Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  Nine-point-six, said my slightly breathless pragmatist, holding up a scorecard.

  Here we go again, sighed the preacher.

  We kissed again and this time both of us were breathing heavily when we pulled apart.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  “Just a glass of ice water for now.” I hadn’t yet decided whether or not I’d be driving later.

  Will laughed. “Are you sure you want to cool off so quickly?”

  He loaded some smoky piano jazz on his CD player and turned the volume down low. While he fixed our drinks, I took a closer look at the pottery.

  “There were times that poor ol’ Amos didn’t have the cash to pay me,” Will said, “so he’d settle his bill with some pieces from his pre-1970 stash before they finally quit making it. I’m afraid I got the better end of the bargain. A bowl like the one you’re holding went for almost eight hundred dollars the last time one came up for auction.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded proudly, then picked up his robe and excused himself for a moment.

  I turned the bowl in my hands and looked at the bottom. The left corner of the triangular kiln mark was ever so slightly crimped, barely noticeable unless you were actually looking for it.

  I checked the soup mug, a plate, a cup and saucer. All had been stamped after it became illegal to use this lead glaze on tableware meant for serving food. It would appear that “poor ol’ Amos” had gotten a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of legal advice out of Will for less than forty bucks.

  “Shall we call this session to order?” Will said from the doorway.

  I turned, and to my surprise, he was standing there in his robe.

  His judicial robe.

  As he walked toward me, I could see that the only thing he wore underneath was a bronze-colored condom.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as he took me in his arms again and pressed his body to mine.

  “I love playing judge,” he murmured, nibbling on my ear.

  “Really?” I purred. I let him nibble for another moment, then said, “You know something? My robe’s in my car. Why don’t I go get it?”

  “Oh, God! Would you?” He was holding me so tightly, I could feel his need become even more urgent. “Judge to judge would be such an incredible turn-on.”

  I reached for my purse, where my car keys were, and slipped out of his arms. “Why don’t you pour me a gin and tonic while you’re waiting?”

  He gave a happy smile and headed for his wet bar.

  I went out, got in my car, and headed back to Seagrove.

  I knew he was too good to be true, said the preacher.

  Here we go again, sighed the pragmatist.

  Fliss was surprised to see me back so early and she thought the whole account of my abortive evening with Will Blackstone was hilarious. “But I almost wish you hadn’t told me. How am I going to keep a straight face next time I have to argue a case before him?” she asked.

  “Your problem, not mine,” I said heartlessly, and went to bed.

  In the darkness of her guest bedroom, though, with only the full moon as my witness, I took a vow of chastity. Worse than being alone, I decided, was making a fool of myself again.

  I convened court promptly at ten the next morning. Again, there were only five of us in the courtroom: Nick Sanderson and his ex-wife Kelly, the clerk, the bailiff, and me.

  “Have you reached a compromise on the disposition of your office?” I asked.

  To my complete lack of surprise, they informed me that they had not.

  Once more I tried to establish a reason to award the Lawyers Row property to one over the other, but it just wasn’t there. Both were from the Asheboro area, both intended to stay in practice here, both had contributed equally to the purchase of the property.

  “I strongly advise you to sell, split the proceeds, and relocate,” I told them.

  “Your Honor, I was the one who first heard about the property when it came up for sale,” said Nick Sanderson. “I was the one who rushed right over and made an offer that she thought was crazy when she heard about it.”

  “An offer made from our joint account,” Mrs. Sanderson responded coolly. “Your Honor, our older daughter is fifteen and she’s already expressed an interest in a law career. It’s her dream to have her office in this house on Lawyers Row and eventually become a partner there. This is her heritage. Please don’t force us to sell it.”

  I looked at Mr. Sanderson. “It is also your desire that it be awarded to one of you in preference to selling?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” He said the words, but somehow he sounded less certain than his ex-wife.

  “Very well,” I said. “I am going to recess court until twelve-thirty. At that time, I will ask that you each give me a sealed bid for the property. The highest bid, even if it’s by only a penny, will get title. In effect, one of you will be buying out the other by making a distributive award. Even though the property will be valued as of the date of separation, the highest bid will become a distributive factor that will effect the ED. This is not going to be an auction. You will have one chance and one chance only to submit a bid. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly, Your Honor,” said Mrs. Sanderson.

  “Mr. Sanderson?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Court’s adjourned till twelve-thirty,” I said.

  The courtroom clerk, Mrs. Cagle, offered to bring me a salad and I spent the break in chambers with my laptop hooked into Lexus-Nexus as I researched case law for a matter I’d have to rule on next week.

  Promptly at twelve-thirty, I reconvened.

  “Do you each have your bids?” I asked.

  “Your Honor—” Mr. Sanderson began.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Mrs. Sanderson interrupted smoothly.

  He turned in surprise. “What?”

  She never looked at him, just asked if she could approach the bench to give me her bid. I took it.

  “You lying bitch!” he said angrily.

  The bailiff stood up, almost as startled as I was.

  “Mr. Sanderson, I don’t tolerate that sort of language in my courtroom. May I have your bid, please?”

