Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  “Well, she seems to have done a fine job with Davis. I just hope he and my children can become friends.”

  Thinking of Tom’s hostility, I figured that would probably happen about the time the devil ordered ice skates, but I just smiled and said, “Well, I’ve hindered y’all long enough. Better go see if I can find him.”

  The lane was in even poorer condition than I’d expected and I was forced to creep along slowly. There was no sign of Davis Richmond. Either he’d jogged back or had left longer ago than the Hitchcocks thought. The lane eventually circled around the end of the car kiln shelter. As I passed the bushes, I was startled to see Davis and Tom rolling on the ground in front of the workshop. Fists were flying and bright red blood stained both torn shirts as they pummeled each other.

  As I jumped out of my car, I could hear Brittany screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!”

  But her screams were almost drowned out by Jeffy’s loud sustained squall. He seemed terrified by the violence of the fight and his cries brought June running from the shop. Several customers craned their necks from the doorway to see what all the excitement was and here came Amos, pushing past them and clearing a path with his walking stick.

  While Brittany yelled at them to stop fighting, June caught Jeffy in her arms and tried to soothe him and Amos waded in and started whacking with his cane.

  Tom Hitchcock came up out of the dirt with a roar and clenched fists and in his anger, he almost hit his grandfather till he saw who it was. One eye was already swelling, his knuckles were skinned, and his ear was bright red.

  “You stupid-ass shithead,” Amos shouted. “What the hell you doing?”

  “Getting the hell out of here,” Tom shouted back, equally enraged. He gave Davis’s leg such a vicious kick that the other boy fell down again, clutching himself in pain. “You want to give him the pottery? Fine! The hell with it and the hell with you!”

  Ignoring Brittany’s outstretched hand, he ran over to his car, jumped in, and tore out of the yard.

  “Fool, fool, fool!” Brittany muttered, and hurried to her Sunfire.

  Tom had already cleared the top of the drive and barely touched his brakes as he hurtled onto the highway. There was no way he could have checked for oncoming traffic. A moment later, Brittany followed, driving almost as recklessly in her effort to catch up with him.

  Amos watched helplessly till they were out of sight, then looked down at Davis, who was still sitting on the ground, exhausted.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Davis said gamely.

  Right.

  Blood still trickled from his nose and a cut on his lip, and from the way he was rubbing his leg where Tom had kicked him, I knew he was going to have a huge bruise there, if not a chipped bone.

  “Who started it?” Amos said.

  Davis gave a weary shrug. “What difference does it make?”

  “He always did have a hot temper. Got it from me, I reckon,” the old man said as he turned to June and Jeffy, whose frightened wails had now tapered off into breathy sobs punctuated by hiccups. “Can’t you make him quit sniveling?”

  He waved his cane testily at the gapers up at the shop. “What are y’all gawking at? Show’s over.”

  Then, leaning heavily on his cane, he hobbled toward his house without even a backward glace at his bleeding grandson.

  June wiped Jeffy’s face with a handkerchief from the pocket of her denim skirt and shepherded him back toward the shop.

  I reached down a hand and helped Davis stand.

  “Thanks,” he said stiffly, and headed toward the shed next door.

  I followed him through the door and up the open steps.

  He didn’t realize I was there till I said, “Is there any ice in that little refrigerator or should I go find some at your grandfather’s house?”

  “Huh?” Davis stared at me punchily.

  “I’m Deborah Knott,” I told him briskly. “An old friend of your mother’s. You haven’t seen me in ages, but she told me you were over here.”

  There was a bathroom beyond the far partition and I found washcloths. I wet one and brought it out to him. While he cleaned the blood from his face, I discovered that the single ice tray was empty, so I hurried downstairs and over to Amos Nordan’s house. With the back door open and the screen unlatched, I walked right in without knocking and opened the refrigerator and took out an ice tray. I didn’t want to go rummaging in Nordan’s cabinets, but one of those large counterfeit red mugs sat on the wide window ledge over the sink beside a small ruby-red glass pyramid on a mirrored base. It glowed in the afternoon sun. Strings of crystals hung from the window casing and little rainbows rippled across the ceiling with every small breeze. Outside the screen was a set of bamboo wind chimes that softly clacked in soothing tones— touches of California New Age here on a back road of North Carolina.

  I filled the mug with ice cubes and carried it back to the potting shed loft. There, I wrapped some of the ice cubes in a clean dish towel and pounded them with a knife handle until they were crushed enough to serve as a makeshift ice pack.

  “That lip needs stitching and for all you know, your nose may be broken or you might have a concussion,” I said. “Come on and I’ll take you to the emergency room.”

  “Look, Ms. Knott—”

  “Judge Knott,” I corrected him. “I’m a judge. And you can come with me or you can wait and go with your mother when she gets here after I call her.”

  He grimaced as he tried to smile. “Isn’t it against the law for judges to blackmail people?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “But if you won’t tell, I won’t, either.”

  CHAPTER

  22

  The cemetery seems an unlikely home for the works of the potter, but . . . there remains solid evidence that he produced a variety of grave markers . . . This was an inexpensive but relatively permanent method of marking a grave.

