Death of a Rug Lord (20 page)

“They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” she said without even looking at the sheet in front of her. “Don't you think that's odd?”

“Not especially,” I said, trying to play it cool. “Do you?”

“Trust me, they seemed suspicious to me. They asked all kinds of questions: like were there any other guests from Charleston. They were looking for two petite women, they said. So your mama must be like, really short too, huh?”

“You know, on second thought, I think I've changed my mind about staying here—”

“No, don't go! You don't squeal on me, and I won't squeal on you. I swear! And I'll be like your undercover spy. I'll call and let you know every time they leave, or enter, the building. Or even just ask about you. And if you want food brought to your room—there's a Denny's right across the street. I can run over there and get whatever you want.”

I was too tired to think straight, and she seemed so eager to play James Bond that I let my guard down. “Fine,” I said.

An alert Abby would have seen the figure lurking in the hallway to the left. As I passed, on my way to the front door, it ducked behind the ice machine.

I
found Mama fast asleep, slumped low in the front seat. Her lips were parted slightly and she didn't stir until I touched her shoulder.

“B sixteen,” she blurted. “Bingo!”

I gave her a moment to enjoy her dreamland win and then helped her upstairs. By then she was fully awake and ravenous. Fortunately, Jennifer was true to her word, and within a reasonable length of time delivered two Grand Slams and a pair of diet colas right to the door. Along with the food came an espionage update: the weirdoes from Charleston had inquired again about their vertically challenged friends.

Jennifer called three more times before I told her we were turning in for the night. The news, by the way, was always the same: the couple was anxious for our arrival.

Thank goodness Mama is an early riser, and by five-thirty the next morning we were ready to hit the road. I'd arranged it with Jennifer so that our room account was already settled; all Mama and I had to do was walk out the side door. By six we were seated in the
IHOP opposite the PetSmart, still working on putting a game plan in place. I was already on my second cup of coffee.

“Well, we screwed up,” I said. “Today is Sunday, so the library doesn't open until this afternoon, and there aren't any Tuppermans in the phone book. What do we do now?”

“Abby, I hate it when you use that word. It is so—so uncouth.”

“Sorry, Mama. From now I'll say ‘that man.'”

Mama sighed and patted her pearls. They were a gift from Daddy shortly before he died. Real pearls, either cultured or natural, are essentially an irritant coated with layers of nacre, a substance secreted by the oyster. Generally, the more layers of nacre, the larger and more expensive the pearl. That Mama's pearls suffer so much abuse at her hands yet retain so much of their nacre is truly a mystery worthy of the Discovery Channel.

“You
know
what I mean, dear. Just for that, I think we should go to church.”

“The Episcopal Church of Our Savior?”

“What other church is there?”

“And how would we explain our presence in Rock Hill, not to mention yesterday's clothes, our unbrushed teeth, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera?”

“Why Abby, you sound like Yul Brynner in the
King and I
. Anyway, dear, are you saying that we should go home as soon as we're done eating? By the way, where
are
my pecan pancakes? I'm starving.”

Of course I didn't have any answers. Rock Hill, South Carolina, where I grew up, is often considered
part of the Greater Charlotte Metropolitan Area, but culturally it is light-years away. Scratch a Charlottean and you have a fifty-fifty chance of hearing a New Yorker yelp in pain. Scratch a Rock Hillian and he or she will apologize to
you
for having gotten too close to your fingernails. Rock Hill, being a much smaller city, also observes Sunday Blue Laws, which meant that we would be unable to obtain a clean change of clothes until after one-thirty p.m.

“No, I'm
not
throwing in the towel.” My mind wandered for a few seconds to towels and linens and the fact that Rock Hill was smack dab in what used to be cotton producing country. Later, as the technology developed, textile mills became a major source of employment for the Piedmont, including Charlotte. But those halcyon days were gone, the millwork having long since been outsourced to China and other Asian countries.

Although the jobs are gone, many of the brick fortresslike buildings were left standing. Some have been turned into warehouses or outlet stores, while others were left empty. During the ensuing years, the abandoned mills have become overgrown by the kudzu vine, which is a native of China and Japan. Now these former mills rise ghostlike from the imported jungle in the Carolina mists that precede and follow the rising and setting of the sun, and are every bit as intriguing as Angkor Wat.