  He was white with suppressed rage. “I apologize, Your Honor, but she came to my office during the break and said she’d changed her mind, that we should just go ahead and sell. She said I could draw up the document and she would go along with it. I spent most of the break working on it.”

  “Is this true?” I asked Mrs. Sanderson.

  Unlike her cousin Connor, Kelly Sanderson did not flush hot and red when confronted with pointed questions. “I would suggest that the matter is irrelevant, Your Honor,” she answered coolly. “You said you would award the property to the highest bidder. I have submitted my bid in accordance with your ruling. What I did or said to my ex-husband should have no bearing on your decision.”

  Nick Sanderson looked as if he’d been kneed in the groin, which, figuratively speaking, I suppose he had. I felt sorry for him, but hell! He’d been married to this woman for sixteen years. Surely he must know how her mind worked.

  “Mr. Sanderson, I will recess for ten minutes. At that time, I will accept your bid.”

  Mrs. Sanderson objected to the delay, but I overruled her and she backed down.

  I had the bailiff escort Mr. Sanderson to an empty conference room so he could gather his thoughts. It was going to be hard for him. If he lowballed, he’d lose the property. If he bid too high, he might never recoup his investment. I had a feeling Mrs. Sanderson knew to the penny what his bid would be.

  In that, I was wrong, though. I opened his bid first and saw that it was well above the appraised valuation. Then I opened hers and saw that she had misjudged his desire to win by eight thousand dollars, bringing her bid to just under twenty thousand over and above the property’s worth.

  She looked a little green around the mouth as it sank in that she could have won for a lot less, but she’d probably done a cost/benefit anal
ysis and decided it was worth it to her before she ever wrote down her bid.

  I could have delivered a lecture about her shabby trick or his gullibility, but nothing I could say would change a thing about either of them.

  The figures were incorporated into my final order. The whole process had taken less than three hours and I was free to go home.

  “But I thought you were going to stay over another night,” Fliss protested when I went by her office to tell her I had finished and would head on back east if I could pick up my things.

  She reminded me where her spare key was hidden and we hugged and promised we wouldn’t let it be so long before we got together again.

  “And call me if Connor Woodall makes an arrest,” I said. “I really want to hear how this comes out.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  Glaze goes into the kiln as a powder adhering to pots. At the height of the fire it is a thick, viscous melt, which hardens to a glass on cooling. A potter can only see the glaze in this state by looking through a peephole into the white heat of the kiln interior. To see glaze in its melt is so ephemeral and exhilarating an experience that its absence is a loss to potters who burn only unglazed ware.

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  At Fliss’s house, I stripped the bed and put the sheets on top of her washer, packed up my few belongings, and carried them out to the car. As I set my bag on the floor behind my seat, I saw the bright red soup mug that I’d coopted for ice on Sunday night when I’d taken Davis to get his lip stitched. I’d totally forgotten about it.

  Well, Nordan Pottery was on my way home, so I could easily drop it off.

  Almost automatically, I glanced at the triangular stamp on the bottom. To my amazement, all three sides were perfectly straight. I looked again, closer. No crimping of the left angle. It would appear that I had helped myself to one of the original pieces of cardinal ware, an object worth at least a few hundred dollars, if I could believe what Sandra Kay and Will had told me. It was a wonder a warrant hadn’t been put out for my arrest. Of course, with all that had happened lately, Amos Nordan probably hadn’t had time to miss it.

  I wedged the mug very carefully between the two front seats so that there was no danger of it rolling and chipping, although if it had survived my sudden departure from Will’s last night, it could probably survive anything.

  After locking the house and putting the key back in its hiding place, I pulled onto the highway and headed toward Seagrove. Odd about the mug, though. Only two days ago, Sandra Kay had told me that Amos Nordan was such a money-grubbing old man that he’d sold every single piece of his original cardinal ware. Somehow he seemed to have missed this one.

  As I drove, I found myself trying again to make sense of all that had happened. If there was a pattern, I couldn’t see it. And if the pottery was the reason for all the attacks, why hadn’t Amos been killed? Was it because all his potential heirs had to be killed first, so that the way would be cleared for the killer to inherit?

  Unless he’d made a will, that would seem to be Betty. But why would Betty want her father’s pottery to go out of business? Or what if James Lucas really hadn’t died intestate? A lot of men forget to change their wills when they get divorced.

  But no, that wouldn’t work because the pottery wasn’t James Lucas’s to will to his wife.

  Ex-wife.

  And besides, in North Carolina, divorce automatically revokes all provisions in a will that favor a former wife.

  Libbet? Dillard?

  I glanced down at the cup beside me, almost wishing I had Maidie here to read the tea leaves for me. Not that I’d ever drink hot tea out of it. The heat and the acid would leach lead right into the tea, which is why Nordan Pottery no longer sold soup mugs and coffee cups except surreptitiously to collectors who knew better than to use them in daily life.

  When I’d toured Fern’s place yesterday, she’d told me that she wouldn’t use any of the heavy metals. “Yeah, the colors were great,” she agreed, “but I couldn’t live with myself if I thought anyone could be harmed by what I made.”

