Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  “Is she telling the truth?”

  “I didn’t ask to see her tongue.” He grinned, remembering how my brothers used to tease me.

  Whenever Mother doubted our word, she’d say, “Let me see your tongue.” She assured us it would have a black spot if we were lying to her.

  We were never quite certain if she really did see black spots or not, but she nearly always knew. Once when I was around five or six, I had to put out my tongue for inspection and there actually was a black spot on it, which Mother triumphantly showed me in the mirror. (I think I’d probably eaten some blackberries a little earlier.) For years afterwards, if I’d shaded the truth by even a hair, I wouldn’t show my tongue and the boys rode me unmercifully.

  I laughed and, hoping that the shared memory had relaxed his own tongue, asked, “Was Sandra Kay Nordan sleeping with her brother-in-law before he died?”

  His face turned bright red. “You heard about that? I didn’t think Fliss was that big a gossip.”

  I was delighted to have tricked him into confirming my guess as to why Amos Nordan had cursed his ex-daughter-in-law. “She didn’t tell me. I asked, but she didn’t know.”

  “I don’t think anybody does,” Connor said. “Amos got it in his head that something was going on between them. I questioned Mrs. Nordan when Donny died, and she denied it, but she would, wouldn’t she? And then she and James Lucas split up right after that.”

  So he’d asked questions after Donny Nordan’s death, had he? A verdict of suicide that had been changed to accidental death? A death no Nordan wanted to talk about? I had a theory about that, too.

  “Another thing Fliss doesn’t know,” I said meaningfully, “is the precise nature of Donny Nordan’s so-called ‘accidental’ death.”

  I thought I’d seen Connor’s whole range, but even his ears turned red on that one. Bull’s-eye!

  “Jesus, Deb’rah! You’ve been over here how long? Two days? And you’ve picked up that much.”

  “Judges learn to read between the lines,” I told him kindly. “Was it a self-inflicted sexual accident? Auto-erotic asphyxiation?”

  He shook his head and I knew he wasn’t going to tell me whether Donny Nordan had been dressed in black leather or black silk when Amos found him.

  “At least tell me this much,” I said. “You’re convinced it really was an accident and not murder? I mean, nobody’s out there killing Nordans for the hell of it, are they?”

  His color was returning to normal. “And waiting two years between times? Not hardly.” He frowned. “On the other hand . . .”

  I waited in hopeful silence, but he didn’t complete the thought aloud. Instead, he pushed away from his desk and offered to walk me back to the main entrance.

  “You’ll have to come over for supper and meet Fern and my girls when you get back,” he told me. “And don’t forget to say hey to Dwight for me.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  As Auby Hilton wryly put it, “Working with clays is like dealing with human nature—you have to work them as they are . . . for trying to force them beyond their nature you make a failure.”

  —Turners and Burners, Charles G. Zug III

  When I got home early Friday afternoon, the first message on my answering machine was from my brother Herman’s wife Nadine, reminding me that I’d promised to attend church services and then take dinner with them on Sunday. The second was from Kidd Chapin: “I’ve UPS’d your stuff . . . and, Deborah? I’m sure sorry it ended like this.”

  Yeah, right.

  My brother Andrew was third, telling me that if I didn’t get a load of gravel to put around the drip lines of my house, the rain was going to wash gullies there this fall. “Gravel don’t cost all that much if you do the raking yourself and you can probably use the exercise.”

  Thanks, Andrew. I really needed to hear that you think I’ve put on weight.

  Next came Dwight Bryant. “They didn’t have that video you wanted, but it’s just as well. I’m off to stay with Cal this weekend while Jonna goes to Virginia Beach with some of her friends.”

  There went my Saturday night. Dwight’s not seeing anybody special these days, either, and we both like old movies, but he’s crazy about his son and hops up to Virginia anytime Jonna offers him extra time with Cal.

  After four downers, it was a relief to get Portland Brewer’s voice.

