Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8) Page 7

  “Hey, June,” she said. “Where is he?”

  “Out back somewhere. Didn’t you find him before?” The housekeeper’s wiry brown hair was standing almost straight on its ends like some sort of fright wig and as she spoke, she smoothed it back with her hands and tied it with an orange ribbon that matched her faded and paint-spattered T-shirt.

  “Before? I just got here.”

  “Oh? I thought I saw your car when—” She broke off with a shrug and gestured for us to come in.

  The others waited for me to enter, then followed me into the long room. The ceiling was open timbers and had been set with clear glass skylights. Natural sunlight fell upon the purple-and-gray pieces of pottery like spotlights aimed on expensive jewelry. There were no windows in the rear wall, but more light came from windows along the front, where a glistening row of Amos Nordan’s trademark cardinal tableware sat behind a placard that warned, “Not for sale— Don’t even ask.”

  Mrs. Nordan went straight past the sale displays, back to where the ceiling lowered and there were no windows or skylights. The shadowy space was clearly a home-built add-on.

  “Want me to get the lights?” asked June Gregorich.

  “That’s okay, I’ll do it,” said Mrs. Nordan. She opened an inconspicuous panel in the wall, flipped a series of switches, and the pottery collection sprang into view. The small open room was lined with glass-fronted shelves from floor to ceiling and each shelf had its own concealed strip of lighting so that every piece could be seen and appreciated.

  I hadn’t paid that much attention to it when I was here before with my sister-in-law, and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t here to sightsee. Instead, I turned to Mrs. Gregorich. “Would you tell Mr. Nordan we’re ready to begin?”

  “Certainly,” she said, and went out through the rear door.

  While we waited, I took a closer look at the collection. The pieces were arranged chronologically and most of the early ones were simple and utilitarian shapes. Among them was a salt-glazed stoneware grave marker that was poignantly incised in crude lettering:

  Chas. Nordan

  Dyed•Oct. lst•1832

  Aged•13M◦.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Sandra Kay Nordan, looking at her watch impatiently. She started for the rear door, but as she put out her hand to turn the knob, it opened and Jeffy came shuffling back in, followed by his mother.

  “Watch out for that table, Jeffy,” she warned.

  The boy—given his small physical size and mental capacity, it was hard to think of this thirty-year-old as a man—backed away from a display table of stoneware candlesticks with exaggerated care as June Gregorich stepped around him and picked up the telephone on the counter.

  “James Lucas must be out at the house,” she said. “I’ll just call and remind him you’re here.”

  After a couple of moments, it was obvious that no one was going to answer.

  She frowned and speed-dialed another number. “Mr. Amos? Is James Lucas over there with you? . . . He’s not? . . . Well, did he say he was going anywhere? . . . No, no, that’s all right. He’s probably out back and didn’t hear me call. I’m going to send Jeffy over to watch television with you, okay?”

  “Mr. Rogers?” her son asked.

  “Almost, sweetie. It’ll be on in just a few minutes. You go sit with Mr. Amos, okay?”

  Jeffy nodded and shambled out the back door.

  “I’ll check down at the house,” his mother told us. “Maybe he was in the yard and didn’t hear the phone ring.”

  “If he was in the yard, he must’ve seen us drive in,” huffed Sandra Kay Nordan. “He’s probably got his head stuck in one of the kilns.”

  It was too pretty a day to wait inside and I followed Mrs. Nordan outside. Two workshops were back there, about twenty yards from the rear door of the shop, and the new kilns were under tin-roofed shelters beyond, half-hidden by those flowering bushes. Graveled driveways linked the houses and main buildings, and dirt lanes led off up the hill through oaks and pines, probably to the wood lots that supplied firewood for the old-time kilns or possibly even to clay beds on the downslope beyond the rise. Nowadays, most potters prefer to buy their clay, I’d been told, but some of the traditionalists still like to dig and pug their own.

  The smell of yellow jasmine floated on the spring air and somewhere someone was rushing the season by barbecuing outside, reminding me that it would soon be time to plan a summer pig-picking.

  Mrs. Nordan opened the door and called, “James Lucas? You in here?”

