Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  I shuddered at the thought of having to live amid so many accidents waiting to happen.

  “These you can hold without feeling that they’ll shatter if you breathe on them,” Fliss said.

  She opened the glass door and put a beautiful lidded bowl in my hand. The grays and purples were a dead giveaway.

  “It’s Nordan pottery, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “And here’s a piece I’ve had packed up for years.”

  It was a homely old earthenware pie plate. The burnt-pumpkin glaze was chipped around the rim and showed the red clay beneath. I turned it to look at the marks on the bottom, not that they meant anything to me. It wasn’t particularly beautiful, so I guessed that its value to Fliss lay in its age.

  “Actually, it’s not all that old,” she said. “You know the story of the Busbees and Jugtown?”

  “I know the Jugtown name, but who are the Busbees?”

  “Well, to give you the condensed version, between the Prohibition movement that did away with the market for whiskey jugs and the arrival of cheap glass jars, potters were getting pretty thin on the ground around here in the 1910s. The Busbees were a wealthy young couple with artistic aspirations from over in Raleigh. He was a failed portrait painter and she was a frustrated photographer who sublimated by doing good works in the state’s federation of women’s clubs. Supposedly, she was arranging a display of fruit at a county fair down in Lexington and sent someone out to buy a pie tin to put the fruit on, only they brought back an earthenware plate like this one. Or maybe it was Davidson and a farmer already had his apples on it. Take your pick. There are lots of minor variations on the details.

  “Anyhow, everybody agrees that Juliana Busbee saw an orange pie plate exactly like this one and went bonkers over it. She rushed over to the hardware store that carried them, bought every one she could find, then brought them back to Raleigh and got her husband just as excited. They decided that pottery was an indigenous craft worth studying and preserving. They also realized there was a big folk art market in New York.”

  There was more than a touch of cynicism in her voice.

  “You sound as if you don’t much revere the Busbees.”

  Fliss shrugged. “I think they were dilettantes looking for something to give meaning to their lives. He was a mediocre painter; she was a young society matron in a presuffragette South. The whole craze for folk arts and crafts was just hitting New York and they were smart enough to realize this was a way to get their ticket stamped and to be part of the avant-garde.

  “To make a long story short, the Busbees moved over here and built a pottery—Jugtown—and they hired local potters to come turn pots for them. And, to do them justice, they introduced a lot of oriental art forms that rejuvenated the whole area. They were probably almost as important as they thought they were, although the wealthy tourists who’d started spending their winters at Southern Pines probably helped a lot, too.”

  “Is this one of the original pie plates Mrs. Busbee bought?” I asked, carefully setting the dish back on the shelf.

  “No, but it’s from that era, made around 1917, back when they still used pure red lead for glazing. These were common as the red mud clay the potters dug out of the creekbanks here. In fact, this was called a mud dish and sold for about ten cents.” She straightened it with a connoisseur’s fond caress. “Of course, it cost me a bit more than a dime when I wheedled it out of old Ben Owen more than twenty years ago.”

  Next to the plate was a modern-day Jugtown piece, a whimsical rooster created by Pam Owens. A graceful Rebecca pitcher turned by Nell Cole Graves stood on a shelf by itself. It was beautiful. I’m not a collector, but for a moment I almost coveted that pitcher.

  “What about these down here?” I asked, stooping to get a closer look at two pieces that were almost hidden on the bottom shelf next to the floor.

  “You tell me,” Fliss said, lifting them up so I could see them better.

  Both were gray-and-purple bowls, about the size of two loosely cupped hands. They were almost identical except that the glaze on one was a clearer color. That one was heavier, though, with thicker sides and a slightly chunkier feel. The other had a more pleasing thinness to the sides, but the glaze had a muddy tone to it and the purple had been applied in less-artistic swirls.

  “The purple on this one makes me think of the Nordan wares,” I said hesitantly, glancing at the gray-and-purple Nordan vase nearby, “but it doesn’t feel right. This other one feels right, but the color’s off.”

