“I’m not. But I’ve met some of those people now and I can’t help being curious.”
I told him a little more about Amos Nordan and the pottery’s long history as we walked out on the pier my nephews and nieces built for me. When we got to the end, we sat down on the edge, facing each other, our backs against the pilings, our shoes almost touching, as we sipped our drinks.
“How’s Cal?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Deb’rah.” Dwight’s back was to the moon and his face was in shadows, but I could still hear his sadness and frustration as he talked about how much he missed his son and how worried he was that Cal wasn’t getting enough exercise and the right intellectual stimulation. “Sometimes I think I should move up there to Virginia, try to get a job in that little town. It wouldn’t pay squat, but at least I’d get to see him more. Get him out from in front of the television.”
Jonna’s elderly mother was Cal’s baby-sitter and it was easier for her to watch him in the house than to take him to a park or enroll him in outdoor activities.
“Is Jonna going to let you have him over Easter?”
He nodded.
“Well, you be sure and bring him out here. Robert and Doris are going to have an Easter egg hunt for all the kids at church and I told her I’d help.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
Small clouds scudded across the moon and a light wind began to blow from the northeast. We sat in silence and let the night sounds of frogs and crickets wash over us.
Dwight finished his drink, stood up, then gave me a hand to pull up and we headed back to the house.
“Sorry,” he said. “Here I’ve dumped on you and never asked how you’re doing. Will says you told him Chapin’s going back to his wife. True?”
“Oh, yes,” I said wearily. “Story of my life. But don’t worry. It’s no big deal.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure. You never liked him, did you?”
Dwight shrugged. “He just seemed a little lightweight. Like everything was a joke.”
“You got that part right,” I told him. “Only the joke was on me in the end.”
“The guy’s an idiot,” Dwight said loyally.
“He missed his daughter as much as you miss Cal,” I said, struggling to be fair. “You ever think of getting back with Jonna?”
“Jonna? Hell, no!”
“Not even for Cal?”
“Not even for Cal.”
For some reason, I felt obscurely pleased.
CHAPTER
16
Most assuredly, memory can be a fickle ally, subject to all types of distortions.
—Turners and Burners, Charles G. Zug III
It was Friday morning.
Betty Hitchcock wrenched open the single loft window as June Gregorich came up the steps from Donny’s old workshop below with an armload of fresh bed linens. Jeffy shambled along behind carrying a broom and dustpan.
Davis Richmond was expected by noon and despite the hostility of her two younger children and her own uneasy apprehensions, Betty couldn’t let him come into a dusty, untidy place.
A thin drizzle still fell, the last remnants of an early morning rain, but she could already see patches of blue sky to the west as the dark clouds moved eastward. Although the skylights overhead gave light, they couldn’t be opened and the window over the bed was too small to be much help in clearing out the musty smell of disuse.
“I don’t know why Dad doesn’t just give him the spare bedroom in the house,” she said. She had already stripped off the old quilt that served as the bed’s dustcover and turned the double mattress in an attempt to freshen it. “This is going to be too much extra work for you.”
“It’s okay,” June said. “Mr. Amos seems so anxious to have the boy here, it’s worth a little extra work.”
A clatter on the stairs made them turn in time to see the broom handle bang the railing as Jeffy attacked the dusty steps.
“Go easy, son,” she called. “You’re kicking up more dust than you’re sweeping. Little short strokes, remember? And don’t forget the corners.”
Immediately, he slowed his tempo and earnestly concentrated on each step.
June fluffed the fitted white bottom sheet over the mattress and began tucking in the corners. “Besides,” she told Betty, who came over to help, “he may not be here long.”
“True,” said Betty. “Learning to turn a pot or two is fun. Doing it day in and day out gets to be hard work real fast if you don’t have the patience for it.”
“No, I was thinking that he might give the boy James Lucas’s house. If it all works out the way Mr. Amos hopes.”
Betty stared at her blankly across the width of the bed. “James Lucas’s house?”
