The Color of Money

Chapter Seven

When he came home late one Friday in March, Arabella was gone and the place felt empty. Annoyed, he made a Manhattan in the kitchen and then walked into the living room. Something was wrong there too; it took him a minute to realize that the metal sculpture of the woman and dog, bought on that goddamned trip to Connors, was gone. It had sat beside Arabella’s green Korean chest since November. He had become fond of it, had bought a bottle of chrome bumper cleaner and shined it up. Originally, even five hundred seemed too much for the thing, but he had come to be proud of owning it. He looked now in the other rooms of the apartment, but it wasn’t there.

He was making his second drink when he heard Arabella come in and hang her coat in the hall closet. “Where in hell’s my statue?” he shouted.

“Take it easy.” She came into the kitchen. “Fix me one of those and I’ll tell you.” Her face was flushed and her eyes bright.

He added more whiskey and vermouth to the pitcher and poured two drinks. “Let’s hear it.”

“I sold her.”

“What the hell? That was my statue.”

“It was a gift for me.”

“Maybe. How much did you get?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Do you remember Quincy Foreman?”

Eddie thought he remembered. An English professor, built like a linebacker. “How much did he give you?”

“Eddie, there’s a lot of money in things like that.”

She was wearing a corduroy skirt with pockets. She reached into one of these and pulled out a folded-over check. She unfolded it, glanced at it to make sure and then looked at Eddie.

“Damn it,” Eddie said, “let me see the check.”

She held it out. He took it and looked. It was made out on the Central Bank for twelve hundred and fifty dollars.

“I tried for fourteen,” she said.

“My my,” Eddie said. He was holding his drink in one hand and the check in the other. He set the drink down. “If we leave early in the morning we can get there by lunchtime.”

“Get where?”

“Deeley Marcum’s junkyard.”

She was looking at him in frank surprise. “To buy another piece?”

“To buy three pieces,” Eddie said. “Four, if we can get them for twelve fifty.”

After stopping at the bank for Arabella to cash the check, Eddie drove out the Nicholasville Pike. “I’ll carry the money,” he said, and she handed the bills to him. Twelve hundreds and a fifty. He folded them over and stuffed them into his pocket, not taking his eyes from the road.

In Delfield he stopped at the A&P for a six-pack of Molson’s, then headed straight for the junkyard. It was a quarter to twelve when they pulled up.

He had decided what pieces he wanted before going to bed the night before. There were two short women that would fit in the trunk of the car and two that could go in back—one on the seat and one on the floor. Size wasn’t his only consideration; there was also weight. And he was fairly sure he knew which ones were better-looking than the others.

There was another woman with a dog, standing just where his had stood. The old man had taken his suggestion. Eddie stopped to look at it a moment, noticing that the welds were better than on the first. Then he took the beers back to Marcum’s shack.

This time Arabella tried to stay out of it while he dealt with Deeley—who, apparently, had just gotten out of bed. The old man washed his face at a dirty sink that sat next to his welding equipment, dried off with a handful of paper towels and took a beer from Eddie without thanking him. He took a long draw from the bottle, holding his head back and chugalugging, and wiped his mouth off with his forearm. He blinked at Arabella, ignoring Eddie. “I got a Heliarc coming down from Louisville,” he said.

“Terrific!” Arabella said.

“They say it’s a beauty. I’ll wait till I see it.”

Eddie said nothing, opening himself a beer and taking a drink. It was a raw February day and it seemed strange to be drinking cold beer.

Finally Deeley deigned to notice him. “How do you like that woman and dog? I mean the one you bought?”

Eddie looked at him. “The dog could be better, but it’s all right. It should have had more balls.”

Marcum raised his eyebrows slightly. “The dog was hard to do,” he said. “I’ve got more experience with women.”

“Get yourself a dog,” Eddie said, “if you’re going to do dogs.”

“A dog’s more trouble than a woman.”

“Sometimes it’s trouble just to get out of bed.”

Marcum stared at him a moment and then he began to laugh. He looked at Arabella. “Stay with this one,” he said. “He knows a thing or two.”

“I’d like to buy four more,” Eddie said.

Marcum blinked. “Four?”

“Four more of your women. I’ll show you.” He led Marcum out into the yard and pointed out the ones he wanted: the Las Vegas Model, the Statue of Liberty, Little Bo Peep, and a cartoonlike one called Olive Oyl. When they came to this one, Eddie said, “I’ll give you a thousand for all four.”

Marcum stared at him. “I can’t do that.”

“I’m going to finish my beer,” Eddie said. He had left it in the shed. He turned and began walking that way.

Marcum followed him silently, and when Eddie was drinking from the bottle he said, “Why do you want four?”

Eddie said nothing.

“Some people want to buy one of them, but when I tell what I expect to get, they get nervous. But nobody wanted four before.”

“We’re going to try selling them.”

“Shit!” Marcum said. “I thought you were up to something. I’m the one ought to be selling them to people, not you.”

Eddie shrugged. “Maybe you’re right.”

“You’re goddamn fucking correct I’m right.”

“Who would you sell them to?”

“Rich people in Louisville,” Marcum said. “Museums and galleries.”

“Is that so?”

“Original works like these don’t come cheap.” Marcum, still holding his empty beer bottle, gestured grandly toward his yardful of metal women.

“How will you get those rich people in Louisville to come here and buy?” Eddie said.

“I’ll go to them.”

“From door to door?”

“I’ll sell them to a gallery, if I sell them.”

“A gallery won’t pay you as much as I will. They’ve got to make their profit and pay their overhead. You’ll have to get a truck to take them to Louisville.”

Marcum’s face had developed a pout. “If I sell them, I won’t have anything here to show people. That’s my livelihood, charging admission.”

“One dollar,” Eddie said, looking out at the yard. “I’ve been here twice and nobody’s come in while I’ve been here.”

“They come in,” Marcum said. “Sometimes whole families at a dollar apiece. And I charge another dollar to take pictures.”

“Then you’re doing all right.”

“I’ve never touched a welfare check or a food stamp in my life.”

“That’s a good thing,” Eddie said. “A man ought to be independent if he’s got a talent.”

“In spades, Mister.”

“I appreciate how you feel,” Eddie said. He reached down into his pocket and took out the folded stack of hundred-dollar bills, most of them new, and began counting them silently. He put the fifty into his jacket pocket, set the stack of twelve hundreds on the metal-topped table beside them and put a chunk of scrap metal on top of it to keep the bills from blowing off. “This is my last offer,” Eddie said.