  Portland’s Uncle Ash is married to my Aunt Zell, but our long friendship began with a mutual loathing of a tattletale in our Junior Girls Sunday School class. In fact, we’ve been sworn best friends ever since we got kicked out of the class for hiding all the yellow crayons so that a tearful Caroline Atherton had to color Jesus’ halo orange. Nevertheless, I didn’t much trust the excitement that bubbled in Portland’s voice as she commanded me to come by her office no later than five o’clock. I’d told her all about my breakup with Kidd within hours of the incident and I had a feeling she’d been beating the bushes all week looking for someone to distract me. I wasn’t anywhere near ready for that yet, but the only way to keep Por off my back was to go take a look.

  Accordingly, I slipped into an all-purpose black pantsuit, wound some gold-and-turquoise beads around my neck, took a few pains with my makeup, and drove over to Dobbs. The sun was still halfway up the sky, but the grandfather clock in the outer office of Brewer and Brewer, Attorneys at Law, was just striking five as I stepped inside the door.

  “Well, hel-lo, gorgeous!” said Avery Brewer, who seemed to be rummaging beneath the receptionist’s deserted counter for manila folders. He gave me a huge smile, then came around the counter and gave me a kiss on the cheek together with a warm hug.

  And I’d only been gone two days.

  “Seen Por yet?” he asked, still beaming at me.

  “Just got here. She in her office?”

  He nodded happily and dumped the folders to lead the way. I was starting to get unnerved. Who in God’s name had Por found for me that had her husband grinning like this? One of their newly single friends? An LL.D. from the law school over at Duke or Chapel Hill? A movie star on location in Wilmington?

  “Deborah!” Portland rose from her desk and embraced me with a similar goofy smile. She has tight black curls and a little round face. Today her face seemed a tiny bit rounder and her hair looked like Julia Lee’s poodle when CoCo’s in need of a good clipping. Her white jeans and lime green sweatshirt did not spell an evening at La Residence.

  “What’s up?” I asked, sinking down on the leather chair adjacent to a matching couch and glass-topped coffee table that comprised an informal setting designed to put nervous clients at ease. It wasn’t doing a thing to help me, other than reminding me of James Lucas’s comment on the furniture Sandra Kay had taken from their house (“Real high quality—like what you’d find in a lawyer’s office”), but we seemed to be alone here in the office, so I was safe for the moment.

  They sat down, too, side by side on the couch, holding hands like a pair of excited teenagers.

  “We wanted you to be the first to know,” Portland said. “We’re going to have a baby!”

  I was stunned. They’ve been married nine years, but when she stopped taking her birth-control pills four years ago and nothing happened, she hadn’t acted like it was a big deal.

  “A child would be great,” she’d told me only six months ago, “but we aren’t going to jump through any fertility hoops. If it happens, it happens.”

  Looking at their blissed-out grins, I knew it was a very big deal.

  Not about me at all.

  About them.

  I moved over to sit on the coffee table so I could hug them both. “That’s so abso-fricking-wonderful! When?”

  “Por’s birthday,” Avery said. “That bottle of champagne you gave her.”

  Portland giggled and punched him in the ribs. “Idiot! She wasn’t asking when the baby was conceived. She’s asking when’s the due date.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t be totally fascinated with a blow-by-b
low account of your technique, Avery.” I laughed, already counting on my fingers from her early March birthday. “December? A Christmas baby?”

  “Definitely before the first of the year,” said Avery. “We might as well get the deduction.”

  “Once a tax lawyer, always a tax lawyer,” Por said happily.

  “Well, why are we sitting here?” I asked. “We need another bottle of champagne to celebrate.”

  “No champagne,” Avery warned me. “No alcohol of any kind for the next eight months. Everything she eats or drinks goes right across the umbilical cord.”

  One month pregnant and now he was an expert.

  Por made a face. “I couldn’t drink anything anyhow. You wouldn’t believe the morning sickness. If I don’t eat a couple of soda crackers before I lift my head off the pillow, I wind up barfing my head off. And I stay so damn sleepy I actually dozed off during Ed Whitbread’s summing up this morning.”

