Relics (20 page)
Adam dropped a folder onto the red-checked table of the Alcaskaki Diner and slid into the seat opposite Faye. “You gonna tell me why you had to ask me for a copy of the very same interviews you gave me two days ago?”
“Would you believe me if I told you I lost my copy?”
“Nope.”
“Okay,” sighed Faye. “I had to give it to Raleigh. I should have done so sooner, but I screwed up. Big time.”
“I think with what’s been going on around here, not to mention the fact that you almost died in a fire, you’re entitled to a slip or two.”
Faye glanced around the diner, bustling with Friday-morning breakfasters. “Maybe. Why don’t you tell Raleigh that? Listen, let’s order. This cold climate has fired up my appetite, and we don’t have that much time. Does this place serve quick?”
Adam smiled and beckoned the waitress. Their “Rise-and-Shine Specials” arrived quickly.
Faye had always believed that calories consumed in diners didn’t count, but she saw ample evidence around her, in the form of broad rears and rounded bellies jammed under dining tables, that those calories did indeed count. Ignoring the likelihood of added poundage, she tucked into her fried eggs and buttered grits.
“Why aren’t you working? I thought you archaeologists were at it before the crack of dawn,” said Adam through a mouthful of cheese-scrambled eggs.
“That’s fishermen,” said Faye. “Archaeologists need sunlight to work in.” She peered out the window at the gray sky. “Anyway, I’ll be back at the site by nine. Not that anyone will notice. With everything that’s happened, I can’t see that anybody will be doing much work today.”
“I see Amanda-Lynne isn’t working here today,” said Adam. “I’ll admit I’m relieved.”
“I know. It’s awful to see her. Everybody’s worried she’ll completely lose her grip on reality, but Jenny says she’s coping by making plans for Jimmie’s funeral.”
“It’s going to be a tough winter for her,” said Adam. “Who knows when she’ll be able to work again, and how much can she make here anyway? You don’t rake in a lot of tips when the all-you-can-eat special goes for seven bucks. She’s got no other skills, and she’s lost her husband and now her son. I don’t know how she’ll get by.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Faye. “You know this community better than I do.” She ran her thumb over the chipped rim on her coffee cup. “How did Jimmie, who worked part-time in a municipal library, and whose mother waitresses part-time, afford to buy a pair of cell phones and a telescope? How did Jorge pay for that new delivery van? How did Ronya and Leo afford that very nice pole barn and the satellite dish?”
Adam buttered his toast with care and deliberation. “When people don’t have a lot, Faye, it means a lot to them to have the big TV and the fancy car. They stretch every cent to get all the things that advertising companies tell them they need. It isn’t until the car blows a hose or they need a root canal that they see their mistake. I wish human nature was different, but that’s the way it is.”
“Maybe,” said Faye, “but if that’s so, why doesn’t Miss Dovey have a convection oven with all the bells and whistles? Why are Elliott and Margie driving a thirty-year-old Ford and only dreaming about a satellite dish?”
“What are you suggesting?” asked Adam.
“That there are people in the settlement who have more money than they should have. That they’re hiding something. And whatever it is, it could be a motive for murder.”
Adam ruminated a moment. “I talked to Jenny Hanahan, and I managed to bring up the subject of that pothole Joe mentioned. She lives by the bridge. She says Jorge always comes back late on Wednesday nights, and she always hears his truck bang through that pothole.”
“Every Wednesday?” Faye’s eyes widened. “That’s got to be it, then.”
“Not necessarily. It’s Jorge’s job to drive that truck, and every driver hates to run empty. It may be that somebody’s taking advantage of Jorge’s schedule to save on shipping for a legitimate product they’re selling.”
“Like what?” asked Faye.
“Well, Ronya Smiley has her flea market pottery sales. Maybe Jorge takes her stock out every week, so she won’t have to lug it around.”
Faye shook her head. “What Ronya can get from her pottery doesn’t come close to explaining the amount of money I’m talking about.” She picked up her coffee cup. The chip in its brown rim inexplicably made her think of riches.
Real money
…
Something the right person would pay a fortune for…
“Well, I’ll check it out,” Adam said. “I suppose you’re suggesting that if Carmen found out this secret, she might have been murdered to keep her quiet.”
Faye nodded wordlessly, still too deep in her own moment of revelation to speak.
Adam, apparently not noticing that his breakfast partner had left the building, finished his coffee in silence, then nodded to the window. “There goes Brent Harbison. Looks like he’s working, anyway.”
