A Killer Collection (13 page)

She spotted a red and white sign
reading Prescriptions in the back of the store. A girl who looked as though she
should still be in high school filed orders into alphabetical bins. She
crackled bubble gum in time to the store’s jazzy elevator music, blowing large,
pink balloons and then sucking them back into her mouth with a series of snaps
and pops. Her dirty blonde hair, held back in a ponytail, swung back and forth
like a pendulum as she moved from bin to bin.

Molly took a breath and approached
her. "Excuse me."

The girl swung around, her hair
whipping over her shoulder. Her nametag read Brandy.

"Yeah?" She looked at
Molly blankly.

"I'm looking for Mr.
Keane," she said in her most sugary voice.

Brandy's eyes immediately narrowed
and her jaw froze mid chew. "He's not here," and then she added
reluctantly, "Can I help you with somethin'?"

"No," Molly assured her.
"I've come to deliver a piece of pottery to him."

"Sorry, he's not in,"
the girl replied flatly.

"But we were supposed to meet
today," Molly insisted gently. “I drove all the way from Durham as a favor
to him.”

Brandy digested this bit of
information while indecision played across her freckled face.

"Look." Her voice became
strained. "He hasn't been to work for over a week. I don't know what else
to tell you."

Molly dropped her eyes to the
counter and frowned, doing her best to act worried. "Is he all
right?"

The conspiring whisper and the
concerned face drew

Brandy in. "We don't
know," the girl admitted, leaning closer. "He's
missing
."

"What?" Molly asked
breathlessly, looking around the room wildly and hoping she wasn't overacting.
"Since when?"

"Friday afternoon, I
guess." The girl closed up again. She obviously cared for her boss on some
level and wasn't willing to expose her feelings to a stranger.

Last Friday had been the day of
the kiln opening. Molly swallowed her excitement She reached across the
counter, patted the girl's forearm, and replied tenderly, "You poor thing.
You must be worried sick."

Brandy's anxiety washed over her
face, making her appear even younger and more vulnerable. "I am," she
confessed. "I worked with him that afternoon. He took the morning off to
go to some pottery thing. But I was the last one to see him."

"You must have to get in here
awfully early," Molly sympathized.

"Yeah, 'bout 7:00 to get all
the orders ready by openin' time," she sighed. "The cashiers don't
have to be here 'til 8:30, but we, I mean, Mr. Keane and me, we gotta be here
early every single day."

"Do you always have the same
shift?" Molly asked, an idea forming.

Brandy blew an enormous bubble and
sucked it back into her mouth as she studied Molly. "Yeah. There's a
pharmacist's assistant who works evenings, but he’s always here by
himself."

"Then you and Mr. Keane must
be close, working side by side every day..." Molly suggested. She was
hoping that showing a willingness to listen would get Brandy to confess
something more intimate about her working relationship. Her intuition paid off.

The girl hesitated and her
shoulders slumped. Finally,she said very softy, "We are. He hired me after
I got... after I had some trouble. Not many people would do that. I really need
this job."

"He is a good man,"
Molly agreed with false enthusiasm. She suddenly felt guilty about pumping this
girl for information. Brandy might look young and innocent, but she had clearly
had to grow up swiftly. Now her benefactor had disappeared, and the town was
probably rife with rumor.

"I wouldn’t worry,"
Molly said brightly, trying to ease the girl's mind. "Maybe he took a
last-minute trip to get away from it all... did he seemed stressed to
you?"

The girl shook her head, her mind
elsewhere.

"Well, these pottery people
are always running off to some show or another." She felt another pang of
guilt. "Did he act like he was excited about an upcoming event or... maybe
worried about something?"

Brandy looked at her like she was
the village idiot. "He's always worried! He has a good reason to be!"

What did that mean? Suddenly, an
image flashed before Molly's eyes. She remembered Keane at the kiln opening,
struggling to clean his glasses. Those hands. They had been so gnarled and his
face had been filled with embarrassment and frustration. Molly had seen hands
like that before. Her grandmother's sister, an accomplished pianist, had
developed such bad arthritis in her early sixties that she could no longer
play. Molly recalled a faint memory of the swollen knuckles, the disobedient
fingers, and the agonized flush on her great aunt's face as she attempted to
peel an apple over the sink.