Deeley looked at the money and then at Eddie.

“When you get that Heliarc,” Eddie said, “you can make more women. You’ve got plenty of raw material.”

“And plenty of imagination,” Arabella said.

“What about that fifty you put in your jacket?”

“All right,” Eddie said, “it’s yours.”

“We could go into the business,” Arabella said.

“We are in the business. This car is a travelling museum.”

“I mean we could open a gallery.”

Eddie was silent for a minute while passing a truck. They were halfway back to Lexington, the sculptures in the seat behind them wrapped in the blankets and towels he had the foresight to bring along. When he got back into his own lane again, he said, “There wouldn’t be enough customers. We’ll be lucky to sell the four.”

“They’ll sell,” Arabella said. “People have more money than you think.”

“Wouldn’t we saturate the market with a dozen?”

“I’ve thought about that, Eddie. There are other artists out here in the boondocks—or craftsmen or whatever. We could have variety. I’ve worked for that magazine three years, and I know about every Deeley Marcum in the state.”

“Lexington is no art town. You have a few hundred possible customers at most. It’s like pool.”

“It’s better than pool, Eddie. There’s a lot of money in Lexington, and people come down from Louisville and Cincinnati.”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. But a part of him was beginning to believe it.

“There’s a folk-art boom just starting. You should see the ads I get from New York. They sell reproductions, Eddie, and they sell them for plenty.”

“Lexington isn’t New York.”

“There are a lot of people there who wish it was. Folk art is getting to be like croissants and pasta. There’s a whole class of Americans who want to get into the act, want to be au courant.”

“I don’t speak French.”

“But you know what I’m talking about. With what I know about the people who make things like these,” she reached back and put her hand on the head of a metal woman that protruded from a green blanket “and with your ability to drive a bargain, with what you already know about running a business…”

He thought about it a minute. He had only planned to sell the four pieces from his living room. It had been fun bargaining with Deeley, and he liked the excitement of markup—of buying a thing for three hundred dollars and selling it for twelve. It was a lot like gambling on pool when you knew you were going to win. “Could we sell these in New York? To a dealer?”

“That would be like Deeley selling them in Louisville. The thing about Lexington is low rent and low overhead.”

It was beginning to sound good, although it still seemed foolish—dealing in art when he didn’t know a goddamned thing about art. “How much money do you have?”

“Not much.”

“How much would it cost to rent a place?”

“Four hundred a month. Five, maybe.”

“How long a lease in case we fizzle?”

“I don’t know. Six months?”

“A year, at least. We’ll have to paint the walls and put ads in the paper. Then there’s insurance and taxes and all those goddamned forms from the state and city and from Washington. And collecting the sales tax.”

“You’ve been doing that kind of thing for twenty years, Eddie. You know how to handle it. I’m a good typist, and I’m good at filling out forms.”

“If I put twelve thousand into it, can you find me enough art to buy?”

“Oh boy, can I ever! We can get handmade quilts and carvings. There’s an old black druggist near Lancaster who does visionary carvings on wood panels.”

He thought awhile before he spoke. “There’s an empty store a block off Main Street. Mandel Realty has it, and I know Henry Mandel. I’ll call him.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Arabella said, staring at the road in front of them.

“It might work,” Eddie said, “it really might.”

“Holy cow!” Arabella said.

They had been passing Holiday Inn billboards, and now up ahead of them on the right he saw the green sign for the motel itself. They were about an hour out of Lexington. When they got closer he could read the words HEATED INDOOR POOL. He began to slow down. “Let’s get a room.”

“Eddie,” she said, “we’ll be home in an hour.”

“I like the way things are right now.”

He hadn’t felt like this in bed for years. They had a back room with a view of a snowy field and trees. He opened the draperies while she began taking her clothes off. It was a king-size bed. They lay on it and kissed. He found himself laughing for a while and she laughed with him. “A couple of art hustlers,” he said, and began kissing her again. Afterward, they rented disposable bathing suits at the front desk and had the pool to themselves for a half hour. She was a good swimmer—almost as good as he, and she did not worry about getting her hair wet. Then they got drinks at the bar, took them to their room. Eddie called Information in Lexington and got Henry Mandel’s number.

“It’s silly,” she said while he was putting in the call. “You can call him free in an hour.”

“Go dry your hair,” Eddie said. “I know what I’m doing.”

Henry wanted five seventy-five a month for the place, plus the cost of heating it. The lease would be eighteen months.

“Too much,” Eddie said. He had dried off and was sitting naked in a chair. “I’ll give you four fifty on a twelve-month lease renewable for twenty-four at a ten percent increase.”

“No way,” Henry said. “That’s a choice location.”

“It’s one room and it’s been empty half a year.”

“There are other people interested, Mr. Felson.”

“Then rent it to them.”

“They have problems right now. I’d like to do business with you.”

“If you paint it I’ll give you four seventy-five.”

“Paint it! For Christ’s sake, do you know what labor costs for that these days?”

“Henry,” Eddie said, “this is still a recession and you know it. If you don’t rent that place to me, it’s just going to sit there while you pay taxes on it.”

Henry was quiet for a moment. Arabella, who had been running the hair dryer, came back into the room. She was stark naked. She seated herself in the other chair and looked at Eddie.

“Eddie,” Henry said, “I can buy you a few gallons of paint, but you’ll have to do the painting.”

He took a deep breath. “I’ll come by Monday and pick up the keys. If the place is all right, we’ll sign papers in the afternoon.”

“For eighteen months?”

“Twelve, Henry. Twelve months.”

When he hung up Arabella said, “You’re amazing.”

“You look great in that outfit. Let’s stay over.”

“What for?”

“Honey,” Eddie said, “up till now we’ve just been engaged. This is our honeymoon.”

The best thing about it was the downtown location. He liked that with the same liking he had felt toward Arabella’s small apartment. It was a sizable room with a couple of closets, a countertop and a two-piece bath. There was a lot of light, with the glass front of the building and windows over a small garden in back. The garden was littered with rusted coat hangers from the dry cleaners that had occupied the place before; and it had an incongruously large brick barbecue over in the center of it, surrounded by trampled-down grass; but it might make a good place to put out some of Marcum’s steel ladies in the spring. When he suggested this to Arabella, she was excited by the idea and began picking up the coat hangers. The walls inside were grimy, and there were big pipes that would have to be painted over. The green linoleum on the floor would have to go. Bending to lift a piece of it away, Eddie could see that the floor beneath was good oak in need of sanding. You could probably have it done for two hundred, and then use polyurethane, which he could put on himself.

