CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
At ten the next morning, Fee was taking advantage of another beautiful day—two in a row—to work in the gardens across the street at the Snuggles.
“You’ve missed your friend,” she shouted at me. “She’s already moved back home. First thing this morning. As quick as she could.”
“Thanks!” I called back and started down Main Street.
The door to Lupine Design was locked when I arrived, which didn’t surprise me. The shop wasn’t open to the public yet. I knocked and got no answer, though I could feel and hear the thump of a heavy bass coming from the studio in the back. I walked around the old building and climbed up the concrete steps onto the loading dock. The thumping was louder and I could make out a melody line, though I still couldn’t guess the song or the artist.
I banged on the barn-style door. No response. I’d already turned to leave when the music suddenly stopped. The door rolled open and Zoey peered out. She smiled, happy to see me. I wasn’t sure she would be once we had talked. “Julia? Come in. You’re just in time.”
“In time for what?”
She led me into the big space. “In time for the opening of the kiln. We’d just finished loading it when Livvie persuaded me to call Phinney’s cell to check if he was okay. You know what happened after that.” She made a face.
“Will the pottery be all right?” I asked.
Zoey was already at one of the kilns, turning the handle. “It should be fine. The kiln was on a timer. Everything has been sitting here, waiting.” She swung the door open. “Every time I do this, no matter how many thousands of times, the anticipation is like Christmas morning.” She clapped her hands and started pulling pieces from the shelves of the kiln.
They were the white pieces, the ones Livvie had called the bisque, which came from the first firing. “What are they?” I asked.
“New designs, I hope. I’ve been wanting to expand my Quahog line. It’s popular with wedding couples, but they’re always looking for soup bowls in addition to cereals, and the wedding guests want serving pieces in a range of prices, for gifts.” She continued to pull pottery from the kiln. “These pieces were experiments. I’m trying out new shapes for the bowls—no lip, thin lip, wide lip. I threw the bowls on the wheel and hand built the platters.”
As Zoey took the pieces out of the kiln, she put them in three groups on a long wooden table, muttering to herself as she did. “No. No. Maybe. Ugly. Possible. Nice! Cracked. Broken. Yuck. Oh my goodness, that didn’t work.” Finally she held up a big piece, triumphant. “Gorgeous.”
The serving bowl was shaped like a giant clamshell. I could see the hinge would be a little bowl for dip and the big shell would hold chips. Even in its unglazed shape, it was beautiful.
Her reject pile was three times the size of the other two.
“It doesn’t sound like Christmas morning to me,” I said. “Unless you were a lot pickier about your gifts than I was.”
Zoey smiled. “Pottery breaks your heart. Every. Single. Time.”
“Even with all your experience?”
“Making pottery isn’t like manufacturing. You can guess and hope, but you can never be sure what you’re going to get. The pottery gods have to be with you.” She paused and held up a soup bowl from the “maybe” pile. “This would be a reject.” She handed me the bowl.
“What’s wrong with it?” For all the world, it looked fine to me.
She took it back and traced a slight irregularity on the lip. She had to do it twice before I saw it. One curve in the design wasn’t quite symmetrical with the others. “That little thing? You can barely see it.”
“I agree,” Zoey said. “I always say that’s how you can tell they’re individually made. But I’ve learned that retailers, who are going to mark these items up forty percent, want perfection. Fortunately, I have a mailing list of customers looking for seconds for our established lines.” She put the bowl back in the “maybe” pile. “The design of this piece has possibilities even if the execution is flawed.”
As she continued examining the pieces, I worked up my courage. It was time for the question I’d come to ask. “Zoey, was Karl here the night Phinney was murdered? The detectives believe he was.”
“Mrs. Bright.” Zoey spat out the name. “What an old witch that woman is. And of course Phinney poisoned her against me. They were constantly gossiping across the property line.”
“The cops know you’re lying,” I said.
“Because they believe Mrs. Bright over me.” She looked at me, jaw jutting, defiant.
“No,” I said patiently, “because you are, actually, lying. I know these guys. They can tell.” I tried again. “If Karl was here, he can give you an alibi.”