  “Very good.” She touched the lidded Nordan bowl I’d held earlier. “This one’s from when they were still working together. These others were fired this year. James Lucas turned the thin one and Sandra Kay mixed the glaze and painted that one at the pottery where she’s been working ever since she filed for divorce.”

  My equitable distribution case. Of course.

  Fliss shook her head regretfully. “This really is a case of the parts being a lot less than the whole. Too bad.”

  If this was the result, she was certainly right. He could turn elegant, thin-walled pieces, but his glazes were muddy. Her colors were rich and vibrant and as wasted on this clumsy piece as a tutu on a mule. In a no-fault state like North Carolina, it really doesn’t matter why a couple seeks a divorce, but I was curious. “Why’d they split?”

  “She thought he was trying to kill her.”

  “What?”

  “Personally, given her temper, I always thought that if anyone was going to get killed in that marriage, it’d be her doing him.”

  Fliss slipped the two unfortunate bowls back on the bottom shelf and closed the glass door. “I heard most of the actual divorce proceedings,” she said. “Let’s go get some supper and I’ll tell you about it.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Clay is one of the most versatile materials known to man. It is soft, flexible, plastic, almost infinitely variable in its natural state. . . . This “mud,” as the potters refer to it, is abundant, easy to locate, and cheap. But when it is burned with fire, it undergoes an irreversible transformation.

  —Turners and Burners, Charles G. Zug III

  I changed my jacket for a turquoise cotton sweater, slipped out of my heels into flats, and freshened my lipstick, while Fliss went from uptown attorney in a navy blue suit to good ol’ girl in faded jeans and a long-sleeved green silk shirt that turned her hazel eyes sea green.

  It was a short drive to Seagrove proper. There’s not much there—the remains of an old lumberyard, a couple of newish furniture factories, the relatively recent North Carolina Pottery Center up the hill, a grocery, and a hardware store. Mainly, Seagrove is a cluster of small pottery shops at the intersection of two state highways. Three blocks from the intersection in most directions and you’re back in the country again. The Crock Pot sits at the edge of town and is the sort of place I always slide into when I’m on the road—a comfortable, old-shoe place where you seat yourself and the tea comes iced and sweet unless you specify differently. It’s down-home cooking and waitresses old enough to be your grandmother, who wear cotton print aprons over their own clothes instead of look-alike uniforms.

  I suppose that similar mismatched chairs and tables and blue-checked tablecloths can still be bought by the yard at any flea market or yard sale. What can’t be bought by the yard are all the pickups and the old Ford and Chevy sedans in the parking lot. They usually tell me clearer than any advertising what the locals think about the cooking inside.

  At least two-thirds of the twenty-five or so tables were taken when we entered the big main room. Fliss seemed to know most of the people, so our progress toward a table back against a side wall was slow.

  On the wall over the cash register, a board listed the daily specials. Tonight’s was meatloaf.

  I took a good look at the tables we passed by and was ready to order without looking at the menu our waitress brought over.

  “Meatloaf with a double side of steamed cabbage, please, and hold the mashed
potatoes.”

  The waitress gave an exaggerated cluck of disapproval as she efficiently slapped down bundles of flatware wrapped in paper napkins with one hand and filled our water glasses with the other. “Skinny as you are, honey, you ain’t doing one of them low-carb diets, are you?”

  “I love this lady,” I told Fliss. “You be sure and leave her a big tip, hear?”

  Fliss laughed. “Me? I thought you were treating.”

  “Or one of y’all could pay the bill and the other one leave a nice tip,” said our waitress with an absolutely straight face, “and then you’d both come out even.”

  Given that the most expensive entrée was less than five dollars, she wasn’t necessarily joking. She brought us our iced tea and Fliss raised her glass to renewed friendship and another welcome to Judicial District 19B. “But you might just want to borrow a bulletproof vest tomorrow.”

  “For what? Stoneware mugs and cream pitchers at twenty paces?”

  “You laugh, but that’s almost what it came to last fall.”

