Off the Beadin' Path, Glass Bead Mystery Series, Book 3

by Janice Peacock

  “Thanks, Tessa. I appreciate it,” I said, trying to rub a little of my grime onto her newly-clean arm.

  “What are friends for?” Tessa said, pushing me down the hall toward the bathroom.

  • • •

  The tow truck driver arrived a few minutes after I finished my shower. I went out to the parking lot to meet him.

  “Here’s your car, ma’am,” the driver said, pointing to the Ladybug, hiked up on his towing rig. “Sign right here, and you’ll be all set.”

  “What do I owe you?” I asked.

  “This one’s on me. It didn’t take much to get your car out. I’ll tell you, though, you might have some damage on your front suspension. You must’ve hit a big rock or something when you parked at the side of the road. If you want, I can take it down to my garage and take a look.”

  “Is she safe to drive?”

  “I think so, but I can check. It won’t take any time at all.”

  The man handed me his card: Tony Stein, Automotive Genius. The guy had a sense of humor, at least. The address of his garage was on Main Street in Carthage. He must own the car repair shop where Tessa and I hid the night she saw Marco’s body in the hot shop.

  I watched as Tony towed the Ladybug down Main Street.

  “She’s going to be all right, you know,” Tessa said, coming up beside me.

  “I know. I’m not worried about my car, just about everything else. I can’t believe Marco’s been murdered and that someone would dump him in the river. I can’t get the image out of my head of how he looked after soaking for so long.”

  “Come on. Let’s walk down to the café and have some lunch. I bet you’re hungry. You’ll feel better if you eat,” Tessa said. In typical Italian fashion, she wanted to feed me and make me feel better. “And maybe we can have a cup of coffee.”

  When we walked into the Robin’s Nest Café, once again Carl was standing at the podium by the front door, a menu in his hand, a smile on his face, and a red apron around his waist.

  “You’re back!” he said, flashing his gleaming smile. “Are you here for more muffins?”

  “Today we’d like a sit-down lunch,” Tessa said.

  Carl guided us to a table and handed us menus. “We serve breakfast all day, so here’s that menu, as well as the one for lunch.”

  Tessa’s eyes glimmered as she reviewed the menu.

  “Chocolate chip waffles!” Tessa said.

  “Sounds delicious. Maybe some bacon on the side?”

  “Shouldn’t take any time at all. We’re past our morning rush,” Carl said.

  “And coffee. Lots of coffee,” I said. “Why don’t you join us for a cup?”

  “You know, I don’t usually join guests at their tables, but I tell you, getting to sit down is one thing I don’t get much of an opportunity to do. We’re having a quiet time right now, so what the heck!” Carl said, grabbing a chair from another table and pulling it up before remembering he still needed to get the coffee and put in the order. “Be right back.” He hustled off to grab three mugs and the coffee pot. Back at our table, he set down the cups, each filled to the brim, and finally settled into his chair.

  “You’re here for the glass class. How’s it going so far?” Carl said, looking from one of us to the other, nodding and smiling.

  “Not going well,” I said, taking a sip of coffee, which was pretty good for diner coffee. “Our teacher passed away.” I decided to leave out the part about how he had died and that I’d found the body.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Dez,” Carl said. The flat tone in his voice told me otherwise.

  “No, it’s Marco de Luca, not Dez. He was a visiting instructor from Italy.”

  “Oh, I… I… thought, well, that’s awful,” Carl said, looking out the window, lost in thought.

  “But Dez is missing. I guess you haven’t seen him, have you?”

  “No,” Carl said, finally snapping out of his daze. “Of course, the sheriff would have come and asked me about Dez if he was dead, I suppose.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Tessa said, trying, and failing, to make eye contact with Carl.

  “Dez and I have some old wounds that’ll probably never heal. You know, ladies, I’m going to leave you to enjoy yourselves,” Carl said, abruptly rising from his chair. “I’ll go check on your meals.”

