She recognized me at the same instant and came over to the car with a surprised look on her face. “Well, hey, Judge! I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”
“I didn’t expect it myself,” I said, drinking in the beauty of her yard.
Azaleas, lilacs, and rhododendrons were shaded by mature dogwoods, which in turn were sheltered by a high canopy of tall pines. The house might be a double-wide, but it was dark brown with a peaked roof of brown shingles and it had been customized with screened-in porches and a deck weathered to the same brown shade. It nestled into its setting like the stump of an old oak and one end was covered with scarlet honeysuckle and yellow jasmine. A border of purple tulips and golden buttercups lined the drive and the deck was brightened with large earthenware pots filled with geraniums and ivy.
I switched off the car and got out for a closer look. “How on earth did you get it looking like this in only two years?”
Unlike this color spread out of Southern Living that she had achieved, my own yard still looked a lot like the field it had been until last year.
“I wish I could say it was all my doing,” she said, “but it was really Uncle Dooley’s. Not that he was any kin, we young’uns just called him that. He was sort of like Bobby Gerard, only more reliable. Used to help my daddy burn his pots back when that meant cutting wood and feeding the firebox to keep the kiln at a steady heat. That was right after the war when cash money was so hard to come by around these parts. Daddy put him a little house here and let him live in it free. He dug dogwoods and redbuds out of the woods and planted most of the bushes. After he died, the house sort of went downhill and the roof fell in. This was the part my daddy willed to me.” The sweep of her hand took in a couple of acres surrounding the house. “When I left James Lucas, I got the old house cleared away and pulled my trailer right in where it’d been. Only had to cut one pine and two redbuds. Once I got all the vines and brambles cleared out, I found the azaleas and rhododendrons were still living.”
Up close, I saw that her eyes were bloodshot and her nose was red as if she’d been crying.
“But we don’t need to stand out here in the sun,” she said. “Come on in and let me get you something to drink.”
“Actually, I was on my way to find a friend at your brother’s place,” I said.
“Oh, surely you have time for a glass of lemonade?” she insisted. “Besides, I want to show you what I’ve done with our collection.”
“Collection?” Back at Nordan Pottery, I hadn’t noticed the disputed collection or even thought to check whether it was still there.
“I sat down and had a good talk with Betty, James Lucas’s sister. She’s also my brother’s wife, I guess you know?”
I nodded.
Sandra Kay opened the screen door, then led me across the porch and into the house. Inside was a little too dark and too consciously rustic for my tastes—the brown leather furniture she and James Lucas had fought over, dark oak chests, iron tools as wall ornaments, and lots of baskets and earth-toned pots as accent pieces. Water was waiting in the one on the coffee table and she filled it with the daffodils she’d picked.
“Betty admitted that Amos didn’t care a dogged bit about collecting and she doesn’t, either, really,” she said, ushering me down a short hallway hung with black-and-white photographs from the twenties and thirties of area potters at their wheels or kilns. “They just didn’t want me getting it all. ‘Well,’ I told her, ‘who do you think’s going to get my part after I die?’ I don’t think Betty’d ever really thought about how everything I have will go to her children. So she talked to Amos and they’re going to give the Pottery Center the pieces that came from his family and I’ve signed a paper that when I’m dead, all the rest of it will go there, too. They’re going to call it the Hitchcock-Nordan collection. In the meantime . . .”
She opened a door and switched on the lights. “What do you think?”
“Wow!” I said, impressed.
“Well,” she said modestly, “it’s not like as if I haven’t been planning this since the day I moved in.”
The second and third bedrooms at this end of the double-wide had been opened into each other with a wide archway. Glass cases with multilevel stands held the collection and baby spots in the ceiling accented colors and shapes. It was like an intimate little corner of the Pottery Center.
“I went over and got the last of it a couple of hours ago when the shop opened up,” Sandra Kay said as I marveled over the great job she’d done. “And I’ve still got to make labels for everything.”
Tears glistened in her eyes.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head even as she pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. “I guess everything’s just starting to hit me. Bringing the rest of the pots over and unboxing them made me remember how much fun the two of us used to have when we’d go to auctions and then come home to unpack what we’d bought and enter it on the computer. I still miss that.”
“You had a long history together,” I said, thinking of my short history with Kidd.
“And not all of it great.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s get you that lemonade.”
As we turned to go, I paused in front of a place setting of cardinal ware and said, “My sister-in-law would give anything for a piece of that for her own collection.”
“Oh?”
“When she was over here last year, she tried to buy a bowl or mug out of that display of the old original stuff at the front of the shop. June told her that they occasionally sell an antique piece but that she wasn’t authorized to and that Amos and James Lucas were out of town.”
“I remember you mentioned something about that the day he got killed.” She hesitated. “You like your sister-in-law a lot, don’t you?”
When I explained that I’d had about fifteen sisters-in-law over the years and that Karen was one of the best, she said, “How would you like to get her a whole place setting?”
“How much?” I asked warily. I only keep about five hundred in my checking account at a time.
“No charge,” she said. “I do you a favor, maybe you’ll do one for me?”