"Of course," Molly
whispered, more to herself than to the girl. "What pain he must have been
in all the time."

Brandy responded to the genuine
sympathy in Molly's voice. "He was. Even though he takes medicine, he can
hardly open the pill bottles anymore." She looked around to make sure no
one could overhear a confession that could ruin her mentor’s career. "I
have to use all the keys for him. It's too hard for him to fit them into the
lock. The whole thing isn’t fair, either. It's not like he's an old man, but he
has such a serious case and he’s afraid he’ll have to retire if anyone reports
him to the district manager."

Molly realized that Brandy was a
little bit in love with her employer. "It's good of you to give Mr. Keane
a hand," she said kindly. "He helped you, so now you keep his
arthritis a secret. You make it so that he can still do his job. That’s
admirable, Brandy."

But Molly had gone too far in
voicing Keane's affliction. Brandy gave her a guarded stare, mumbled,
"Yeah," and returned back to her work and defensive gum chewing.

"Look, if I hear anything
about his whereabouts, I'll call you," Molly offered, even though Brandy
had turned away. "No matter what, you'll be just fine. You obviously have
a good head on your shoulders."

Brandy raised her face and gave a
slight nod. Molly retreated to her car, feeling like a complete jerk. Her theory
about Keane had been shot to bits. If he had such an advanced case of arthritis
that he couldn't open a bottle cap or turn a set of keys, there was no way he
could squeeze the tiny syringe used to give George-Bradley the extra shot of
insulin. But if Keane was innocent of the murder, why had he run away?

~~~~~

Molly stopped to pick up a dozen donuts. Sam Chance loved
anything with sugar, and his apprentices were always hungry. Consulting her
Seagrove area potteries map, she remembered that the landmark closest to
Chance's Ware was the abandoned Chance Beans factory. The dilapidated building
and overgrown lot proudly displayed a real estate sign. Molly was surprised to
see that the sign read Sold.

Chance's Ware was down a long, gravel road, much like a hundred
other potters in the area. The yard was deserted except for the polished Ford
pickup resting under a carport.

"Someone has a new truck." She greeted Sam with a
hug as he came out of the workshop.

His kind face broke out in a wide
grin, scattering laugh lines across his cheeks and carving creases into the
corners of his blue eyes. "Yes, indeed." He rocked back on his heels,
hands tucked into his overall pockets as the two of them admired the sheen of
the vehicle.

"Did some Chance Beans
relative leave you a pile after they sold their land?"

"Now you know I'm no kin to
them. If I were, I'd be messin' around with clay for fun and wouldn't trouble
over sellin' a pot. Nope," he said as he patted the hood of his truck
affectionately, "bought this by sweat and tears."

"I brought you something to
cure your sweet tooth," Molly said as she handed him the box of donuts.

"Oh boy," Sam whistled.
"This'll help, but my case is hopeless. Come on up to the shop."

They walked up the driveway to the
metal-sided bam, which housed Sam's wheel, drying shelves, glaze barrels, and
all the ware available for purchase. Molly looked around at his utilitarian
pieces. He made plates, bowls, pitchers, candleholders, bean pots, casseroles,
and birdhouses in four different glazes. His traditional pieces were
concentrated on a single table where several face jugs with corncob stoppers
and a few roosters proudly proclaimed their creator's right as a
fifth-generation potter.

"So what do you want to cover
today? Lord knows I could talk pottery to you until the cows come home, but I
don't figure you've got all that much time."

Molly watched as Sam helped
himself to a jelly donut.

"How about digging the clay
and turning? Unless you want to talk about firing too."

"Well, you've been to C.
C.'s," Sam said, "so you've seen the best kiln around these parts.
He's got the genuine article in that groundhog kiln of his."

"Let's cover how a piece of
wet clay becomes a jug," Molly suggested.

"All the action before
glazing."

"Right."

Sam dusted sugar particles from
his overalls, pointing to a shelf of unglazed pots. "It's called bisque
ware when the pottery hasn't been glazed yet. Lots of us say 'biscuit' for
short."

"If it sounds like food, then
