Relics

by Mary Anna Evans

  Joe’s absence was unfortunate. She did not really want to do what must be done alone, but it wasn’t safe to delay the upcoming confrontation any longer. Two people were dead. She couldn’t live with herself if someone else died and she could have prevented it. Making up her mind, she headed out again into the cold on foot, stopping first at her office.

  In her desk was the sample bag holding the cobalt blue lusterware potsherd Joe had uncovered the day before. She retrieved it and cradled the lovely thing in the palm of her hand. The making of useful things—plates, cups, jars—was a worthy craft. In the right hands, even the most utilitarian pottery rose to the level of high art. Faye would put the artist who had made this artifact into that category.

  The decorative painting on this lustered fragment looked nothing like the plain glaze on the gray sherds her team had found all week. Still, in the end, they had all been made from dirt using skills handed down through the generations.

  Light from the overhead bulb played over the fragment’s luminous surface. She rocked her hand back and forth, admiring the way the luster ornamentation changed color. Collectors loved medieval lusterware for its luminous color and its great age. Luster painters of the time, typically Islamic, had incorporated eastern designs into their work, giving it an exotic flair that made present-day rich people happy to part with piles of money just to own something so beautiful. Why was a piece of something so old and so valuable buried in a vacant lot behind a country store in a poor, remote, American village?

  One of the stars on the potsherd glittered at her, giving away its secret.

  There was no longer any doubt in Faye’s mind how the Sujosa were earning their extra money. She wouldn’t grieve much to see Jorge and his poisonous attitude headed for jail, but Ronya was her friend. She deserved a chance to explain herself.

  Pocketing the lusterware fragment, Faye stepped out of the store into a world where her Army-surplus camouflage jacket utterly failed to fulfill its design parameters. She was the only green thing in a sea of winter-gray. Raising her hood to fight off the chill winds that had begun stirring with the sunrise, she cuddled her face deeper into her hood and started walking.

  ***

  Joe stood again under the shadow of the tower. Faye and Adam had assumed that, since they hadn’t found Jimmie’s phone after two hours of looking, they never would. That was a silly attitude. Even Joe, who was not a whiz at math, knew that there was a big difference between two hours and forever. Somebody needed to take those two people fishing. A day spent watching a bobber fail to bob was an exercise in patience.

  He paid heed to all of his senses as he canvassed the winter-blighted vegetation. He would continue looking until he found the phone, or until he was sure it had never been near that tower.

  ***

  Faye stood on the Smiley doorstep, the potsherd in her closed hand. Ronya opened the door and took a step forward, trying to herd Faye away and obscure her vision into the house. Faye stood her ground.

  “Tell me how to make lusterware the old way, Ronya,” she said, looking up into the silent face of a woman twice her size. She opened her hand and held the potsherd up. “And tell me how you found buyers stupid enough to believe your brand-new pots are hundreds of years old.”

  Ronya said nothing.

  “This sherd hasn’t been buried long. It couldn’t have been; the luster wouldn’t have survived those conditions. That doesn’t mean it isn’t old, just that it was buried recently, but I think you know exactly how old it is.”

  Ronya ran her eyes over the sherd in Faye’s hand. She held her silence.

  “If you won’t talk to me, I’m going to have to take this to Adam Strahan.”

  “You’re going to take it to him anyway.”

  “Carmen Martinez is dead.”

  Dusky eyelids flickered over luminous blue eyes. “I know.”

  “Somebody set the fire that killed her. The vessel this came from would be worth a lot in the collector’s market. Maybe enough money to justify murder.”

  “I said I know!” Ronya’s low voice broke. “After the fire, I wanted to go to Adam and tell him everything. But people will be ruined, innocent people, when this comes out.”

  “Innocent?” challenged Faye.

  “I think so. I wanted to take as few people down with me as I possibly could. But it’s hopeless.” She stepped aside and let Faye into her parlor. “I decided last night that I was going to have to tell somebody what I’ve done. I have to say I’m glad that you’ll be the one. With all the trouble haunting the settlement, I have to speak.”