“What sort of favor?”
“Nothing to do with you being a judge,” she assured me, correctly reading my cautious question. “I heard that you’re an old friend of Connor Woodall’s?”
“He was in school with my brothers, but I hadn’t seen him in years till I met him again over here.”
“He was out to see me yesterday,” she said, using the edge of her shirt to wipe a finger smudge off one of the cases. “He thinks I killed James Lucas.”
“Oh, surely not,” I murmured inanely. I mean, what do you say to something like that?
“June told him it was my car that went through the lane after James Lucas went down to the kiln.”
“Was it?” I asked bluntly.
Her eyes darted away. “No, of course not.”
“Because if it was,” I said carefully, “and if you didn’t have anything to do with putting him in that kiln, you might be able to say whether you saw anyone else in the lane, or if you noticed anything in your rearview mirror.”
She shook her head in exasperation. “But I didn’t see a—”
Appalled, she clapped her fingers over her mouth and looked as guilty as an egg-sucking hound caught in the henhouse.
“For Pete’s sake, Sandra Kay, why didn’t you just tell Connor?”
“Because it puts me right there at the right time. But I didn’t do it, Deborah. I swear to Almighty God, I didn’t! I think the only thing that’s holding him back is that he can’t find a reason why I’d want James Lucas dead. The divorce was final. We’d divided everything except the collection. I’m not going to say there weren’t times before the divorce when I could have cheerfully strangled him, but that was over two years ago.”
“Connor and I saw you two fighting in the Crock Pot just last week,” I reminded her.
She
sighed. “So did half of Seagrove. He didn’t want to talk serious about dividing our pots and he dragged up all that old mess about Donny and me, like those lies would make me change my mind. He wanted all the best pieces, and dogged if I was going to let him get away with that. But once we got to court and you told us how it was going to be, there was nothing left to fight about.”
By now we had moved to her spotless kitchen and she poured us each a glass of lemonade, which we took out onto the screened porch.
“So you did drive through the lane at lunchtime?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I didn’t mean to, but it’s such a habit that the car just turned in before I realized what I’d done. I didn’t see a soul, though. Course, I wasn’t looking for anybody, either.”
“But why lie about it when June asked you? That was before we even knew James Lucas had been killed.”
She looked embarrassed and took a sip of her lemonade to cover it. “Because she was there when he yelled at me last month and told me he was going to put a chain up if I kept driving through his yard and I got mad and swore I’d drive my car off Felton Creek bridge before I’d ever use that dogged lane again. And really, that was the first time since then. By the time I realized where I was, I figured that if James Lucas said anything, I’d lie through my teeth and tell him it must’ve been Betty or Tom. Both of them drive white cars, too. Then after we found him, I realized that if I said I’d been anywhere near that kiln, they’d think I was the one that killed him.”
Leaning over to clasp my hand in hers, she said, “Please, Deborah. You’re a judge. You’ve known Lieutenant Woodall for years. He’ll listen to you if you tell him I couldn’t have done it. Please?”
“But surely you must know him better than I do?”
She shook her head. “I knew who he was, of course— his wife’s a potter—but the only time I ever talked to him was when Donny died.”
“The best way to convince him you’re innocent is to tell him the truth yourself,” I said.
But she was adamant. “Soon as he knows for sure I was there, he’ll quit looking for anybody else. And that’s what’s so dogged bad. There’s not anybody else.”
“Nobody gains anything at all with him gone?”
“Well, Tom, I suppose. He wants to quit school, get married, and set up on his own, but James Lucas would’ve let him come, long as Tom knew who was boss. They didn’t always see eye to eye—too near alike, I always said. Tom can be cocky and James Lucas was as pigheaded as they come. Tom would’ve had to take orders with James Lucas alive and he still will till Amos dies or deeds it over to him.” She gave a rueful shake of her head. “Now, if it was Amos that got himself killed, you could throw a rock and hit a dozen people that he’s done dirt to over the years. The only really wrong thing James Lucas ever did was to keep making—”
I almost had to smile. If she couldn’t keep herself from blurting out things better left unsaid, it was no wonder she didn’t want to face Connor.
“Look,” she said, “can you keep a secret?”
“If it’s personal and not criminal.”
“I don’t know about criminal,” she said dubiously. “You said your sister-in-law wanted a piece of Amos’s old red dinnerware, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there isn’t any.”
“You mean except for those few pieces in the shop.”
She brushed my words aside. “Not even those. The only authentic pieces left are what’s on my shelves inside and three pieces that Betty still has on her mantelpiece. That money-grubbing old man sold off every single one of the real pieces years ago. The government closed the line down about thirty years ago because of the lead content. People knew the dangers before then and most potters had quit using the heavy-metal glazes, but Nordan Pottery was famous for its cardinal red and lead’s the only thing that’ll give that clear bright color, so he and the boys kept on making coffee cups and soup mugs right up till the end, even though studies had shown that things like juice and soup or tea or coffee can leach the lead out even faster. Ever since the rules changed, the only things he can use his red glaze on have to be purely decorative, and even those have to be labeled that they’re not for food.”