Who owned these vine-covered castles, and why hadn't they been replaced with tract housing or golf courses? Not that I wanted them to fall prey to developers! No siree, Bob! I was thinking how lovely it
would be to turn one of them into an antiques emporium.

Some of those mills had great bones, as they say in the trade. Many of them still have usable parts; when my friends James and Gretchen Werrell refurbished a house, they were able to purchase old-growth maple flooring that had once been used in a mill.

At any rate, there are a great collection of dealers up at Metrolina, just north of Charlotte, and it opens its doors once a month. Then in the spring and fall it hosts antiques extravaganzas that draw vendors from all over the Southeast. But why not have a similar operation in South Carolina, built, of course, in an abandoned mill? You could bet that my shop, the Den of Antiquity, would be well-represented.

As for the kudzu, it can be eaten as a vegetable—by both humans and livestock—turned into soaps, jellies, woven into baskets, and most appropriately, processed into a powder that is used as a thickening agent for cooking and is very popular in Asian food markets. Perhaps by figuring out a way to keep overhead down, I could send kudzu back to China and Japan from whence it came.

“Mama, what mills do you remember around here that were not torn down after the great exodus of the textile industry?”

“Well, there's that one over by the
Rock Hill Herald
that's now a linen store.”

“Pledges? I heard it's been converted into high-end condos.”

Mama frowned; she hates it when I know something about our old stomping grounds that she doesn't.
“Then there's the old Putrid Mill out on Dead Man's Lane.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, dear. It's too disgusting to repeat in a place of fine dining.”

“This is the IHOP for goodness sake, and except for that priest sitting by his lonesome, we're the only ones here.”

“All right, calm down. But you
do
know where Dead Man's Lane is, don't you, dear?”

“No, and I was born and raised here.”

“It's just a dirt road south of town, out in the country a good ways. Just stay on Cherry Road until it becomes McConnells Highway, follow it all the way to the town of McConnells, where the road changes names and becomes West McConnells Highway. Keep going straight. Then it will be nothing but country, so keep a sharp lookout for an immense oak on the left—Lordy, I don't know if it even exists anymore. Anyway, I have no idea how Dead Man's Lane got its name, but when I was growing up we called it the Putrid Mill because—why shoot a monkey, Abby, I can't recall that either.”

“It's okay, Mama.”

“Easy for you to say; it's not your brain that's turning into fish flakes. Now there was something else—oh yes, the Putrid Mill was one of the very first to close, if not the first. I remember because Uncle Benny used to work there until he was called up to serve in the Pacific. One day Aunt Connie came over, her eyes all red, and said that instead of hiring women workers to replace the men, like the mill had promised, they
were going to shut down instead. Back then a lot of factories that made nonessential products—for the war effort, I mean—were converting to munitions or, in some cases, melting down their machinery and shipping the metal off to where it was needed.

“But the company that owned the Putrid Mill was more interested in profit than in patriotism, and after letting its employees go, hunkered down to wait out the war in a kudzu patch off of a dirt road. After the war, however, the men of Rock Hill remembered the broken promises made to their wives and looked for other jobs. Can you blame them, Abby?”

“No, ma'am.”

“You know, of course, that your Uncle Benny never came back from Iwo Jima, but if he had, he wouldn't have wanted his old job back either. So anyway, one day, when you were just a baby, your daddy and I and Aunt Connie were taking a Sunday ride in the country and we found ourselves driving past Dead Man's Lane. It was your Aunt Connie's idea, otherwise I would never have agreed to it; you do understand, don't you?”

“No, Mama, as I have no earthly idea what it is that you agreed to do.”

“To drive down the lane, of course, and take a look around the old mill. By then the lane was rutted and somewhat overgrown because nobody used it except for spooning couples.” She paused to savor the shock on my face, and when none was forthcoming, she sighed heavily. “You do know what to spoon means, don't you, Abby?”

“I'm not rightly sure, ma'am,” I said in my best
Gomer Pyle voice (which is pretty darn awful), “but is that why some children are born with silver spoons in their mouths?”

“Abby, be serious! Now where was I? Oh yes, well, the surprising thing was that the mill itself was untouched: no broken windows, no forced doors. Your daddy said he thought it was because the people were afraid of the owners and didn't want trouble. That made your Aunt Connie so mad she said she could spit cotton and we all laughed. After that we peeked in some of the windows, and do you know what? All the looms and such were still in there. I swan, Abby, anyone who knew how to operate that machinery could have waltzed right in there and woven chenille spreads—that's what the Putrid Mill was particularly famous for—well, not famous, but you know what I mean. That, and beach towels.”

