The showroom was locked, but lights had been left on inside. Above the door hung a wide white board that was lettered in shiny black enamel: Stanberry Collection. A leafy green vine with generic purple berries twined through the letters.
Although there were several hand-painted three- and four-panel folding screens scattered around the small showroom and clustered across the rear corner, the Stanberry Collection seemed to consist mainly of headboards, headboards of a design I’d never seen before. These were like upright wooden boxes that slanted back at a slight pitch and had a wide ledge at the top. With a few pillows, you could lean back at a comfortable angle to read or watch television and the ledge would still be a few inches higher than your head so that your pillows wouldn’t bump into your books or pictures or whatever personal knick-knacks you wanted to display. The slanted headboard was hinged at the bottom and magnetic latches at the top allowed access to a concealed space that could store extra pillows or hide the family silver. The box extended around on either side of the mattress where it jutted forward to become built-in bedside tables wide enough to hold reading lamps, radios, and bedtime snacks. Some were a series of open shelves, others had a couple of drawers built in below. Some were constructed of fine-grained natural woods, but most were painted and then stenciled in sophisticated colors and patterns.
They really were quite striking and extremely practical and I was not the only one drawn to the Stanberry Collection. Another man had left his briefcase on the floor beside me and was roaming up and down the long windows, occasionally pressing his face right up against the glass and cupping his hands around his eyes as if to see past any reflected glare.
All of a sudden, I heard a muted roar from inside the showroom and saw a man, his face contorted with fury, dart out from behind those screens at the rear and rush toward the door.
Instantly, my fellow viewer jerked back from the window and hurried over to collect his briefcase, which was now behind me.
I tried to zig as he zagged and we wound up in that embarrassing tango of two strangers trying to pass each other, until he quit trying and barreled right into me. I went flying into the projecting corner of the hall with such force that my shoulder hit the sharp edge and I gasped in pain. In his haste, he stumbled over his briefcase and sprawled full length on the floor. He scrambled up almost immediately but that slight delay was just enough to let the second man fling open the door and pounce on him.
“Okay, asshole! Gimme the film,” he snarled.
The first man tried to bluster, but even though he was a couple of inches taller and several pounds heavier, the showroom proprietor wasn’t intimidated.
“Give me the film or I’ll stomp your camera.”
Defeated, the man took a tiny camera out of his pocket, snapped it open, and extracted the film.
“I see you or anybody from your company back here again, I’ll stomp your camera and smash your face. You got it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered the other man as he slunk away.
Hie second man finished exposing the roll of film and turned to me with a big smile. “Hey, you okay?”
“I guess so,” I said, rubbing my bruised shoulder. “What was all that about?”
“Bastard was trying to steal our designs.”
“Jeff?”
The woman who came out to join us was about my age and height, but her almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair showed an Asian heritage even though she spoke with no discernible accent. She carried a battery-operated vacuum cleaner and gave me a friendly smile as her husband explained why he’d rushed out like that. “And if this lady hadn’t been there to slow him down, he’d have got away.”
“We’re Mai and Jeff Stanberry,” the woman said. “If you’re interested, we’ll be glad to show you our line.”
According to the clock on the wall behind her, I had enough time and soon I was happily wandering through the Stanberry Collection, opening drawers, admiring the capacious storage space in each headboard, and picturing my mother’s Made in Occupied Japan porcelain shepherdess and a few other personal treasures clustered on the top ledge of a painted headboard while the Stanberrys proudly explained that theirs was a fairly new company.
“Originally, we were just going to build screens. I’m an artist and Jeff’s an engineer. He knows about hinges and strapping and ratios of board feet to finished product, and I know découpage and stenciling. We brought two dozen to our first show three years ago and sold out, but there’s not much profit in them.”
Their line of headboards grew out of a lack of finances to buy a ready-made one, coupled with their fondness for reading in bed.
“So Jeff started out with a slanted backrest.”
“And Mai realized that a piano hinge at the bottom would let us utilize the empty space behind for storage.”
“Then Jeff wanted a place for his cassette player—”
“I like to listen to old Nichols and May routines when I’m going to sleep.”
“—and I wanted my clock radio and a box of Kleenex.”
“And that was the first prototype of these.”
“Last year we brought three-dozen screens and a dozen headboards and went home with enough orders to hire two people to help us,” Mai said proudly. “A carpenter and a painter.”
“And if we do good this year,” said Jeff, “we can maybe move out of the garage and get a real workshop.” They told me that this was the first time they’d rented an official showroom.
“Before, we’ve had open booth spaces across the street at Market Square. This year we can afford a real showroom. We may be small, but our quality is high and we don’t make promises we can’t deliver on.”
They gave me their brochure and an order form and I found the model number of the headboard I was sure would be perfect for my new house, whatever that house turned out to be.
“This is my first Market,” I said, circling the model number, “so I don’t quite understand why you think that guy was stealing your designs. Don’t you have a patent?”
They laughed and Jeff Stanberry said, “You are new, aren’t you? We do what we can to protect ourselves, but if a big company wants to do a knockoff of our designs, their pockets are a lot deeper than ours if we tried to sue.”