He made a deal with Henry to rebate a hundred fifty from the first month’s rent—for paint, brushes, rollers and a ladder, along with the polyurethane for the floor. Eddie knew where to get the supplies at a discount, and he had them assembled by mid-afternoon. He used a pay phone on the corner to call the telephone company to get a business line put in. Then he called the electric company to turn on the current.

“Maybe we ought to be locating our stock,” Arabella said.

“We have to have the place ready before we put it in.” He was feeling terrific and he knew what needed to be done. He was wearing old jeans and a worn flannel shirt. He got down with a broad putty knife and began peeling up big flakes of linoleum, throwing them into a cardboard box. “I’ll get this crap off today. I’ve already talked to a floor refinishing place and they’ll be in with sanders tomorrow morning. We’ll scout out your artists the next day, while the varnish is drying, and then see what we’ll need in the way of stands for the sculpture, and track lights, and rods to hang quilts on the walls. We’ll figure out ads for the papers and a sign for out front.”

“Eddie,” she said, “you’re a one-man band.”

“Wait’ll you hear me do ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’” The trick with the putty knife was to slide it in one smooth motion under the old linoleum. “This is going to be a first-class floor,” he said, working, pleased with himself.

Ellen Clouse ran a one-pump gas station in Estill County, an hour and a half from Lexington. There was a three-room wooden house, badly in need of paint, attached; and all three rooms were full of quilts in dizzying patterns. A sign over her front door read “QUILTS FOR SALE—GENUINE KENTUCKY CRAFTS.”

“I don’t make ’em myself,” Ellen said, “but there’s a half-dozen women do it for me. My mother quilted, but mostly I pump gas.” She was a broad, unsmiling woman in her fifties, with steel-gray hair and untied Adidas on her feet. “Some of these quilts is trash, but some are dazzlers. Look here…” She led them to one on the far wall. “This quilt is a Bible pictorial. There in the middle is the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace and that’s Abraham and Isaac in the bottom-right corner.”

“Appliquéd,” Arabella said.

“It’s the best way to do it, honey,” Ellen said. Her voice seemed surprisingly gentle for such a mannish woman. Eddie studied the quilt. It was divided into five brightly colored panels, with cloth cutouts of people and trees and a Noah’s ark and the curving flames from the furnace in the middle. The stitches that held it all together were fine and even. It was a good-looking thing once you got past the gaudiness, and it would take a lot of hours to make it. He looked at her. “How much is it?”

“That quilt was made by Betty Jo Merser over at Irvine, and she’s dead. Died last year of cancer of the Fallopian tubes. She wanted five hundred for it.”

“It’s a valuable quilt,” Arabella said.

“Let’s see some more of the best ones, Miss Clouse,” Eddie said.

She took them through the three rooms, where the walls were covered with quilts. In the third room there was a pile of them twenty or thirty deep, on an old wooden bed. There were coverlets and pillowcases too. Most of the decorations fell into one of two kinds: patriotic and religious. A few mixed the two of them; one of these had Jesus in a manger with the American flag overhead. One patriotic quilt showed crudely cut-out airplanes, with the legend REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR. It was signed, and dated in 1943.

By the third or fourth one, Eddie felt he could look at them and pick out the ones that were genuinely good. It was partly a matter of design and partly of construction. Some of them were cheap and random, but others—especially those made by the dead Betty Jo Merser—had a lot of energy to them and good, tight workmanship. But he had no idea how much money they were worth.

Just as this was beginning to bother him, there was the sound of a car horn outside and Ellen excused herself to wait on a gas customer.

When she had left, Eddie walked over to the Bible pictorial and felt its cloth. “How much could we sell this for?” he said.

“I’m not sure,” Arabella said.

“Do you know anyone in Lexington who has some of these, or some like them?”

“The woman who lays out the magazine has quilts. I don’t know where she got them.”

“And she’ll have books?”

“She must have.”

“That’s good enough. We can go see her after I varnish the floor.”

With the finish dry, the floor looked even better than he had hoped. He had bought good interior white and a heavy roller. He put out drop cloths, set up a ladder and did the ceiling. It might need touching up after the lights were put in, but he could do that easily. The ceiling was done by noon and he started the walls. Arabella bought Windex and paper towels at the corner drugstore and started on the windows.

The telephone had come and now sat on the drop cloths in the middle of the floor. During a break Eddie sat by it with coffee and a Big Mac and called a sign-painting place from the Yellow Pages. It would cost four hundred for a board sign to hang over the door, and a hundred thirty to have KENTUCKY FOLK ART GALLERY painted in gold letters on the window. He told them just to do the window. Then he got his roller and went back to the walls. Arabella did the rest of the windows and then started picking up trash in the yard. After Eddie finished the second wall his shoulder was aching; he rested it while he scrubbed up the lavatory bowl and toilet. The money would go out alarmingly for a while; but you had to be prepared to put up money when you gambled, and that didn’t bother him. He got some of Arabella’s Windex and polished up the bathroom fixtures, cleaned the mirror over the sink. He began to whistle. There would be furniture, and stands for display, and the lights and installing them. But Arabella was right. A place like this could really go. With Arabella talking to the customers, with her looks and her accent, and with her connections at the university, they might take off. Even if they didn’t it would be exciting for a while. And it beat trying to get back his lost pool game or working for Mayhew at the goddamned university recreation room.

Jane Smith-Ross had a big pictorial on the wall over her fireplace, with lambs and cows in a field. Eddie looked closely at the appliqués and at the stitching. The stitches were not as small or as neat as Betty Jo Merser’s. Maybe they could get an old photograph of Betty Jo and have it blown up and put it on the wall, with her birth and death dates. Make her into a kind of quilt celebrity. Who knew anything about such people, anyway? Looking at this one over the Smith-Ross mantelpiece, he felt a proprietary feeling about Betty Jo’s work. It was better than this.

“Can you tell me what you paid for it?” he asked.

“My husband bought it for my birthday four years ago. It’s from the nineteen thirties and I think he paid eight hundred dollars.”

“Do you know where he bought it, Jane?” Arabella asked.

“I sure do,” Jane said with a little laugh. “It’s ironic. It’s a Kentucky quilt, but Dalton bought it in Cincinnati, at Shillito’s.”

