Relics Page 23

  Faye knew something of collectors. She was well aware of the sins they would commit to hoard treasures that by rights belonged to no one, and she knew they would happily buy stolen goods, so long as they weren’t required to do the stealing. She would shed no tears over the collectors Ronya had duped. But she was deeply concerned over the price Ronya would pay if her crimes came to light.

  “Does Miss Dovey know about your forgery business?”

  “Lord, no.”

  Faye’s lips had already begun forming the word, “Why not?” when she swallowed the question and delivered the answer herself. “Because everybody does things that they just don’t want their mama to know about.”

  “Exactly. It’s been hard to keep it from her. I’ve used a lot of Miss Dovey’s old pieces as models for my work, and I gave her a lot of lame excuses about why I was spending all that time and money on individual pieces of pottery when nobody at the flea market will pay what they’re worth. Like most mamas, Miss Dovey’s smarter than her kids give her credit for. She knows something is wrong, but nobody will tell her what. Isn’t that an awful way to spend your last years—believing that your children can’t trust you with the truth?”

  “But if Miss Dovey doesn’t know there’s a secret to be kept, it would be easy for her to say too much without realizing it. I wonder who knew that she’d been talking to Carmen.”

  They stepped onto the back doorstep of a house that had been well built, but had suffered in the twenty years since its builder died and left an old woman to care for it alone. Its window screens were torn, and green mold clung to its wooden siding. The porch floor beneath Faye’s feet was mildewed. Ronya knocked on an unpainted door that was soft with rot.

  The elderly woman responded quickly to her knock, dispelling Faye’s mental image of her as slow-moving and frail. Even with a slight dowager’s hump, Dovey Murdock was significantly taller than Faye, and she didn’t move like a woman who was approaching the end of her first century. Her golden-brown facial skin was heavily marked with age spots, and there were very few black strands left in her thin gray hair, but her alert brown eyes had not grown old.

  The old woman flung the screen door open, and Ronya caught it before its spring-loaded action banged it shut again.

  “Have you come to explain to me why my friend Carmen burned to death? And to tell me who’s responsible for young Jimmie’s death? Because, Ronya, if you haven’t, you can go away and stay gone.”

  “I don’t know the answers to your questions, ma’am, but I promise you I’ll help find them out.”

  “Well, then, come in. And bring your archaeologist friend. The one who never showed up when I invited her for biscuits and coffee.”

  Ronya hung her head like a child caught swearing in Sunday School.

  ***

  Faye and Ronya left Zack in the kitchen eating cookies and sat on the floor of Miss Dovey’s bedroom, surrounded by relics. One by one, Ronya hauled treasures from beneath the bed. Miss Dovey sat to one side in a worn easy chair, while Faye fondled the merchandise.

  “This is why we call ourselves the Sujosa,” Ronya said, stretching out her arms as if to gather every piece of pottery into her arms. “Look what we can make out of dirt.”

  “And here I thought your Spanish ancestors got the name from some Portuguese-speaking neighbors who enjoyed calling someone else ‘dirty.’”

  “I don’t know about any neighbors giving us our name. Some of our ancestors could have been Portuguese, for all I know. There were Islamic potters in Portugal, too. I think we earned the name ‘Sujosa’ ourselves.” Ronya held up an intricately molded tureen.

  “How old is this stuff?” Faye asked, holding a lustered apothecary jar up to the light.

  “That one’s worthless to anybody but us. Miss Dovey’s mother made it in the late nineteenth century.”

  Faye admired the jar’s delicate design. “I understand that certain Sujosa families like Ronya’s handed their skills down to their children. Did your mother teach you how to make pottery, Miss Dovey?”

  “My mother was sick with the consumption from the time I was a little girl, and she died young. She never had the energy to teach any of us what she knew. That’s why Ronya’s the only potter we’ve got left.”

  “Did your mother make all these things?”

  “Lord, no, child,” Miss Dovey said, and the instincts of an old teacher overrode the grief of a mother whose children have strayed from the righteous path. “Ronya, show her the oldest pieces. What’s left of them.”