“Holy guacamole!” I shouted as the light of a thousand days dawned in my pea size brain. I jumped to my feet, knocking over my chair, just as Tamika, our waitress, arrived with a tray loaded down with our breakfast.

“Ab—” was all Mama could say as she watched her much anticipated pecan pancakes sail over her head and into the booth behind her. My poached eggs didn't even get airborne, and had to be scraped from the floor.

“I am so sorry, ladies,” Tamika said.

Do you see what I mean about Rock Hillians? I'd tipped the chair directly into her path, for crying out loud. Fifty percent of Charlotteans would be excavating me a new anus, not apologizing to me.

I dug two twenty dollar bills from my purse and slapped them into our waitress's hand. “This should more than cover our meal, and you keep the change. Have a great day, Tamika.” Next I grabbed Mama's arm and all but dragged her out the front door.

“But I didn't get my pecan cakes,” she wailed.

“We'll get something to go from Bojangles,” I said.

To be sure, I wasn't about to take a left turn on Dead Man's Lane on an empty stomach. My hunch was that together Mama and I had just solved the mystery of Charleston's counterfeit carpets. While I intended to confirm that hunch, I had no intention of getting caught. Yet on the outside chance that a dead woman showed up anywhere near Dead Man's Lane, I wanted her to have met her Maker on a full stomach, and for a Southern gal like me, a sausage biscuit would do just fine.

 

I explained my eureka moment to Mama and then briefed her on her assignment. Upon arriving at Dead Man's Lane—assuming we could find it—she was to wait in the car, on the driver's side, while I walked surreptitiously down the road. With any luck, she would be shaded by the immense water oak that she remembered. We would both have our cell phones on. Once I was able to get confirmation that the old mill was used clandestinely to manufacture fake antique rugs, I would immediately turn around and head back for the car. In the meantime, should another vehicle turn down Dead Man's Lane, Mama was to call and warn me of its approach. If questioned by anyone, she was to say that she'd gotten drowsy and pulled over for a nap.
With a few notable exceptions, most folks are still very kind to the elderly.

Unfortunately the word “unfortunately” must be used far too often to describe my life. We drove up and down West McConnells Highway, almost as far as the Cherokee and Union County lines, without spotting a massive water oak that stood alone by the highway. Although we came across a number of small lanes on the left-hand side of the road that otherwise appeared promising, they either bore numbers or had no signs at all.

On our sixth pass, about an hour and a half later, Mama stomped at the floor with her little taupe pump. “Stop, Abby, stop!”

“Why here? That's a new subdivision. I can see only one tree, and its trunk isn't any thicker than Paris Hilton's legs.”

“Stop anyway!”

I pulled into the nearest driveway. Several dozen houses had recently been erected along a cluster of treeless streets, yet each street was named after a tree. I could see two home styles: ugly and uglier. I shuddered thinking of the children who would be reared in this place, which was neither a town nor true country.

“Look at that street to your right,” Mama said. “It's named ‘Water Oak.' And look at the lawn on this side, right up by the corner. You see that depression in the grass?”

“The one with the standing water? Otherwise known as Mosquitoville, South Carolina?”

“That's where the water oak was. When they dug
out the stump, they didn't fill it back in properly. I bet you anything that Putrid Mill is down this road.”

“But it's paved, Mama.”

“I think that's called progress, dear. Believe me, bumping down Dead Man's Lane in your granddaddy's old Ford was no picnic for the kidneys.”

“I remember that rust bucket! He kept it out behind the garage, right?”

“Speak kindly of that car, Abigail, seeing as how that's where you got your start.”

If the windows hadn't been closed, it would have taken me much longer to catch my breath. “I was conceived in a car?”

“And right here on Dead Man's Lane too. I know, that's an awful place to begin a life, but it wasn't like we planned it—in fact, your daddy swore up and down that it wouldn't happen, just so long as I stood on my head for half an hour afterward while saying the Lord's Prayer over and over again.”

“Mama, I can't
believe
we're having this conversation.” I looked up to the sunny heavens beyond the shoddy roofs of the prefabricated houses. “Obviously that was not a reliable method of birth control.”