Eddie looked at it again. The figures were not as good as Betty Jo’s; the sheep were stupid-looking and there was no imagination to the cows. Betty Jo’s fiery furnace had looked hot, and each leaf of flame had character. It wasn’t as old as this one—Ellen Clous had said it was done in the fifties—but if this was worth eight hundred, Betty Jo’s was worth a thousand. At Shillito’s, anyway.

Jane Smith-Ross had two picture books on quilting to lend him; that night he studied them carefully. There was no doubt about it: Betty Jo Merser was a find. The whole problem would be marketing. He would hire someone to install the track lights and to put shelves along one wall; he wanted to start dealing with Ellen Clouse for all the Betty Jo Merser quilts she had. The fiery-furnace one would look terrific on the freshly painted white wall on the left as you came in the door. They could hang two or three of them and store the rest on shelves, like pool-table cloths. If you put Deeley Marcum’s statue of the Las Vegas Model on the floor—that newly varnished oak floor—to one side of it and a few feet out from the wall, the two of them would go together just right. Thinking about it, his heart began to beat faster.

He had no difficulty getting a carpenter and an electrician. Everybody needed work, and it was wintertime. But when he talked to the electrician about an alarm system for the windows, the man said he didn’t know anything about that. Eddie called a place from the Yellow Pages, but no one answered. He decided to worry about it later and left the man installing track lights in the ceiling while the carpenter was cutting boards for the shelves. Arabella got license applications at City Hall and began calling her friends to tell them about the shop, starting the word-of-mouth. He left the men working and went to the newspaper office to talk about advertising. He had run a few ads for his poolroom from time to time, but they had been simple cuts. He needed something for the gallery opening that would look elegant. And there was radio and TV. Enoch—or his secretary—might be able to help with that. Maybe he could get Arabella on the morning show, to talk about Kentucky folk art. And then they had to look into the other artists: they would need to stock more than metal statues and quilts.

It did not seem crazy, or even strange, for him to be doing what he was doing. Art had never meant anything to him, and he had never been in an art gallery or museum in his life. But what he was doing felt like a hustle and he liked the notion of a hustle, liked putting his mind into it. It was in the service of money, and he loved money—loved dealing with it, loved making it, using it, having a dozen or more large denomination bills, folded, deep in his pocket. So much in his life did not make sense. But money did.

“We could take the quilts on consignment and not have to put up any money,” Arabella said. They were driving toward Irvine.

“That means we don’t pay Ellen in advance?”

“Right.”

“How does she know we have a better way of selling than she does?”

“You talk her into it.”

He drove silently for a while, pushing the two-year-old Toyota pretty hard. He had been thinking of a panel truck or Microbus, with KENTUCKY FOLK ART GALLERY on the side, along with a logo of Marcum’s woman-and-dog in profile. He thought about Arabella’s idea for a moment and then said, “We’d have to give her at least half, and I want to go for broke. I want to buy a quilt for three hundred and sell it for nine. Otherwise it’s not worth our time.”

“What about poor Ellen?”

“Poor Ellen? In the first place Ellen didn’t make the quilts, and in the second she hasn’t been able to sell them at that dump with the Esso pump and the kerosene stoves. If you want to feel sorry for somebody, make it Betty Jo Merser. Ellen’s the robber baron of this enterprise, not its victim.”

“You should be teaching economics at the university instead of shooting straight pool.”

“A person learns about money shooting straight pool.”

“Eddie,” Arabella said, “you’re driving too fast.”

He said nothing but did not slow down.

“I’ll give you twenty-seven hundred for all nine.” Eddie had that much in cash and he set it on a little table with a doily on it near the fireplace.

“You’re being silly,” Ellen said. “That’s the whole lot of Betty Merser’s life’s work, and any five of them’s worth that much.”

“They’re not making you anything hanging on the walls here.”

“Let me get you folks some tea,” Ellen said. She went into the kitchen. She didn’t even look at the money.

“Eddie,” Arabella whispered, “you’re going to have to pay more or get fewer quilts.”

“We’ll see.” He had his eyes on the fiery furnace above the fireplace, with the three black-haired children tied with ropes about to be shoveled in. He could get twelve hundred for that quilt if he could find the right buyer.

When Ellen came back carrying a tray with mugs of tea on it, Eddie said, “What do you think all nine of them are worth?”

“You’re downright serious about those quilts, aren’t you?”

“I like the workmanship.” He took a cup from the tray.

Ellen nodded but said nothing. They sat with their tea for a while and then, abruptly, she stood up, smoothing out her heavy corduroy skirt. “Maybe you’d like to see what her mother did.”

Eddie looked up at her. “Her mother?”

“Betty Jo’s. She passed away before the war.”

“And she did quilts?”

“She’s the one taught Betty Jo. Leah Daphne Merser was the best quilter around.”

“Where are they?” Eddie said.

“In the bedroom.” She walked through the door to the right of the fireplace. “There’s only three.”

There was a wooden chest at the foot of the bed. Ellen opened this and took out a sheet that covered what was inside. Under this was a quilt wrapped in a clear plastic garment bag. She took it out of the chest with care, set it on the bed, eased it out of the bag and began unfolding it. As it opened up Arabella began to hold her breath.

“I’ve had these a long time,” Ellen said. “There was a dealer from New York going to buy them back when Betty Jo was alive, but I never heard from him. I wasn’t all that fond of selling. Don’t know if I am yet.”

Eddie stepped closer to look. He had spent several hours with Jane Smith-Ross’s books, looking at the detailed illustrations carefully. This quilt was the real thing. It was trapunto, with flowers and birds in appliqué, and the stitching was as delicate as that in any of the pictures. He remembered one in the book that the legend said belonged to the Museum of American Folk Art in New York; the book gave it two pages, in color, and another page to show details of the stitching. This one was better. He picked an end of it up gently; the cloth was smooth and light, and the quilting of flower petals was flawless. He looked over at Ellen. “I’d like to see the others.”

“Seven thousand dollars!” Arabella said.

“In for a dime, in for a dollar,” Eddie said. He was driving just at the limit. In back of him, wrapped individually in plastic, were the nine quilts of Betty Jo Merser and the three exquisite ones of her mother. He felt fine. He always liked raising the bet.

“If you get sprinklers in, I’ll write it. Otherwise I just can’t.”

“Sprinklers?” Eddie said. That was one thing he hadn’t thought of. “How much is that going to cost?”

