Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  June’s mental treadmill of weary if-onlys was interrupted as the customer in front of her noticed Amos Nordan’s clay-stained rubber apron.

  “Are you the one who made my vase?” she asked brightly.

  He gave her a grudging nod.

  “I’d sure love to see your wheel,” the woman chirped.

  Most potters were amenable to giving mini-demonstrations. They even sold their wares right out of the pottery where they worked.

  Not Amos Nordan.

  More than once she’d heard him complain to James Lucas, “I ain’t no performing monkey. I’ll sell ’em my pots, but bedamned if I’ll put on a show for ’em to stand around taking pictures with their stinking cameras.”

  Fortunately, he was too savvy to say it to a customer’s face.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said blandly, “but I’ve stopped for dinner. If you’re set on seeing somebody throw a pot, though . . .” He mischievously reached for her map and pointed to a spot a few miles across the Moore County line as the crow flies. “Luck’s Wares. Sid Luck used to be a teacher and he pure enjoys showing folks how it’s done. You ask him real nice and he might even show you how to turn a ring jug. Don’t tell him it was me sent you, though. I don’t want him to feel he owes me anything.”

  June gave him a disapproving look as the customer hurried out the door, to catch a potter at work.

  “One of these days Mr. Luck’s going to take a shotgun to you,” she warned her employer.

  All this time, Jeffy had been sitting on the floor at June’s feet, playing with some miniature clay animals Amos had made for him in an unwonted burst of generosity this past Christmas, but the mention of lunch roused him from his absorption and he tugged at his mother’s denim skirt. “I’m hungry, Momma.”

  She looked at Mr. Amos. “Want me to close the shop and fix lunch?”

  Before he could answer, James Lucas opened the door and the old man’s face lit up. “It’s all done? You’re completely shet of her now?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “We still have to divide the collection.”

  Jeffy went to him and held out a clay dog, but James Lucas was too distracted to notice. Nothing new there, June thought. He had never been mean to Jeffy, but in the two years they’d lived there, he’d never taken any time with her son, either, which was about as much as you could expect from most folks. At least the Nordans had never asked her why she didn’t stick her son in an institution, as if he were an awkward inconvenience who needed to be warehoused out of sight and out of mind.

  “They’re all coming out after they eat—the judge, the lawyers, Sandra Kay,” he said.

  As Jeffy butted up against him like a friendly puppy, James Lucas tousled his hair as if he were indeed a puppy. His own hair had gone a shade grayer in the two years she’d known him and the lines in his face were so deep now he could have passed for Mr. Nordan’s brother instead of son, even though she knew he was almost exactly as old as she. While she was a carefree young wife in California, he was already carrying a man’s workload here at Nordan Pottery, helping to turn out the pottery’s famous cardinal ware.

  “Bobby finish loading the car kiln?” he asked.

  Amos shook his head. “He swears he’ll finish this evening, but you know him.”

  “Want me to set a plate for you?” June asked as she paused in the doorway with Jeffy.

  “No, I already ate a hamburger. Y’all go ahead, though.”

  “Come on over and set with us,” urged his father.

  But James Lucas shook his head. “You go on and eat and have your rest, Dad, and I’ll see you after this is over. I just want to look at everything one more time while it’s all together, okay?”

  When he finally eased them out of the showroom, James Lucas walked over to the addition they’d built on years before the separation. Till then, the pieces had sat haphazardly around their house, but one day he and Sandra Kay heard Dorothy and Walter Auman speak on the significance of old pots.

  The Aumans were self-taught historians, potters just like the Nordans. They had loved and collected old family pieces, too, and sought out the stories behind them, and their enthusiasm sparked his and Sandra Kay’s and gave them a rationale for the old chipped and cracked pieces they kept lugging home.

  These homely demijohns, chamber pots, and butter jars were a tangible link to generations past and, lacking children and that link to the future, the two of them had become almost obsessed with finding things their grandparents and great-grandparents had made and used.

  Now the Aumans were dead, their collection gone to the Charlotte museum, away from the clay pits of Seagrove. And soon this collection, too, would be broken up. He alternated between rage and grief as he moved from one glass case to another. He remembered the excitement when they found this jug etched with his great-great-grandfather’s initials, the glow on Sandra Kay’s face when she brought home that storage jar. They used to laugh together in those days. How could it have gone so wrong between them?

  The bloom was long since off the rose by the time Donny died, yet they still worked well together, were easy in each other’s company, with no thought of divorce.

  But the minute Donny died, seemed like their marriage just flat went to hell.

  Dad got it in his head that Sandra Kay had been having an affair with Donny and for some reason blamed her for the way Donny died.

  Did she sleep with his brother? He still didn’t know. She swore there was nothing between them, but where there’s smoke . . .?

  And Donny wasn’t there to answer his questions.

  Not that he would’ve. Or not that he’d have told the truth if he did answer.

  Sometimes, thought James Lucas, he could well understand why Joseph’s brothers had thrown him in the pit and sold him into slavery. The Bible made it sound as if the brothers had acted without a bit of provocation even though the younger brother was old Jacob’s pet, the one who got all the praise and all the consideration.

