Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  “Another potter?” I wondered aloud. “Somebody jealous of his standing in the field?”

  Sandra Kay ran both hands through her blond hair with a bewildered frown. “But he doesn’t have that much standing. Not since we split up.”

  She glanced apologetically at June Gregorich. “I’m sorry, June. I know you’ve tried.”

  The older woman shut the cash drawer and closed down the computer. “You don’t need to apologize for speaking the truth. I told James Lucas I didn’t know anything about mixing glazes and Mr. Amos only knows red. I can dip ware into a glaze barrel and I can paint simple flowers and vines and things like that—that’s just common sense. But the stuff you do? That’s talent.”

  Sandra Kay started to demur, but June wasn’t having it. “Yes, it is talent. And nothing to brag about or be modest either. It’s straight from the genes and you either have it or you don’t.”

  She faced me forthrightly. “She’s got it. I don’t.”

  “And neither did James Lucas,” Sandra Kay said sadly. “He could turn as good as his daddy, almost as good as Donny, but he didn’t have their feel for slips and glazes and the way they work over different clays. No, if professional jealousy was reason to kill a Nordan, it’s Donny they’d have killed. If he wasn’t already dead.”

  Again that odd awkwardness hung in the air and I remembered Fliss saying that Amos Nordan’s stroke was brought on by finding his son’s body.

  “How did he die?” I asked bluntly.

  “An accident,” she said, her face closing down. “We don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Sorry,” I murmured, and backed off. I’d soon be seeing Fliss. She’d certainly know, and if not, there was always Connor Woodall, who ought to be getting around to taking my statement sometime before dark. If we went one on one, he might be persuaded to gossip a bit with the nosy younger sister of old boyhood friends.

  All this time, various official vehicles had come and gone through the yard, including the ambulance that would be taking Nordan’s body over to Chapel Hill for autopsy. As the minutes dragged on, we became more and more restless. June went back to the house to check on Jeffy and Mr. Amos and that left Sandra Kay and me casting about for something safe to talk about, since I could hardly ask her why her ex-father-in-law called her a horny bitch or why June thought she’d driven her white car through the yard before any of the rest of us arrived.

  Their pottery collection was good for another fifteen minutes, then I asked about the set of bright red tableware with the emphatic NOT FOR SALE sign.

  “That was Nordan Pottery’s biggest seller for years. They shipped it all over the country,” she said, picking up a dinner plate and flicking a bit of dust from its shining glassy surface. It was that rich clear hue that balances perfectly at true red. No touch of yellow to tip it toward orange. No hint of blue to tip toward violet.

  “It’s a shame Mr. Nordan quit making it,” I said. “I’d love a set of plates and mugs for family barbecues.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said firmly. “This is a low-fired lead glaze. The minute it crazes or chips, the vinegar in barbecue would leach the lead right out. Same with the mugs and anything as acidic as hot coffee or tea. It—”

  Her lecture was interrupted by a loud car horn from out back just as June Gregorich pushed open the door. She looked back over her shoulder and we saw a white van splashed with red mud come tearing through the lane that snaked down from the wooded hill behind the kiln sheds. When it became clear that the patrol car blocking the lane wasn’t going to move, the van quit honking and pulled up sharply. Two of the three doors were open before it came to a full stop and out tumbled a tall woman and two tall kids, a boy and a girl. He was almost a man, she looked to be early teens. They were immediately followed by the driver, a shorter, middle-aged man in mud-stained khaki work clothes and a John Deere cap.

  An officer moved to intercept them.

  “I’m sorry,” June told Sandra Kay again as she stepped on through the door, “but Mr. Amos called her a few minutes ago.”

  Her California voice might have held sympathy, but her brown eyes flashed with universal interest in drama and I didn’t need a printout to realize this was the Hitchcock clan—James Lucas’s sister Betty and Sandra Kay’s brother Dillard Hitchcock with two of their three children.