She gazed out over the bright bushes blooming beyond the screen. “Well, you know how collectors are. Tell them there’s going to be no more of something and it drives up the prices. Amos still had a few cartons on hand that he wasn’t allowed to ship. When people came around asking, he put the warning labels on the bottom of the pieces and charged them double, then triple, until finally, a cup that was made to sell for fifty cents was going for fifty dollars. Even at those prices, the cartons were empty after a couple of years.”
“So I’m guessing he made more?”
“He wasn’t the first one in Seagrove and I bet he’s not the last. There’s some famous potters been dead ten years or more, yet stuff is still being sold with their names or their marks on it. Every two or three years, James Lucas and Donny and Amos would fill up one of the groundhog kilns and burn enough to dole out piece by piece like it was the last of the old. Donny was real good about sizing up a collector. They never sold any of the display. No, Donny would walk you down to his shed, flirting with you if you were a woman or talking about his poor old dad’s craftsmanship if you were a man. He’d almost whisper to you about how he’d saved out a few good pieces over the years and how he wouldn’t offer them to just anybody, but since you were so interested and knew so much about Nordan Pottery’s history, he had a feeling in his heart that you would appreciate the piece and give it a good home.”
I had to smile. “Sounds like my brother Will.”
“He was good,” Sandra Kay conceded. “He once sold a platter for twelve hundred dollars that was so fresh out of the kiln, it was still almost warm.”
I glanced at my watch. Her mention of Donny reminded me that I’d been on my way to find Davis Richmond nearly an hour ago.
“Anyhow,” Sandra Kay said, “unless you tell your sister-in-law, there’s no reason she couldn’t be happy with some of the counterfeit pieces.”
“There’s no way to tell the new from the old?”
Sandra Kay’s lips quirked in a wry smile. “Actually, there is. Amos’s father had made a metal stamp for stamping the bottom of all their ware. Wait a minute. I’ll show you.”
She darted inside and soon returned with one of the red plates. There on the back was a small triangle with an NP incised in the middle.
“When the PDA people told Amos he couldn’t make any more cardinal ware, he got so mad he stomped on the stamp and said that was the end of Nordan Pottery. After that, they just scratched an NP on the bottom. But when they sneaked and started making more of the cardinal ware, they had to have the stamp. Donny and James Lucas straightened it out the best they could, but if you look real close, the left corner of the triangle is squeezed a little”—she made a pinching motion with her thumb and index finger over the mark—“and that makes the left side tilt just a hair off center.”
So this was the secret she’d threatened James Lucas with at the Crock Pot that first evening? Unethical and dishonest, yes, but “filthy”?
“I think Karen would be suspicious with a whole place setting,” I said. “Maybe just a plate or mug.”
“Then you’ll talk to Connor Woodall for me?”
“I was planning to see him tomorrow anyhow, but I really think he needs to hear the truth.”
“Okay,” she said finally. “Only, could you do it for me? Make him understand why I lied about it?”
That was something I could agree to and we left it that I’d call her the next day.
CHAPTER
21
[The potter] then wedged the clean clay to beat air out of it . . . Each half is thrown down hard, one on top the other, onto the board. Cutting and slamming is repeated in a rapid, rhythmical way, a dozen or more times, forcing tiny air pockets to break.
—Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweez
y
A fairly new white sedan was parked next to an older white van at the back of Rooster Clay Works, which was closed all day on Sundays. The Hitchcocks were sitting on their deck when I drove up and there were open boxes of photographs on the glass-topped table.
I had met Dillard Hitchcock the day of the murder and now he introduced me to his wife. Both were interested to hear that I knew her newly discovered nephew and said that the boy had left for Nordan Pottery about twenty minutes ago.
“He’s probably there by now,” said Betty Hitchcock. “I offered to run him back over, but he said he needed the exercise.”
She gave me directions on which forks to take through the back lanes and over the low ridge and she warned me to mind the potholes through the bottom.
“You really need to dump some more gravel along there, Dill. After all the ice we had this winter?”
“I’ll see about ordering it the end of the week,” he replied.
If I hadn’t already heard that she was the better potter and that he did most of the glazing and firing, I would have guessed the other way around. He seemed to have the quiet, steady patience exuded by most of the potters I’d met, while she came across as edgier. Too, her hand when she shook mine felt limp and soft. His was firm and strong. But the sidelong glance he gave her let me know who held the balance of power here. He was acutely aware of her every movement.
The romantic preacher in my head sighed. Wonder if you’ll ever find such devotion?
And just as quickly, my cynical pragmatist asked, Wouldn't it get a little tiring to be adored that obviously for thirty years?
Not something you’re liable to find out for yourself, the preacher said acidly.
“Davis hasn’t said much about his mother’s side,” Betty told me. “Is she in law, too?”
“Oh, no.” I smiled pleasantly and edged for my car. Whatever Davis’s reasons for reticence, I didn’t think it was my place to tell them that his mother was as well known in her field as they were in theirs. “She’s a lovely woman, though.”
Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8) Page 17
