The Cracked Pot (19 page)

With the collection of nightmares I had, I might as well have stayed awake. Bill's snoring beside me didn't help matters, though I couldn't say it hurt all that much, either.

After my restless night, I wasn't ready to face a new day when my alarm went off, but I didn't have much choice.

Bill was annoyingly refreshed as he popped up beside me. "That was some night. How'd you sleep?" he asked as he practically leapt out of bed.

"Barely," I said.

"Really? I had a great rest. My hand's not even that sore. I think I'll go back to the shop today."

"Don't you think you should take a little more time off? You don't want to rush it, and if you even get near those pills, I won't allow any woodworking. Do you under stand?"

Normally my scolding would set him off, but not today. "I don't need them, I tell you. Maybe tonight, though." The grin on his lips made me uneasy.

"Pain pills are the easiest thing in the world to get ad dicted to," I said. "Easier than heroin, alcohol, or cocaine." I wasn't entirely sure that was true, but I didn't want my hus band hooked on the medication. That wasn't the whole story, though. For some reason, my dear spouse was aggra vating the fool out of me, and I felt the need to come down hard on him.

"Hey, I'm the one who said I was done with them, re member? If I don't hurt, I don't need them, and I won't take any more."

"That's a slippery slope, and you know it. Tell you what. Why don't I hang on to them for you."

"I'm not a child, Carolyn. I'm perfectly capable of dis pensing my own medication. I'm going to go take a shower," he said grumpily.

I felt a twinge of guilt about crushing his good mood. But I was still upset with his jaunty attitude. Out of aggrava tion more than anything else, I stole into the bedroom and put his bottle of pills by the cleaning supplies in the kitchen. He'd never look there; I had full confidence in that. If he asked, I'd turn them back over to him, but he was going to have to make the request.

After he got out of the shower, he didn't mention the pills again, and I certainly wasn't going to bring it up. I made us eggs for breakfast, and he headed back to his workshop.

Or so I thought.

"Carolyn, you might want to come out here," he said as he called to me from the back porch.

"What happened, did another dog make a deposit on our deck?" Some of the neighborhood dogs loved leaving us lit tle presents, and Bill had threatened to electrify the entire place on more than one occasion.

"No, it's nothing like that. Come out here. Now."

"All right, I'm coming. There's no need to be so gruff about it," I said as I joined him outside.

The second I got outside, I saw what had disturbed him so. Someone had scrawled the words "BUTT OUT" on my car windshield in big block letters with a black Sharpie pen.

"That's rather clear, isn't it?" I said.

"Who did this?" Bill asked. "Do you have any idea?"

"It could have been a dozen different people," I said, more honestly than I wanted to admit.

"I'm going to call the sheriff," Bill said as he started back inside.

I grabbed his sleeve, being careful not to touch his hand. "Don't, Bill. It's not going to do any good."

"He needs to be told someone's threatening you," Bill said, shaking off my grip.

"Let me deal with it in my own way," I said. I couldn't imagine Hannah writing such a terse message, but she'd been angrier than I'd ever seen her in my life. I couldn't rule it out, not completely.

"Are you at least going to take the advice?" he asked.

"What do you think?"

"I think I wasted my breath even asking you the ques tion," he said as he started to walk away.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"If you're not going to let me call the sheriff, I'm going to my workshop."

He stormed off to his shop and went inside. It was a hun dred feet from my raku pit, on the other edge of our property line, and I wondered if my woodlands visitor might have done something to my husband's shop. He didn't come back out, so I had to assume it was undisturbed.

I went back into the house, grabbed the phone, then stared at it a full minute before I had the nerve to dial the number I had to call.

"Yes?" Hannah said, her voice full of frost.

"It's me," I said. "I want to talk to you about what hap pened last night."

"There's nothing to talk about," she said.

"You didn't leave me any messages, did you?" There, I'd said it.

"I haven't called you. Why would you think I had?"

"I'm not talking about on the telephone. I mean on my windshield."

"Carolyn, what on earth are you talking about?"

"I didn't think you'd do it," I said.

"What was the message?"