“All we can do,” said Mai Stanberry, “is try to land as many new accounts as we can before the big boys notice us.” She gave a winsome smile. “So! Does Home-Lite do a large volume in sleep products?”
Guiltily, I realized that my badge had misled them into thinking I was a buyer. “I’m afraid I’m not exactly a commercial customer.”
Jeff Stanberry gave me a wary look. “Hey, you’re not another exhibitor looking to knock us off, are you?”
“Nothing to do with the Market at all,” I assured him. “Someone gave me this badge so I could get into one of the parties upstairs. I’m actually a district court judge. And I really do like that headboard. Does anybody in the Raleigh area carry it?”
“Not yet,” said Mai. “But we’ve had nibbles.”
“If you land one, would you please have the store drop me a note? Or can I order from you directly?”
“Tell you what,” said Jeff. “If you’re going to be around till the end of the show next week, we’ll be selling these samples at wholesale so we don’t have to cart them back to the mountains with us. If you like, I’ll red dot the one you want and you can pick it up then.”
Before one of us could change our mind, I sent Reese a mental thank-you and reached into my tote bag for my checkbook.
Instead of my purse, though, my hand closed around a plastic bag of fried chicken.
5
« ^ » “Among the marvelous accomplishments of human study and genius, nothing, all facts considered, can well be regarded as more important than man’s triumph over space and time in the matter of the intercommunication of widely separated individuals.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
The Stanberrys stared while I slapped at m
y pockets in mild panic. All I needed to make this day complete was having to spend half the night on the phone trying to cancel all my credit cards.
My wallet is nothing more than a flat nylon-and-Velcro folder made to hold driver’s license, the usual set of cards and whatever paper money I happen to have on hand. When I travel, I usually stick it in an inside jacket pocket so that I don’t have to dig through my purse at the gas station or ATM.
Happily, my wallet was still there.
Unhappily, my car keys were with my purse and checkbook. Not to mention my cellular phone, lipstick, hairbrush and God knows what else.
“Something wrong?” asked Mai Stanberry.
“This isn’t my tote bag.”
Of course it had to be Savannah, the erstwhile Matilda McNeill Jernigan alias Louisa May Ferncliff alias Melissa Dorcas Pond or whatever that last alias was, who had taken my bag by mistake.
At least I hoped it was by mistake.
“Of course it was,” said the preacher who lives in the back of my head (and who always gives everyone the benefit of the doubt).
“Humph!” snorted the pragmatist (who doesn’t).
The Stanberrys were sympathetic once I convinced them that this wasn’t some sort of con game. They weren’t set up to take plastic, but they did agree to take my business card and a fifty-dollar deposit, which was all the cash I thought I could spare without hunting for an ATM.
By then it was two minutes till nine, and now I had to worry that Dixie might leave without me.
“Hey!” called Mai as I hurried down the hall. “I thought you wanted to get to the main elevators.”
“I do.”
“Then you’re going in the wrong direction. It’s this way. Come on, I’d better show you.”
I hadn’t realized how many branchings I had taken, but eventually we turned a final corner and there were the elevators.
“See you next week,” said Mai as I pushed the Down button.
Nice woman. And tactful, too, to pretend she believed that I could actually find my way back to their showroom in only a week.
Two cars went past—one with a blue ox—then a third, and each time there was no room for me.
An exit sign over a doorway at the end of a short hall finally convinced me that it would be quicker to walk down.
Inside the stairwell I found a world removed from polished tile and gleaming glass. Here were grungy walls, concrete steps, utilitarian steel railings and low-wattage lightbulbs. Here also was an institutional smell that was one part disinfectant and the other part damp cement with just a dash of machine oil for pungency. No windows, of course, no markings on the doors, and utter silence except for the sound of my echoing steps.
After several flights, I lost track of the floors and pulled open a door hoping to see someone to ask. Instead, I seemed to be standing at the back of a dark and deserted showroom filled with wicker chairs and couches.
“Careful you don’t set off a burglar alarm,” whispered the preacher.
“Better try Door Number Two,” advised the pragmatist.
As I closed the door and stepped back into the dimly lit stairwell, I heard another door swoosh open below me. Great! Someone I could ask for directions.
But when I reached the next landing, there was no one in sight and no sound of other footsteps. Puzzled, I tried the door. It didn’t budge.
I began to get uneasy. And just a tad claustrophobic. Surely I was on the sixth floor by now? But what if all the rest of the doors were locked? Should I go back up or keep going down?
I compromised and continued on down. One more door, I told myself. If it didn’t open, then I would go back up and take my chances with the wicker. A banner headline flashed across my mind: JUDGE NABBED IN MARKET BREAK-IN.
As I paused on the landing, I heard the door I’d just tried slowly open on the landing above. I shrank back in the corner shadows directly below and froze.
A long silence, then the door gently closed and footsteps started down.
I hadn’t checked to see what else was under the fried chicken, but that tote bag had a certain heft and I wound the straps around my hand, prepared to slug my way past whoever was playing cat and mouse with me.