  Ronya lay on her belly and reached far up under the bed. Faye noticed that no dust bunnies clung to the small bundle. Unfolding the protective rags, Ronya revealed a collection of sizeable potsherds.

  “May I?” Faye asked, reaching for the broken pots. The clay exposed along their broken edges was a much lighter buff than the potsherd she’d found the night before. “These were made from different clay. Was it dug somewhere else?”

  “They were made in Spain,” Ronya said, and her quiet pride told Faye the rest of the story. Goosebumps prickled her forearms.

  “These are the water bottles from Miss Dovey’s story?”

  “What’s left of them. Ship travel was hard on pottery in those days, and I’ve heard tell those jars went on more than one long sea journey,” Miss Dovey said.“If the old stories are to be believed, at least one of those pots was broken over the head of a ship’s captain.”

  “There used to be more,” Ronya said, and the brittleness Faye had heard in her voice earlier was back.

  “You never told me why you wanted to hide these here,” Miss Dovey said. “Why didn’t you trust Leo not to take them? Did you have a fight? Sometimes men do awful things when they’re drinking.”

  “Leo doesn’t drink, and he knew exactly what he was doing.”

  Zack came in and ran straight to Miss Dovey, climbing into her lap. She began to sing to him, rocking slowly.

  Ronya distractedly straightened the potsherds, grouping them by age and style. After a minute, she was ready to address the question of why she’d been hiding things from her husband. “Our buyer told him to bring the oldest pots we had, and Leo took him all he could find. He would’ve taken them all, but I was trying to copy these, so I had them in my shop. I don’t understand exactly why they needed old, broken pottery, but it has something to do with faking out the lab tests.”

  Faye rifled through her memory for an article she’d read about antiquities forgers in Mali. The native potters took broken pieces of ancient clay figurines, crushed the smaller pieces into powder, then mixed this powder with newly dug clay to fashion modern reproductions out of larger ancient fragments. It had proven very difficult to distinguish these fakes from authentic antiquities, even for analytical laboratories.

  Based on Faye’s understanding of thermoluminescence analysis, she believed Ronya’s pottery could be made almost completely from modern materials, as long as the laboratory collected its sample from an area made from the old potsherds. Thermoluminescence testing would give the date of the last time the clay was exposed to high heat—in the case of the first Sujosa’s Spanish potsherds, sometime in the mid-1500s, maybe earlier.

  “The buyer pulverized the sherds Leo stole from me and sent the powder back,” continued Ronya, “telling me to use it in the bases of my best pieces—the ones that cost so much that the buyer might pay to have them tested.”

  Ronya’s explanation made sense. If the base of each plate or jar or vase—the spot where the laboratory would surely take its sample to avoid diminishing the piece’s aesthetic value—contained significant amounts of clay dug in Spain and fired in late medieval times, then the most sophisticated analyst could be fooled into thinking the whole piece was old. It wouldn’t take a particularly large volume of truly old artifacts to pull it off, but the thought of grinding up potsherds like the ones she held in her hands broke her heart.

  “I’m so sorry,” Faye whispered, caressin
g the old things.

  Faye looked at the other pots on the floor around her, like a landscape in blue and white and gold. “You brought these here to keep them safe because even Leo doesn’t have balls enough to mess with Miss Dovey?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who made all the others?”

  “You’re looking at centuries of Sujosa art,” Ronya said. “I made some of these, trying to copy the older pieces. My mother and Miss Dovey’s mother made some of the others. I don’t know who made the rest, but some of them might be nearly as old as the water jars,” she said, gesturing at the sherds in Faye’s hands.

  “Wait,” Ronya said, jumping to her feet and hurrying Faye into Miss Dovey’s parlor. “You’re an archaeologist. Maybe you can tell me what this is. It’s not like any of the others.”

  On Miss Dovey’s mantel sat the gray tea set Carmen had described in her notes and, with it, something that Carmen had not had the skills to recognize. The object that she had described as a brass platter enameled in blue was something else entirely. It was a ceramic platter underpainted in blue, then adorned with a brassy gold luster.