“Well, yes.” June looked at her and hesitated. “It is his now, isn’t it? Deborah—Judge Knott, I mean—said that if he didn’t leave a will, everything would go to Mr. Amos.”
“No, it’s all Dad’s again . . . only . . .”
Despite the years, the graying hair, the fine wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, Betty Hitchcock was still beautiful, but now her normally serene face was troubled.
As if reading her mind, June said, “Don’t worry. I’m sure Mr. Amos will do right by Tom. There’s always his house. And like he says, nothing’s in writing yet. He’s sure looking forward to this, though, isn’t he? I never saw your dad quite in this frame of mind. You were up at the house. Did you see how he has all those picture albums out?”
She briskly fluffed the pillows, put fresh cases on them, and piled the old ones by the landing to take back to the house and wash.
June had helped Betty and Sandra Kay clear out most of Donny’s things shortly after his funeral. Clothes and personal papers had been sorted and disposed of. What remained was a large, sparsely furnished open space. The entertainment center no longer held television or stereo, but furniture still ranged in front of it. The couch, low round table, and a club chair were old yet comfortably inviting. More than once she had missed Jeffy and found him here curled up on the couch, sound asleep.
The tabletop was an abstract mosaic that Donny had pieced from shards of broken pottery and the couch and chair echoed those purple and gray hues. (Not a chip of that famous cardinal red, though, June had noted the first time she saw the table.)
At the far end of the loft a long, ceramic-tiled counter held a cold-water sink, a microwave, a toaster oven, a coffeemaker, and a straight-sided earthenware pot into which cooking and eating utensils had been stuck indiscriminately. There was also a small refrigerator, which Betty had already wiped down with baking soda this morning and plugged in. Above was a shelf full of gray-and-purple Nordan tableware and drinking vessels.
Behind the wall was a homemade bathroom consisting of sink, shower, and toilet, again cold water only.
Betty had moved the bed from its former position. Involuntarily, June looked at the beams overhead and tried to recall which one Donny had dangled from, but even though she’d helped Mr. Amos lower his body, she couldn’t now be sure. Her mind went back to that gray November day. Hard to realize that more than two years had passed since then. . . .
It was only her second or third time cleaning for Mr. Amos and she had been washing up their lunch dishes when she missed Jeffy. In the living room, the Muppets had been singing her son’s favorite song, but Jeffy wasn’t singing along as he usually did.
When she went in to check on him, his plaid wool jacket and red knit cap lay on the arm of the leather couch. The big television screen had been full of colorful furry animals, but the afghan she’d covered him with for his nap earlier lay in a woolen pile on the floor. No Jeffy.
The two-story house held four bedrooms upstairs, but all the rooms were small and it only took a moment to assure herself that he was in none of them. The coverlet on Mr. Nordan’s bed was rumpled where he’d taken his usual midday rest and she automatically straightened it. Irritation battled with worry o
ver Jeffy’s disobedience. Grabbing up her own jacket, she pushed open the side door of this rustic wooden house and stepped into the yard. No sign of her son.
Tall pines shaded the whole pottery compound and nondeciduous bushes, some of them more than head high, lined the paths and the foundations of every structure. They seemed to be ubiquitous in this part of the country. So different from her native California. Azaleas and rhododendrons, she’d been told, and glorious in the spring. Everyone kept saying that North Carolina would knock her eyes out in the spring. “California may have flowers all year ’round,” they said, “but you just wait till you see everything here all pink and white and new green. You won’t believe how pretty it’ll get around here.”
Even in the gray and chill of early November, it was a lovely peaceful setting, but right then, June was too worried to take more than passing notice.
Had Jeffy gone into the showroom? He wouldn’t mean to break anything, but he was so clumsy and uncoordinated. He’d gotten her fired from the pottery that first hired her when they came to Seagrove and she certainly didn’t want him to upset the people here before she’d had a chance to make herself indispensable to the Nordans.