  “All the trouble? You mean Jimmie’s death, too?”

  Ronya nodded. “We’ve never had anything of our own here in the settlement, nothing but land. And peace—but now we’ve lost that.” Tears spilled out of her deep blue eyes. “I babysat Jimmie when he was a tiny thing. There was no reason in this world for that child to die. I can’t figure out how his death is connected to the things I’ve done, but dishonesty is like a cancer. I’ve dragged the whole settlement into a lie that’s eating us alive. It’s got to stop and I’m the one that’s got to stop it. Even if it takes me to the penitentiary for a long time.”

  It was impossible not to believe her. “Oh, Ronya. Is it that bad?”

  Ronya led Faye toward a door at the back of the parlor with a ponderous grace that made Faye think of Demeter leading Persephone to her annual date with Hades. She threw open the door, and Faye walked into a room filled with glitter and earth.

  Platters and bowls and tureens in all stages of completion were scattered around the room, but dominating the scene was a winged vase nearly as tall as Faye. It had been coated in luminescent white, and an intricate pattern in a dull brown was being painted over the fired glaze. Faye knew that the dull brown decorative design was deceiving. When the vase was properly fired a second time, the clay paste could be rubbed away to reveal ornamentation with the iridescent sheen of gold or ruby or bronze that gave it the name “lusterware.” Shaped in the style of the great vases that had adorned Spain’s Alhambra Palace in medieval times, the vessel’s slender neck swelled into a graceful belly like a wine jar.

  Or a water jar.

  ’Twasn’t nothing but their water jars and the clothes on their backs, but those jars held their fortunes.

  “Miss Dovey’s stories aren’t talking about just any old water jars, are they?”

  Ronya dragged a finger over the vase’s sweeping wing. “It’s hard to say. I’ve been reading a lot about pottery in Moorish Spain and Portugal. I’m guessing my people descended from the Islamic potters that brought luster painting to Iberia from the Middle East. They probably left for the Americas sometime after the Christians overthrew the Moors, maybe during the 1500s.”

  “Based on the dates of one of Miss Dovey’s songs, I think you’re right.”

  “Well, the Alhambra vases that survive are more than a hundred years older than that, so I’d say that the women who left were descendants of Alhambra potters who had passed their knowledge down to them,” Ronya said. “I’m thinking that after they got kidnapped by the English sailors, they kept passing the techniques down to their children and, eventually, to me.”

  The tiny arabesques and stylized floral decorations on a completed platter caught Faye’s eye. The patterns had been made by incising the pigment with a sharp stick while it was still wet, leaving a distinctive comma-shaped design that Faye found oddly familiar.

  “Zack’s tadpoles!” she cried.

  “Did you ever once think I wouldn’t pass on what I know—every bit of it—to Zack?”

  Faye circled the unfinished vase. It was magnificent enough to fool the eye, if not the analytical laboratory. “Only eight jars from the Alhambra are known to have survived. It wouldn’t be too hard to convince a wealthy collector that this was the ninth.”

  “Tenth. I’ve already sold one.”

  Faye had no idea how much a collector would pay for a lust
ered vase from the Alhambra, but it would be a fortune. Selling a modern forgery for that much money was serious fraud. Ronya was right to worry about going to the pen. “That other jar must have brought in a big pile of money. I noticed you were doing okay, but you don’t look rich.”

  “I pay Jorge to truck the merchandise out of here. I don’t let anybody touch the big vases but me, but I’m teaching Irene to dig clay and make pots and to do simple glazing and painting. Jimmie, too, when he was still with us. I pay them for their time. I pay Jorge and Fred to help with the drum kilns that I use for less important pieces.”

  “And I thought they were burning trash in the drum behind Jorge’s house.”

  “Irene helps with grinding pigments and processing clay,” Ronya continued. “Leo cuts the wood for my big kiln, but I fire the good stuff myself. The money goes fast. I learned early on that we couldn’t make enough really fine reproductions—”

  Faye cocked an eyebrow. “You mean forgeries?”

