Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  It was only a few miles from the Hitchcock house to Fliss’s place, but I was sorry that Davis was in the car behind instead of on the seat beside me. He’d been hit with a lot of heavy stuff tonight, more than any nineteen-year-old ought to have to handle alone. It probably helped that he was still shaking with anger when we left.

  With all the shattered glass in his car, I’d tried to get him to come with me, but he’d stubbornly taken a broom and swept out the worst from around the driver’s seat.

  “I’m not leaving my car here,” he’d said. “Or what’s left of it.”

  “Let me know how much the windows are,” Dillard had said stiffly. It wasn’t clear whether or not he still thought Davis had anything to do with Tom’s death, but at that point, Davis didn’t care.

  “I certainly will,” he’d snapped back.

  The deputy, a local man, had placed Libbet in his cruiser. He said it was a shame he had to write all this up for official action, considering how much the Hitchcock family was going through right now, but he got no sympathy from either of us. Far as we’d known at the time, she was shooting to kill when we crouched behind Davis’s car.

  Even so, I had a feeling that once everything sank in, Davis’s anger was going to be battling with deep, deep hurt and maybe even a little guilt for ever coming to Seagrove in the first place.

  I used my cell phone to let Fliss know I was finally on my way. She hadn’t heard about Tom Hitchcock’s death and was totally shocked. “God! Poor Betty. Both brothers and now her son? Those people are snakebit, aren’t they?”

  An ironic comment, considering how the wreck occurred.

  When I told her that I was bringing Davis Richmond with me and why, she was instantly sympathetic. “I’ll go put fresh sheets on Vee’s bed right now.”

  Then, because she’s no fool, Fliss said, “Deborah, you’re sure he’s telling the truth?”

  “Oh, Lord, not you, too,” I groaned.

  She wouldn’t back down, though. “We both know that adolescent boys do stupid things that wind up with serious repercussions.”

  “And then swear on a stack of Bibles they didn’t do it. I know, I know. But I’ve been with this one all evening and if I’m that bad a judge of character, then I’d better hang up my robe.”

  “Speaking of robes, this probably isn’t the time for it, but I ran into Will Blackstone tonight and he was very interested to hear you were back in the area. He wants you to call him.”

  She was right. Gratifying as that information might be, this wasn’t the time. In fact, it seemed almost like another lifetime that I came bopping over to Seagrove hoping for a more interesting afternoon than hanging around my own house.

  Be careful what you ask for, said the preacher.

  Amen, said the pragmatist.

  Fliss met us at the door when we pulled into her yard a little before eleven. As a mother herself, she urged Davis to pick up the phone in Vee’s room and call Raleigh.

  “I don’t want to tell my mom all this on the phone,” he protested.

  “You don’t have to,” Fliss said. “Just give her this number and tell her you’re coming home tomorrow.”

  “She’ll want to know why,” he said glumly.

  “Tell her you’re having car trouble,” I suggested.

  That got me a half-smile and we left him to it.

  Back in Fliss’s study, I was happy to sink down on her comfortable chaise, kick off my shoes, and let myself relax for the first time in hours. She poured us both a glass of wine and I finished sketching in the highlights of my afternoon and evening that I had skipped over during our phone call. She listened raptly and was as appalled as I’d been to hear of Amos Nordan’s plan to trip up James Lucas’s killer by using Davis as a decoy.

  “Decoy?” she snorted. “Staked goat is more like it.”

  When Davis rejoined us, he still looked sad and shaken. The stitches in his lip weren’t helping, either, and he took another pain pill.

  “What’s going to happen to Libbet?” he asked.

  “Juvenile court. Most likely, she’ll be charged with misdemeanor assault and damage to personal property,” I said. “Depending on the judge, she’ll probably get a year’s probation and she’ll have to do community service to earn the restitution for your car windows.”

  “And if I know Betty and Dillard,” said Fliss, “she’ll be grounded till she’s twenty.”

  “Not with them getting ready to bury Tom,” Davis said.

  Fliss sighed, too. “That’s true.” Then, more briskly, “Would you like a sandwich or something?”