  Vickie brought out our meals a few minutes later. Plates full of waffles, chocolate, and bacon were an excellent boost to our morale, as were a few cups of java. After our amazing meal, Vickie stopped by again to fill our cups.

  “You gals stay as long as you want. When you’re ready to go, tap the bell and I can ring you up,” Vickie said.

  “What now?” I asked Tessa. “Do you want to head back to my house?”

  “Doesn’t seem there’s much else to do here. Do you think your car is ready by now?”

  “Only one way to find out. We might as well walk down to the garage and see what the mechanic found. I hope whatever is wrong with my car doesn’t cost a lot. With the price of the class and only a few bead sales this month, I’m feeling a little tight right now.”

  “Do you need a refund from Abby for the class?” Tessa asked.

  “I’m doing okay.” It was hard making a living as a glass artist, but since Aunt Rita had left me a substantial sum of money after she died, along with the house I resided in, I knew I had a financial buffer, even during the months when I didn’t have a positive cash flow. I could imagine Abby and Dez’s struggle to keep their new studio afloat given the expenses of building and running such a large facility. The electric bills to keep the furnace running, alone, would break the bank. Unless they were independently wealthy, there would be no way for them to have built a state-of-the-art studio without going into debt. That, combined with what must’ve been a large financial outlay to get Marco de Luca here from Italy, it would have stretched anyone’s bank account to its limits, and might even be the cause of Dez’s drinking problem.

  Our moods had improved after the scrumptious meal, although I was certain that our cheerfulness would be short-lived, once we returned to the dismal situation at Abby and Dez’s studio.

  We rang the bell at the cash register so we could pay and waited for Vickie to appear. As we stood there, we noticed a portrait of a young girl, about ten years old, behind the counter, with dozens of get-well cards taped in a wreath around it.

  Vickie swung out of the kitchen door and chugged up to us.

  “What a beautiful girl,” Tessa said, nodding toward the portrait.

  “Is that your daughter?” I asked.

  Vickie reached up and touched the edge of the frame, inhaling deeply as she did.

  Carl ran from the kitchen and grabbed Vickie in a big hug. “It’s okay, Vickie. I’m here now.” Carl turned his wife toward the kitchen and guided her away from us.

  Tessa and I looked at each other.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “Sounds like something happened to the girl. Maybe it’s Vickie and Carl’s daughter?”

  “I wonder what happened to her.” We were going to have to find out. That was second on my list. The first thing was finding out who killed Marco de Luca.

  I dropped twenty dollars by the register and we headed out the door with more questions than we had when we entered. We crossed Main Street to Tony’s garage and found him lying on his back with only his feet sticking out from under the front of my car.

  “Excuse me, is that you, Tony?” I asked.

  “Sure is,” he said, rolling out from underneath the Ladybug. “I tightened things up on the underside of your car. Fortunately, there’s no damage. I don’t usually get to work on nice, new cars like this one. Usually it’s beat-up old pickups and such. See all this junk?” Tony pointed out the back door of the garage at the spare parts in heavy-duty plastic bins. “
I hold onto a lot of it in case I can reuse it. My customers like to save a little money when I can install a recycled part rather than buying a new one.” Tony pulled himself up to standing.

  “So, I can take her?” I asked. “What do I owe you?”

  “Do you have any beads like the one you have on? I’d like one for my sister,” Tony said. I was wearing a bead with an ocean motif that I’d started making recently.

  “Sure. I can bring you one.” Trading beads for a car repair? That was my kind of deal.

  TWELVE

  After picking up my car from Tony, we headed back to my house, since it was clear nothing else was going to happen at the studio.

  “Do you feel like a little treasure hunting?” Tessa asked as we entered my studio. She was looking at the attic stairs.

  “Treasure hunting? Do you want to look in my attic? If you do, I think you may mean spider hunting,” I said.

  “When I was cleaning up our attic to get ready for the remodel, I found some amazing things, like an old tin cup from the 1920s and a calendar of pin-up girls from the 1940s. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, maybe sell them on eBay, but it’s the hunt that’s the most fun.”