  The pottery shed was long and poorly lit and every surface seemed covered in powdery gray clay dust. The floor was nothing but dirt, and bare light bulbs dangled at the end of extension cords over the work areas. Steel utility shelves held the greenware that hadn’t yet been fired; behind them were barrels of clay, buckets of glazes, and other supplies of the potting trade.

  Both wheels stood motionless, though. No potter here.

  I tagged along as Mrs. Nordan passed straight through and out a side door and there were the two newer kilns, each under its own tall tin-roofed shelter. To the left was the nonmarital groundhog kiln, a low, domed, brick-lined burrow with a firebox in the front and a chimney at the back. I looked at it with new eyes after Mr. Nordan’s recent testimony. It must be tedious as hell to load one of those things. You’d have to crawl through a small door on your hands and knees and, if you were lucky enough to have help, those helpers would hand in the various pots and crocks and churns, which you would space in rows according to size and glazes. I guess you really would look like a groundhog entering and leaving a burrow.

  To the right was a more modern construction of creamy white firebricks and gas lines hooked up to heat dials along the sides—Mr. Nordan’s car kiln.

  “That’s why he’s late,” said Mrs. Nordan. “He’s got the dogged kiln fired up.” Impatiently, she called, “James Lucas! What the dickens are you—”

  “What is it?” I asked, seeing the puzzled look on her face as her words broke off.

  She pointed to the far side of the kiln, to a heap of shattered pottery and scattered debris.

  The kiln was clamped shut, but some sort of red liquid had puddled on the concrete floor between the runner tracks.

  “That’s Amos’s glaze and it’s still wet,” said Sandra Kay Nordan, “but the burners are running wide open. What the heck’s he thinking? He’s not supposed to use this kiln for cardinal ware.”

  She grabbed a pair of heavy leather gloves from a nearby shelf, pulled a brick out of the nearest peephole, and looked through.

  “What on earth?” she said to herself, and then in sudden horror, she dropped the brick as if it’d burned through the glove. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God,” she moaned, and began turning off the gas valves as fast as she could.

  I stepped up to look through the hole myself. At first, all I saw was a dark shape beyond the tongue of fire that leaped in front of me. Then I saw a ghastly toothy grin in red-glazed features. At first, I thought it was a particularly gruesome face jug made to represent the devil. As I watched, the hair burst into flames.

  That’s when I realized it wasn’t a pig that I’d smelled cooking and almost lost the string beans and apple I’d had for lunch.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Unquestionably, there was some danger involved in this operation.

  —Turners and Burners, Charles G. Zug III

  Okay, it was completely unprofessional of me. I do know better than to watch someone tamper with a crime scene.

  Theoretically, anyhow.

  In practice, in the grisly horror of the moment, there was no way I could’ve stopped Sandra Kay Nordan from turning off the gas, unclamping the bolts, and with unimaginable strength, pulling on the heavy apparatus until it rolled out of that broiling kiln.

  James Lucas Nordan, or what was left of whoever it was—and who else could it possibly be?—lay crumpled amongst broken pots and mugs on a platform of plate setters tha
t teetered precariously. His clothes had burned off and his flesh was charred black, but the bright glaze that coated his head and hands hadn’t heated high enough to start melting into glass. It had certainly dried, though, and as the cooler air hit the body, the thick glaze began to crack and powder while we watched helplessly.

  Sandra Kay’s screams brought the others running to the kiln shelter.

  “Oh, dear God!” said Wallace Frye.

  “How . . .?” faltered Mrs. Cagle.

  Wide-eyed, June Gregorich said, “He was just talking to me an hour ago.”

  “Who could’ve . . .?” asked Nick Sanderson. “Dammit! Who would’ve?”

  Shock and morbid fascination had us all babbling.

  “Here, now. What’s going on?” said Amos Nordan, who moved so slowly, he’d probably set out as soon as June Gregorich called over to his house.

  He reminded me of my own daddy, in his bib overalls and a long-sleeved blue chambray shirt, except my daddy still walked the earth with strength and vigor. This old man needed the support of a homemade staff cut from wild cherry as he walked unsteadily across the gravel drive and peered nearsightedly under the shelter. “That you bawling, Sandra Kay? What ails you, girl?”

