actually inherit a spot in a factory or a sales territory?”
“Absolutely. That’s why Jacob Collier was so furious with Ch—”
She broke off as she suddenly remembered that Lynnette was sitting quietly in the backseat.
“So now you go on around the hospital and just keep straight till we cross over the railroad tracks, then take the first left.”
I did as she said and fetched up in front of a charming black iron gate that led to the String and Splinter Club’s heavy oak door. The facade was brick and boxwood and frosted glass for privacy.
“Very British-looking from out here,” I observed.
“Inside’s full of Sheraton and Queen Anne reproductions. Queen Victoria would feel right at home.”
She might poke fun at it, but I could hear the affection in her voice.
“Dad and Mother love it and the chef is wonderful. Maybe you could join us for lunch one day next week?”
Spoken with the graciousness of a hereditary princess.
“I’ll have to look at my schedule,” I said.
Drew thanked me for the lift, told me how to get to the Discovery Center, and reached back to squeeze Lynnette’s knee. “ ’Bye, punkin. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
“Okay.”
11
« ^ » “
The Furniture Discovery Center is back of the Convention Bureau’s tourist information office and only a short walk from many showrooms, but most Market people must have been heeding the
“Do you come here much?” I asked Lynnette as we crossed the graveled lot
“Uh-huh.” She headed directly for the correct door and her sand-colored braid swung jauntily across her narrow back.
I paid our admission fee to the attractive brown-haired woman at the desk and followed Lynnette, who knew exactly what she wanted to see and it wasn’t how tree logs get turned into Queen Anne armoires, which was the main focus of the museum.
“First come see the model bedrooms,” she said, leading me off to the left, past the gift shop and into a small room devoted to dioramas of fifteen famous bedrooms through the ages. The sleep furniture, as I was learning to call it, ranged from King Tut’s bull-shaped gold bed and Queen Elizabeth the First’s massive four-poster to the moon bed of Kublai Khan and Queen Liliuokalani’s ebony bed with its horsehair mattress, each reproduced in delicious detail on a one-inch to one-foot scale and commissioned, I was amused to discover, by the Serta Mattress Company.
From there, Lynnette took me up a short ramp, past some dollhouses, including a little house trailer furnished in Fifties decor, and into a display area that truly seemed to hold a bajillion dolls. The floor-to-ceiling shelves and cases were jammed with dolls of all sizes, all materials, all nationalities, all time periods, and all collected by one Angela Peterson.
Lynnette showed me her favorites; then, while she wandered from case to case discovering new faces, I went back to the entrance to read about the woman who had built the collection. The placard was chatty and informative and told me that Mrs. Peterson had joined the military after the early death of her husband and had been stationed in Korea during that war. Later she was in Turkey for several years and used it as a jumping-off place to travel and collect. By the time she settled down in High Point, she had visited forty-four different countries and had brought back dolls from every one of them—some sixteen hundred dolls in all.
I spent more time on the placard than I normally would because two equally chatty women with Market badges were standing in the gift shop a few feet away and my ears pricked up as soon as I heard one of them say, “—just surprised nobody killed him before this.”
“Like Tracy Collier?”
“Yeah. The way he was sleeping with her, getting kickbacks from her father and jerking her grandfather around by the nose—”
“Poor old Jacob.” The younger woman’s voice held youthful pity.
“Humph,” said her friend. “ ‘Poor old Jacob’ is so past it he couldn’t sell ice cubes in Hell if it wasn’t part of the golden egg. I heard that the real reason Chan converted them to house accounts was because he was so ticked at Jacob’s heavy dating.”
Golden egg? Heavy dates?
They moved on over to the cutaway upholstered couch on the main floor of the museum and I drifted after them, pretending to read the explanatory cards about eight-way hand-tied cone coils, kiln-dried wood frames, and flow-matched custom upholstery as I strained my ears to hear more about Chan Nolan and the Collier family. The news of his death must be all over the Market and I wondered if the woman’s choice of words was accidental or if it were already known that someone really had killed him.
Unfortunately, I had come in on the tail end of their gossip about Chan. A third buyer joined them burbling about “Alexander Julian’s color seminar” and how Vanna White, there to promote a mattress line, had planted a lipsticked kiss on a fabric mogul’s polished bald dome at lunch today, which, for some reason, made the first two