“Can he?” she demanded. “I’ve thought about this. We were upstairs in my apartment. You can’t hear anything that goes in on the basement from there. Karl was asleep. For all he knows, I got up, went down to the basement, and murdered Phinney.”
“For all you know, Karl got up while you were sleeping, went down to the cellar, and murdered Phinney.” I was talking very fast. My cheeks were flushed. “By lying to the police, you’re hiding the fact that Karl was at the scene of the crime. You could go to jail as an accomplice.”
Zoey stayed calm in the face of my anger. “Karl? Kill Phinney? That’s ridiculous. And the question no one has answered in any of these scenarios is what Phinney was doing in the basement in the middle of the night.”
A couple of answers came to me immediately. Karl lured Phinney there so he could kill him and pin it on Zoey. Or Zoey lured Phinney there in order to have Karl kill him. I was hard-pressed to come up with another explanation. “Zoey,” I said, “you need to go back to Lieutenant Binder and Sergeant Flynn and tell them the truth.”
“No. Thank you.” She spread her hands out wide. “Karl’s in the middle of a truly awful divorce. If I place him at the scene of a murder, it’s bound to get out. You know it will. And once it becomes public, it will ruin everything. It will probably triple his wife’s settlement. Also people will say I’m working with him on these town issues because we’re together. I don’t want to be known around town as Karl Kimbel’s girlfriend.”
“Then don’t be his girlfriend,” I said.
We were silent after that. I knew I couldn’t persuade her. Binder and Flynn would get Kimbel to admit he’d been there. I had faith in them.
Zoey went back to examining the pieces she’d taken from the kiln. “This is why I love pottery. I love all of it. Digging for the clay. Shaping a piece on the wheel. Working on the slab. Looking at my glazes and thinking, ‘I wonder what this combination would look like?’
“But the thing I love the absolute most, is the constant risk of failure. You can’t be a potter if you can’t handle the risk of never knowing what will come out of the kiln. You have to be prepared to fail again and again.”
Zoey looked directly at me. “When I told you about my mother, I wasn’t clear about one thing,” she said slowly. “Because it’s the most painful thing.” Her eyes were suddenly wet with tears and her voice shuddered. “I was ashamed of her. I was embarrassed by our life. I did everything to cover it up. At school, after school, with friend group after friend group, I carried on the pretense that we were like other families. I understand now I wasn’t fooling anyone, particularly the grownups, but it was desperately important to me.
“Then it blew up in spectacular fashion. The rest of the kids in my foster homes were there because of private tragedies. Everyone knew who I was and what had happened, even before my name was in the paper. I was mortified, not by my mother’s murder, which I knew wasn’t my fault, or hers, but by everyone knowing what our life together had been like. We weren’t the people I had pretended we were.
“Then I got to college and found pottery. I was a natural talent on the wheel, but I failed again and again. That’s the real life lesson of pottery. You have to learn to handle the failure. Some people walk away from clay because they can’t handle the losses. Pottery makes you a better, stronger, more resilient person.” She paused. “Everyone tried to help me when my mother was murdered. The prosecutors assigned a victim’s advocate. The foster system made sure I had a shrink. But it was pottery that healed me and allowed me to go on with my life.”
Zoey threw the cracked and broken pieces into a big trash bin. “You could do with that yourself,” she said. “Learning how to fail. And then to move on.”
“You’re talking about Chris.” I got angry. “But who are you to lecture me? You’re a grown woman with daddy issues, mixed up with a man who isn’t even free. And you’re lying for him. How long are you going to keep this up? Until they send you to prison?” The more I talked the madder I got. I was furious at her. “I am trying to help you!”
Zoey met my anger with deadly calm, though there were two bright splotches high on her cheeks. “I know you are,” she said. “That’s why I’m trying to help you.”
She came around the table and gave me a hug. I remained stiff-backed. Then she walked me to the studio door. “Such a gorgeous day,” she said when she rolled the door open. “I should be outside.” She hugged me again and pushed me out the door. “You think about what I said.”
“You think about what I said,” I responded. “Please.”