Faye roused herself to watch Brent’s red sports car crawl past the diner and disappear around a corner. “Did you know Brent didn’t like Carmen?”
“Why, because it took her about two minutes to blow him off?” Adam joked.
“No,” said Faye coolly.
Adam’s freckled face reddened. “Then why?”
“He said she didn’t care enough for the people she worked with. He accused her of only being interested in using them to further her own career and offering nothing in return. I believe the exact word he used for her was ‘parasite.’”
“Parasite? Ouch.” He drained his coffee and looked around for the waitress. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I thought it was just normal antagonism between two hard-charging professionals…until I read Carmen’s transcript of her interview with Brent. When he called her a parasite, he meant it.”
The waitress brought the check and Adam rose. “Well, it’s a quarter to nine. You’re going to be late.”
“I think the odds of my doing any useful archaeology today are exceedingly slim,” said Faye. She followed Adam out without telling him that she might have figured out what Jorge was hauling out of the settlement. More than that, she knew precisely what he was hauling back home in his nearly empty truck.
Money didn’t weigh much.
Returning from Alcaskaki, Faye went first to the bunkhouse to look for Joe, but she had no luck. Laurel was missing, too, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess where Joe might be. He had picked a fine time to discover the pleasures of romance.
Elliott was waiting for her at the excavation. Faye found it a pleasure to work with someone who was anxious to be on the time clock, but she didn’t have time to brief him on the full details of the new work plan. She just sent him off to the Lester site, telling him to carry on with the work they’d begun Wednesday and promising to join him as soon as she could.
Joe’s absence was unfortunate. She did not really want to do what must be done alone, but it wasn’t safe to delay the upcoming confrontation any longer. Two people were dead. She couldn’t live with herself if someone else died and she could have prevented it. Making up her mind, she headed out again into the cold on foot, stopping first at her office.
In her desk was the sample bag holding the cobalt blue lusterware potsherd Joe had uncovered the day before. She retrieved it and cradled the lovely thing in the palm of her hand. The making of useful things—plates, cups, jars—was a worthy craft. In the right hands, even the most utilitarian pottery rose to the level of high art. Faye would put the artist who had made this artifact into that category.
The decorative painting on this lustered fragment looked nothing like the plain glaze on the gray sherds her team had found all week. Still, in the end, they had all been made from dirt using skills handed down through the generations.
Light from the overhead bulb played over the fragment’s luminous surface. She rocked her hand back and forth, admiring the way the luster ornamentation changed color. Collectors loved medieval lusterware for its luminous color and its great age. Luster painters of the time, typically Islamic, had incorporated eastern designs into their work, giving it an exotic flair that made present-day rich people happy to part with piles of money just to own something so beautiful. Why was a piece of something so old and so valuable buried in a vacant lot behind a country store in a poor, remote, American village?
One of the stars on the potsherd glittered at her, giving away its secret.
There was no longer any doubt in Faye’s mind how the Sujosa were earning their extra money. She wouldn’t grieve much to see Jorge and his poisonous attitude headed for jail, but Ronya was her friend. She deserved a chance to explain herself.
Pocketing the lusterware fragment, Faye stepped out of the store into a world where her Army-surplus camouflage jacket utterly failed to fulfill its design parameters. She was the only green thing in a sea of winter-gray. Raising her hood to fight off the chill winds that had begun stirring with the sunrise, she cuddled her face deeper into her hood and started walking.
***
Joe stood again under the shadow of the tower. Faye and Adam had assumed that, since they hadn’t found Jimmie’s phone after two hours of looking, they never would. That was a silly attitude. Even Joe, who was not a whiz at math, knew that there was a big difference between two hours and forever. Somebody needed to take those two people fishing. A day spent watching a bobber fail to bob was an exercise in patience.
He paid heed to all of his senses as he canvassed the winter-blighted vegetation. He would continue looking until he found the phone, or until he was sure it had never been near that tower.
***
Faye stood on the Smiley doorstep, the potsherd in her closed hand. Ronya opened the door and took a step forward, trying to herd Faye away and obscure her vision into the house. Faye stood her ground.
“Tell me how to make lusterware the old way, Ronya,” she said, looking up into the silent face of a woman twice her size. She opened her hand and held the potsherd up. “And tell me how you found buyers stupid enough to believe your brand-new pots are hundreds of years old.”
Ronya said nothing.