The steps came closer, closer. They had nearly reached the foot of the flight when I stepped out of the shadows and with tote bag poised to strike, rasped, “What are you—?” before I recognized the woman.
She gave a terrified moan and all the color drained from her face as she half fell, half scrambled back up the stairs.
“Wait!” I called, running after her. “I won’t hurt you. I thought you were chasing me! Please stop.”
She turned and faced me warily, a stocky young woman with long black hair. Color crept back into her face as she recognized me. “You’re the one who was with Savannah at the reception upstairs.”
It was the reporter from Furniture/Today.
“And you followed her out of the Leathergoods party,” I said.
“You scared the bloody hell out of me,” she said, taking deep breaths as she pushed her heavy hair away from her face.
I realized I was breathing just as deeply. “How do you think I felt hearing someone sneaking in and out of the same door?”
“God! When you pushed against it, I thought I was going to pass out.”
“We are Woman,” I said wryly. “Hear us whimper.”
She gave a shaky smile. Her face was too broad and her nose was a little too big for prettiness, but her smile was engaging and intelligence shone in her dark eyes.
“Do you have any idea where we are?”
“I think that was the fifth floor,” she said in an accent I couldn’t quite place.
“Hallway or showroom?”
“Hallway. All the elevator cars were full so I thought I’d walk down, but when I heard your footsteps, I got nervous for some reason.”
“I think I’ll see if I can get one going up,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll come with you. I’ve had enough of creepy stairwells for one night.”
“I thought you said you just got here.”
“But I’ve been pretty well lost for the last half hour,” she said, following me up the steps. “I went after Savannah, hoping for an interview. I want to write an article on her.”
“Did you get it?”
“She never let me get close. I was going to wait till she left the elevator, but she didn’t get off till the ground floor and it was so damn crowded I had trouble keeping up. That woman can move when she wants to.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, remembering how I’d had to rush to stay with her earlier in the evening.
“I saw her go through a door at the far end of the corridor and I didn’t think to see if I could get out again until it latched tight. But I could hear her rushing on down the steps as if she were late for an appointment and I figured she must know a shortcut out. It was like Alice following the White Rabbit. I don’t know how far down I went, but I think I must have wound up in a sub-sub-basement—really dark and creepy. I called, but she never answered and I started thinking maybe it was pretty dumb to go wandering around the bowels of a deserted building. Except that I knew it wasn’t deserted. That’s what’s so weird about this place. Parts of it are jammed to the gills while other parts are like this.”
I reached the landing, pushed open the door, and we were back in civilization again. Around the corner, a cluster of laughing and chattering sales reps were waiting for a Down elevator. I mashed the Up button and was almost immediately rewarded with an empty car.
“Hey, great idea!” said one of the men. “If we ride up, we can then ride down.”
So many of them piled in with us that we were separated and when I got off at the sixth floor, I expected that she would continue on up. Instead, she pushed her way through and looked at me like a happy, long-haired puppy.
“You know, we didn’t actually get introduced before. I’m Heather McKenzie.”
“Deborah Knott,”
I said, as I studied Dixie’s diagram.
Her office wasn’t hard to find. Straight down the hall past Vittorio E’s, Dixie had said.
Vittorio E’s was a large showroom filled with what, for lack of a better term, I would call Italian Provincial. The pieces would have been right at home in the first Victor Emmanuel’s palace. All the rococo couches and tables and chairs had bent—cabriole?—legs and all the exposed wood was either painted an antique ivory or ornately encrusted in gleaming gilt.
What stopped me in my tracks though was a lamp that sat atop a bow-fronted ivory-and-gold chest: the base was a three-foot-long porcelain piece cast in the image and likeness of an eighteenth-century open carriage pulled by four white horses with pink plumes on their heads. The carriage held four porcelain Barbie types in period bouffant wigs and colorful, low-cut dresses. The whole improbable contrivance was topped by a pink silk lampshade shaped like Aunt Zell’s oval roasting pan if you turned it upside down and put a pink fringe around the bottom.
Heather McKenzie giggled. “How would you like to have something like that in your living room?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think there’s a single house in North Carolina that could live up to that lamp, but I’ve got a sister-in-law who would just love it to death.”
On the corner beyond Vittorio E’s was an open gallery that featured what I was learning to call motion furniture, i.e., anything that rocked, reclined, swiveled, tilted, popped up or swung. As we approached, several people seemed to be rocking and swinging, but as we got closer, I saw that Dixie Babcock and another woman were the only real people. The rest of the figures were stuffed dummies that looked like large Cabbage Patch dolls.
“There you are,” said Dixie. She stood up and smoothed the wrinkles from her chic green linen dress. “I was beginning to wonder if I needed to send out a Saint Bernard.”
The other woman stood up, too, and began carrying the dummies inside a lockable area of the gallery.
“Aw, they looked comfortable,” said Heather.
The woman laughed. “We left one of them out last year and somebody carted him off to a party at the Longhorn.”
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