  “I’m not hungry, thank you.” He looked at me. “Coming here just now, I was thinking. The night James Lucas was buried, the first time my so-called grandfather ever laid eyes on me, he decided right then that he’d throw me to the wolves to save Tom. He didn’t even know me.”

  “But he did know Tom,” I said softly. “What he did was absolutely cold-blooded and monstrous and there’s no excuse for it. All you can do is try to understand his logic. He’s an old man, Davis. He’s lost both sons and he’s scared of losing more members of his family. Rightly scared, as it turns out.”

  “It’s too bad he didn’t tell Tom.”

  “I wonder who he did tell,” I mused.

  “June?” asked Fliss. “Bobby Gerard? Betty Hitchcock?”

  “The elusive Bobby Gerard.”

  “You haven’t seen him around the pottery?” She gestured to my glass with the bottle.

  I held out my empty glass for a refill. “I’ve heard snide remarks about his unreliability, but I’m beginning to think he’s a collective figment of the Nordan clan’s imagination.”

  “No, he’s real,” Davis said. “I don’t think he turns, but he seems to do a little of everything else. He was there Friday afternoon and was back the next morning—yesterday morning? Jeez, yesterday seems like a year ago. Guess this is what Einstein meant by relativity.”

  “What about today?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t see him anyhow.”

  “This Bobby,” I asked Fliss. “Could he have had a grudge against James Lucas?”

  “I never heard that he had, but I told you, Deborah. I don’t hear every bit of gossip that goes around the area.”

  “You didn’t annoy him, did you?” I asked Davis, who immediately shook his head.

  “What about June Gregorich or Jeffy? Both of them certainly had opportunity.”

  “Do you really think Jeffy’s capable?” Fliss asked sensibly. “And what would be June’s motive? She gains nothing from having James Lucas or Tom dead. Besides, if Donny’s accident was murder, too, she’d barely met him. Furthermore, if the pottery fails, she’ll have to look for another place to stay, and not every place would welcome Jeffy.”

  “How did Donald Nordan die?” Davis asked abruptly. “Nobody’s ever come right out and said.”

  I sat quietly as Fliss said, “So far as I know, he got tangled up in some cords or ropes and accidently hanged himself.”

  “Ropes? Cords? Sounds like something that could have been rigged, doesn’t it? Donny, James Lucas, and now Tom. Has anyone else connected with the pottery died oddly?”

  Fliss thought a moment. “Nope, that’s it.”

  We had struck out on motive, but I kept wondering about opportunity. “If the person who killed James Lucas is the same one who put the snake in Tom’s car, then when did he do it? Tourists and customers don’t roam around the workshops on Sunday, so who could besides the family or someone who works there?”

  “Maybe it was sheer coincidence?” Fliss suggested. “If his car window was down, maybe the snake crawled in all by itself. Or if someone did do it, it could have been a couple of days ago. I don’t see where that’s anything the police could ever be sure about unless that person confesses.”

  “Sandra Kay was there this morning,” I said slowly.

  “So was Tom’s mother, but Tom and I
were with them both the whole time,” Davis objected.

  “Were you? You said Sandra knocked on your door, so you weren’t there when she first drove up. And she’d already sent Tom up to the house for the shop key?”

  Davis nodded reluctantly.

  “So if she had the snake in a bag in her car, say, she’d have had a couple of minutes to slip it from her car to Tom’s.”

  Fliss’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think she was real crazy about Tom, either. It annoyed her that she wouldn’t have any say over the pottery if James Lucas died first. And I think there were times that he was too much the heir apparent, if you know what I mean.”

  “They seemed okay with each other this morning,” Davis said. “Besides, the pottery has nothing to do with her anymore once she got her collection out, right? I mean, she’d already divorced James Lucas and now she’s decorating for someone else, isn’t she? So what would she get out of hurting Tom?”

  It occurred to me that Tom might have seen Sandra Kay go through the lane when James Lucas was killed, which opened up the possibility that she really had killed her ex-husband despite all she’d told me. Either way, though, the same question applied to both deaths.

