel like I’m drowning in a tub of warm honey.”

  “Not me. I sort of like it that people seem happy for us. Besides, you’re the one who thought that getting married would generate some political goodwill, remember? Seems to me it’s working.”

  I sighed and glumly admitted he was right.

  At the house, he didn’t switch off the truck. “You’ll want to pack tonight and get an early start tomorrow and I’d just be in the way.”

  It was a sensible decision, especially since all our appetites were temporarily sated. Nevertheless, I was irrationally disappointed. We’d been together only a few short days, yet I was already getting used to his comforting bulk in my bed, and when he stayed over, I found I liked waking up to the smell of coffee … among other things.

  I reached for the door handle. “See you next weekend, then.”

  “Actually, you won’t,” he reminded me. “I’ll be out that way myself. We’ll probably pass each other on I-40 Saturday morning.”

  I’d forgotten that he was due to spend the weekend in the mountains of Virginia with Cal.

  Slow as Dwight drives unless he’s expediting to a crime scene, I figured I could be halfway home before he got out of the state. “Want to try and meet up for breakfast in Burlington or Greensboro?”

  “Sounds good,” he said, “but I plan to get on the road real early.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll call you.”

  He leaned over to kiss me goodnight and I deliberately kept it short and casual so he wouldn’t think I was trying to change his mind about staying the night. His smile in the glow of the dash lights was teasing. “Don’t go driving off any mountains while you’re out there, you hear?”

  He knows I don’t have a head for heights.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be hugging the center line all the way.”

  Actually, except for my ears popping every time the elevation rose too quickly, the drive out next morning was fine.

  When I left home at sunrise, the trees along Possum Creek were just starting to turn. Fall was late this year. Sassafras and crape myrtles had been showing a few orange and pink leaves for a couple of weeks, but oaks and maples were still mostly green.

  By the time I reached the foothills around Hickory, the gums and tulip poplars were bright yellow. At Morganton, I left I-40 and angled northwest toward Lafayette County and Cedar Gap. As I passed over the eastern continental divide and started down a steep decline, late-morning sunshine lit up the valley from one side to the other and range after range of hills spread out before me in glorious fall colors. Heaven’s streets of gold are going to look pretty bland compared to those brilliant oranges and burning reds, the tawny browns and flaming coppers of trees I couldn’t begin to identify.

  I almost ran off the road trying to take it all in and automatically braked to give myself time to drink in the beauty.

  Behind me, a car honked angrily, then zipped around me. The driver gave me the finger as he passed and I heard him yell, “Fricking leafer! Get off the goddamned road!”

  Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have slowed so abruptly, but he didn’t have to go ballistic. Thoroughly steamed, I picked up speed and kept my mind on my driving the rest of the way.

  Lafayette County is tucked into a fold of the Blue Ridge Mountains right smack up against the Tennessee border. It’s one of the smallest counties in North Carolina. In square miles, its actual footprint is only a sixth the size of Colleton County’s, but if you could lay it out somewhere and iron its craggy old hills as flat as Colleton’s landscape, it’d probably be half again bigger.

  Cedar Gap sits right below a ridge that separates two valleys. It’s not the biggest town in Lafayette County—that honor belongs to Howards Ford down in the valley below. Indeed, Howards Ford was the site of the first courthouse, but it was burned during the Civil War when feelings between secessionists and unionists ran high, so the county seat was moved temporarily to Cedar Gap. After the war, the change became permanent. The “new” courthouse was struck by lightning in the late seventies and burned to the ground, which is why the current courthouse is built of native undressed stone and blends into the landscape like a modern, low-slung office building rather than something with Corinthian columns and a Grecian frieze.

  I stopped at the grocery store in Howards Ford for some basic essentials and made a mental note of where a drugstore was since I’d been warned that Cedar Gap has none. No Wal-Mart, Kmart, movie theater, no OfficeMax or Home Depot either. A three-lane road winds from the valley up to Cedar Gap—three lanes so that cars don’t get stuck behind eighteen-wheelers that can’t seem to clock more than twenty-five miles an hour getting up that grade. Here at noon on a beautiful blue-sky Sunday, the road was clogged. Not with trucks, though.

  With tourists.