  “Ed’s summations always put me to sleep, too,” I said, “and I’ve never had your excuse. But I’m serious about celebrating. Let me take you guys to dinner. Avery and I can drink your share of the champagne.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “We’re on our way down to Wilmington to tell my mom and dad. They’re beginning to think they’re never going to have any grandchildren and we want to see their faces when they hear.”

  So there I was. All dressed up and nowhere to go. Nowhere in Dobbs anyhow. It’s a real Noah’s Ark town—everything from McDonald’s to the country club is on a two-by-two basis. But I hadn’t stopped in at Miss Molly’s in a while, so I headed on over, knowing I’d probably catch the after-work crowd.

  Miss Molly’s is on Raleigh’s South Wilmington Street and is the watering hole of choice for many state and local law enforcement agents on their way home from work or as an interlude before dinner.

  As I pulled into the parking lot a little after six, the car in the next space cranked up to leave. I gave the white-haired driver a cursory glance, then we both did double-takes and he had a wide grin on his weatherbeaten face as he let his window down.

  “What are you doing this far inland?” I asked him. “I thought you were going to retire and write position papers from a laptop on the beach.”

  When I first met him, Quig Smith was a detective with the Carteret County Sheriff’s Department down in Beaufort, just counting the days till he could retire and become a full-time watchdog for the Clean Water Act.

  “Didn’t change your mind, did you?”

  “Naw,” he said. “I’m up here to try to lobby the legislature out of some more relief money.”

  Last fall, down east suffered a major hurricane disaster. There was unprecedented flooding that swept away whole towns and communities, businesses and churches, crops and livestock. Hog lagoons overflowed into the rivers. Dead pigs and poultry floated across the flat land. Buildings and houses weren’t just underwater, they were under filthy, nasty, polluted water. Damages ran into the hundred millions. In what everybody agreed was a hundred-year storm, the poorest section of the state was devastated.

  So how did Raleigh react to this emergency?

  As politicians, not statesmen.

  Instead of a onetime tax to which the whole populace would have consented in compassion for the thousands of victims, our legislators are so scared of the T-word that they’ve tried to raise the necessary aid by cutting social and cultural programs that were already underfunded. Down east should have gotten the economic equivalent of hospitals and ambulances. Instead they got a handful of Band-Aids, while overstressed programs all across the state now go begging, too.

  It has not been North Carolina’s finest moment.

  “You really think you’re going to pry loose another nickel for cleaning up waterways?” I asked him.

  “Don’t hurt to try,” he said cheerfully. “The most they can do is say no and we’re no worse off than we were, except I’m out a tank of expensive gas.”

  He started to put his car in reverse, then hesitated. “I was real sorry to hear about you and Kidd.”

  “He told you?”

  He and Kidd had been friendly colleagues, but as Quig nodded, there was nothing—thank you, Jesus!—in his expression to indicate that Kidd had told him any of the juicier details.

  “He only told me because I asked him if he was coming up this weekend.” Quig gave me a puzzled look. “I thought he had his head screwed on better than to go back to that wife of his.”

  “Me, too,” I said and tried for a smile that would imply it was more Kidd’s loss than mine.

  As he backed out, we agreed that the next time I was in Morehead, I’d call him for some of the best grilled sea bass on the whole coast. I waved goodbye, then the door of Miss Molly’s opened wide and I could hear the jukebox pounding out a rollicking salsa.

  Inside, cigarette smokers still outnumbered nonsmokers. Toward the back of the big room, I immediately saw SBI friends K.C. Massengill and Morgan Slavin with their blond heads close together and Terry Wilson, who was about four boyfriends before Kidd and who is still a good buddy, something Kidd will never be. They welcomed me raucously and made room for me at a round table for eight that already held nine.

  They were exchanging dumb bad guy stories and a Wake County sheriff’s deputy was putting forth his candidate for dumbest.

  Amid the general laughter, I ordered a light gin and tonic and heard about thieves who lock themselves out of their getaway cars, bank robbers who write their demands on the back of their own deposit slips, and insurance frauds who forget and wear their “stolen” rings to file their claims.