  “Cui bono?” I said.

  Fliss nodded sagely while Davis looked puzzled. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s Latin for, ‘Who profits?’” she translated.

  “Tom would have gained a little sooner by James Lucas’s death,” I said, “but if Tom’s death was deliberately caused by the same person, then I don’t see it. What about the potter Sandra Kay decorates for now?”

  Fliss shook her head. “They might’ve warmed each other’s bed when she first left James Lucas, but I think it’s been strictly business for over a year now.”

  “Libbet?” Davis asked doubtfully. “Maybe she’s the one who’ll inherit now.”

  “Heck,” said Fliss. “Maybe it’s Amos himself, jealous that anybody’s going to outlive him. Or Edward, taking out all the competition to the Nordan-Hitchcock name.”

  Davis suddenly yawned and picked up the wine bottle. “You know, a glass of this would probably help me get sleep.”

  “Good try,” I said, taking the bottle from his hand. “But with all the painkillers you’re taking for that lip, I’m betting you’ll be asleep two minutes after you hit the pillow.”

  He tried to keep from yawning again, then shrugged sheepishly.

  His yawns were contagious. The wine had worked its magic on Fliss and me both, and we all decided to call it a night.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Customers seek contact with the potters, watch their work in progress, explore their shops, and absorb the flavor of the past. The potter’s lifestyle has at its core a control of product, from the digging of the clay to the firing of the kiln. Such visible wholeness is uncommon today, and its satisfactions extend to the buyer who uses the pottery as well as to the potter who makes it.

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  The next morning, Davis was anxious to get on the road and Fliss had an eight-thirty appointment, so I was alone at her kitchen table, making a dent in the half-full pot of coffee they’d left me while I read the Asheboro Courier-Tribune’s account of Tom Hitchcock’s death. It was headlined “Snake Causes Fatal Wreck.”

  The reporter had asked the right questions, but “Lt. Connor Woodall of the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department declined to speculate on whether young Hitchcock’s suspicious accident is related to the earlier murder of his uncle, James Lucas Nordan, also of Seagrove.”

  In a sidebar on the same page, a herpetologist at the nearby state zoo discussed this year’s early emergence of snakes from hibernation and gave amusing examples of warm spots he’d known reptiles to seek during spring’s chancy weather. And yes, car interiors were certainly one of them.

  Happily, nothing seemed chancy about today’s mild weather. Although spring showers were predicted by the weekend, only clear blue skies were visible through the open kitchen window. Around the window itself were more of June Gregorich’s New Age totems—another small ruby-red pyramid, a string of crystals, and a less complex set of bamboo wind chimes beyond the window screen.

  “She appropriates an east-facing window in all the places she works,” Fliss had told me the night before. “She says it helps focus her harmonic energies.”

  A light breeze set the bamboo lengths clacking gently and sunlight made little rainbows across my newspaper. It was so quiet and peaceful that I yawned and stretched and couldn’t decide whether to go back to bed for a short catnap or get dressed and see if I could catch Connor at his office. The phone rang at that precise instant and there was Connor Woodall—just like the psychic hotline.

  “I have to be down in the Seagrove area this morning,” he said. “Why don’t you come have lunch at my house? Fern would like to meet you. Eleven-thirty too early?”

  He gave me directions and I’d just decided I might as well nap for an hour when the back door opened and in walked June Gregorich and her son Jeffy with a bright purple backpack slung over his shoulder. She was surprised to see me. I’d forgotten that this was the day she cleaned for Fliss, and she’d forgotten that I knew Fliss well enough to stay in her house.

  Jeffy said hey with his usual sunny smile, then passed straight on to the den, where he took a cushion from the chaise and lay down on the carpet beside his backpack to watch a children’s program.

  I offered June a cup of coffee.

  “Let me get the sheets and towels started first,” she said.

  I told her that my sheets didn’t need changing and that I’d take care of my room, since I’d probably be here another two nights. “But you might want to check her son’s room. Davis spent the night here, too.”