She mounted the two steps at the rear and unlatched the heavy wooden door. Inside, all was as it should be. Shelves and cabinets held orderly rows of beautifully glazed stoneware in deep purples and grays. A couple of customers were murmuring happily to each other as they lifted the various pieces and marveled at their beauty.
“Mrs. Nordan?”
Amos Nordan’s daughter-in-law looked up from her work at the sales counter and shook her finger at June in mock scolding. “Now, what did I tell you about that?”
“Sandra Kay,” June said stiffly.
The other woman smiled approvingly. She was easily mid-forties, but fighting every year, with blond rinses, moisturizers, and liquid diet lunches. “You finding everything all right over there?”
“Except that my boy—Jeffy—he’s wandered off. He didn’t come in here, did he?”
“Haven’t seen him,” Sandra Kay Nordan said, turning back to the computer, where she was entering receipts. “Did you check the potteries?”
“I’ve told him not to bother—”
“Oh, he’s no bother,” the woman assured her. “I’ll bet you Donny’s got him playing with clay right this minute. You run on down and see if I’m not right. And if that husband of mine is back, tell him I need to ask him something.”
“Okay,” said June, moving toward the door.
“Oh, and June,” she added casually, “if you get a chance, could you just dust off the shelves in here before you go today?”
“Sure,” June said, even though they both knew quite well that Mr. Amos was only paying her to clean his house once a week, not the shop. But until she figured out the dynamics of the family, she wasn’t about to cross the only other woman at Nordan Pottery.
The pottery belonged to Mr. Amos, and technically, his two sons, Donny and James Lucas, worked for him. Or so she’d heard. Sandra Kay and James Lucas lived in a house on the opposite side of the sales shop from Mr. Amos’s house and the younger son Donny had fixed up a bachelor apartment over his workshop, although he still fixed breakfast for his father every day.
The first pottery was shared by Mr. Amos and James Lucas. She wasn’t surprised to see one of the wheels standing idle. James Lucas had gone to pick up some supplies over near Charlotte and, from her annoyed tone, Sandra Kay clearly thought he should have been back by now. But Mr. Amos wasn’t at his wheel, either. Four newly turned tall vases did stand on the drying rack and the fresh lump of clay that lay on the wheel had a wet cloth draped over it, so he couldn’t be gone long.
To her surprise, Bobby Gerard, the pottery’s general helper, was at the far end of the shed sanding rough spots off ware that had come out of the kiln yesterday. He hadn’t shown up for work this morning and she didn’t realize he’d come back this afternoon. A taciturn man in his mid-forties, Bobby Gerard was small and wiry and, from what she gathered from conversation between Mr. Amos and Donny, not entirely reliable, having a capricious thirst that made him disappear from the pottery a couple of days at a time.
“We ought to just go ahead and fire his ass once and for all,” she’d heard Donny say this morning.
“Naw, now, Bobby’ll do,” Mr. Amos had replied. “He may not work steady, but he does work cheap.”
“And when he does work, he works hard,” James Lucas had added.
“Have you seen my son?” June asked him now.
Bobby shook his head and kept working.
Apprehensively, she moved on to the second structure. It, too, seemed empty when she first opened the door and came out of the cold into the earthy warmth of the workroom. A powdery film of clay dust lay over everything except the dozen or more candlesticks Donny must have turned this morning and the leather-bottomed barstool where he’d half-propped, half-sat as he worked.
Then she heard Mr. Amos’s voice raised in anger and a frightened note in her own son’s voice.
A surge of protective maternal instinct carried her across the room and up a set of crude wooden steps to an open door on the landing.
The door led immediately to the large loft that Donny Nordan had remodeled for his own use. Despite the gray day, the place was brightly lit from skylights set in the roof.
Jeffy cowered beyond the doorway.
“Just get the hell out!” Amos Nordan snarled. “Git, before I knock the living bejeesus out of you. You hear me, you dumb-ass idiot?”
