laugh so hard that they had to head for the exit before one of the docents could ask them to leave.
I walked back toward the doll exhibit wondering about the animosity between Chan Nolan and Jacob Collier. How sexually active could a seventy-eight-year-old man be? And who was Chan Nolan to object to the grandfather’s randiness if he himself was getting it on with the man’s granddaughter?
It was, as the King of Siam once said, a puzzlement.
“
By three o’clock, Lynnette and I had exhausted the dolls. It was too early to take her back to Dixie’s but she was clearly ready to move on.
“Is there a playground nearby?” I asked as we walked out into the warm spring sunlight. An hour on the monkey bars or swings would probably ensure an early bedtime.
But Lynnette was to the industry born and had her own idea of how to spend the rest of the afternoon, an idea spurred by three huge helium balloons in the shape of a ewe and two lambs that floated against the bright blue sky, mascots for a line of designer sheets and spreads.
“Could we go to Market Square?” She tugged me toward the street, her braid swinging from side to side. Like Dorothy yearning toward Oz, she was lured by the balloons and by the cluster of mismatched buildings built into the hillside beneath them. “Please?”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering if Lynnette would be recognized. Unlikely, I decided. Fitch and Patterson was quartered in the Global Home Furnishings Market, a full three or four blocks from Market Square, and while we might pass business acquaintances who had known Chan and heard about his death, how likely was it that they’d ever met his daughter? Almost none of them knew me, so who was going to notice my Munchkin companion or give her a second glance at a trade show like this?
Besides, by the time we walked over, wandered around for an hour or so and then walked back, Lynnette would be as tired as if we’d gone to a playground, right?
Okay, okay. So I wanted to go look around as much as she did. After all, furniture was why I’d come to High Point in the first place, so why not throw a rock at both birds and check out the latest fashions?
We stopped by the car to pick up my Jacki Sotelli badge and I stuck a legal pad in my shoulder bag so I could make notes in case I found a perfect table or couch or chair.
“
“
Made sense to me.
According to Pell Austin and Dixie, who had talked about it the night before, the original Market Square building was an old chair factory that had been gutted down to its brick walls and turned into showroom space. A system of escalators and sky walks connected it to buildings on the west side of Main Street so that buyers could avoid April showers and October winds.
Through the years, the old factory seemed to have sprouted brick wings and annexes all down the hillside, and one tall building towered above the rest. The domed high rise looked like any modern office building in Raleigh or Durham, but Dixie had said that the top of the building was devoted to luxurious penthouse suites for the Market’s high rollers.
Just inside the doorway stood two lovely young women who looked like spring buttercups in huge cartwheel garden hats with yellow streamers, wide yellow hoopskirts and low-cut bodices. They were passing out green nylon tote bags imprinted with the name of a waterbed company. I didn’t quite get the link between waterbeds and sexy Southern belles, but people were grabbing for them.
After last night’s fiasco I was off tote bags, but Lynnette seized one, slid an arm through each handle and wore it like a backpack, “ ’Cause sometimes you can get a lot of neat stuff,” she told me.
Her braid bounced in and out of the tote and her snaggle-toothed smile was electric.
If the Global Home Furnishings Market—GHFM—was an upscale furniture mall, Market Square was a modern version of an Arabian Nights bazaar.
Here on the lowest level, it was hard to tell where one display ended and another began. Hand-tufted velvet cushions and gold tasseled pillows spilled like a silken fountain onto lacquered tables and boxes that edged up against stair runners and area rugs next to Tiffany lamps and porcelain jardinieres big enough for Lynnette to hide inside. Live angelfish swam in a five-foot-tall Plexiglas column that was topped by a traditional clock face with Roman numerals: the grandfather clock as aquarium?
I tried to picture Kidd’s reaction to finding something like that in my living room.
(“
There were designer picture frames of inlaid woods, whimsical kitchen stools stenciled with fruits and vegetables, coffee tables topped by real sewer grates that had been buffed to a steely sheen, decorative folding screens that reminded me of the Stanberrys’, wrought-iron coatracks and candelabras, handblown glass of an airy delicacy, twig birdhouses and pebbled fountains designed for indoor sunrooms.
Almost every display area had a brass or crystal bowl filled with peppermints, chocolate-covered peanuts or hard candies and Lynnette’s grubby little hands dipped into every bowl we passed.
“Daddy always lets me,” she said when I suggested she might have collected enough. She dropped some foil- wrapped chocolates into her tote bag. “He says it’s like Halloween. I can bring it home, I’m just not allowed to eat it all at once. Besides, Shirley Jane’s coming and I can share.”
Remembering why Shirley Jane was coming, I didn’t have the heart to stop her, especially since she was still referring to Chan in the present tense.
A display of bed linens at the end of a long gallery had drawn a small crowd and as we drew nearer, we saw the attraction. The company’s logo was a sheep and two lambs jumping over a fence, just like the balloons tethered outside. Here in a straw-filled pen were the balloons come to life—a mother sheep and two woolly lambs.
A company rep was stationed there with an instant camera and enchanted customers lined up to have their