“Plenty. But I can’t write you a policy without them. Not on those quilts. Not on any of these things.”

“I’ll look into it,” Eddie said, shaking his head.

“I need to take two weeks off.” Eddie was standing by the newly covered Number Four. Mayhew had just come in.

“Can’t do it,” Mayhew said.

“You ran this place without me before I came.”

Mayhew looked at him and said nothing.

Eddie wanted to hit him, but instead he lit a cigarette. Then he said, “I’ve earned it.”

“There was a lot of wear in those old cloths,” Mayhew said, not looking at him. “I didn’t ask you to put new ones on.”

Eddie looked at him. “They were worn out.”

Mayhew opened up the cash register and began counting the bills.

“I’ll see you in two weeks,” Eddie said, turning to leave. There was only one pool game going on, on Number Three. Two silent young blacks were shooting nine-ball.

“No you won’t,” Mayhew said, not looking at him.

Eddie said nothing and walked to the door.

“If you’re not back tomorrow, you’re not coming back,” Mayhew said.

Eddie walked out the door and past PacMan and Space Invaders. Outside it had begun to snow. He would have to go back sometime; his Balabushka was there.

“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I’m scared.”

“Scared?”

“It’s all been so fast. We don’t know if we’ll be able to sell these things.”

It was almost midnight; they had just come from painting the wooden stands and trying out the track lights. The lettering on the glass in front had been finished that afternoon. They would open Saturday.

“It’s going to work,” he said.

She sat heavily on the white sofa. “I hope so,” she said. She leaned her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. “Sometimes you go at it in a way that scares me. Headlong.”

He didn’t speak for a minute, looking at her tired face with the eyes still closed. “I held back all the time I was married and running the poolroom. I just sat tight and watched television a lot. It wasn’t any good.”

She opened her eyes wearily. “Maybe not.”

“It wasn’t any good at all. Martha and I didn’t do anything. We drank too much and bought things for the house and every now and then we had a fight. I went out to the poolroom every morning and brushed down the tables and put out fresh chalk and after a while I was fifty years old.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray by the chair. “There aren’t many things I can do. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to play pool again well enough to make money from it; and even if I can get the money to buy another poolroom, I don’t know if that’s what I want. It’ll just be more of the same.”

She was looking at him. “You’re nowhere near burned out. Even if this fails you’ll find things to do.”

He looked at her. “Name two.”

“Eddie,” she said, “I’m going to bed.”

After she had left the room he got out the blue-covered journal that he used for business expenses and began going over the figures: the cost of installing lights, the money in quilts and metal sculptures, the two-months’ rent deposit on the gallery, the cost of operating the car. He had about five thousand left in the bank. It was all that was left from twenty years of running the poolroom. It was less than he had made several times in his twenties from a single night of shooting straights.

He set the book on the table and lit another cigarette. On Saturday they would go to Madison County to see that druggist and his wood panels. Arabella had written the man up two years before for the magazine when Greg was running it; she had shown Eddie the article, with photographs. They were Biblical things, forceful and direct, like Betty Jo’s quilts. He went to the closet and took one of the plastic bags from a shelf, and got the quilt out. He spread it over the couch and adjusted the lamp shade so the light fell brightest on the center, where the Hebrew children were ready to be put into the fiery furnace.

He would never have found the quilts without Arabella, nor the metal sculptures that stood against the living-room wall now like an audience. There were plenty of people in Kentucky who called themselves craftsmen and folk artists, but most of them were second-rate. It was only through Arabella’s experience with the magazine, the fact that she had already gone around the state with Greg and seen dozens of the people who tried to make a living from work like this, that he was able to avoid wasting time with junk. She had provided the judgment and knowledge; he had only contributed money and nerve. Desperation, maybe. He looked at the bright applique flames under the light—red, orange and yellow, coming from the furnace door. For days the picture had been in his mind at odd times, as persistent as an advertising jingle or the desire for money. The three dark children were strapped by a red surcingle to a broad shovel, like the thing bakers used. They lay rigid, their wide cartoon eyes open in fright, their mouths little dark lines. A huge hand gripped one end of the shovel, ready to push them in. Of all the things he had looked at in the past week, this was the one that held his attention the most.

He made up his mind. He would take the quilt to the shop tomorrow, but it would not be for sale. He would keep it for himself.

He spent the afternoon installing wooden brackets and rods for hanging the quilts—three along one white wall and two along the other; it was dark outside by the time he hung Betty Jo’s Fiery Furnace in the middle of one wall. He climbed the ladder and aimed two floodlights directly at it. Against the white, the colors of the quilt were brilliant, and its five pictures, centered by the Hebrew children, were like a mystical comic strip.

He had the two smaller metal statues in the trunk of the car, which was parked outside. The Little Bo Peep was about three feet high; it was the shortest of the five pieces he had bought. He got it out of the trunk and carried it in his arms like a sleeping child. Little Bo Peep was made from bumper parts welded together, partially covered with a blue cloth pinafore; her head was two small hemispherical hubcaps fastened together and painted with a pouting face. She carried a shepherd’s crook made from a tailpipe.

He positioned her on a wooden pedestal to the right of the quilt and adjusted the track lights to spotlight her. When he came down from the ladder, he stood at the far wall and looked at them together. The effect was striking. He seated himself on an empty pedestal and began to decide which quilts he would display and which keep folded on shelves. He knew them all by now.

He did not like the wooden carvings at first, and the old black man who made them was difficult; but he had to admit a lot of work had gone into them. There was a series of eight panels called THE EMERGENCE OF AMERICA INTO THE WORLD OF MEN that must have taken years to do. The wood was dark, close-grained walnut. Each of the panels was roughly a yard square and each was carved with figures in relief in the manner of the drawings of a precocious child. The man who had done them was lean, very old, and so black that he was nearly purple. Like Marcum, he had a song and dance about museums and galleries in Louisville and Chicago; when Eddie questioned him about his claims of being an important artist, he began pulling newspapers and magazines out of an old metal cabinet in his shop behind the pharmacy. There were columns in old newspapers—several with pictures of him and of one or another of his wooden panels—but the clippings were old and yellowed. His real triumph was a two-page spread from the Sunday Courier-Journal showing several of the panels in color and a picture of the artist in a white smock at the counter of his drugstore. The caption read, “A KENTUCKY WOODCARVER INTERPRETS HISTORY.” The date on the paper was September 1961.