  Faye pulled the potsherd she’d found that morning out of her pocket. The patterns were remarkably similar, but the platter was graced with a bigger splash of gold in an unmistakable shape. The flames of the sun’s fiery crown surrounded a dark disk in a perfect depiction of a total eclipse of the sun. This once-in-a-lifetime event had clearly made an impression on some long-ago potter.

  Ronya, looking at the sherd in Faye’s hand, unbuttoned a pocket near the knee of her cargo pants and pulled out a half-dozen similar ones, holding them next to the one in Faye’s hand. They matched. “Goddamn Jorge for his laziness—”

  Miss Dovey cleared her throat.

  “Excuse my language, ma’am.” Holding the eclipse platter up, Ronya said, “I was trying to copy this piece, but the new one broke in the kiln. I gave Jorge a pile of waster pots, mostly plain grayware with a couple of broken luster pieces mixed in and I told him to take them to the dump. Instead, he drove over to Jenny’s store and threw them out back. I’d gathered up everything I could find before Raleigh started digging, and Jorge and Fred did a pretty good job of hiding the pieces they found from Raleigh.”

  “Who wasn’t all that interested in finding anything anyway.”

  “He sure didn’t seem to be. That man is no archaeologist, but you sure are. You terrified me from the start.”

  “I did? Then why did you come to work for me?”

  “Well, with Jorge and Fred out of the picture, we needed some way to keep you off the track. I went home from work Wednesday with my pockets full of lustered potsherds I didn’t want you to see.”

  Faye’s ego shouted at her for letting her employee outsmart her, but there were more important things at hand. “I notice that some of these pieces are decorated in blue,” she said, walking back into the bedroom and surveying Ronya’s treasures. “Why didn’t you use blue on any of the reproductions I saw at your house?”

  “The Alhambra potters had access to blue pigment, but you can’t just go out and dig up cobalt in Alabama. Mama used to buy commercial pigment when she could afford it, because she just thought blue was pretty. That’s what you’re looking at here. And here.”

  She held up two potsherds, one in each hand.

  “I let Irene use store-bought blue pigment on the cheap stuff,” she continued, “because it sells and because we don’t try to use authentic materials in those pieces. Who’s going to spend a lot of money on laboratory testing of something they didn’t pay a hundred dollars for? Sometimes I buy blue for my own work, when I’m copying a Spanish piece made with cobalt pigments. On the good stuff, though, I only use primitive materials. I dig the clay. I make the tin glaze. I—”

  “Where do you get the tin?” Faye interrupted. Then she interrupted herself. “Wait, I remember. The confederacy had tin mines in Alabama, thanks to your great-great-great-grandmother.”

  “You can find tin here if you know where to look, and I guess she must have told the Confederates where the right spots were. And I can get silver and copper ore here, too, for the luster pigments, but I can’t get cobalt or anything else that will give me a decent blue. So I don’t use blue. My work is still authentic, though. The Spanish didn’t always use blue, even after they got cobalt pigments. Leo’s buyer can’t get that through his head. He’s always pestering for blue and gold pieces.”

  “Blue-and-gold is the classic Hispano-Moresque color scheme,” Faye said, bending down to study a cracked platter decorated with a golden ship sailing across a deep blue sea. Looking back at the eclipse platter to compare the color of the cobalt ornamentation, she was struck by the precise pattern of stars scattered around the sun’s corona. “I don’t think this one is as old as the water jars—”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not,” Ronya said, rubbing a thumb over the painted surface.

  “—but I think it may be really important. Almost as significant as the oldest pieces. It almost—”

  The old-fashioned ring of a dial phone interrupted her train of thought. Miss Dovey set Zack aside and rose to answer it.

  That would be Adam, thought Faye. The knowledge dampened her spirits in the midst of her excitement about the pottery finds. She would have to tell him about Ronya, and that would give her no pleasure at all. She was halfway to the bedroom when Miss Dovey called to her.

  “It’s for you, Faye,” she said.