  For some reason, though, my heart wasn’t really in it.

  Truth was, I was beginning to feel as if life were changing all around me, passing me by. Marriage to Avery hadn’t altered my friendship with Portland, but I had a feeling this baby might. Babies complicate everything. Not only do they require a lot of attention, previously carefree couples immediately morph into parents, anxious one minute, insufferably smug the next.

  I was really happy for Portland.

  Honest I was.

  All the same, until the baby hit sixteen, there would be no more spur-of-the-moment trips to the coast or mountains, no all-night parties, no late afternoon cookouts at the lake. Everything would have to be scheduled in advance and geared around the baby’s schedule.

  I’d seen it happen to most of my friends and now it was happening to my oldest and best friend.

  I looked around the smoky table, at Morgan and K.C. and Terry and the others. How many marriages and divorces between them? And why were we all still hanging out at Miss Molly’s?

  I was pretty much over Kidd, but I wasn’t over wanting someone special in my life.

  Easy enough for my brothers and their wives to keep nagging me to settle down. Hard to find someone with the right qualities.

  I thought about that new judge over in Carthage.

  Will Blackstone.

  Maybe I would let him show me his pots next time I was there. Who knows? To quote my brother Haywood, “You can’t catch a fish if you ain’t got a line in the water.”

  Saturday I cleaned house and planted a flat of red petunias that Daddy brought me. “Your mama always liked these,” he said. He also said that Maidie was rooting me some of the old roses from the family graveyard down from the homeplace.

  On Sunday I did my duty by Nadine and Herman and went to church with them even though New Deliverance is my least favorite of all the houses of worship in the area. The minister’s one of those borderline control freaks who preaches from the Old Testament more often than the New, more shalt-not than shall. There’s not a single window in the sanctuary and nothing on the walls, not even a cross, to distract the congregation’s attention from his joyless sermons. He manages to make heaven and salvation sound so dreary that I always leave more depressed than uplifted.

  If my brother wasn’t such a sweetie . . .

  If Nadine’s Sunday dinners weren’t so delicious . .
.

  But he is and hers are and it’s only once or twice a year, so I hold my tongue and go.

  By Monday, I had my equilibrium back and was ready to sit my normal rotation down in Makely. It was the usual calendar of petty crimes and misdemeanors, traffic violations and such, until the middle of the week, when we got to the State vs. Allie Johnson.

  Briefly, it was alleged that Ms. Johnson (nineteen, blond, blue-eyed, blue jeans, and many silver bracelets) had taken her car to the local car wash and there at the entrance of the Tunnel of Suds, she discovered that the car ahead of her was that of her not-then-ex-boyfriend Carl Judd. In the car ahead of Mr. Judd was his newest girlfriend, a Ms. Stauffer. Enraged by the sight of them, Ms. Johnson drove around to the car wash exit, blocked Ms. Stauffer’s car, jumped out, and started trying to choke her rival.

  Mr. Judd tried to intervene, at which point Ms. Johnson pulled a knife and tried to cut him.

  She was charged with assault on Ms. Stauffer with a deadly weapon and she was the picture of outraged innocence on the stand. “I did not assault that bitch with a deadly weapon,” she said.

  I cautioned her about language suitable to the courtroom.

  “Well, I didn’t,” she said stubbornly. “I only tried to choke her with my hands. He’s the one I wanted to cut.”

  Amid barely concealed snickers from bailiff and attorneys, Mr. Judd (early twenties, flat black hair, chinos, and a red knit shirt) took the stand and my clerk chanted the formula. “Place your left hand on the Bible and raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you’re about to give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  “No.”

  “Be seated,” the clerk said automatically.

  “Excuse me?” I said to the witness. “What did you say?”

  Like a well-brought-up son of the South, Mr. Judd immediately corrected himself. “No, ma’am.”

  “Did you just say you would not tell the truth?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Judd, but that wasn’t a polite question the clerk asked you. You’re obliged to tell the truth or I’ll have to hold you in contempt. Maybe even send you to jail. Do you understand?”