“The university has displayed that set,” the man said. His name was Touissant Newby and his demeanor was grave. “People arrive from Chicago and want to buy. But I don’t make my prophecies to hang in somebody’s apartment.”

Eddie nodded and said nothing. The panels were fastened to the wall and poorly lighted. He put on his glasses and started with the one on the left, studying them one at a time. The first showed a sailing ship on a bright blue ocean, with a cluster of what were probably Pilgrims lined up on deck, their wide-open eyes heavenward. Over them a dark cloud hovered with streaks of yellow lightning in deep relief. The faces of the people were childishly drawn but carved vigorously. The sea had painted whitecaps and the yellow of the lightning was paint; everything else was natural wood. The whole thing had a crazy, urgent force to it, but it made Eddie uneasy.

The next panel showed Indians bowing before a stern white man on a rocky shore. The ship was in a cove in the distance. Carved in relief into the sky were the words MAN’S MISUSE OF MAN. In the next panel a dozen Indians were shooting arrows into the Pilgrims while a Pilgrim baby looked on, its face distorted in fright. The final panel showed a conventionalized city skyline, with dark skyscrapers and the wasted bodies of children lying in the street at the foot of them, their eyes shut and their faces twisted. This one had a wooden frame carved around it; on the frame were painted the words AMERICA AS WE HAVE MADE IT. The idea was clear enough and Eddie did not exactly disagree with it. He had seen this final panel reproduced as a photograph in Arabella’s journal article. The anger was unsettling, and he wasn’t sure you could sell things this grim—not for the kind of prices they would require. Deeley Marcum’s work was so blunt as to be nearly comical, but there was nothing comical about these panels. They were like dark, spiritual graffiti. They reminded Eddie of bag ladies on the street who hated whatever they saw.

“If you’re going to sell, I suppose it’ll be only the whole set,” Eddie said.

“I didn’t say I wanted to sell,” Newby said.

Arabella said nothing; she looked from one of their faces to the other and jammed her hands into the pockets of her coat.

“If I’d made those I wouldn’t want to sell them,” Eddie said. “Maybe one like this.” He pointed to a single panel that showed a church with the devil seated—horns and trident painted red—on its front steps. “Or The Three Graces.” That had been the first one Touissant Newby showed them; it had three fat black women on their backs asleep on a brass bed with three chamber pots under it.

Newby looked at the floor. “Five hundred dollars.”

“For both.”

“Apiece.”

Eddie said nothing and walked out of the shop. It was a raw March day and there was ice on the sidewalk. A minute later Arabella came out. She was wearing a knit cap pulled down over her ears. Eddie had his scarf over his chin and his own cap pulled down.

“I don’t think we should buy anything more,” she said as she came up to him.

“I didn’t like that set at first, but I like it now.”

“He’ll want thousands for it, Eddie, and we haven’t even opened the shop yet.”

“Those titles grab you after a while.” Eddie jammed his hands deeper into his pockets. “The old son of a bitch.”

“Once we begin selling the quilts, and Deeley’s women—”

“I don’t want to wait,” Eddie said. “If we put that eight-piece set on the wall facing the quilts—and get the old man to lend us that newspaper article. Somebody’s going to want to buy it.”

“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I’m scared to risk any more money. What if the business doesn’t go and nobody wants to buy anything?”

He looked up at the dead white sky, feeling the deep chill. “I don’t want to play it safe. I’ve never won anything playing it safe.”

Arabella looked at him a moment as if she were going to say something, but she didn’t speak.

“Let’s go back inside,” Eddie said. “It’s too damned cold out here.”

He paid with a combination of a check and cash. It left him less than two thousand in the bank. Arabella had twenty-three hundred in savings and the alimony on the first of each month. That was it. He felt all right. In his twenties, playing against Fats in Chicago, he had put every penny he had on one game, doubling the bet in the face of losses. They had shot straight pool for five thousand dollars and Eddie had never played better in his life, amazing even himself with what he could do with that much money riding on a single game—while Bert and Charlie, the cautious ones, had watched as he pocketed the balls one after another.

Now, with the eight panels of the set and three others with them in the backseat and trunk, he felt the old sense of control. Going back to Lexington it had begun to snow and the road was white with fresh powder over ice patches. Eddie drove like a dream, handling the little car effortlessly, his whole nervous system relaxed and precise, spiritually enhanced by the presence of risk.

It was almost midnight when they arrived in Lexington. Eddie drove them to the shop and they carried the panels in. He wanted to see them under the floodlights. And he was too wide awake to go to bed yet.

While Arabella made coffee with the hot plate on the countertop, he measured off the right-hand wall with his tape, marking it into eight equidistant sections, and then drilled holes with his quarter-inch drill and put in Molly bolts. Each of the panels had a heavy ring screwed to the back; he hung them in order across the wall. He climbed the ladder and re-aimed the lamps, dividing them between the two walls. Against the fresh white, the colors seemed incandescent. The Levolor blinds had been installed the day before; he went over, lowered and then tilted them, to make the window wall now white. He walked back to the center of the room; his footsteps on the bare floor were shockingly loud.

“It’s spooky in here,” she said. “I feel frightened.”

“Look at the things on the walls,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, it looks good.”

She raised her head and looked around herself. She faced Touissant Newby’s walnut panels for a long time. Then she turned to Eddie and smiled. “Yes, they do. They really do.”

Arabella went to bed as soon as they got home, but Eddie stayed up for an hour in the living room, surrounded by his quilts and wooden panels, with the row of insolent metal women—like a small, angry choir—against the wall facing him. It was three o’clock before he turned in, and even then he had difficulty getting to sleep. He kept seeing the gallery as it would be with all the stock in place. They had nothing small or cheap for sale; if they could sell only one piece a week, it would pay the rent and support them. Everything beyond that would be profit.

On Saturday morning Arabella had coffee and croissants ready to serve to as many as forty people, but no one came in. She had sent out announcements and made phone calls. Several professors had promised to drop by, but they did not. Eddie put a simple notice in the window saying “OPEN” and his ads had run in the evening paper on Thursday and Friday, but no one came in the doors. People passing looked in, and some stopped to stare for a while at the Las Vegas Model and the Olive Oyl that stood there facing out, with the REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR quilt behind them. It would take a while. If a week passed and no one came in, that would be the time to panic. He left the shop for a while in midmorning to go up Main to Alexander’s Photo and get the black-and-white blowups he had ordered to be mounted on plastic. He brought them back and fastened them to the walls with brass round-headed screws. They were big grainy pictures, copies from old photographs, and they looked properly artistic on the walls: Betty Jo Merser, unsmiling, with her gray hair in a bun; Deeley Marcum, bald and squinting, from one of his old newspaper clippings; and the double-page spread on Newby from the Courier-Journal enlarged to twice its original size. It was eleven-thirty by the time he had them all up.