“This sherd hasn’t been buried long. It couldn’t have been; the luster wouldn’t have survived those conditions. That doesn’t mean it isn’t old, just that it was buried recently, but I think you know exactly how old it is.”
Ronya ran her eyes over the sherd in Faye’s hand. She held her silence.
“If you won’t talk to me, I’m going to have to take this to Adam Strahan.”
“You’re going to take it to him anyway.”
“Carmen Martinez is dead.”
Dusky eyelids flickered over luminous blue eyes. “I know.”
“Somebody set the fire that killed her. The vessel this came from would be worth a lot in the collector’s market. Maybe enough money to justify murder.”
“I said I know!” Ronya’s low voice broke. “After the fire, I wanted to go to Adam and tell him everything. But people will be ruined, innocent people, when this comes out.”
“Innocent?” challenged Faye.
“I think so. I wanted to take as few people down with me as I possibly could. But it’s hopeless.” She stepped aside and let Faye into her parlor. “I decided last night that I was going to have to tell somebody what I’ve done. I have to say I’m glad that you’ll be the one. With all the trouble haunting the settlement, I have to speak.”
“All the trouble? You mean Jimmie’s death, too?”
Ronya nodded. “We’ve never had anything of our own here in the settlement, nothing but land. And peace—but now we’ve lost that.” Tears spilled out of her deep blue eyes. “I babysat Jimmie when he was a tiny thing. There was no reason in this world for that child to die. I can’t figure out how his death is connected to the things I’ve done, but dishonesty is like a cancer. I’ve dragged the whole settlement into a lie that’s eating us alive. It’s got to stop and I’m the one that’s got to stop it. Even if it takes me to the penitentiary for a long time.”
It was impossible not to believe her. “Oh, Ronya. Is it that bad?”
Ronya led Faye toward a door at the back of the parlor with a ponderous grace that made Faye think of Demeter leading Persephone to her annual date with Hades. She threw open the door, and Faye walked into a room filled with glitter and earth.
Platters and bowls and tureens in all stages of completion were scattered around the room, but dominating the scene was a winged vase nearly as tall as Faye. It had been coated in luminescent white, and an intricate pattern in a dull brown was being painted over the fired glaze. Faye knew that the dull brown decorative design was deceiving. When the vase was properly fired a second time, the clay paste could be rubbed away to reveal ornamentation with the iridescent sheen of gold or ruby or bronze that gave it the name “lusterware.” Shaped in the style of the great vases that had adorned Spain’s Alhambra Palace in medieval times, the vessel’s slender neck swelled into a graceful belly like a wine jar.
Or a water jar.
’Twasn’t nothing but their water jars and the clothes on their backs, but those jars held their fortunes.
“Miss Dovey’s stories aren’t talking about just any old water jars, are they?”
Ronya dragged a finger over the vase’s sweeping wing. “It’s hard to say. I’ve been reading a lot about pottery in Moorish Spain and Portugal. I’m guessing my people descended from the Islamic potters that brought luster painting to Iberia from the Middle East. They probably left for the Americas sometime after the Christians overthrew the Moors, maybe during the 1500s.”
“Based on the dates of one of Miss Dovey’s songs, I think you’re right.”
“Well, the Alhambra vases that survive are more than a hundred years older than that, so I’d say that the women who left were descendants of Alhambra potters who had passed their knowledge down to them,” Ronya said. “I’m thinking that after they got kidnapped by the English sailors, they kept passing the techniques down to their children and, eventually, to me.”
The tiny arabesques and stylized floral decorations on a completed platter caught Faye’s eye. The patterns had been made by incising the pigment with a sharp stick while it was still wet, leaving a distinctive comma-shaped design that Faye found oddly familiar.
“Zack’s tadpoles!” she cried.
“Did you ever once think I wouldn’t pass on what I know—every bit of it—to Zack?”
Faye circled the unfinished vase. It was magnificent enough to fool the eye, if not the analytical laboratory. “Only eight jars from the Alhambra are known to have survived. It wouldn’t be too hard to convince a wealthy collector that this was the ninth.”
“Tenth. I’ve already sold one.”
Faye had no idea how much a collector would pay for a lustered vase from the Alhambra, but it would be a fortune. Selling a modern forgery for that much money was serious fraud. Ronya was right to worry about going to the pen. “That other jar must have brought in a big pile of money. I noticed you were doing okay, but you don’t look rich.”
“I pay Jorge to truck the merchandise out of here. I don’t let anybody touch the big vases but me, but I’m teaching Irene to dig clay and make pots and to do simple glazing and painting. Jimmie, too, when he was still with us. I pay them for their time. I pay Jorge and Fred to help with the drum kilns that I use for less important pieces.”