  They were too far away for me to make out her words and a few of the bushes blocked our view, but Betty Nordan Hitchcock was clearly crying as she spoke to Connor Woodall, who had stepped forward to meet them and turn them away from the kiln where all the activity was centered. I heard her voice raised in tearful argument, but Connor’s voice was a steady rumble and her shoulders slumped as she gave up. Supported by her son, she stumbled up the path that led directly to her father’s house. Her daughter started to trail along behind them, but when Dillard Hitchcock took the path that led to the shop door where I stood looking over Sandra Kay’s shoulder, she came with him.

  As soon as he saw Sandra Kay, he stretched out his arms and she ran to him with a low moan. Whatever her problems with her sister-in-law, Sandra Kay was clearly ready for a brother’s comfort. “Oh, Dilly, it’s awful. So awful.”

  The girl, the super-talented Libbet that Fliss and Connor had discussed the night before, watched without speaking. Tall as all the Nordans seemed to be, she was so thin that there was almost no sign of breasts or hips inside her oversized T-shirt and straight-legged jeans. Her long brown hair was plaited with a single braid that hung halfway down her back and was secured with a plain rubber band. Her dark blue eyes flicked from her aunt to June and me, then back again. All the fourteen-year-olds I knew would’ve been babbling, but she just listened silently till Sandra Kay finished telling how she’d found James Lucas’s body in the kiln, then said, “If you hadn’t gone and left him, you’d be in charge here now and I could’ve come and turned for you.”

  “Libbet!” said her father, sounding appalled.

  The girl shrugged. “Well, it’s true. Now Granddaddy’ll give it to Tom and he’ll just run it into the ground. You know he will.”

  “Now, see here—”

  “Soon as he hears, he’ll probably head straight to Brittany and pop the question. You and Mom won’t be able to stop him this time.”

  “That’s enough, Elizabeth!”

  ‘“Soon as he hears’?” Sandra Kay pulled back and looked at her brother. “Where is Tom, Dillard? Why isn’t he with y’all? And where was he right after lunch?”

  CHAPTER

  8

  It is commonly believed that glaze seals a pot against liquid penetration. With the exception of . . . slip glazes, this is not always the case since many glazes do not fit a pot perfectly and therefore are under tension, causing the glaze to yield and develop fine crazed lines (sometimes discernible only with a magnifying glass) either immediately or over time.

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  It was almost five-thirty before I got back to Fliss’s house. She met me in the doorway with a drink we’d concocted together and christened a Carolina Cooler: half orange juice and half tonic water in a twelve-ounce glass with enough gin to suit whatever the occasion. Since she’d be driving, hers was almost a virgin. Mine was not.

  “You sure you still want to go with me?” she asked when I’d finished telling her about James Lucas Nordan’s death. “I’m one of the officers, so I have to be there tonight, but if you’d rather skip it . . .?”

  Even a bar association dinner seemed preferable to spending the evening alone at Fliss’s house. Besides, it’d give me the chance to ask her some of the questions I hadn’t been able to ask Connor Woodall.

  After all that waiting, he’d barely asked for my name, rank, and serial number before letting me leave. “I’ll catch up with you tomorrow,” he’d said, turning his attention to Sandra Kay and June.

  So now I took a quick shower and changed into a silky, ankle-length, sleeveless shift. It was olive green with a random scattering of black le
aves around the neckline. Over it, I wore a short, fitted black jacket. When I stood perfectly still, I was a demure and proper judge. When I moved, a thigh-high side slit suggested other adjectives.

  As befits an officer of the association, Fliss wore a rust-colored linen suit the exact same shade as her new hair.

  Once we were on 134 heading south to Troy, I settled back in my seat and described the weird vibes given off in the Nordan shop when Donny Nordan’s name came up.

  “How did he die?” I asked Fliss.

  “Truth to tell, I’m not a hundred percent sure,” she said, passing a tractor that had a bewildered-looking cow tethered in the railed flatbed it was pulling. “First they said it was suicide, then they said it was an accident. He’d remodeled the loft over his potting shed. Called it his bachelor’s pad, and that’s where it happened. They found him hanging from one of the rafters. No one could figure out why. His work was selling well—a lot of serious collectors were starting to say he was the most gifted potter Nordan Pottery’s ever produced.”