At one-thirty a couple came in. He was from the university, from one of the science departments. Arabella did not know him. He and his wife looked around in that silent, respectful way of middle-class people in museums. He held his hands behind his enormous camel-hair overcoat and she kept her arms folded in front of her, placing her weight on one foot while studying the quilts and the metal sculptures and then going from one wooden plaque to the next. Both of them were self-conscious; both more interested in looking at things in the right sort of way than in the things themselves. At one particular moment when the woman was studying the middle panel of Newby’s set, she held her fingers to her chin and pursed her lips in an exaggeration of discriminating thought.

“You certainly have some interesting pieces here,” the man said. “Unusual.”

“If they weren’t so…” the woman said, “…so exaggerated.”

Eddie looked at her. He knew how Deeley Marcum felt about women and he felt that way now. “That’s folk art for you,” he said.

“I guess so…” the woman said. Then she smiled with forced brightness. “We’ll be back. Thank you so much.” The man nodded apologetically and they left.

“Deeley could make her out of bumpers,” Eddie said when they had gone.

But the couple had started something, for other people began to come in. Arabella had reheated the coffee, and she served it in plain white mugs and gave them croissants with butter on plastic plates. It was while there were six or seven strangers in the gallery that Roy and Pat Skammer came in, both in puffy down coats and heavy scarves.

“Fast Eddie,” Roy said, “your talents never cease to amaze me.”

“It’s easier than nine-ball.”

“How’s it going?” Pat said. “Have you sold anything yet?”

“Not yet.”

“The cheapest thing we have,” Arabella said, “is four hundred dollars.”

“I’ll take it,” Roy said. “What is it?”

“The quilt next to the bathroom, with the flowers.”

“We don’t have enough money to pay the heating bill,” Pat said.

Roy smiled benignly. “We can sleep under the quilt.”

“You’re being an idiot,” Pat said in exasperation. Then she looked at Eddie and smiled. “We just dropped by to look you over and wish you luck.”

It wasn’t until five-thirty that a dean from the college of education came in, studied the Marcum sculptures for several minutes and then said to Eddie, “I’d like to buy the Las Vegas Model if you’ll take a check.”

It was as simple as that. Eddie figured the sales tax, took the man’s check and helped him load the piece into the back of his Volvo across the street. The price Eddie had put on the sticker at the base of the sculpture was nine hundred fifty dollars; he had bought it from Marcum for less than four hundred. Their profit was well over five hundred dollars.

On Monday and Tuesday there were no buyers, although several people seemed interested. On Tuesday morning, a woman from Channel Three called; and at two in the afternoon, while a few customers were looking over the things, she came by with a camera crew and spent a half hour making a tape for the Monday-morning talk show. She had her cameraman pan the room and then do close-ups of the quilts and sculptures while she did a commentary into the microphone. Her manner varied from earnestness to superciliousness. She called the quilts “items of Americana” but raised her eyebrows helplessly when the camera was on her and Olive Oyl together. Then she had the camera make a quick pan of the eight wooden plaques and did an interview with Arabella. Arabella was pleasant but reserved; her British accent seemed more pronounced than usual. When the woman asked her about Marcum’s pieces, she said they were indigenous American folk art; that they were comic, satirical and original. Eddie stayed out of it, liking the way Arabella handled the woman. He did not want to be asked questions about how a pool player could become an art dealer.

Eddie had seen the kid hanging around. The day before they opened, he stood in front of the window a long time, staring at the display. Another time he stood across the street for nearly half a day. But he had never come in the shop before. A gloomy-looking young man with fiercely black hair and eyebrows, he had the pale skin and hairy forearms of a certain Appalachian type. You saw them at country gas stations, with the sleeves of their green workman’s shirts rolled to the elbow and the black hair on their arms distinct against the white skin. They drank Orange Crush and R. C. Cola.

Eddie had just come back from lunch and was parking the car when the kid came bursting out of the shop and slammed the door behind him hard enough to break the glass. Eddie watched him head down the street, turn and go from sight.

Eddie went on in and hung his coat up. Arabella was standing by the cash register, her face cloudy. He walked over and put his hand over the back of hers. “Something wrong?”

“That damned kid.”

“I saw him stomping off. What happened?”

“He wanted me to meet him for a drink when I close up.”

“He looked pretty young.” Eddie did not say anything about Greg, who had not been much older.

“That’s what I told him,” Arabella said, “but he was persistent. He said age didn’t matter to him as long as everything else was right. That’s when I told him to get lost.”

Eddie got a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “Don’t worry about it. You did the right thing.”

She reached into the pocket and took a cigarette for herself. She smoked rarely, and only when upset. “I suppose so,” she said.

The morning show on Monday gave them six minutes. Eddie timed it. The pictures of Marcum’s women looked bright and good, and when Arabella came on she was very professional, smart and relaxed. It should help a lot.

By eleven there was a good crowd of people there—at least a dozen. Several mentioned the TV show, and a few seemed interested in buying, saying they would think about it or mull it over. But nobody bought anything. By six the shop was empty, and at six-thirty Eddie and Arabella locked the door and left. He was beginning to feel worn out.

“Well,” Arabella said, “we’re merchants. Two weary merchants.”

“Let’s eat at the Japanese place,” Eddie said. “I’m not ready to go home.”

The restaurant was two blocks away; they left the car in front of the gallery and walked. After dinner they decided to go to a movie and then they walked around downtown for a while. It was eleven before they got back to the car. As they crossed the dark street to the gallery, Eddie saw something on the window; it became clearer when he got closer.

Using white spray paint, someone had covered the glass over the gallery sign and then written below it, in glossy white, KENTUCKY FUCK ART GALLERY.

“Son of a bitch,” Eddie said between his teeth. “That goddamned son of a bitch.”

“I’ll call the police,” Arabella said.

The police were no help, although the sergeant who came by a half hour afterward said he’d have his men keep an eye on the place. Eddie was able to get the paint off with a razor blade, and since the gold lettering was inside the glass, no real harm had been done.