  While every third car seemed to have a Florida license plate, I did see plates from several other states, all moving antlike up and down the mountain. Cameras poked from the open windows and I could almost hear the passengers telling their driver to slow down! Wait! Look over there at that bunch of yellow trees! Oooh, see those red maples! Stop!

  No wonder that earlier driver had given me the finger.

  There are numerous scenic pull-off spots along this road, and every one of them was packed by tourists who hung over the rails with their video cameras to get a better view or a more artistic angle on those spectacular fall colors. The eleven miles between Howards Ford and Cedar Gap took me forever, and when I got there, it was more of the same—every parking spot taken, every sidewalk bench filled. A large bronze monument to World War I sat in the center of a traffic circle on one of the few pieces of purely level ground in town, and the low stone walls that circled it were lined with happy tourists who licked ice-cream cones from the hand-dipped ice-cream shop across the street while they watched the passing show.

  As I waited at one of Main Street’s three traffic lights, I looked around to get my bearings. Except for the monument and the ice-cream store that was still called Roxie’s and still sold hand-dipped ice cream according to the sign in its window, nothing looked familiar, but then I was barely eight years old my one and only visit here with Mother and Aunt Zell.

  Mother adored Daddy and she loved her sons and stepsons, yet there were times when she felt suffocated and exasperated by so much testosterone. That’s when she’d call her sister, and the three of us would take off for a just-us-girls adventure.

  Since I was last here, Cedar Gap had evidently come down with what some of us down east call the “Cary syndrome.”

  Cary used to be a charming, if somewhat scruffy, little village a few miles west of Raleigh. Then high-end developers moved in, the town was “revitalized,” and gradually the town board filled up with such fierce zoning zealots that houses and storefronts are now forced to conform to a limited range of bland colors and architectural styles, signs are discreet and almost invisible, and every lawn is groomed and manicured into such prettiness that all individuality has been tidied away—the Stepford wife of North Carolina towns.

  Like Cary, Cedar Gap looked to be well on its way to becoming picture perfect, too. No ugly “big box” stores up here. Huge old sycamore and oak trees almost met overhead, and Main Street consisted of boutiques, upscale souvenir shops, real estate agencies, and restored Victorian houses that had been turned into B and Bs or pricey restaurants that catered to the tourist trade. A handful of law offices clustered around the courthouse just off the traffic circle here in the
middle of town. Each sported dark green balloon awnings in keeping with all the other businesses. The whole town is only six or eight blocks long, and cedar-shingled houses and condos stair-stepped up and down the mountain on either side, through thickets of hemlocks and hardwoods. Banks of rhododendron bushes filled all the spaces in between.

  Eventually, the light changed and oncoming traffic finally cleared enough to let me make a left turn through a set of gates next to an old stone church.

  My cousin Beverly, who lives in Durham, has a condo here and she’s always urging me to use it during off-season. Leaf season still had a few weeks to go, so when I called her Friday night, it was only to ask if she could recommend a place.

  “Oh, you’d have to pay an arm and a leg for something up there right now,” she said. “If you could even find a vacancy. The leaves are supposed to peak this week. But you can use our condo if you don’t mind the mess it’s in—”

  “It’s not rented?”

  “—and if you don’t mind sharing it with the twins on the weekend.”

  “The twins? I thought they were in school down at Wilmington.” Beverly’s daughters are nineteen and sweet kids, but not rocket scientist material.

  “Nope. They flunked out before Christmas,” she said cheerfully. “We’ve had them at Tanser-MacLeod since last January.”

  I’d never heard of Tanser-MacLeod and said so.

  “It’s in Howards Ford. Used to be a junior college up until about three or four years ago. Fred and I thought a small campus might work better for them. Anyhow, we’re in the process of renovation and they’re doing the painting, which is why the condo’s not rented out right now. We need to get it refurbished before it starts snowing. You’re more than welcome to use it if you can walk around paint buckets.”

  Better than sleeping in my car, I assured her.

  Beverly said her unit was three levels up from the street. Following her directions, I drove through the gates of the condo, up a slight incline to the parking area that served the first level, then up a steeper drive onto the second level that curved around to a driveway that I swear to God was only about three feet wide and went straight up the side of the hill.