  “That’s what Sandra Kay said, only she was sort of snide about it. She called him the fair-haired son with the magic fingers.”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into that. Yeah, Amos favored Donny over James Lucas, but Nordan Pottery wouldn’t have been profitable if it hadn’t been for her and James Lucas’s steadiness. Donny was gifted, but he was erratic as hell and lazy, too.”

  “When he was good, he was very, very good?” I suggested.

  “And when he was bad?” She smiled. “Well, he’d just found out he was a father.”

  “Huh?”

  Without taking her eyes off the road, Fliss nodded. “He never married. Lot of girlfriends, but none of them ever got pregnant. And since Sandra Kay and James Lucas didn’t have children, I guess Donny assumed that he and his brother were both sterile. Then, out of the blue, he got a letter from a woman who’d been in a pottery class he gave over in Raleigh years ago. She’d been married at the time, but now she was divorced or her husband died, I forget which, and she wanted Donny to know that he was the father of her younger son. I heard he was happy about it, happy but so surprised that they were going to do a blood test. That’s why suicide seemed so unlikely.”

  “You think he was murdered?”

  “Oh, no,” Fliss said as I fiddled with an air vent that was blowing on my face. “About a week after the funeral, word seeped out that it was an accident. Though I don’t know why that should be something the Nordans would want hushed up. Seems to me an accident is better than killing yourself, but that’s when my dad was going into a rest home over in Charlotte and I was back and forth a lot about the time they changed Donny’s cause of death, so I missed whatever talk there was. But the Nordans still don’t want to talk about it, so it must’ve been a real dumb accident. Like drowning in the toilet bowl or something.”

  “Was Amos the one who found him?”

  She nodded. “And right after that, he had his stroke.”

  We drove in silence for a few minutes while I thought about ways to accidentally hang yourself.

  “What happened to the boy?” I asked. “Was it his?”

  “Who knows? Donny died owning nothing but a few pots, a car, and the clothes on his back, so it’s not as if he had much to leave to an illegitimate child.”

  “But if Amos Nordan was so crazy about Donny, wouldn’t he want to help raise Donny’s son, his own grandson?”

  “We’re talking a teenager here,” she said. “Not an infant. And remember I told you that Amos went and signed a lifetime right over to James Lucas when he had his stroke? So it’s not as if he had much extra money to toss around even if he wanted to.”

  “Didn’t James Lucas care about his brother’s son?”

  “Evidently not. But then he and Donny weren’t all that close, either. Now that he’s dead, too, maybe Amos will change his mind.”

  “His granddaughter—that Libbet Hitchcock you were bragging on? She seems to think her brother Tom’s going to step right in and take over the works. That he’s been waiting for an opportunity to get married and strike out on his own.”

  Fliss snorted. “If he thinks working for Amos is going to be easier than working for his parents, he’s in for a shock.”

  “The old man’s got a real temper, hasn’t he?” I said, and told her how he’d reacted to Sandra Kay’s attempt to comfort him down at the kiln. “Why’d he call her a horny bitch, do you think?”

  She shrugged. “Believe it or not, Deborah, I really don’t keep up with every jot and tittle of gossip that swirls through Seagrove. Half the time, things go in one ear and out the other, and— Oh, damn!”

  With no warning blink of her signal lights, Fliss swerved to the right, barely missing the ditch as she pulled into a dirt parking lot under some tall oaks.

  “I always miss this turn,” she said.

  Unnecessarily.

  CHAPTER

  9

  In this dynamic, shared memory, incidents of twenty-five and fifty years ago are kept so vivid that they are often related as recent happenings.

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  June Gregorich tiptoed to the door of Amos Nordan’s bedroom and was relieved to hear the old man’s light snores. It had been a stressful afternoon and early evening for all of them and she was glad when Betty and Dillard Hitchcock cleared the house of friends and neighbors who’d heard the grisly news and wanted to hear all the gory details. Amos had sat stunned, his eyes wide and unseeing, until Betty persuaded him to drink some of the hot chicken broth left over from lunch. Then she and Dillard had helped him up to bed.