  —Turners and Burners, Charles G. Zug III

  The speedometer went from forty-five to fifty, to sixty, seventy, and was edging eighty when Tom skimmed over a low rise and saw that both lanes of this winding road were blocked up ahead.

  No room to pass on the left and no time to slow down enough to avoid rear-ending the Crown Victoria in front of him. He floored the accelerator and cut sharply to the right to squeeze by on the shoulder. He was dimly aware of some object shifting on the floor beneath his seat, but adrenaline instantly washed it away as his front right fender clipped a mailbox before he could whip the car back into the now-empty lane.

  From behind him now, the Crown Victoria’s horn blared in futile protest and Tom raised his fist in reply, his third finger doing all the talking as he zoomed forward.

  Still, the incident made him ease off on the gas till the speedometer dropped back to just under seventy, which was still twenty miles over the limit along this stretch of highway.

  Rage churned through his body in physical waves that twisted his guts and shortened his breath to ragged gasps for air. His head and eye throbbed from the pounding they’d taken.

  Confused thoughts raced through his mind faster than his speeding wheels:

  Bastard was asking for it scaring Brittany like that—arrogant prick, who does he think he is, coming in, acting like he already owns the place, and Jesus! but it hurt like hell when that lucky blow landed on my ear, and who’d have thought a wimpy-looking faggot like him could give it back like that?

  While Granddad—my own Granddad . . .

  That was it, of course. Beneath his conscious thoughts, over and over, like an endless loop, his anger and pain circled back to its roots: He promised. Goddammit, he promised!

  The speedometer began to creep up again as he took a curve dangerously fast.

  And what is it that keeps shifting down there?

  An unmarked highway patrol car met and passed him in the other lane, registered the Toyota’s speed, and started looking for a turnaround spot, but Tom never noticed because he’d leaned over
to feel around on the floor beneath him. His groping fingers felt something ropelike and flexible and—

  Holy shit!

  He jerked his hand back, but it was too late.

  His prodding had so disturbed the black snake hiding there that it oozed away from his hand and came up between the two seats. Its body was half as thick as Tom’s wrist and its blunt head swayed back and forth as it searched for escape.

  Fighting panic, Tom jerked away from it in an automatic reflex and the steering wheel followed his motion straight into the path of an eighteen-wheeler.

  The truck jackknifed as the driver slammed on his brakes and swerved to avoid the head-on collision.

  The Toyota crashed into the truck’s right bumper and was flipped end over end into a stand of cedars on the other side of the ditch.

  Pulled off balance by the weight of its load, the cab of the rig tottered, swayed, almost fell over, then slammed down foursquare on its tires. The driver immediately snapped the release on his seat belt, swung down from the door, then raced for the smashed Toyota just as the patrol car pulled onto the shoulder, siren wailing, blue lights flashing.

  “I swear to God he turned right in front of me!” the driver cried hoarsely. “He must’ve been doing seventy. I couldn’t miss him.”

  “More like eighty,” the trooper said, realizing the man was almost in shock. “I was clocking him.”

  Just as they reached the smashed car, they saw something move inside, then the black snake began to crawl through the broken window. It bled from a ragged gash in its side.

  “Goddamn!” the trucker yelped, and jumped back.

  Almost automatically, the trooper pulled his pistol and dispatched the creature with one shot.

  “I hate snakes,” he said, and kicked its carcass into the ditch.

  CHAPTER

  23

  An earthy, canny, and sometimes rollicking perception of human frailties and foibles has served Southerners with grace through hard times.

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  Driving Davis Richmond to Randolph Hospital was like driving one of my nephews someplace they didn’t want to go, only he had to be more polite about it since we’re not kin. That means he sulked a little; but because he thought I was his mom’s good friend, he couldn’t tell me to butt out.

  We brought along the extra ice cubes and I made him keep the cold pack on his nose and lips. The backs of his knuckles were also skinned, but those were minor abrasions compared to his face. A rather nice-looking face, too, now that the blood was all washed off.

  From practice with my nephews, I’ve become rather good at asking questions that require more than a yes or no answer. (As a rule, my nieces are easier to get talking. The trouble with girls, though, is, if they don’t want you to know something, they’ll overwhelm you with more verbiage than you can easily process.)

  It wasn’t long before Davis had told me all about the garter snake, how it first appeared in his bed and how he’d put it in one of the jars he knew Tom would be grinding today.

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known his girlfriend was going to be the one to find it,” he assured me.

  “You don’t find all this just a little adolescent?” If I was going to be his surrogate aunt, I felt obliged to point out the error of his ways. “You guys are, what? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

  “Nineteen,” he muttered.

  “This is the sort of thing I see in juvenile court all the time. And it just keeps escalating. He disses you, you diss him, and the next thing you know, one of you’ll be standing in front of a judge trying to explain how the other deserved to get shot or stabbed.”

  He glowered. “So it’s okay for him to try and scare me but not vice versa?”

  “I’m not saying what he did was okay, but you should have been the adult there. Besides,” I said with a grin, “if you hadn’t said or done a thing, it would have driven him crazy not knowing if he’d got you.”