  “Yeah. The good stuff takes too long to make. I couldn’t keep everybody busy with it, so while I’m doing this—” she said, gesturing at her own artwork, “they’re making cartloads of tiles and nun’s bowls that we sell for cheap.”

  “Do you let people think they’re old, too?”

  “Sure. I know you’ve seen ads for our work. You know how some popular archaeology magazines are full of advertisements that say things like, ‘Own an oil lamp from the time of Christ!’?”

  “I’ve seen them.”

  “Well, now you can own a tile that comes straight from Moorish Spain.”

  “By way of Alabama.”

  “Yep.”

  “And Jorge trucks a load of that stuff out of here every week. It never occurred to me that it was you paying him to drive his truck. How do you stand working with that bastard?”

  “It’s not fun, but I need help, and Jorge needs the money. They all do. My business lets my crew make enough money to put food on the table and buy a few luxuries for themselves and their families. But that’s all. The middleman skims off a lot of the profit.”

  Faye nodded. She had her own stories to tell about dealing with the black market.

  Ronya had created a ninth Alhambra vase. The authentic ones graced some of the world’s great museums, and collectors would have been waiting in line when word got out that a ninth one had turned up on the black market. Even accounting for all Ronya’s business expenses, Faye guessed that the middleman was keeping ninety percent of the profit, maybe more.

  “Zack’s college fund is doing well, too,” Ronya continued. “I thought it was worth the risk—until people started to die.”

  “Have you ever met your customers?” Faye asked. It could be dangerous to deal with wealthy people doing illegal things. She’d learned that the hard way.

  “I’ve never even met my middleman.” She turned her back on Faye, looking out the window at the backyard kiln that Faye had thought was a simple pile of bricks. “Leo takes care of sales.” Her brittle tone did not speak of marital bliss.

  “How on earth did Leo find somebody who had connections with this much money?”

  “It’s somebody he met while he was away at the university. He took some of my pieces to show around to people who might be able to get me a scholarship to art school. Nobody came up with any scholarship money, but one of Leo’s connections was happy to ask me to make fake antiques. He came home all lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘This is it, Ronya,’ he said. ‘We can both go to school, then we can come back here, where we belong. We’ll able to afford a nice house and nice things for our kids. And we’ll be able to afford a lot of kids.’”

  Faye was doing the math. “It’s been fifteen years since Leo went away to school. I don’t think you’ve been doing this that long.”

  “Fifteen years ago, I told Leo, no. I told him I wouldn’t lie and I wouldn’t steal. Even if it meant we lived here in his parents’ old house for the rest of our lives.”

  “But you changed your mind.” Faye could hear Zack rattling around in his room, making piles of blocks and knocking them onto the worn wooden floor of his grandparents’ home. “I bet you started your business sometime within the past four years.”

  Ronya actually cracked a bitter grin. “You got it. You’re a woman, so you understand. I would kill somebody for that child without blinking an eye. Of course I’m gonna grab the chance to make sure I’ll always be able to give him the things he needs.” The grin faded when she realized what she’d said. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t kill anybody. Truly, Faye.”

  “Who did?”

  “No one on my payroll, I swear. I may be able to swallow being a forger, but I couldn’t live with being an accessory to murder. Look, it’s true we’ve all been on edge since the project came in and we heard there was an archaeologist on board. The last thing we wanted was someone with knowledge of artifacts wandering around—evidence of our operation is all over the place. As you see.” She gestured to the fragment in Faye’s hand. “We were relieved when Dr. Raleigh started his dig in the last place on earth he’d find anything, and when the original archaeologist wasn’t available after all. But then we heard you were coming. We did what we could to discourage you.”

  “I noticed,” said Faye. “Then the dummy in the tree was meant for me, after all.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” said Ronya. “You could have been killed. Jimmie did a stupid teenager thing on the spur of the moment—he was capable of that. He’d made that dummy for the game, but when he heard you were coming, he thought putting it to another use was an absolutely brilliant idea. I told him how wrong he’d been. After the fact.”