I can remember it." Molly accepted a chocolate-frosted donut for herself.
"Where are all your apprentices today?"

"Oh, they're delivering a
load to some gardening place in Asheville. Lady bought up all my flower pots
and birdhouses except this one."

"That's great, Sam! And
where's your talented son Justin, the famous sixth-generation Chance
potter?"

A look of sadness surfaced in
Sam's eyes, then darted away like a startled minnow. "He's going to law
school."

"Oh. What does that mean for
the future of your business? "

"Well, he's using the kiln at
the university's main campus, so he hasn't quit pottery. But I don't think he's
going to be a full-time potter. I can only hope that I live long enough to wait
for him to retire from the law and take over the business."

Molly reassured her friend with a
pat on the hand. "Maybe he just needs to spread his wings for a few years.
He'll end up here eventually. And there aren’t too many parents who’d complain
about their kids becoming attorneys."

Sam smiled, his good humor
restored. "I know it, but we're a dying breed out here. Some things are
more important than money."

Sam led her down to the banks of
the creek that snaked through long grasses and stooped trees. There, a large
depressed circle formed a wide bog. Molly poked at the clay with a stick and
asked Sam if he had stayed at C. C.'s long enough to see the collapse of
George-Bradley.

"I sure did. The whole town
is a-twitter over it. It's a shame, him being so young and all."

Calling George-Bradley young was a
stretch, but Sam always had a kind word for everyone. Molly knew that
George-Bradley wouldn't have bought much from Sam because he wasn't as
collectible as many of the other potters, but it didn't effect the potter's
disposition. But then, Molly suddenly remembered how rude George-Bradley had
been to Sam at the kiln opening, slighting him for creating "pretty dinner
plates" instead of traditional art pottery. Was it possible that Sam
wanted revenge for having his life's work insulted so publicly?

"Weren't you angry at him for
what he said to you that morning? He insulted your work." Molly watched
Sam's face carefully as he replied, even though she didn't really believe Sam
had the capacity to hurt anyone.

"Shoot." Sam shook his
head. "I can't get in a huff just 'cause some big shot doesn't like what I
make. Those dinner plates have sent my two boys to college, and we've had full
bellies every day of our lives." He grinned nonchalantly, rubbing his
small pouch.

"Now, back to business. This
is our clay pit." He pointed at the bog. "We dig it, mix it up with
some commercial clay, and add some water. That gives it a good, plastic feel.
You gotta have that to turn."

"I bet you get some serious
mosquitoes from that pit." Molly felt itchy just looking at it.

"I wear overalls for more
than one reason," Sam laughed, leading her back toward the shop where he
pointed at a square machine the size of a refrigerator turned on its side.

"This is a motorized pug
mill. It mixes the clay. Back in my daddy's day, they had a pug mill turned by
a mule. Most people had those kind, but none of us keep mules anymore."

"Does this do a better
job?"

"Not really, but we just got
sick of puttin' that poor mule to work. Us kids were all crazy about that mule.
She was our family pet." Sam rocked back on his heels, remembering.

"So she retired and lived a
good life?"

"Not exactly. We stopped
working her, and on her very first day of retired life she keeled over and died
on us."

"That's a terrible
story!" Molly laughed. "What did you call her?"

"Whiskey Girl. Whiskey jugs
were real big when my daddy was turning. Everybody wanted one, especially with
our corncobs stuck in 'em. So it seems like we heard that word about a million
times a day."

Molly made a mental note to add
the mule story to her article. "So what's next, after the clay gets mixed
up?"

"Well, now you've gotta pick
the junk out of it. You're gonna have all kinds of stuff in there. Stuff the
screens don't get out. So you need to cut it up into slabs and pick it
out."

Sam picked up a block of clay and
sliced into it with a wire.

"Banjo string," he told
her, cutting a bread-sized piece of clay that revealed embedded pieces of grass
and stone.

"May I?" Molly helped
herself to a slab and pulled out the invasive bits of nature. The clay was cool
and moist, nestling comfortably in her hand.