June’s own temper flared at the sight of the enraged man’s uplifted hand. “You stop!” she cried, rushing into the room. “Don’t you dare hit him. And don’t you ever call him an idiot again! He’s . . .”
Her voice faltered as she took in the rest of the loft. Jeffy ran to her and her arms opened automatically to comfort her sobbing son, but her eyes were riveted by what lay behind the old man.
It was Donny.
Motionless as a lump of clay, he knelt in the middle of his bed, but his head was suspended by a silky loop of soft white cloth that hung from a hook in one of the low beams. His slender body was nude except for wisps of satin—a white lace bra and lacy white panties.
One hand swung loosely over the side of the bed. The other was caught inside the elastic waistband.
He was clearly dead.
At the sight of her, all the anger had drained from Amos Nordan’s body and he had stretched out his clay-stained hands to her.
“Help me,” he had whimpered. “Please help me.”
“I hope nobody tells Davis how Donny died,” Betty said now, abruptly interrupting June’s memories. “Not right away anyhow. I’ve warned the children.”
“That’s good.” June knew she was being warned, too, as if she were a common gossip, when nothing—nothing—could be further from the truth. Except for Betty and Sandra Kay, who both had a right to know, and the detectives after they’d figured out that someone had changed Donny’s clothes, she had never talked about Donny’s death. Lots of Seagrove people had tried to get her to confirm the rumors that swirled around at the time, but she’d just stared them coldly in the eye and kept her mouth shut. If people chose to interpret her silence as confirmation, that was their business. She wasn’t responsible for human nature.
They worked in awkward silence for a few minutes, then June said, “I only met your brother a couple of times. Were you close to him?”
“Close?” Betty paused with dustcloth in hand. “I suppose as much as any brother and sister. He was a little younger and Dill and I got married so early. But we were always back and forth, living just up the lane from each other like we were. He was different-natured from James Lucas and me. More the artist. That’s what everybody always said: ‘Betty and James Lucas are craftsmen, but Donny’s the artist.’”
There was an edge of old resentment to her voice.
Well, thought June, it was common knowledge that Mr. Amos had favored h
im. Even in the few short weeks she’d been in Seagrove before coming to clean here, she’d heard that Donny was Jacob to James Lucas’s Esau.
Voicing June’s thoughts, Betty said, “I think Dad’s expecting Davis to pick up right where Donny left off.”
June glanced at her watch, then noticed that Jeffy had abandoned the broom and was no longer on the steps.
“Are you okay to finish up here alone? I’m usually at Ada Finch’s by nine o’clock, but I can get there a little late if you want me to stay.”
“No, there’s not much more to do here,” said Betty. “If you’ll leave the broom, I’ll just sweep down the cobwebs in the bathroom and wipe things off in there.”
Jeffy reappeared with a fistful of azaleas. He pointed to a vase standing on the windowsill and said, “I got him some pretty flowers.”
As June beamed, Betty said, “What a good idea, Jeffy.”
She filled the gray-green vase with water, arranged the pink blossoms, and set it in the center of the coffee table.
She wished she felt as welcoming as the flowers looked.
“Look,” Davis said for the tenth time in two days. “It’s not like I’m going for good. I’m leaving most of my notebooks and stuff.”
He opened his duffel bag wide to show only jeans, sweatshirts, socks, several sets of underwear, and a small black case. “See? I’m only taking my portable CD player.”
“I wish I’d never told you.” The woman was in her late fifties. While her short straight hair was unabashedly gray, it was stylishly asymmetrical in cut. She had not been conventionally pretty in her youth, but good bones and a level penetrating gaze were proving better assets than dimples and fluttery lashes.
“I’m glad you did,” Davis said vehemently. “I’m glad I wasn’t that asshole’s son.”
“Keep a civil tongue. For all you know, Donald Nordan was a bigger asshole.” She sat on his unmade bed and patted the various pockets of her blue twill coverall till she found a crumpled pack of unfiltered cigarettes.
“Hey!” Davis protested. “You swore you’d quit”
Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8) Page 13