He was an unprepossessing man in a gray tweed overcoat with a button missing. He appeared to be about sixty. When he came in he went immediately to the quilts and looked at them at great length, especially studying Betty Jo’s Fiery Furnace, which had a small not-for-sale sign on the wall below it. Leah Daphne Merser’s bird-and-flower design was next to it, and he studied that for a long time too, tilting his head this way and that. Eddie sat on the stool at the counter drinking coffee. There was no one else in the store.

Suddenly the man broke the silence. “Remarkable trapunto,” he said. “The stitching is flawless and the stuffing is tight.”

“Leah Daphne Merser,” Eddie said. “She was one of the best.”

“I believe you,” the man said. “Nineteen thirties?”

“She died during the war.”

“I see you are asking eighteen hundred dollars.”

“I know it seems like a lot,” Eddie said.

“It’s a museum piece,” the man said. “I have no problem there.”

Eddie finished his coffee and said nothing. The man began looking at the metal sculptures. After a few minutes he came over to the counter. He was carrying a checkbook. “I’ll take the trapunto quilt,” he said, “and the Statue of Unliberty. I think you were exactly right in putting them together.”

The statue was eleven hundred. Eddie had the sales tax figured in a moment and made out a receipt. He was wondering about the reliability of the check when the man spoke. “Can you deliver?”

“In Lexington?”

“We’re a few miles out. Manitoba Farm.”

Eddie kept his surprise from showing. Horses from Manitoba Farm ran in the Kentucky Derby; at least one of them had won it.

“I’m Arthur Boynton,” the man said.

“I can bring them out tomorrow morning.”

“That’s fine. I’ll be there at ten.” He handed Eddie the check.

“You should have seen it,” Eddie said, pleased. He set the car keys by the register. There was no one in the store but the two of them. “They have marble statues in the foyer and abstract paintings in the living room. There’s nothing horsey about it.”

“Just rich,” Arabella said.

Eddie looked at her. She was frowning as if in concentration. “Yes,” he said, “rich.” He felt suddenly uncomfortable. “What are you pissed about?”

“I don’t know.” She had just finished showing one of the less expensive quilts and it was laid out on the counter to display the pattern; she began folding it now. “I’m sorry if I was mean-spirited, Eddie,” she said, “but I’m beginning to feel as if I’m working for you. You make the decisions and take the responsibilities.”

He seated himself on the stand where the Statue of Unliberty had been. “You took us to Marcum and the others,” he said. “You’ve put up money.”

“It’s not the same. I was the one who was supposed to know folk art, but you chose the pieces to buy. You’ve taken over.”

He understood her problem, but he was getting annoyed. “You don’t have to be a second-class citizen.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Maybe you’re right. You caught me off balance at first. I hadn’t expected you to move so fast.”

“I was making up for lost time.” He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “Still am.”

She finished folding the quilt, carried it to where the others were kept and set it on top. Then she came back and stood by Eddie, putting her hand on his shoulder. “I could gather the articles I’ve done over the past few years, add five or six more, and I’d have a book. I’ve talked to some people at the Press, and they like the idea.”

He looked up at her and then held up a cigarette. “Sounds fine to me,” he said. “Now that we’re beginning to roll, we don’t both have to be here.”

She took the cigarette and lit it. “The trouble is, there’s no money in a university press book, and a lot of work. I have to get photographs, and do interviews. I don’t know if I’m ready for it.”

“I thought that’s what you like doing.”

She took a deep puff from her cigarette, and let it out slowly. “I’m good at it. But it’s like shooting pool is for you. I’m not sure about it anymore.”

He pictured his Balabushka, still locked in its rack at the Rec Room. “Wait a minute,” he said, suddenly angry. “It’s not that I don’t want to play those kids. I just can’t beat them.”

“You don’t really know that, Eddie.”

“I know it well enough. Babes Cooley made me look like a geriatric fool.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Geriatric? Don’t be silly. Your problem is that you aren’t committed to pool any more than you are to me.” She took a quick, angry puff from the cigarette and then stubbed it out unfinished. “You were never committed to beating Fats either, Eddie. Never.”

He stood up angrily and walked over to Betty Jo Merser’s Fiery Furnace, with its Not for Sale sign, and studied it for a moment. He liked the quilt more every time he looked at it; it helped calm him down. Then he turned to Arabella and said, “Maybe you’re right. But it’s a stand-off between you and me.”

“A stand-off?”

“If what’s between us means so much to you, why do you keep a drawerful of obituaries for Greg Welles?”

She stared at him silently for a moment. Then she said, levelly, “That’s goddamned competitive of you, Eddie.”

“I suppose it is,” he said. “I hate those newspapers.”

Arabella shrugged. “All right. It’s a stand-off. There are worse things.”

They were civil but distant at breakfast. When he said it was time to leave for the shop, she suggested he go ahead while she cleaned up the breakfast things. She would be over in an hour or so. There was nothing wrong with it, but they hadn’t done it that way before. He took the car and drove over alone.

When he got out of the car he knew immediately that something was wrong. The pieces in the window were gone, although the glass wasn’t broken. He unlocked the door and opened it. There was a heavy smell of cold, wet smoke. He flipped the light switch, coughing. Through a haze he saw, where Newby’s work had hung, the words KENTUCKY FUCK ART—this time in huge, skewed, blue letters—sprayed carefully, the letters gone over and over again until the paint dripped in tears down the empty wall. There was not a single piece of art in the room.

He knew where to look. A hole the size of a saucer had been smashed through the sliding glass door right beside the lock. All the son of a bitch had to do was reach his arm—with its goddamned black hair—through the hole and flip the lock down before sliding the door open. The room was freezing cold. The door was still wide open.

It was all out in the little garden, in the brick barbecue oven, still weakly radiating heat. A black sodden mass of burned quilts. It would be impossible to tell which was the Hebrew Children in the Fiery Furnace, which were the delicate, intricately wrought trapuntos of Leah Daphne Merser or the appliques of Betty Jo Merser. He had burned them and then, just to make sure, doused them with water from the garden hose. Amid the quilts, Deeley Marcum’s women lay in a crumpled heap, dismantled, smashed and charred. The son of a bitch must have worked all night at it.

An arm of Little Bo Peep had fallen to the ground. Eddie picked it up and poked at the mess. Underneath everything else were pieces of charred wood. The goddamned son of a bitch had used Newby’s magical carvings for kindling. For kindling.