  She made a tsking sound. “Poor guy. Yesterday was a nightmare, wasn’t it? That fight. Then Tom getting killed and the way Mr. Amos was so mean to him.”

  “Not to mention his cousin taking potshots at us.”

  “Well, that won’t be happening again anytime soon. They confiscated Dill’s rifle. There’s one judge here that has every gun in a juvenile case destroyed. Doesn’t matter if it’s an expensive deer rifle or a Saturday night special. If a kid’s used it to cause trouble, it’s history. I made Mr. Amos lock up his guns and hide the key the second day I cleaned for him.” She took a laundry basket from the utility room next to the kitchen.

  “I just won’t work where there’s a chance Jeffy might get hold of a gun,” she said as she went off down the hall.

  I’d barely finished the sports page before she was back to put the kettle on and load the washer.

  “I put fresh towels in the guest bath,” she said. “If you need more, the linen closet’s at the end of the hall.”

  I followed her to the doorway of the utility room and watched her measure detergent and fabric softener. “Did the magistrate let Libbet come home last night?”

  “Yes, but she has to go back this morning. For some sort of hearing’s what Betty told Mr. Amos.”

  Her thick brown hair wasn’t braided or tied back this morning and it fanned out from her head in all directions as she closed the washer lid and started the machine.

  “How are they doing?”

  I thought of the grief the Hitchcocks must be feeling. They’d probably spend the morning in court with their daughter and the afternoon picking out a casket for their son. And as much as Betty might be hurting, I had a feeling that her husband would be hurting doubly, since he would feel her pain as well as his own.

  “They’d probably be doing better if they didn’t have to worry about Mr. Amos, too.” She shook her head. “He acts like it’s all about him. Like Tom and James Lucas and even Donny, too, are all part of a plot to hurt him. He thinks God’s got it in for him alone. Never mind that they’re the ones dead. The way he’s carrying on about nothing left to live for, I think Betty’s afraid he’ll hurt himself.”

  “Commit suicide?”

  “Not if I can h
elp it,” she said firmly. The kettle began to whistle and she made herself a cup of herbal tea from a packet she’d brought along in her pocket. “I know where he keeps the key to the guns. I hid the bullets last night and I gave the key to Betty this morning.”

  An aroma of oranges and cinnamon wafted up from her cup and filled the kitchen.

  “You were working there when Donny died,” I said. “Right?”

  She looked at me warily and admitted that yes, he’d died soon after she’d started cleaning there.

  “Was it murder like Amos thinks?”

  She shrugged and stirred her tea, not giving anything away.

  I tried to sound as matter-of-fact as possible. “I know that it looked like an autoerotic accident, but was it really?”

  That stopped her in her tracks. “You know about that? How? Amos Nordan would just die if he thought it was all over the Seagrove area. Or did Connor Woodall tell you?”

  I didn’t deny it and she sat down at the table opposite me and gingerly took a sip of the hot tea. “It makes him feel better now to think it was murder, but when it happened—the way it looked with Donny rigged out like that—it shocked him so bad, it brought on his stroke.”

  Now that she thought I knew everything, June was not only prepared to dish, she seemed positively eager to. “I used to hear about kinky stuff like that out in California, but I never expected to find it here in the backwoods of North Carolina.”

  Eyes agleam, she described in salacious detail how Amos Nordan had found his son dressed in frilly white lingerie, slumped over a silken loop that hung from the low rafter above.

  “Mr. Amos was beside himself—shocked and embarrassed and mad all at the same time. I helped him get those clothes off Donny and get him dressed in his own clothes and then we got a rope and somehow managed to make it look like he’d hanged himself.” She shuddered. “It was awful, but Mr. Amos was in such a state, I couldn’t not do what he asked me.”

  “The medical examiner wasn’t fooled, though.”

  “No. Something about the rope marks on his neck. He wasn’t stiff yet, but they could still tell whether the marks were made before he died or after.” She gave a wry smile. “And I guess it didn’t help that we’d put his shorts on backwards. The police found the lacy stuff where we’d stuffed it under the mattress.”