I had to tell her. "It said 'butt out.' "

"I can understand the sentiment, but I didn't leave the message," she said, and then she hung up.

That answered that. I knew Hannah well enough to know that if she'd done it, she would have at least admitted it to me. So, who else wanted me to mind my own business? It could have been a message from Rose Nygren, Kendra Williams, Mayor Harvey Jenkins, or my uncle Don Rut ledge. Then again, it could have been half a dozen other people I didn't even realize I'd offended with my im promptu investigation. Whoever it was, they were going to have to do better than that to get me to stop.

If anything, I was more determined than ever to find out what had happened to Richard Atkins in my raku pit, and just as important, why.

Butch Hardcastle was waiting for me in front of the shop when I got there thirty minutes later. He handed me a cup of coffee. "I thought you could use this."

"How did you know I didn't meet Hannah this morn ing?" Was the man watching me?

"I didn't. Here, give it back and I'll drink it."

"Not on your life," I said. "I need this."

"Two cups already? I don't want to be the one responsi ble for you getting the jitters."

I opened the door and let him in. "As a matter of fact, Hannah and I skipped our morning ritual," I said as I deadbolted the door behind us.

"Are you two squabbling again?" he asked.

"I'm afraid I might have pushed things a little too far this time." I told him what I'd said to Hannah about David and waited for his reaction. All he did was listen. "No com ment?"

"Are you kidding? I've got enough problems without getting involved in a fight between two strong-willed women. No, I'll stay on the sidelines for this one."

I snorted. "A fat lot of help you are, then. So, what brings

you here so early? I wouldn't think you'd be up at this hour."

He grinned. "I've found it's a whole lot easier if you don't go to bed first."

"You've been up all night? My mother always told me nothing good happens after midnight."

Butch pulled up a chair and sat down. "Then we wouldn't have had much in common. Sometimes I think just the opposite is true."

I grabbed a seat across from him. "Butch, you haven't been backsliding, have you?"

He patted my hand. "Carolyn, I appreciate your con cern, honestly, I do, but I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself."

"I know you can. I just worry about you sometimes. I can't help it, so don't ask me to stop."

"I won't," he said. "I'm here this early for a reason."

"Not just my company? I figured as much. What's up?"

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded enve lope. "I may have found something about Richard Atkins's first disappearance." He slid the envelope across the table to me. "See what you think."

Inside was a faded and yellowed newspaper article, and it broke in two as I unfolded it. "Sorry about that."

"That's all right. Read it."

Holding the pieces together, I scanned the article, then looked up. "It's about a jewelry store robbery. I remember reading about it back then." In fact, Kendra had brought up the subject when she'd first heard that Richard had returned to Maple Ridge.

"Look at the date," he said as he tapped the paper.

"Okay. It doesn't have much significance to me. I'm sorry, I must be a little slow this morning."

Butch sighed. "Think about it. You know David's birth day, don't you?"

"Of course I do. It's March eleventh."

"You know the year as well, I'll wager. Take that date, count back seven months, and what have you got? I imagine it's about the time Hannah knew she was pregnant with him."

I frowned at him. "Are you saying that the two events are related? Do you honestly believe Richard Atkins found out his wife was pregnant, then decided to go out and rob a jew elry store to celebrate? The owner was shot and wounded. It hardly seems the proper way to celebrate."

"I don't believe in coincidences, Carolyn. This has to be related."

"But how?"

"Give me some time. I'll dig into it and get back to you. But first I've got to go out of town today."

As we stood, I said, "I'm not even going to bother asking you where you're going."

He smiled. "Good. Then I won't have to lie to you. If you're in a hurry for the information, it won't hurt my feel ings if you look into this yourself."

"I've got a better idea. Why don't I ask Sandy?"

"That works for me. I'll stop by when I get back into town."

I couldn't let him go yet. I held his hands in mine, then said, "Be careful. Promise me that much."

"Yes, ma'am."

Once he was gone, I dialed Sandy's number at the li brary. Before I could tell her what I wanted her to investi gate, she said, "Carolyn, I haven't had a chance to look into that ClayDate thing since we spoke yesterday. Things have been kind of crazy around here."

