A Devious Lot (Antiques & Collectibles Mysteries Book 5) (31 page)

“Lord, what a slime! Does he sell used cars or lots of prime swampland?” Molly asked.

Her mother laughed. “He doesn’t really need to work. His wife has a very large trust fund, but officially, he’s a real estate attorney. He’s got ‘Esquire’ on his cards along with that mouthful of a name.”

“He oughta have ‘Sewer Breath, Esquire’ on them instead.”

“Oh, he’s a sleaze, there’s no doubt about it, but he’s got the premier pottery collection of central North Carolina, next to that man at the front of the line.” Clara jerked a thumb toward a nervous-looking middle-aged man wearing a red and white checked shirt tucked into jeans.

“Who is he?” Molly asked.

“He has an odd name. Hillary Keane. He’s the first one on the scene at any major kiln opening.”

Molly observed Keane as he struggled to take off his silver spectacles. His hands looked swollen and gnarled, as if crooked branches had replaced the fingers and the knuckles had been transformed into wrinkled walnuts. Awkwardly, Keane removed his glasses and tried to clean them against his shirt, but dropped them helplessly on the ground instead. The woman next to him retrieved them, and he gave her an embarrassed smile. Fumbling, Keane replaced the glasses on his narrow nose and cast a cautious glance to the left and right before once again fixing his anxious eyes on the pottery.

“Anyway,” Clara returned to the original subject of their conversation, “as difficult as it may be, everyone wants to be George-Bradley’s friend for those rare days when he feels like selling a piece or two.”

“Have you seen his stuff?”

“Not in person. I’ve only heard about it from friends. His wife is always at home, and she doesn’t like pottery or the people in the business, so not many are welcome there. I’d give anything to snoop around that house. Did I ever tell you what happened at this opening last year?”

“No.”

“Oh my stars, this story is a legend!” She lowered her voice. “Everyone was waiting for C.C. to cut the rope, just like we are right now. When he did, George-Bradley sprinted off to get some piece that he had to have. He knocked two people over getting to it.”

Molly looked around at the tight spaces around the tables and considered the size of the current crowd. She thought about George-Bradley’s wide girth. “I can see how that would happen.”

“Yes, but one of the people he knocked over was an elderly lady, and she was hurt badly.” Clara’s face was solemn.

“How?”

“She broke her leg! George-Bradley shoved her so hard that she fell sideways in a twisted heap. She spent a week recovering in the hospital and had to hire someone to help her get around the house after she was released. She told everyone who caused her accident too. George-Bradley denied it. Never even apologized. And we all saw what he did with our own eyes.”

“That is shameless!” Molly let a judgmental scowl fall on George-Bradley’s barrel-round back.

“Forget about that greedy lawyer. C.C. and Eileen are heading our way.”

The potter, wearing the traditional denim overalls that seemed to separate the potters from the collectors, moved shyly toward the line and greeted a few friends. He was in his late seventies and moved with the slow stiffness of a man who has spent dozens of years working in mills and bent over a potter’s wheel. Molly noticed that the other potters were hanging off to the side, out of line, drinking coffee and humorously watching the tense buyers. One of them looked familiar.

“Isn’t that Sam Chance?” she asked Clara as her eyes met those of a short, kind-faced potter with white hair and winking blue eyes. “It is!” Molly waved, and Sam held up his coffee cup in a smiling salute.

Occasionally, Sam Chance would go to area schools as a visiting artist. He’d set up a wheel and demonstrate pottery-making techniques to the amazement of the student body. Last year, he had come to Molly’s school, and she had watched, spellbound, as he threw jug after jug for her sixth-grade students. The art teacher had arranged for several North Carolina artists to be guest teachers for a day. In addition to Sam, there had been a folk art carver who cut up logs using a chainsaw and turned them into alligators and giraffes. There had also been a storyteller who recounted Appalachian tales while having the class sketch the “feelings” her stories invoked. Molly had asked to sit in on each of these lectures and found them as rewarding as her students did.

“Do all the area potters visit one another’s kiln openings?” she asked her mother.

“Only if they’re friends or former apprentices. Most of these guys have learned all they know from C.C., so they come to show their support and to help wrap up the pieces after the sale.”