  Technically, judges aren’t supposed to receive any ex parte information that could influence a judgment, but there was nothing left to influence in the Nordan ED. As Fliss had reminded me on the short drive over, the divorce was finalized early last fall. All the fault hearings were over, support issues had been worked out, the scheduling and discovery conferences had already taken place.

  The only thing left for me to do was add up the figures they’d agreed on and make the final adjustments so that whatever they’d acquired together could be equitably divided. If everything went as it should, the Nordans would be completely quit of each other by the time I adjourned tomorrow, and nothing Fliss told me about either combatant would make the slightest particle of difference.

  Not that she’d said much, having gotten sidetracked by the history of Nordan Pottery.

  “A lot of potters around here will talk about how their forebears used to turn a little mud so you’ll think they learned their skills at their granddaddy’s knee.”

  “They’re lying?” I asked, thinking of the many signs I’d seen in previous trips that implied unbroken lines of tradition.

  “Well, not lying, exactly. Just sort of stretching the truth a little. Look, my own paternal great-great-grandfather used to turn the crockery his family needed after the Civil War. Didn’t cost him anything but time and labor to dig some clay out of the creekbank behind his house and make his own. Cheaper and easier than struggling out of these backwoods on roads that weren’t much more than pig trots. But neither my grandfather nor either of his sons ever messed with it, though you wouldn’t know that to hear my cousin Patty talk. She and her husband have a little pottery over at the old homeplace and their card says, ‘A tradition begun in 1874.’

  “Many of the old families did work the local clay back in the 1800s. But most of their descendants today—including my cousin Patty—wouldn’t even know which end of a pug mill to put the clay in if they hadn’t gone over and taken courses at the community college. They’ll brag about being fourth- or fifth-generation potters, when everybody knows there were only about five or six families still potting regularly before the Busbees came. Hell, even as late as 1970, you could probably count all the active potteries on two hands.”

  “And the Nordans were one of those families?”

  She nodded. “Amos’s father was one of those too set in his ways to try the new forms. He just kept turning out the old wood-fired earthenware plates and bowls along with salt-glazed stoneware—churns and crocks and demijohns. Amos, now, he took a look at what the Jugtown potters were doing and adapted it to his own things. And his glazes were something else. Beautiful clear reds. It’s a shame he can’t throw those tall, thin-walled vases anymore.”

  I was surprised to hear that Amos Nordan was still numbered among the living. “The way my sister-in-law went on about how collectible his work is, I thought he’d been dead for ages.”

  “No, but he did have a stroke a couple of years ago that affected the left side of his body, especially his left hand,” Fliss said, squeezing lemon into her tea. “His other son had just died—that’s what brought on the stroke. He was the one who found Donny’s body. It left him so sick and discouraged that he deeded James Lucas a lifetime right to the pottery and laid his own body down to die.”

  “Only it didn’t?”

  She shook her head. “When he was better, he tried to get James Lucas to renounce his right, but it didn’t happen. Even before Donny died, James Lucas had been doing most of the grunt work and I guess he was tired of having to clear everything with Amos. Amos was mad enough to spit nails and he still sulks about it, but he’s gone back to his old wheel. About all he can manage, though, are small bowls and plates. Nothing like the jugs and vases he used to turn.”

  Our own plates arrived, and yes, they were local earthenware, a bright blue to match the blue-checked tablecloths.

  “Okay?” asked Fliss, who’d opted for the fried shrimp.

  I nodded happily, my mouth too full of ambrosial meatloaf to speak for a moment. “But why a lifetime right? Why not deed it to his son outright?”

  “Some say it’s because James Lucas and Sandra Kay don’t have any children, but others say he’s had it in for Sandra Kay ever since she threatened to turn him in if he didn’t follow all the rules about his glazes.”

  “Turn him in? To whom? Why?”