  I tried to remember what I knew about lead poisoning, but all I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was a drunken old man that my daddy used to hire to paint the exterior of our house when he was sober enough. Mother accused Daddy of hooking him on moonshine, but Daddy said no, it was a known fact that most painters drank too much because the lead in the old white paints drove them to drink.

  “Never knew a single sober house painter,” he’d told her.

  So thirty years ago, several years after the dangers of lead glazes were known to most potters, Nordan Pottery had been forced to quit making and selling tableware. Yet Amos had stubbornly—arrogantly?—continued to make his cardinal red vases, each with a little warning label on the bottom where he scratched his initials.

  Thirty years ago I was just a little kid. Sandra Kay and James Lucas had been courting then but not yet married. Same with Betty and Dillard. And Bobby Gerard had long since taken his first drink.

  Okay, bring it closer to the present. Two years ago Donny was killed.

  Maybe.

  If indeed he hadn’t killed himself accidentally, something that sounded increasingly improbable.

  So what else happened two years ago?

  Well, Amos had a stroke. Then Sandra Kay and James Lucas split, and June Gregorich and her thirty-something retarded son came to live there and take care of Amos.

  June?

  The soup mug had been in the window with all June’s New Age totems.

  “She appropriates an east-facing window in all the places she works. She says it helps focus her harmonic energies.”

  “That money-grubbing old man sold off every single one of the real pieces years ago.”

  But she’d barely met Donny before he died. Surely she wouldn’t have killed a stranger on the off chance of being offered a live-in job? She didn’t need a place to live that badly.

  “We started posting all the pottery stamps three or four years ago so that people across the country could know what they have.”

  The stamps are posted on the web and within a year, June Gregorich arrives from California.

  Sheer coincidence? Or cause and effect?

  I turned onto the road where Nordan Pottery lay and a few minutes later, I was parking my car outside the sales shop. The OPEN sign was in the window, the door was unlocked, but no one was inside. I helped myself to their phone and called over to Fernwood Pottery with muddled thoughts of Portland and Avery and champagne tumbling through my brain.

  When Fern answered, I asked her a single question and her reply confirmed my guesses. I told her where I was and what I suspected and asked her to send Connor.

  With the mug in my hands, I walked over to the Nordan house and tapped on the kitchen door, but no one answered. The door was open beyond the screen and I stepped inside. June didn’t answer even though her car was here. Music came from the den and I looked around the corner. The television was tuned to a children’s program and at first glance I thought Jeffy was asleep under the afghan on the couch, but when I went over to him, I saw it was only the way the afghan was bunched up over the cushions and pillow.

  Back outside, I started down the slope to the pottery. As I approached the one where Davis had stayed, I smelled wood smoke and the pungent fumes of kerosene. June’s voice came shrilly through the open door.

  Amos’s voice was raised, too. “But I never took the damn mug!” he cried angrily.

  As I crept closer, I realized it wasn’t anger in his voice, but fear.

  Not ordinary fear, either.

  June’s back was to the door. She held a gun in one hand and the smell of kerosene was even stronger. The smoke came from a pile of cardboard boxes beneath the open steps and I saw flames leap up and around the dry wooden treads.

  “. . . they’ll say you finally snapped,” June taunted the old man. “That you set fire to the pottery and then shot yourself.”

  Amo
s was facing the door, but he seemed so traumatized by those leaping flames and what she was saying that he never noticed me.

  “I was good to y’all two,” he howled. “What’d I ever do to you that you’d kill my boys?”

  “Why do you think my boy’s like he is? I did all the healthy things when I was carrying him. Homemade soups, juice from our own orange trees. No pesticides, no artificial additives. And all served in your pretty red hand-thrown mugs. You knew lead was dangerous. Other potters around here quit using it as soon as the government started telling you people the dangers, but not Amos Nordan. Oh, no! Not Nordan Pottery. Did you know what lead does to unborn babies? Did you care? You and your precious glaze made my son what he is and I swore I’d find you if it took the rest of my life, find you and pay you back for what you did to me. To me, you wicked old man. To me!”

  The fire was racing up the scaffolding of the stairs and spreading to the walls behind the blazing boxes.

  “My only fear was that you’d die or go senile before I could make you suffer a tenth what I’ve suffered.”

  As she spoke, I’d been looking around for something to hit her with, but the yard was bare of convenient rocks or sturdy sticks. All I had was the soup mug and I could hardly get close enough to brain her with that.

  Amos whimpered in protest as the gun came up.

  “No!” I cried.

  Startled, she whirled and saw the mug in my hands.

  “You?” she cried. “You’re the one who took it?”

  She fired wildly as black smoke swirled through the shed.

  A second shot rang out as I bolted in panic, racing around the corner of the building, anything to get out of her range.

  Another bullet zinged past me.

  As she swung around the corner and saw me, she fired again and a slug slammed into the wall beside my head. I tried to run, but my foot slipped on the pine straw and I went sprawling.

  “Momma! Momma! Momma!”

  From the open window directly above us came smoke and panicked wails.

  “Jeffy?” she screamed. “Oh, God, no!”

  Instantly forgetting me, she raced back around the shed.

  Jeffy had heard her voice, though, and came to the open window, which was already leaking smoke.