  I let him think about that a minute, then asked how the other family members were responding to him.

  He allowed as how his aunt and uncle seemed nice. “And Edward and his girl Nancy are okay with me being here, but Tom and Libbet act like I’m doing something wrong just by breathing the same air.”

  “Well, you can’t really blame them. Rumors are going ’round that your grandfather had promised to leave the pottery to Tom, but that now he’s thinking of leaving it to you.”

  “Me? That’s crazy! I’m no potter,” he said, echoing Jenny McAllister’s own assessment.

  “That’s not what Amos Nordan’s telling everybody.”

  “Yeah? Well, have any of those rumors going ’round said that he might be senile?”

  His question was so grumpy that I had to smile.

  “No, and he seems pretty sharp to me. I know the stroke left his hand a little messed up, but they say his mind wasn’t affected. Why?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s because I don’t know him well enough, but I keep picking up weird vibes. If anyone else is around, even if it’s only Jeffy, he acts like you said—like I’m already better at potting than my . . . than Donny. You know about Donald Nordan?”

  “That he was Amos’s younger son and he died a couple of years ago?”

  “No, I meant did you know about Mom and him?”

  “It all happened long before I met her.” It was a relief to speak with absolute truthfulness. “She only told me about it Friday.”

  We entered the Asheboro city limits and I drove in silence for a minute while I got my bearings and tried to remember whether the courthouse was north or south of the hospital and whether I’d be better off staying on 220 or getting off to follow Fayetteville Street all the way through town. Since that was the route I was most confident of, I took the Dixie Drive exit.

  “How’s your ice holding out?” I asked as we stopped for a light

  “It’s all melted, but the water’s still cold.” He dipped the cloth into the soup mug I’d brought back from the Nordan house and held it against his split lip, which was really starting to swell now.

  “So how’s your grandfather different when you’re alone with him?”

  “It’s like he doesn’t care if I’m there or not. When I got over here Friday, he was friendly and all, showed me how to throw a bowl, but it wasn’t till Libbet and Tom came in that he started calling me Dave and acting like I was special. Then that night, he was showing me pictures of the family, but as soon as Miss June and Jeffy went upstairs, he shoved the albums in my hands and said I could take them back to the loft with me if I was interested, since they were mostly labeled anyhow.”

  “Maybe he was just tired and wanted to go to bed,” I suggested. “After all, he is past seventy.”

  “When I left, he was watching a rerun of Smackdown wrestling,” he said flatly.

  The hospital’s ER was like most ERs these days, overcrowded and understaffed. I got Davis checked in, then called Fliss and told her why I was going to be delayed.

  “Why, you sneaky woman! Why didn’t you tell me you knew Donny’s son?”

  “At the time the subject first came up, I didn’t know they were the same boy. Honest.”

  “I’ll be home by ten,” she said, “and I want to hear the whole story, okay? I’m putting a bottle of wine in the refrigerator right now and I’ll leave the glasses and corkscrew on the counter in case you get back here first.”

  She told me where the spare door key was hidden, then she left for her supper date and I went back to Davis, who had found an old issue of the Smithsonian magazine and was absorbed in an article on Oscar Nauman, an American artist I’d never heard of.

  We waited almost two hours before a doctor could see him. I offered to go in with him, but he said he’d be fine alone.

  Forty minutes later, he finally returned. There had been more waiting in the examination room, he said, but eventually it was determined that he did not have a concussion and he did not have a broken nose. His lip required only
six stitches. “And the doctor said that everything would’ve been worse if I hadn’t put ice on it right away. So thanks.”

  On our way out of town, I stopped at a drugstore. Davis bought some over-the-counter painkillers and immediately took two tablets. By now it was well after dark and we also stopped for hamburgers and big cups of iced drinks.

  Lights were on all over Amos’s house when we got back about nine and a patrol car was parked down by the shed. As we drove up, Connor Woodall got out to meet us.

  “Hey, Connor,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Good to see you, Your Honor,” he said formally. “Davis Richmond? Could we go upstairs and talk?”

  His manner instantly reminded me of Dwight when Dwight gets official, and that made me apprehensive. “What’s up?”

  “Tom Hitchcock was killed in a car wreck a few hours ago.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  In a cultural sense, those persons were outsiders, foreigners, mediators with the larger world. And not surprisingly, they were greeted with curiosity and suspicion.

  —Turners and Burners, Charles G. Zug III

  Judges are not supposed to give legal advice, nattered my internal preacher. Remember? That’s one of the first things they told you at New Judges’ School.

  I assured him that I was not going to give advice. But given that Connor must have been told that Davis and Tom Hitchcock had fought, he obviously thought the fight had contributed to the wreck. I didn’t plan to act as the boy’s attorney, I was just going to be there as a friend while Connor talked to him, and then, depending on where the talk went, I’d probably call Jenny McAllister and let her know what was happening with her son.

  And if she asks your advice, you’ll tell her she’ll have to ask her own attorney. Perfectly ethical, the pragmatist agreed.

  “I understand you and Tom had a fight this afternoon,” Connor said as we settled ourselves on couch and chairs around a colorful mosaic table at the front of the loft.