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

by Janice Peacock

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Hi, I hope I’m not coming over too late,” I said. I felt Tessa standing close behind me.

  “Oh, this is Tessa Ricci. Tessa, this is Mr.—”

  “All right already,” said Mr. Chu impatiently. He was more of a cat person than a people person. “Why are you here bothering me?”

  “We want to ask you about some beads,” Tessa said, emerging from behind me and holding Violetta’s beads out to show him.

  “Come in, come in. You can’t be standing outside with the door open, some of my cats will escape,” Mr. Chu said, beckoning us to come inside. Tessa swallowed hard and peered into his front room. She must have decided it wasn’t too scary to enter since she followed me as I headed reluctantly into his home. Mr. Chu closed his robe and shuffled over to his roll-top desk, shooing a cat from a stack of papers. There were cats everywhere. At least twenty, doing the things cats do, mostly sleeping.

  Mr. Chu’s house was exactly as mine had been before it had been split down the middle. It was a large house, which was a good thing, given the number of cats living there. My miraculous discovery was that even though he had far too many cats, his house didn’t smell like a litter box and his furniture wasn’t covered in cat hair. He might have had a lot of cats, but he seemed to take good care of them, and that meant I wasn’t going to have to call animal services to report a cat-hoarding problem.

  “We have a couple of items we were hoping you could tell us something about.” I handed the whale carving to Mr. Chu.

  He said nothing as he held the miniature sculpture in his weathered hands. He turned on the reading light on his desk and pulled out his loupe.

  “Sit, sit,” he said. We sat down on his old tweedy couch in spots that were not occupied by cats. A large orange tabby walked over and started sniffing me. He must have smelled Gumdrop, but this didn’t stop him from climbing into my lap and proceeding to knead his sharp claws into my thighs. Tessa and I sat quietly, craning our necks to see what Mr. Chu was doing. What could he see that we couldn’t?

  “What you’ve got here is quite special. It’s an Inuit carving of a whale. Very old. Very valuable. Are you selling?”

  “Oh, I’m not interested in selling it. I’d like to know a little more about it,” I said. “It was my Great-Aunt Rita’s.”

  “Ah, she was a nice lady. Kept to herself,” said Mr. Chu, giving me a squinty look, which seemed to say he’d like it better if I did the same.

  “Thanks. That’s great.” I tucked the tiny whale carving into my pocket.

  “What? You’re not wrapping that up? I told you it was valuable,” Mr. Chu said impatiently. “Give it to me.”

  I handed the carving to him, and he wrapped it up with some tissue paper. “Keep it safe. It’s worth maybe five thousand dollars. Maybe more.” Tessa and I looked at each other, dumbstruck. She passed the beads she’d stolen from Violetta to Mr. Chu.

  “Can you take a look at these?” Tessa asked.

  “Ah, what you’ve got here are some fakes. Whoever is making these, they’re trying to make them look old, but they’re off on some things.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “The millefiori patterns are all wrong. You don’t find work as sloppy as this in the older beads, like this star with so few points. You’ll never see that in real old Venetian beads. They tended to have a lot more detail. And the colors, this bright purple, nobody made colors like that until recently.”

  Mr. Chu passed the beads back to Tessa with a look of disgust. “Just junk.”

  As Tessa expected, the beads weren’t old. She pulled the other strand from her purse and held it out. These were her grandmother’s, and she knew for a fact they were antiques.

  Mr. Chu took the strand. “Now, this is more like it. These are nice. See the flowers? The patterns are more complex than those others. And the colors, much more basic with no exotic purples.” He handed the strand back to Tessa. “Hope you didn’t pay too much for the first strand. It’s not worth much, but this one, this one’s authentic. Worth a lot.”

  “I appreciate your time and expertise,” I said.

  “Right, well, good night,” Mr. Chu said, ushering us to the door, dodging cats as we went. We walked back across the alley to my back door. Mr. Chu picked up a Siamese and waved its little paw at us. We waved back.

  As Tessa had thought, there was something wrong with Violetta’s beads. They were fakes. What we needed to know now was whether Violetta knew they were fake and how these strange beads fit into Marco’s murder, if they did.

  “There’s one way we can find out if Violetta knows if the beads are authentic or not. We need someone to confront Violetta about what she is selling and then see how she reacts,” I said. “Maybe she’ll break down and confess everything. Maybe Marco had given her the beads to sell and had lied to her about them. Maybe she found out they were fakes and he was committing fraud, so she killed him. Maybe—”

  “Can you stop with the ‘maybes’ for a second and slow down that wild imagination of yours?” Tessa asked. “Who are we going to get to be so obnoxious to accuse Violetta of selling cheap imitations? Someone so rude—”

  “Rosie!”

  “You’re right. She could do it,” Tessa replied.