Molly was surprised. “Wow. C.C. is older than I thought. For some reason, I pictured all of these guys as middle-aged or younger.”

“C.C. is one of the last real traditional potters. He digs his own clay, makes his own glazes, and fires everything in a kiln he built himself. In fact, except for the ancient mule that he replaced with a tractor motor, he does everything just as the potters did it in the early 1900s. He’s a piece of living history.”

George-Bradley’s bright white suit caught Molly’s eye again. Done flirting with the attractive women in the back of the line, he moved toward the potters and began shaking their hands and slapping them on the backs with overblown gusto. When he reached Sam, Molly heard him say, “Sam Chance? What are you doing here?” He raised his voice like a bully on the playground, hoping to seek the attention of the other children. “Don’t you have some
dinner plates
to make?” He laughed as the other potters eyed him angrily. “This here is art pottery, boy. The stuff that collectors are made of.”

Molly was shocked. George-Bradley had called a man at least fifteen years his senior “boy.” Sam’s face was blocked by George-Bradley’s expansive back, where sweat was beginning to spread through the thin jacket, so Molly didn’t see the potter’s reaction. Several of the other potters simply walked away, but George-Bradley rapidly cornered another, younger potter and began criticizing him on the weak color of his red glazes.

Eileen Burle, a soft-spoken woman in her seventies, saved the young man from further torment by asking for his assistance. She sent him off to the house and continued walking among the crowd handing out what looked like cookies from a wooden tray. Another, younger woman in her late thirties poured out cups of coffee or sweet tea. Molly noticed that she was pregnant, but her freckled face lacked any trace of an expectant glow and her eyes stared fixedly at someone standing in line. Her gaze was so intent that she filled a glass of tea until it flowed over the brim of the cup. Blinking, she nervously cleaned up the mess and reloaded her drink tray in order to serve the waiting throng, which had now grown to almost two hundred people.

From her place near the front of the line, Molly couldn’t believe how many people had congregated behind her. There were at least one hundred eager buyers wringing their hands and talking loudly with bursts of nervous excitement as the rope-cutting moment drew near.

Her mother introduced her to C.C. as he made his way over to where they stood.

“This your first openin’? You’re in for a treat. My wife told me to go by the lottery system, where folks pick a number out of a hat, but this is too much fun to give up.” He smiled, snipping his scissors in the air.

“Can you tell me something about that kiln, Mr. Burle?” Molly gestured toward the dome of bricks and wood sticking out of the ground a few hundred yards behind the pottery tables. It resembled an overturned ship whose rounded hull closely hugged the earth. At one end was an arched opening in the bricks that looked like a miniature railroad tunnel entrance.

“Call me C.C. Now, that kiln is called a groundhog kiln, ’cause it sits kind of squat against the ground. I’ve got to crawl on in there to load the pottery, then stoke it with wood, then heat it up good and hot for a few days. In the last couple of hours, we feed that fire like crazy and smoke comes pouring out the chimney there.” He pointed toward the end of the kiln. “That’s called the ‘blast off’ time. That’s when you can look in at yer pots and they’s as red as the devil, just a-starin’ back at ya through all that heat.”

Molly watched the pride flush his face as he looked over at his finished pots. He pointed at a gallon jug with a greenish, earth-tone glaze.

“That glaze is called ‘Seagrove slip’ and it’s been made in these parts for more than a hundred years. My daddy made it that way and his daddy and his daddy did too. It’s our family recipe.”

“I’d love to ask you more questions after the sale, if that’s okay.” Molly told him about the pottery articles she planned to write.

“Sure, I’ll take you around and show you all the tricks. You got yer eye on somethin’ out there?” He looked in the direction of the waiting pottery.

Molly nodded as he winked. “Good,” he said merrily. “’Cause it’s time to fetch it.”

C.C. moved over to the thin piece of rope, scissors in hand. The noise in the yard ceased. Just then, George-Bradley brazenly shoved his bulk between the potter and the first person in line, the nervous man named Hillary Keane. The man stared at George-Bradley, his mouth opening and closing like a landed fish gasping for air. George-Bradley completely ignored Keane’s expression of silent outrage.