“And I thought they were burning trash in the drum behind Jorge’s house.”
“Irene helps with grinding pigments and processing clay,” Ronya continued. “Leo cuts the wood for my big kiln, but I fire the good stuff myself. The money goes fast. I learned early on that we couldn’t make enough really fine reproductions—”
Faye cocked an eyebrow. “You mean forgeries?”
“Yeah. The good stuff takes too long to make. I couldn’t keep everybody busy with it, so while I’m doing this—” she said, gesturing at her own artwork, “they’re making cartloads of tiles and nun’s bowls that we sell for cheap.”
“Do you let people think they’re old, too?”
“Sure. I know you’ve seen ads for our work. You know how some popular archaeology magazines are full of advertisements that say things like, ‘Own an oil lamp from the time of Christ!’?”
“I’ve seen them.”
“Well, now you can own a tile that comes straight from Moorish Spain.”
“By way of Alabama.”
“Yep.”
“And Jorge trucks a load of that stuff out of here every week. It never occurred to me that it was you paying him to drive his truck. How do you stand working with that bastard?”
“It’s not fun, but I need help, and Jorge needs the money. They all do. My business lets my crew make enough money to put food on the table and buy a few luxuries for themselves and their families. But that’s all. The middleman skims off a lot of the profit.”
Faye nodded. She had her own stories to tell about dealing with the black market.
Ronya had created a ninth Alhambra vase. The authentic ones graced some of the world’s great museums, and collectors would have been waiting in line when word got out that a ninth one had turned up on the black market. Even accounting for all Ronya’s business expenses, Faye guessed that the middleman was keeping ninety percent of the profit, maybe more.
“Zack’s college fund is doing well, too,” Ronya continued. “I thought it was worth the risk—until people started to die.”
“Have you ever met your customers?” Faye asked. It could be dangerous to deal with wealthy people doing illegal things. She’d learned that the hard way.
“I’ve never even met my middleman.” She turned her back on Faye, looking out the window at the backyard kiln that Faye had thought was a simple pile of bricks. “Leo takes care of sales.” Her brittle tone did not speak of marital bliss.
“How on earth did Leo find somebody who had connections with this much money?”
“It’s somebody he met while he was away at the university. He took some of my pieces to show around to people who might be able to get me a scholarship to art school. Nobody came up with any scholarship money, but one of Leo’s connections was happy to ask me to make fake antiques. He came home all lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘This is it, Ronya,’ he said. ‘We can both go to school, then we can come back here, where we belong. We’ll able to afford a nice house and nice things for our kids. And we’ll be able to afford a lot of kids.’”
Faye was doing the math. “It’s been fifteen years since Leo went away to school. I don’t think you’ve been doing this that long.”
“Fifteen years ago, I told Leo, no. I told him I wouldn’t lie and I wouldn’t steal. Even if it meant we lived here in his parents’ old house for the rest of our lives.”
“But you changed your mind.” Faye could hear Zack rattling around in his room, making piles of blocks and knocking them onto the worn wooden floor of his grandparents’ home. “I bet you started your business sometime within the past four years.”
Ronya actually cracked a bitter grin. “You got it. You’re a woman, so you understand. I would kill somebody for that child without blinking an eye. Of course I’m gonna grab the chance to make sure I’ll always be able to give him the things he needs.” The grin faded when she realized what she’d said. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t kill anybody. Truly, Faye.”
“Who did?”
“No one on my payroll, I swear. I may be able to swallow being a forger, but I couldn’t live with being an accessory to murder. Look, it’s true we’ve all been on edge since the project came in and we heard there was an archaeologist on board. The last thing we wanted was someone with knowledge of artifacts wandering around—evidence of our operation is all over the place. As you see.” She gestured to the fragment in Faye’s hand. “We were relieved when Dr. Raleigh started his dig in the last place on earth he’d find anything, and when the original archaeologist wasn’t available after all. But then we heard you were coming. We did what we could to discourage you.”
“I noticed,” said Faye. “Then the dummy in the tree was meant for me, after all.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” said Ronya. “You could have been killed. Jimmie did a stupid teenager thing on the spur of the moment—he was capable of that. He’d made that dummy for the game, but when he heard you were coming, he thought putting it to another use was an absolutely brilliant idea. I told him how wrong he’d been. After the fact.”
“At the football game.”
