“I know she worked at your design studio,” I told Pell, “but where did she live?”
“Furnished apartments all over the area. I don’t think she ever cared about stuff beyond her cars, a few clothes and maybe jewelry. She kept most of her books and personal papers down at the studio. Said she didn’t trust nosy landladies with no lives of their own not to come snooping.”
He looked up her last address and the three of us drove over to Jerilyn Street and talked to the owner of a furnished garage apartment, a woman in her twenties who couldn’t have had a spare moment to snoop. Not with three children under the age of four and, from the looks of her swollen belly, another due any minute.
“The police were here yesterday asking about her,” said young Mrs. Eakes, balancing a baby on one hip and using the other hip to keep a toddler corralled on the porch. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. She wasn’t well, poor thing, and her daddy sent somebody up here to bring her home. It was right before Stephanie Leigh was born—’bout a year and a half ago? Anyhow, I’ve not seen or heard a word from her since I shipped her things down to Athens, Georgia, like her daddy asked me to.”
The efficiency apartment was now rented to a college student who was waxing his car in the driveway. “Now that you mention it, there was an old lady came by right after winter break. Said she used to live here, wanted to see if any of her stuff was still here. Seemed harmless enough, so I let her look.”
“Was there anything?” I asked, resisting the urge to buff a spot he’d missed.
“Just a little cushion.” He measured a twelve-inch square with his hands. “Black velvet with gold tassels in each corner. Wasn’t anything I used and Frances—Mrs. Eakes—wasn’t here to ask, so I let her take it.”
Underwood had told me that Savannah still had work space at Mulholland and that he was going to put the building under surveillance. I was on the middle seat behind Pell and Dixie as he finished circling the block and again turned his blue van off Main Street onto Mulholland. I didn’t see a soul that looked like a police officer.
Traffic was thick and parking spaces around the design studio were at a premium. While Pell maneuvered into the employees’ lot, Dixie and I craned our necks trying to spot a car with someone sitting motionless. On television, the surveillance people are always digging up the streets, stringing telephone wires or staked out in a van with dark windows.
Not here.
No workmen, no smoked windows, and all the cars looked empty.
“Maybe they’re watching from inside one of the surrounding buildings.”
“Look around you, Deborah,” Dixie said dryly. “Do you see any windows overlooking this entrance?”
She had a point. I could see a corner of GHFM, but no windows broke its exterior walls. The same was true of smaller showroom buildings that backed onto this block. Glitter and shine might fill those endless interiors, yet none of it came from natural sunlight.
Pell parked in his assigned slot in front of an inconspicuous rear door and I realized that I must have passed the Mulholland Design Studio a half-dozen times this weekend without noticing it.
Not that they were trying to keep their location secret. The name was carved on a low stone slab next to Mulholland Street, and the stone slab sat amid a narrow strip of evergreens with a thick border of bright yellow pansies running around the whole thing. But the block-square building itself could have been a tobacco warehouse for all the care that had been taken with its design: four windowless cement walls painted mud brown and a pitched roof sheeted in what looked like ordinary barn tin.
Hard to believe that ads for some of the glossiest magazines in the world were shot right here in this building.
Or to realize that a home furnishings revolution had started here when a brilliant young designer made eclecticism a household word.
“Thirty years ago, furniture was still being sold in rigidly matched suites,” Pell told me. “Your mother wore matched cardigan sets, right?”
I nodded as he expected me to.
“So did mine. So did Dix’s. Handbags coordinated with her shoes, right?”
Again I nodded dutifully.
“Same with furniture. Chairs matched tables that matched sideboards which matched china closets. Beds, dressers, and bedside tables—all part of a perfect matched set. If there was a candlestick lamp on one end table, it was balanced by an identical candlestick lamp on the opposite end table. If your couch was upholstered in striped satin, so were the side chairs, and chances are that your satin drapes would be a solid version of the dominant color as well.”
“Savannah changed all that?”
Pell slid back my door and gave me his hand as I stepped down from the van. “Savannah changed all that. Put the word ‘eclectic’ on everyone’s lips. It was before my time, of course, when Mulholland Studio was only a quarter of the size it is now. I got here ten years later but everyone was still talking about the way she turned things upside down. She was a Sixties Happening right here in High Point. She bought her clothes at a thrift shop, did what she wanted, said what she wanted and made everyone want that look, that style. She used it to talk her way into old Mack Keehbler’s office.”
“Keehbler Couches?” I asked, remembering that his was one of the power names Dixie had linked with Savannah’s.
“And case goods,” said Dixie, who must have known the story by heart.
Pell unlocked the studio door and we walked into another of those drab concrete corridors so at odds with the glitz and glamour of the industry when on display.
“So Keehbler sent over two suites,” said Pell. “A bedroom and a living room, and she mixed them like two decks of playing cards. A bedside table became an end table for the couch. She hung the dresser mirror over the sideboard, put the coffee table at the foot of the bed for a dressing bench, and instead of matching lamps, silver cigarette boxes and neat little bouquets of flowers, she rummaged in the junk shops for off-the-wall accessories: funky lamps, painted boxes, antique toys, a wall display of old hand mirrors.”
“And Keehbler loved the ad she created for him?” I asked.
“Hated it!” Pell said cheerfully. “But Victoria Cumbee of Ashenhurst saw a copy in his wastebasket and hired her on the spot to style their new fall catalog. The rest is history.”
He opened a door at the end of the corridor and I caught my breath in astonishment.
Outside, the place had looked like a warehouse; inside, the resemblance was even stronger. Row after long row of eight-foot-tall gray steel shelves met our eyes and each orderly shelf was full of stuff.
At the door where we’d entered, the subject was candlesticks. I hadn’t considered there could be that many different kinds of candlesticks in the world: eight-branched silver candelabras, tall silver, short silver, simple and severe, heavy and ornate, delicate for slender tapers, chunky for thicker candles. And after all the changes had been rung in silver, you had the same thing again in brass, pewter, wood, cast iron, tin, glass of all colors, porcelain, ceramics and crystal. Shelf after shelf after shelf.
There were shelves of cats and dogs of all sizes and all materials; twenty feet of antique painted iron, mechanical banks and toys; a section devoted to teddy bears of graduated sizes and all periods; another to boxes made of wood, paper, leather, metal, glass, marble or plastic, from matchboxes to painted breadboxes; yet another held bowls, from simple Revere silver to reproductions of Chinese porcelain. I saw old-fashioned wind-up clocks, Seth Thomas grandmother clocks, plastic dogs with clock faces for bellies, and even a few hourglasses. Taller shelves held the studio’s extensive collection of table lamps (floor lamps stood in serried ranks along a far wall). Baskets, picture frames, vases, fire screens, books bound in colorful leathers, switehplates, bottles, silk flowers—I was already dizzy from looking at it all when Dixie touched my arm and said, “Look up.”