  “FDA, Department of Commerce, you name it,” Fliss mumbled, her mouth too full of fried shrimp to answer clearly. She swallowed, then dabbed her lips with her napkin. “There was a big deal about lead poisoning back in the late sixties, early seventies. I forget all the details, but I remember my mother’s uncles fuming about it. They did a little turning and they liked the old glazes and didn’t see why the state had to come meddling in just because some kids out West somewhere got lead poisoning from drinking juice every day out of ceramic cups made in Mexico. Nevertheless, there are still random tests, state and federal, to make sure everything meant to hold food is lead-free. It’s against the law to use lead glazes for anything except purely decorative pieces, and even those have to be clearly labeled.”

  She sipped her tea and ate another shrimp. “Amos Nordan was one of the few who was stubborn enough to keep using it. There’s just no other way to get that bright red that he was famous for. He’s an ornery old cuss. James Lucas doesn’t like to mess with it much, but his brother Donny did. Sandra Kay made them build new kilns to keep their cardinal ware separate from the tableware because of the fumes. If you burn a load of pots in the same kiln that you use over and over for lead-glazed things, they can test positive for lead. Amos still doesn’t fully believe it. He thinks Sandra Kay was just being bitchy.”

  Fliss paused in midbite. “Well, damn!” she said. “You know, I never thought about it before, but wonder if Amos had anything to do with her accidents?”

  “What accidents?”

  “I don’t remember all the details, but things like shelves and bricks falling on her, buckets left where she’d trip and fall. Any one thing could have been a pure accident, but these seemed to come in a series thick and fast. Then she caught James Lucas putting a footstool in her way. Least that’s what she says he was doing. He swore he didn’t know how it got there and that he was only moving it out of the way so she wouldn’t trip again. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe it was Amos instead.”

  “Why? Was he trying to break up the marriage?”

  “Who knows? Anyhow, as soon as Donny died—”

  She broke off to smile at someone behind me. “Hey there, Connor. Fern and the girls not with you?”

  “Naw,” said a deep male voice. “They’re having a lingerie party tonight and I was told not to come home before nine-thirty.”

  I turned and saw a man of medium height and solid build. Early to mid-forties maybe, in a dark blue windbreaker and a white shirt over chinos. The end of a green plaid tie dangled from his jacket pocket. He had police officer written al
l over him, but that’s not why I took a second look. Pale reddish blond hair? Eyebrows and eyelashes that were almost white against the fair skin of his face? I’d seen him before. Not in court, but where?

  “Deborah, this is Connor Woodall of the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department. Connor, Judge Deborah Knott.”

  “Connor Woodall?” I asked. “The same Connor Woodall that graduated from West Colleton with Adam and Zach Knott and used to come out to the farm once in a while with Dwight Bryant?”

  Now it was his turn to take a closer look, and his fair skin flushed with delight as he grabbed my hand and started shaking it. “Deborah? Deb’rah Knott? Well, I’ll be darned! Last time I asked about your brothers, must’ve been about four years ago. Dwight did say you were a lawyer now, but I never heard you’d made judge. How’s ol’ Dwight doing? I haven’t seen him since we did a computer seminar together over in Greensboro.”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “But how’d you wind up in Seagrove?”

  “Aw, I went and married me a Seagrove gal and she said she couldn’t live where the dirt wasn’t red clay, so that pretty much let out Colleton County, didn’t it? And I had some family over here, too, so it all worked out.”

  “Sounds like old home week,” said Fliss. “You might as well sit with us, Connor, if you’re by yourself.”

  “You sure I won’t be butting in?”

  Even as he spoke, he was already pulling out a chair.

  “Not a bit,” said Fliss. “Deborah’s over here for the Sandersons’ pretrial conference and to finish up the Nordan ED. I was telling her about all the accidents out at Nordan Pottery a couple of years ago. Didn’t Sandra Kay call you to come about them?”

  “Not me, one of the other boys. And I believe she wanted to put a restraining order on poor old James Lucas. Keep him out of his own house and pottery. Her brother talked her out of that. Course, I hear she’s still mad at Dillard ’cause he wouldn’t let her go back to the Rooster Clay.”