  “I’ve only been in my attic once, for about thirty seconds, and it was scary. Sorry, not today.”

  “Aren’t you curious? You don’t care what amazing, maybe even valuable, things are up there?” Tessa asked, ready to dash up the staircase. I wasn’t going to get her to settle down until I’d made at least a modest effort to explore what was lurking above our heads.

  “Okay, okay. We’ll take one brief look up there. We’re going to spend five minutes. Got it? Five.” Usually it was Tessa’s role to be the bossy one, but right now, it was my turn. I’d been through too much to want to spend the rest of the day dodging cobwebs and sorting through bits and pieces of my great-aunt’s belongings.

  “Get a flashlight! We need some light,” Tessa said. I grabbed the Maglite by the back door and headed for the stairs. Tessa was already halfway up the staircase and started passing down boxes of beads to me. Since I never used the steps, I’d turned it into one more place where I could store beads. I’d have to put them back when we were done so my studio wouldn’t turn into an obstacle course of bead boxes. Tessa turned the attic doorknob and pushed open the door. The hinges screeched as the door swung open. Inside, it was as I remembered it: cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, a chair covered in a sheet—looking ghostly—and a few small boxes crammed into corners. One of the boxes contained the tiles that I’d found in my only other foray into the attic. Some of those tiles were now installed in my studio.

  “Are you satisfied?” I asked, as I sat on the top stair next to her, peering in. “This was fun, let’s do it again sometime.” I stood up, ready to pull the door shut. Gumdrop cruised up the stairs to see what we were doing. He wasn’t the most adventurous cat, but he did have a way of causing trouble. As I closed the door, Gumdrop jumped between Tessa and me and into the attic. I grabbed for him, but he slipped through my hands and scampered off into the darkness. His paws left a little trail of cat footprints in the dust on the attic’s floorboards as he scurried away to the far side of the attic.

  “Gumdrop! You come back this instant!” My cat did not understand English, but he did understand when someone was yelling at him. I adjusted my tone. “Gummie, here kitty-kitty-kitty.” I swept the flashlight across the attic. His eyes flashed bright green as the light passed over them. He sat against the far wall, looking as gray as everything around him. All except for his vibrant eyes, which right now were staring at me mischievously. If I could have read his mind, he’d have been saying, “I bet you can’t catch me.”

  I took a tentative step into the attic. Dust swirled around my ankles as I tiptoed toward my cat. As I passed the sheet-covered chair, I spotted a trunk I hadn’t seen from the attic door.

  “There’s a trunk up here. I’m going to push it out the door. Be careful it doesn’t squash you!” I hollered, as I shoved the wooden box out of the attic’s opening.

  As the trunk disappeared from view, there was a grunt on the other side of it. It had smashed Tessa a little more than I had intended. I reached Gumdrop and lunged toward him. He jumped through my outstretched arms and made a break for it.

  “Gumdrop!” Tessa shouted as he ran over her lap and down the stairs. “Are you okay in there?”

  “Yes. I’m on my way out. This is the last time I’m coming up here!” I turned slowly and headed toward the door, keeping my head low to avoid the spider webs, then inched my way back out. Tessa had dragged the trunk onto the top step so I could make my way out. I scrambled over the top of the trunk onto the steps below, a cloud of dust following me.

  “Close the attic door before more dust escapes,” I told Tessa. “Let’s get this trunk downstairs.”

  With Tessa pushing, me pulling, and the trunk thunk-thunk-thunking down the stairs, we managed to get it to my studio floor. We sat next to the trunk admiring our newly-found treasure. I flipped the clips on its side and strained to push the lid open. The hinges, likely unopened for a decade or more, finally gave way. Inside were two colorful handmade quilts.