  “I gave him one of his sleeping pills,” she said when they came back down.

  The phone rang shrilly and her older son Edward answered it before it could ring a second time. Another concerned neighbor wanted to know how Amos was or if there was anything they could do to help.

  “I’m going to cut off the phones,” Betty said, “or they’ll keep y’all awake all night. Call me in the morning, though, and let me know how Dad is, okay?”

  “Certainly,” June said.

  At the door, Betty had hugged her impulsively. “Thank goodness we have you here for him, June. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  June had made a deprecating sound. “You’d have managed.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to stay the night with you, Miss June?” asked Libbet Hitchcock.

  “No, we’ll be fine, thanks,” said June.

  It was still early evening—barely dark, in fact—but Jeffy was already asleep, worn out by so many people. As she checked on him and then went around locking up, June wondered how much longer the two of them could stay here and where they would go when everything was over. Mr. Amos swore he’d live under his own roof and die in his own bed. That’s why James Lucas and Betty asked her to move in two years ago after his stroke. And it’d worked out even better than she’d hoped. He tolerated Jeffy well enough and he was easy to clean and cook for. But if the pottery closed or changed hands, Betty might insist on his going to live over there. And then there was Tom Dillard, heir presumptive to the pottery. If he married that Simmons girl as gossip predicted, he and his bride might move in here to take care of his grandfather.

  June brushed her thick wiry hair and braided it into a single plait for the night, then slipped on the oversized T-shirt she wore as a nightgown, brushed her teeth, and got into bed.

  As she had feared, she couldn’t stave off the ghastly image of James Lucas on that kiln car, hair burnt, his face and hands coated with dried red glaze. She saw again the utter shock and grief on Mr. Amos’s face when he realized who it was. It was a wonder he hadn’t had another stroke then and there.

  Her thoughts moved on to the white car that had driven through the lane while James Lucas was down at the kiln. She had thought it was Sandra Kay and that’s what she’d told Connor Woodall, but lying there, staring into the darkness, she remembered that Tom Dillard drove a white car
, too.

  And where had Bobby Gerard been at the time?

  Twilight was fading into darkness as Dillard Hitchcock switched off the van and looked over at his wife.

  “You okay, hon?”

  In the seat behind them, their firstborn, twenty-year-old Edward, already had the door open and was halfway out, but their fourteen-year-old daughter lingered, as if to hear Betty’s answer.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m fine, sweetie. Why don’t you go on in and get started on your homework?”

  “I’m not going to school tomorrow,” she said mutinously.

  “Don’t argue with your mother,” said Dillard. “Whether it’s tomorrow or Monday, your schoolwork’s got to be done sometime.”

  “And what about Tom? He’s not here doing his.”

  “You want to get left back a year, too? Fine. Forget about schoolwork. You and Edward can see to putting some supper on the table for us.”

  “Go ahead, Libbet,” said Betty. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Reluctantly, the girl went.

  “You okay?” Dillard asked again. His face and voice softened and he reached out to clasp his wife’s hand.

  “No.” Her eyes were red from all the crying she’d done at her father’s house and they filled with tears again as she spoke. “No, I’m not okay.”

  She cupped his big square hand between her thin ones. “My last brother’s just been killed, my daddy’s half out of his mind with grief, Tom hasn’t been seen since his first class this morning, and your sister’s acting like he’s the one killed James Lucas.”

  “Aw, now, honey, you know Sandra Kay don’t really mean that.” With his free hand, he brushed back a lock of hair that had fallen over her cheek.

  It always came as a mild shock to realize that she was going gray. In his mind’s eye, she would always be the teenage girl he’d fallen in love with on the school bus when her straight dark hair blew back in his face from the open window beside her. They had known each other from childhood. She was just another Nordan, one of several kids who lived and played together along the rutted back lane that ran from Nordan Road to Felton Creek Road. Until that day, he’d taken no more notice of her than he’d take of the flat rock that served as home plate in their summer afternoon ball games.