"That's fine." It looked as though I was going to have to research the robbery myself.

Before I could hang up, she asked, "That was why you were calling, wasn't it?"

"No, but it can wait."

"You can't tease me like that," she said. "I'll fret about it all day."

I quickly relayed Butch's hunch to her, expecting her to dismiss it out of hand. Instead she said, "I can get back to you in half an hour."

"I thought you were busy," I said.

"I've got time for this. It's an entirely different kind of search. This is all open information. Will you be at the shop this morning?"

"Who knows? I think so, but that's no real indication, given the way my days have been going lately."

"I'll track you down, then," she said, and then hung up.

David wasn't due in for an hour yet, and though I had a hundred things I could do, I didn't want to do any of them. Was I losing my drive for running Fire at Will? No, I still loved working with clay, glaze, and paint. It was just that I had so many distractions to deal with, I couldn't enjoy my real purpose in life.

I decided to open my kilns to see how the cottages had turned out. As I unloaded them, I marveled at the simple little structures, and how much fun they were to make. Though they were all the reddish pink of bisque-fired clay, I could imagine the many variations we could make with paint and glaze. Taking one of the cottages I'd created, I sat down at one of the painting benches and lost myself in dec orating the structure. When I looked up from my work, I saw that I should have opened my door twenty minutes ear lier. I'd been so wrapped up in what I'd been doing that the time had flown past me. As I unlocked the door, I was a little disgruntled that no eager customers had brought my tardi ness to my attention.

I'd just flipped the sign on the front door when David came trotting up. "Sorry I'm late. I slept in."

"Is that good news, or bad? Did you have any luck with Annie?"

"She's thawing, but it's still kind of chilly," he admitted as he took off his jacket and hung it on a peg. "Speaking of arctic blasts, I talked to my mom this morning."

"Did you? What did she have to say for herself?"

He whistled. "I thought I was the only one in the world who could push her buttons like that, but you must have found a few I didn't even know existed. You probably should know that you're not one of her favorite people in the world right now."

"I didn't think I was," I said as I returned to my cottage. I'd suddenly lost interest in working on it, but it was nearly finished. It had been for ten minutes, but I'd been enjoying adding little details, like a black cat perched on the front stoop. The next house I did would have a three-dimensional feline on it. I had a core group of customers who would buy anything I made as long as it had a cat on it. The only catch was, it had to be unique, so I was constantly searching for more ways to add cats to my pieces. I loved them myself, but it was strictly a marketing decision. Okay, that wasn't true. They were fun to do, and I considered it a challenge making the felines fit in.

"Do you want to talk about it?" David asked as he put on his apron.

"That's the last thing I want to do," I said. "Let's finish these cottages, shall we? I want to get them fired and in the window as fast as I can."

"We're not doing production work, are we?"

"No, but if these little buildings help pay the rent, we should embrace them."

"Okay, I get it," he said. As he looked at the pieces spread out on a table by the kilns, David said, "We've got a lot of work to do."

"I think we should just glaze half of them," I said. "We can put the others out on the open shelves for our cus tomers."

"Have you thought about what you're going to charge for them?"

"Not yet," I said. "For now, just put them in the most ex pensive pricing section and we'll figure out an exact amount later."

I had my shelves of bisqueware organized, from the least expensive saucers to the fanciest jugs and teakettles. The system wasn't perfect, but it was the best I'd been able to come up with in the years I'd owned Fire at Will. Pricing the pieces I bought wholesale wasn't that difficult. But David liked to add his own work to the shelves, and Robert Owens, the potter from Travers who sometimes taught classes at the shop, often put the pieces he didn't think were quite good enough on the shelves, too. I hadn't seen him lately, because he was on some kind of research trip in Eu rope—nice work if you could get it. I seemed to be stuck in Maple Ridge. Not that I didn't love our little corner of Ver mont, but sometimes I got the itch to grab my husband, get the next flight out, and see what the world had to offer. The funny thing was, I knew if we ever actually did it, in three or four days I'd be yearning for my kilns and pottery again. It was something that drove my husband crazy, but I couldn't help myself.