  “They’re beautiful. Do you think your great-aunt made them?” Tessa asked, running her hands over the fabric. She pulled out one of the quilts from the trunk and unfolded it. It had an intricate diamond pattern with tiny squares alternating in dark and light calico prints in pinks and greens. Safety pinned to the quilt was a note that simply said For Connie. While Tessa admired that quilt, I pulled the other one from the trunk. The design was similar to the first, but instead was made with tones of greens and blues. The note attached to it said For Andy. These were quilts my great-aunt had made for my brother and sister. I recalled Great-Aunt Rita’s will listed two quilts that were for my brother and sister, in addition to my inheritance of the house. I’d never found the quilts and had wondered what had become of them. Had I realized they were in the attic, my siblings would have received their bequests three years ago. I’d make sure they got them now.

  I found a small velvet sack under the quilts. While the quilts were in perfect condition, the bag at the bottom of the trunk looked older and much more fragile. I tugged open its drawstrings and gently pulled out the object within. It was a little ivory whale sculpture, no bigger than a deck of cards. It was amazingly intricate, and I wondered where it had come from and what its significance was.

  “Do you think it’s real ivory?” Tessa asked.

  “I don’t know, but it’s got to be old. Maybe it’s carved from a whale’s tooth,” I said, rubbing the side of the piece to see if there was an inscription. Gumdrop, who had been cleaning the dust off his long gray fur, sauntered over to see what we were up to.

  Val burst in the front door.

  “Hellooooo! Are you gals home?” Val called out from the foyer. “Come out, come out, where ever you are!”

  “Let’s keep this a secret for a while until we figure out what we’ve got here,” I said. We hastily put everything back in the trunk, closed the lid, and pushed it under one of the worktables.

  “We’re back here in the studio,” Tessa shouted to Val, then to me added, “we should act busy, so we don’t look like we’re hiding something.”

  I grabbed a metal cookie tin I’d been storing my most recent bead creations in and popped off the lid. Nestled in cotton balls inside was a necklace made with six round glass beads covered in tiny shell and coral designs. I’d strung them together with pink and white pearls and finished the piece with a seahorse-shaped clasp.

  The trip-trapping of Val’s high heels grew louder and louder as she walked through the house toward the studio.

  “Jacqueline Renee O’Connell, you have outdone yourself!” Tessa exclaimed.

  “Please don’t call me by all my names, and especially not Jacqueline. You sound like my mother when she was angry with me.”

/>   “She did like to yell all of your names at you, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, she did,” I said, picking up the necklace and running my fingers across the strands. “She still does.”

  “Hello, my little honeybunches! What are you doing back here?” said Val, flouncing through my studio door.

  “Oh, us? Nothing,” I lied.

  “Nothing,” Tessa repeated.

  “Oh, good. I wouldn’t want to hear that you two were digging up trouble!” Val said. She didn’t know the half of it.

  “What about you, has your mystery man come and gone? Are you back to normal now that you’ve finished making Tessa’s delicious birthday cake?” I used the word normal in the broadest sense of the word. Val’s version of normal was not that normal.

  “Well, poo. I’m actually not normal at all. Rudy told me a couple of weeks ago we could go to the Burien UFO Festival. That’s why I was trying out my stormtrooper boots. Now I’m furious because he says he’s working on this big project, and, well, it sounds like there are delays, and it’s going to back up his other projects and put him so far behind he’s not going to get caught up for a while... Long story short, he said he can’t take the time off.”

  “Delays?” Tessa asked. I knew what she was thinking. Rudy was working on her house this week as part of her big attic renovation. “Do you know what project?”

  “Oh, some house in Ballard. Actually, now that you mention it, that must be your house.”

  “There cannot be delays. All of us are only gone for a week and then the house has to be ready to live in. My family of five cannot camp here with you until my house is finally done.”

  “Oh, sorry, Tessa, I don’t know for sure if it’s your house, maybe it’s not your house.”

  “I’m calling the contractor!” Tessa said, stomping away to make the call in private.

  “I’m sorry Rudy can’t go to the festival. It happens with work. Sometimes you can’t control your schedule.”