Smiling wickedly, George-Bradley leaned over to Keane and elbowed him roughly in the side. “My dear little man, what are you doing here? You know all the pieces you want are gonna be snapped up by yours truly. Why don’t you just give up now and save face? I am the King of Kiln Openings!” Then, as if emphasizing Keane’s hopelessness, George-Bradley dropped his empty cup onto the ground in front of Keane’s feet and crushed it with an Italian leather loafer. He then stuffed two of Eileen’s cookies into his mouth and chewed like a contented cow.

Rage drained Keane’s face of all color. “Bastard!” he yelled, inhaling a great swallow of breath in order to release a stream of hatred at the rude collector beside him, but at that moment, C.C. severed the rope.

“Wait! Wait for me!” George-Bradley tried to bellow in protest, but his mouth was too crammed full of cookies to be heard clearly.

The crowd lurched forward as one body, shoving one another out of the way as each person moved toward a table. Molly headed for the nearest piece, the face jug with the greenish glaze and the white, crying eyes. As she reached out to grasp it, a thick, sweaty arm pushed her away so roughly that she lost her balance and fell to the ground. With a smarting elbow and stains on her shirt and pants, Molly quickly stood up again and looked around to see George-Bradley shrug his wide shoulders in mock apology.

“What a jerk,” Molly muttered as she watched him disappear into the writhing crowd. She gritted her teeth and shoved herself forward, knocking into another man who was reaching toward the same piece. She grabbed the green face jug and began to fight her way toward the table where the snake pitcher still waited to be chosen.

Chaos reigned. Bodies collided and bounced off one another in every direction. Arms and hands reached out, desperately seeking to grab hold of the pottery, and angry curses were issued in sharp staccato among shouts of delight and disappointment. These noises were punctuated by gasps of pain as feet were stepped on, ribs were jabbed, or two pieces of pottery bumped one another too hard, chipping the glaze or creating cracks in the handle of a jug.

Molly darted through a small opening in the squirming throng, and though she was neither quick nor agile, she was determined to get her piece. She saw with relief that it had yet to be claimed. Pottery was being whisked away from the tables like it was on fire, and as she made her move to grasp the handle of the snake pitcher, she saw George-Bradley out of the corner of her eye, wrestling a large jug with the face of a devil out of a petite woman’s arms.

“I had it first!” she protested, but he was too strong for her, and she released the piece and moved on to find another, her face a mask of anger.

The victorious scoundrel examined his piece for a millisecond with a look of pure greed and satisfaction, then returned to the fray. Disgusted, Molly looked around for her mother, spotting her just as she seized a red rooster from the back table. Their eyes met for a second, and both women lifted their pieces in the air, proclaiming their success before the crowd blocked their view of one another again.

As Molly turned to make her way back to the safety of the lawn, she saw George-Bradley’s face beyond a trio of buyers arguing over a double-handed vase. Eyes darting about frantically, he searched for another treasure. Suddenly, he raised his head and howled in pain, his eyes bulging even farther from their sockets. In another flash, Molly’s view was obscured, and then she saw George-Bradley stagger off toward the side of the barn, out of sight.

Curious, Molly held her pottery against her ample chest and followed. She poked her head around the corner of the sheet metal wall and stopped in her tracks. George-Bradley was leaning heavily against the side of the barn, his devil jug and another crying face jug resting on the ground at his feet. As she watched, he examined a tiny red stain on his peach shirt, his expression one of befuddlement.

Undoing the last two buttons, he exposed a roll of pasty flesh and rubbed at his flaccid skin with moistened fingertips. He repeated this motion several times, more and more slowly each time. His downcast mouth frowned in confusion. And then, his eyes lifted and stared off at something over Molly’s shoulder. A look of surprise crossed his face, replaced by one of stunned realization.

Abruptly, a firm hand propelled Molly away from the corner of the barn and into the clearing. It was Clara.

“You’ve got to protect your pieces once you’ve got them, honey,” Clara said, unaware of George-Bradley’s odd posture. The two red roosters were already tucked neatly into one of the plastic bins, which Clara had strategically hidden behind the trunk of a pine tree.

The tight knots of struggling people had dispersed and only a few buyers remained around the tables, still playing a verbal tug-of-war over a vase or jug.