  Motherly little Mrs. Cagle, who seemed to know him, hurried over and took his arm. “Come away, Amos. You don’t want to see.”

  “The hell I don’t!” He shook off her hand and kept coming. “Some damn fool tourist go poking his nose too close to a peephole? Get his eyelashes burnt off? James Lucas! Where you at?”

  “You really need to go on back to the house, Mr. Nordan,” the bailiff said firmly.

  Too late.

  Before he could be turned back, the old man brandished his staff and June Gregorich stepped aside, giving him an unobstructed view of the grisly scene behind her. Amos Nordan stared at the charred, still-smoking figure lying on the kiln’s car and wrinkled his forehead in bewilderment. Suddenly, in one heart-wrenching moment, I saw comprehension flood his face and contort his features till he, too, looked like a face jug turned by a demented potter.

  “James Lucas? No!” His legs collapsed beneath him in instant, heart-shattering grief. “Say that ain’t him! That can’t be him.”

  Half-kneeling, half-sitting, he pounded the dirt with his gnarled hands until they came up bloody from the sharp-edged chips of past kiln breakages. “No, no, no, no! Not my boy? Please? Not my last son!”

  Sanderson and Frye retrieved his staff and tried to help him up, but he wouldn’t rise, just sat there on the ground like some Old Testament Jeremiah, shaking his head and howling in anguished protest.

  With tears in her eyes, Sandra Kay Nordan went to him, knelt down on the broken shards, and tried to speak.

  “Goddamn you to hell and back,” he snarled, almost spitting in her face.

  She drew back, shocked.

  “This is your fault, you horny bitch! You killed him sure as you put him in that kiln. Won’t for you and this mess you brought on my family”—his bloody hand swept the yard to encompass all of us—“this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “You’re a mean old man,” his ex-daughter-in-law said, rising angrily, “and when I get what’s mine, I hope I never have to see your greedy face again.” She turned and stomped back toward the shop.

  Galvanized by the anger that momentarily blanked his grief, Amos Nordan gestured to Mrs. Gregorich and let her help him stand. His bloody hands streaked her arm.

  Jeffy, meanwhile, had edged closer to the kiln car, unnoticed by us. I saw him just as he put out his finger, then jerked it back with a whimper. “Hot!” He stuck his burnt forefinger in his mouth. “All red, Momma. He got a boo-boo?”

  The bailiff reached for the cell phone clipped to his waist and said, “Folks, I think we all oughta move on up to the shop.”

  It was close to five-thirty before I made it back to Fliss’s house. The two attorneys had convoyed out from Asheboro and they got to leave shortly after Connor Woodall arrived. Mrs. Cagle had ridden out with the bailiff and they, too, were soon allowed to go. But since I’d been there when James Lucas Nordan’s body was discovered, Connor said he’d really appreciate it if I’d wait in the shop a little longer. His “little longer” lasted a full two hours, so I heard everything the others had to say before they left. And yes, I asked questions of my own while we waited for the sheriff’s department to get to us.

  Wallace Frye said he and his client had parted in front of the courthouse. “He told me he was going home and would see me here.”

  “Did he mention that he was meeting anyone?”

  Frye shook his head. “Far as I know, he didn’t have any special reason for hurrying back.”

  The bailiff—Anderson, Anderson, Anderson, I chanted mentally, trying to fix his name tag in my brain—and Mrs. Cagle had gotten there a few minutes before either attorney.

  “Customers were in the shop with June and Jeffy,” said Mrs. Cagle. “I didn’t see James Lucas, though. You, Andy?”

  He shook his head.

  “Any other cars drive in or out?” I asked.

  “Not that I saw. Course, now, if a car was already there and they drove out the back way, we wouldn’t’ve seen them, would we, Andy? There’s lanes that go over past the Hitchcock place and come out on Felton Creek Road. Quicker than going ’round.”

  Mrs. Nordan said she’d planned to eat lunch at Zoo City, but it was so crowded, she decided to go on home, home being a double-wide she’d had set up on Hitchcock land inherited from her parents.