  Just like Donny.

  He didn’t have a doubt in the world that Dad would have willed the pottery to Donny alone if his brother hadn’t gone and killed himself when he did.

  Well, that was water under the bridge now, he told himself, and switched off the lights in the glass shelves as a couple of customers came in.

  They proved to be browsers only and left a minute or so after June returned to mind the shop.

  “I’ll be down at the sheds if anybody needs me,” James Lucas told her as she sat down at the computer to finish entering the last kilnload of ware in their inventory records.

  Better to be busy than to be brooding on what can’t be helped, he thought as he walked along the path through a bed of rhododendrons that were now taller than he. Their large pink or purple blossoms were prettier to him than any lilies or orchids he’d ever seen. He and Sandra Kay had once talked about designing a set of tableware around rhododendron colors, but Dad and Donny had vetoed the idea—“Gray and purple are our colors,” they said. “That and our cardinal red”—and after Donny died, there was no working with her.

  Bobby hadn’t made much headway on loading the car kiln with a new batch of bowls and plates, and James Lucas set to work. His hands were full when a white car eased slowly through the rutted lane that led from the road out front over to Felton Creek Road.

  Sandra Kay. On her way to her double-wide on the other side of the Rooster, no doubt.

  Hitchcocks had used the shortcut since the horse-and-buggy days and she couldn’t seem to break the habit. Weren’t for his sister Betty being married to Dillard Hitchcock, he’d put a chain up and close the lane once and for all, James Lucas thought.

  Through the rhododendrons, he caught a glimpse of his ex-wife’s face as she slowed for a particularly deep pothole and he deliberately turned his back on her. Time enough for phony politeness when the others arrived.

  He continued ferrying the wares from the drying shelves inside the potting shed to the car kiln and was half-finished wh
en he heard his name.

  “Yeah?”

  He turned to see a shard of pottery held out to him.

  “What’s that?” he asked, but before his fingers could close around it, the shard fell to the ground.

  He stooped to pick it up and a crushing blow smashed his head.

  Something cool and wet splashed on his face and hands and he groggily opened his eyes.

  The pain was so intense that it took a moment to register that he was lying amid broken bowls and plates.

  He looked at his hands. At the sleeves of his shirt.

  Red. Bright red.

  Blood?

  Then he felt himself moving and his world went dark again.

  CHAPTER

  6

  As Joe Owen points out, the potter’s first task was to get the kiln to full heat.

  —Turners and Burners, Charles G. Zug III

  Fliss had planned to meet me for lunch at Zoo City, a cafe that sits a half-block down from the courthouse where Worth Street tees into Fayetteville, but when I buzzed her office, I found she’d left a message with her secretary that she was going to be tied up in a deposition and would see me back at the house.

  “And Mrs. Chadwick told me to ask if you wanted to go with her to the bar association dinner at the country club down in Troy tonight.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Okay, so a bar association dinner isn’t usually a barrel of laughs, but since there was nothing more exciting on my docket, why not network a little?

  In the meantime, lunch.

  When I came down the steps of the courthouse, I saw Mrs. Nordan and her attorney take leave of each other. She seemed to be heading for Zoo City, while Nick Sanderson veered off toward one of the perfectly charming offices that lined Lawyers Row and fronted onto the courthouse square. I could understand why neither Sanderson would want to relinquish such desirable quarters.

  Although connected, each row house had its own distinctive architectural charm, from leaded windows to discreet gingerbread trim. Together, they breathed an automatic tradition and solidity that no modern office complex could ever match. Whichever Sanderson lost, that Sanderson would be losing more than the usual goodwill owned by most firms. He (or she, let us not forget) would be losing status, convenience, and income, too, no doubt. Anyone charging out of the courthouse with the sudden urgent need of an attorney would surely head straight for this row of legal saviors.

  I thought of the law offices over in Dobbs, where I had practiced before becoming a judge. The white clapboard house had been built in 1867, half a block from the courthouse, by my maternal grandmother’s grandfather, and it had been hard to leave even though it was my own choice to run for the bench. What if my cousins and I had dissolved the partnership under acrimonious terms? I would have felt bereft and dispossessed.

  Maybe the Sandersons would be able to reach a civilized agreement on their own, but if they didn’t, my next hope was that Judge Ferris would recover from his stroke in time to render the final findings of fact and conclusions of law.

  Rather than risk the awkwardness of lunching in a small place where one or other of the Nordans or their attorneys might also be eating, I decided to pick up an apple, a handful of raw string beans, and a bottle of water at a grocery store on my way out of town. I could munch my way down to Seagrove, pick up a map of area potteries, and look for a serving platter that would go with the casual lifestyle I’d adopted since building my own house out by one of the farm ponds.

  Summer was coming and with it would come hordes of nieces and nephews to swim off the pier I’d had built. Most of my eleven older brothers still lived in Colleton County and they and their wives would be out, too. I was probably going to need two platters to hold all the sandwiches or grilled chicken it would take to feed them. Just thinking of it made me smile as I browsed the exhibit hall at the Pottery Center.