  Faye took the receiver reluctantly. “Hello?”

  Adam, usually the soul of good manners, didn’t even bother with hello. “I got a preliminary lab report on the sample I collected from the second pillow for comparison.”

  “And?”

  “In both pillows, there was a wide spectrum of the chemicals produced when you burn kerosene or heat up a foam pillow, but at fairly low levels. But there were some fairly hefty spikes of chlorinated chemicals that only showed up in Carmen’s pillow—”

  “I remember,” Faye said. “You said they could have been leftover cleaning compounds.”

  “Yeah, but I talked to the lab director about that. She said the levels were too high to be cleaning residuals. She says someone must have put those chlorinated hydrocarbons on that pillow.”

  “Were they used to set the fire?”

  “They aren’t flammable enough. But they would do a good job of anesthetizing anyone who put her head on the pillow.”

  Faye felt something crawling at the base of her skull. This changed everything. A missing briefcase and mysterious chemicals on a pillow had been interesting clues. They had intrigued her mentally, without making her think too much about the reality of Carmen’s death. But this…someone had made sure Carmen was unconscious so that she couldn’t possibly survive the fire. Faye hesitated, uncertain of what to say.

  “Look, I’ve gotta go,” said Adam. “I’ve got a meeting with the sheriff. All hell is about to break loose. Stay safe. I’ll talk to you later.” With a click, the line went dead.

  “Did you tell him?” asked Ronya, standing in the doorway.

  “No,” said Faye.

  “You’ll have to, sooner or later,” said Ronya. “We should go. I need to tell the others, and you’ve got things you have to do. I’d rather not be standing there when you tell Adam.”

  Faye nodded and went to retrieve her coat. Adam wasn’t going to be happy when he found out how his high school buddies had been spending their time.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The motion of the pale sun through a cold, sodden sky told Joe that hours had gone, but he’d paid no attention to their passing. Woodcraft required a man to remain in the moment. Otherwise, he would never smell the odor of a broken limb or a crushed leaf. The slight change in color of a dirt clod that had been scuffed by a hoof or a shoe or a hurtling phone would pass unnoticed.

  The search had been easier without the distracting sounds and smells of Faye and Adam, both of whom were ver
y smart and very well-intentioned but were more or less clueless when it came to woodcraft.

  The phone eventually showed itself. He squatted down beside it and rested his elbows on his knees. It had struck three pine limbs on its way to earth, then bounced off a bare patch of ground and crash-landed on a fragrant sassafras seedling. A physicist would have said that each of the first three collisions had transferred some of its energy into a flexible branch, slowing its velocity to the point that the final collision with the soft clay soil had been survivable. Joe couldn’t have communicated such a thought in words or through mathematics, but he understood intuitively why the cell phone was still whole and functional. He wished Jimmie’s fall had ended so well.

  Joe stood and put Jimmie’s cell phone in his pocket without much looking at it. He’d seen the innards of electronic gadgets before and he knew what this one looked like on the inside. It was chock-a-block full of many-legged rectangular chips crawling across a rectangular wafer, but it felt empty to Joe, filled with nothing but pain.

  ***

  Leo Smiley wasn’t proud of what he was doing, but he was doing it. That was the problem that had confounded his life for four years now. He had found a way to get Ronya’s art into the hands of people who saw her for the genius she was and were willing to pay princely sums for her work. Except they didn’t actually know who she was. And the princely sums dwindled down to pennies before they reached rural Alabama.

  The fact that people were being deceived into believing Ronya’s work was very old nagged at him some, but not much. On any given day, he could use a different technique to rationalize that problem away. For example, he truly believed that one of her pots was just as intrinsically valuable as one that was five hundred years old. Also, he held a certain degree of contempt for people willing to part with all that money for an antique when they couldn’t actually tell the difference when somebody sent them a modern reproduction instead. On one of his more resentful days, he could work up a lather of indignation over the prejudice the Sujosa had endured through history. Every dollar Ronya’s fakes brought in could be seen as a single reparation for segregated schools, biased courts, and poll taxes, if you looked at things the right way.