  “At the football game.”

  “You saw that? Then you saw how contrite he was. He was scared witless when he saw your car start to skid. It had never occurred to him that he might hurt somebody. Teenagers aren’t big on thinking things through—they’re deep-down certain that they’ll live forever.”

  Ronya’s dark skin blanched as her words reminded them both that Jimmie had been dead wrong about his own immortality. She shook her head abruptly, as if frustrated with herself for yielding to weakness, then continued. “What I’m trying to say is that young people can’t always fathom the possibility of dire consequences for themselves or for anybody else, until they see life’s realities up-close. For a few seconds, Jimmie thought he’d killed you and Joe. Trust me. That was the end of his pranks.”

  Faye remembered the look on Jimmie’s face as Ronya had told him off. Was it enough to remove him as an arson suspect? She wasn’t big on eliminating possibilities, just on somebody else’s word. She needed hard evidence to be sure. “What about the others?” she asked.

  “They all have pretty good alibis,” said Ronya. “Leo was with me, in bed. Fred and Jorge were playing poker all night with three other men at Jorge’s house. Irene was in bed. She sleeps in the same room as her mother. I managed to find out from Kiki, who was awake off and on, as usual, that Irene was sleeping like a lamb. For once, poor kid…”

  “And Jimmie?” asked Faye casually. Jimmie’s footprints placed him at the crime scene. If Ronya came up with an alibi for him, it would be proof that she was lying.

  “I asked him.” Ronya hesitated. “He had his own room, and he was alone. He admitted he was up in the middle of the night. He’s always done most of his studying while Amanda-Lynne was asleep. You’ve heard her talk, so I know you can understand why. I pressed—after all he did put up that dummy—but he was adamant. When he said he couldn’t comprehend how anyone could do such a thing, he looked so betrayed. I guess we all look that way when we first find out that people can be evil. I believed him. Jimmie adored Carmen. I can’t believe he did anything to hurt her.”

  “No. But he might have died because he knew who did.” Faye closed her eyes briefly. “If only he had told you, when you asked.”

  “Well, I’m not going to make Jimmie’s mistake,” said Ronya. “I’m not pla
nning to die, and I don’t plan to see anybody else die, either. I can’t leave the authorities in the dark about something this big.”

  “I’ll call Adam Strahan. Can I use your phone?” Ronya gave her the phone, and she tried his cell, in case he was back in Alcaskaki. The goddamn tower that killed Jimmie was a hateful thing, but it would be a boon when it was finished and the Sujosa finally had cell phone reception. No luck.

  “What’s the number for Hanahan’s?”

  Ronya took the phone, poked in the number, and handed it back.

  “Jenny, it’s Faye. Is Adam around? Damn. Well, tell him I need to talk with him. He can call me at—”

  “Tell him to call you at Miss Dovey’s.”

  Faye raised an eyebrow, but she did as Ronya said. “We’re going to Miss Dovey’s?” she asked when she had concluded her call. “Three days ago you did everything but stand on your head to keep me from going into her house. There must be some interesting secrets in that house. Care to tell me what they are?”

  “Come with me and I’ll show you. Pottery lasts a real long time.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “How long did you think you could keep this thing going?” Faye asked as Ronya wrapped Zack in a coat and hustled him out the back door. The morning’s clouds seemed to have settled to earth. Faye stepped out into a gray mist that wormed its way into her clothes, leaving them damp and useless as a barrier against the winter air.

  “A month ago, I’d have said forever. Until Zack was grown and educated. Until I was absolutely certain that he’d never be hungry when payday rolled around because his check wasn’t big enough to feed his children and still leave enough money to feed him all month, too.” She was silent for a few paces. “But we’re all profiting from a lie. We’re stealing from people who trust that the art they’re buying is hundreds of years old. Nothing good can come from that, but I never expected people to die.”