  “Betty Nordan might’ve kept me out of the Rooster,” she said bitterly, “but she couldn’t keep me off my own land. Thank goodness the trees are thick enough on my side that I don’t have to see them going and coming every time I turn around.”

  “Poor Amos,” Mrs. Cagle said sadly. “This is just going to kill him. First Donny, now James Lucas. I reckon this’ll be the end of Nordan Pottery.”

  “Donny?” I asked, half-remembering that Fliss had mentioned a Nordan son who died.

  “James Lucas and Betty’s brother.” She cast a guilty glance toward Sandra Kay Nordan. “He . . . um . . . he died—over a year ago, was it?”

  “Two and a half years,” Mrs. Nordan said. Her voice held a quality I couldn’t quite decipher. “The fair-haired son with the magic fingers.”

  Before I could get her to elaborate, a deputy stepped through the back door and told the other four that they could go.

  June Gregorich came back about then. She said that Amos Nordan wanted to be alone for a while, “but I left Jeffy watching television. He knows how to press the shop button on the telephone if Mr. Amos needs anything.”

  She had brought with her a plastic milk jug full of chilled sweet tea. Sandra Kay plucked three tall stoneware mugs from the display shelves, wiped out any dust with paper towels, and we drank thirstily.

  Once the bailiff, the clerk, and the attorneys left, the three of us were pretty much on a first-name basis within ten minutes. There seemed no need to keep up formalities when it was clear to me that any division of the Nordans’ collection would involve probate.

  “What does happen now?” Sandra Kay asked, wandering restlessly back and forth in front of the glass shelves that housed the pottery collection she’d shared with her ex-husband. “Do we have to start the dogged thing all over again?”

  “The ED, you mean? No,” I said. “Both of you signed the Memorandum of Judgment, so everything you and he agreed to this morning is still binding. Whoever represents Mr. Nordan’s estate will substitute for him in dividing the collection. Everything else stays the same.”

  “That’ll be Betty, probably,” she said. “If he still has a will. I made a new one after we split up.”

  “If he died intestate, his father would be the next of kin. Unless there were children?”

  “No children,” she said abruptly. “Not even any bastards.”

  “Oh?” I was sensing all sorts of unspoken undercurrents. Sometimes an innocuous “Oh?” wi
ll loosen tongues itching to speak. Not this time, though.

  So I asked June Gregorich, “Did you see Mr. Nordan when he came home? Was anybody with him?”

  She shook her head. “Far as I know, he was by himself. That was a little before one, I think. He told me to go on to lunch, that you and the others were coming out to split up the collection and he wanted to have another last look at it while it was still all together.”

  Sandra Kay rolled her eyes.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Sandra Kay, but that’s what he said and that’s how he said it. Not mean or anything. More sad-like.”

  “What about Bobby Gerard?” Sandra Kay said. “Was he working today?”

  “Supposed to be. He was here this morning, but nobody’s seen him since lunchtime. It’s been a couple of weeks since he went on one of his benders, so . . .” She made a face and Sandra Kay nodded in understanding.

  I asked who Bobby Gerard was and they explained that he was the pottery’s kiln helper. Not a very reliable one, I gathered.

  “So lunchtime was the last you saw of James Lucas?”

  “No. He’d changed clothes when I got back around one-thirty, and he said he was going down to the pottery and for me to put up the closed sign soon as you got here. There were a couple of people looking around, but they didn’t buy anything. Weekdays are usually pretty slow. But the next ones—well, I guess you saw them because they were still here when you came.”

  “How did they pay?” I asked.

  “One with a check, the others with cash.” She hit the key that opened the computerized cash register and took out the check. “Winston-Salem. And there’s a phone number. But they didn’t go out back and I’m sure they never saw James Lucas.”

  “Who hated him that much?” I asked.

  Sandra Kay shook her head helplessly and June said, “Nobody that I knew of. But then I probably wouldn’t. We’ve only lived in Seagrove about three years.”

  “I don’t understand trying to glaze his face,” said Sandra Kay. “It was awful to put him in the kiln, but to paint his face and hands first? That doesn’t make sense.”