  Not that any pottery is sold there. Fliss had told me that many of the potters originally opposed the center because they feared that a gift shop would end the custom of buyers coming out to the potteries, which would, in turn, cut down on their impulse buys when surrounded by so many goodies. So there’s no gift shop in the usual sense. Instead, the center displays representative pieces from most of the surrounding potteries, each keyed to a simplified map of the area. “Which doesn’t stop people from whining, ‘Oh, but I just loved your sample at the Pottery Center,’” says Fliss. “It’s a joke how often the potters come in to take away the old sample and put in a new one, but you’ll never get them to admit that they’re selling from the center.”

  Since no one at the center can let you buy a sample outright, you’re encouraged to go foraging on your own. Potteries are found on both sides of Highway 705 as well as along the branching roads. Most are right on the road, but others are up narrow dirt lanes, hidden from casual view by stands of cedar and pine, with only a small sign to tell you you’ve arrived. I found a half-dozen pieces whose style and color appealed to me, marked my map, and was on my way by one-fifteen.

  At that, I barely had time to check out three or four places in the next hour, because you can’t just go in and look only at platters. There’s so much tactile variety, so many intriguing shapes, all demanding to be touched and held. The shops themselves were interesting, too. Some had regular museum pedestals with single pieces displayed like works of art, others stacked up rough planks and bricks and loaded the planks down like a discount warehouse. Some of the shops were separate showrooms, some were tables and racks at one end with the potter and his wheel at the other end, up to his elbows in wet clay as the wheel spun around and bowls magically emerged from the lump beneath his hands.

  Although I didn’t find my platters, I bought a grotesque face jug at one place and a large flower pot at another. At still another, I stood mesmerized as the potter turned out several cereal bowls in a row without a hair’s worth of difference between them.

  “Practice does make perfect, doesn’t it?” I marveled. “I don’t see how you can make them so uniformly.”

  The potter chuckled and wet his hands again before cupping them around the next ball of clay. “Things don’t always come out of the kiln as identical as they went in. I’ve had many a customer fuss ’cause they couldn’t find six juice cups that matched precisely. One woman was so picky, I finally told ’er to go on over to Kmart. Every one of their cups match.”

  I would have enjoyed talking to him longer, but a glance at my watch showed a quarter past two. Even though Nordan Pottery was less than a half-mile away, I didn’t want to be late.

  Built of rough clapboards stained a dark brown, the pottery complex nestled in a grove of dogwoods and pine as if it’d been there forever, or at least for the whole two hundred years that Nordans had owned this section of land. It was far enough back from the road to have a graveled parking area that could accommodate six or eight cars, yet it was partially screened by a weathered split-rail fence and head-high azaleas and rhododendrons. Here in early April, everything was pink and green and earth-toned. No grass, just a thick carpet of pine needles and leaf mold.

  To the right of the shop was the house James Lucas Nordan had inherited from his grandparents and where he still lived alone since the separation. To the left was Amos Nordan’s house, which the old man shared with June Gregorich and her son Jeffy. Fliss had told me that she kept house for him in exchange for their room and board and that she was free to work elsewhere for wages as she chose.

  “She works in the shop on weekends, decorates part-time for them and for Grist Mill Pottery,” Fliss had said, ticking the jobs off on her fingers. “Cleans for me on Mondays and for a friend of mine on Fridays.”

  “When does she rest?” I’d asked.

  “I’m not sure she does. But she’s trained Jeffy to help a little. He can use a broom, run the vacuum, or scrub down a shower stall. You just have to keep it real specific.”

  When I arrived, Jeffy was rocking in the porch swing with Mrs. Cagle, the matronly,
gray-haired recording clerk, who probably had grandchildren. They were singing a Sesame Street song about friendship and taking turns.

  The bailiff, whose name I kept forgetting, was leaning against the porch post to smoke a cigarette. His toe unconsciously tapped along with the rhythm of the songs. The two attorneys were talking together under a dogwood in full flower and as I got out of my car, three unfamiliar women came through the shop doorway with brown paper sacks that bulged with newspaper-wrapped pottery.

  June Gregorich saw them down the porch steps, then turned the open sign on the door around so that it now read closed.

  “Oh, goodness!” exclaimed one of the tourists. “We got here just in time, didn’t we?”

  Her friend gave the attorneys and me a look of commiseration. “Too bad they’re closing on y’all. Their stuff is so wonderful! You simply have to come back.”

  Wallace Frye smiled and assured them we certainly would.

  They started to drive out of the parking lot and had to wait while a shiny white Lumina turned in. Sandra Kay Nordan. She drove right up to the edge of the porch and parked.

  “Am I late?” she asked as she hopped out of the car. She had changed into khaki slacks, sneakers, and a short-sleeved bright red cotton sweater. There were smudges on the sides of her pants, as if she’d wiped her dusty hands there.

  “We still have five minutes, according to my watch,” I said. “Is the collection in this building?”

  She nodded and led the way up the porch steps with a mixture of awkwardness and familiarity. Mrs. Nordan had spent thirty years of her life here, yet now she came as a truculent visitor.

  June Gregorich held the door open for us.