  NINETEEN

  The following morning Tessa and I were up early. Each of us had our own missions for the day. Tessa headed to her studio to get ready for the students who soon would be arriving for a day of beadmaking demonstrations, including Violetta’s presentation about vintage beads. Tessa and I both hoped Rosie Paredes, the owner of our local bead shop, would agree to help us with the next part of our plan. We wanted Rosie to come to Tessa’s studio to look at the Venetian beads as a potential buyer, and in the process, find out if Violetta had anything to do with the death of Marco de Luca.

  I met Rosie last year when she’d hosted an event at her shop, Aztec Beads. Without a doubt, Rosie was the most obnoxious person I’d ever met. She’d be perfect to help us find out whether Violetta knew that what she was selling were counterfeit beads. Rosie could be feisty and was known to be quite temperamental. It had taken some coaching from Tessa to keep Rosie from flying off the handle at the smallest provocation, but she was making good progress at being a patient friend and parent.

  Rosie’s daughter, Tracy, was behind the counter when I arrived at Aztec Beads.

  “Is Rosie here?” I asked.

  “Mama’s in the classroom pricing some new strands of copper beads,” Tracy replied. Tito, their obnoxious Chihuahua-mix dog, growled at me as I passed him. Rosie barely looked up when she saw me weaving my way through the shop, which was so packed with inventory I couldn’t move in a straight line. I turned sideways to make sure I didn’t knock the boxes of seed beads off the low shelves against the wall.

  “Hi, Rosie,” I said, sitting down next to her, a giant pile of strands of copper beads in all sizes and shapes in front of her.

  “Hi. Sorry. Can’t talk now,” Rosie said, not pausing for even a second from writing prices on tiny stickers.

  “How about I help you price these and in return, you help me with something?” I asked.

  Rosie said nothing and continued writing numbers on stickers.

  “Rosie?”

  Irritated, she finally stopped and looked up at me. I smiled and reached for a pen and some price tags.

  “Fine.” She handed me what I needed to help her with the pricing. “Mark all of these five dollars.” Rosie handed me a pile of beads, and I went to work. Fifteen minutes later, we were done, and Rosie sat there looking at me.

  “Thanks for the help,” Rosie said. “When I get into the pricing zone it’s hard to stop. I don’t want to get confused and start marking things wrong.”

  “I need a favor,” I said. Rosie looked at me and blinked.

  “I’m not into favo
rs,” Rosie said, drumming her stubby fingers on the table.

  “What if it helped us catch a killer?”

  “That I could handle. After all the chaos last year here at the shop, I nearly died.”

  “I know, I was there, remember? I saved you from strangulation, I caught a killer.”

  “Fine. I’ll help,” Rosie said. “What do I have to do?”

  “Just be yourself.” In Rosie’s case that meant being surly and confrontational, a perfect fit for the job we had for her. I explained what I wanted her to do.

  Tessa phoned me. “Everyone is here. Are you coming?”

  “We’re on our way,” I said.

  “Are you ready?” I asked Rosie, as I hung up the phone.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.” She grabbed her long black raincoat and handbag, and we headed toward the front of her shop.

  “You’re okay to watch things while I’m gone?” she asked her daughter.

  “Of course, Mama, go and help them catch a killer.”

  With Rosie in the Ladybug next to me, we started the short drive to Tessa’s studio.

  “It’s too cold in here,” Rosie said, punching the buttons on the heater in the Ladybug. “Does this seat go back any farther?”

  I was thankful the drive to the Fremont District was only ten minutes. Much longer in the car with Rosie, and I’d be ready to drop her at the side of the road. The rain was coming down hard again, and I flipped on the wipers.

  “Your wipers sure don’t work very well,” Rosie said.

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter, not wanting to say anything for fear of exploding, which was more likely in Rosie’s playbook than mine.

  When we arrived at Fremont Fire, Violetta was putting her beads on a table that Tessa set up by the front door. I was sure Violetta was excited to get a chance to finally sell some beads this week, since I didn’t think she’d sold a single bead to the students in Carthage.

  In the back of Tessa’s shop, where she had a glass beadmaking classroom, Vance had settled in at a torch and was doing a demonstration on how to create one of his signature glass beads, which looked as if it had been spray-painted with graffiti. The Twins and Katia looked on in interest. Duke was nowhere to be found.

  “Thanks so much for coming. Please, have a seat,” Violetta said. Rosie sat down at the table and ran her pudgy hands over the strands, saying nothing. “Please, let me know if you have any questions.”

  “Hmmm,” Rosie replied, not looking up from the beads. She plucked a strand from the pile and ran the tip of a fingernail over the surface of a bead. “Hmmm.”

  “Those are very nice. Very old,” Violetta said.

  “How old?”

  “Oh, those are at least a hundred years old, possibly older,” Violetta said.

  “How do you know that?” Rosie asked, in her surliest voice, finally looking Violetta straight in the eye. Tessa and I casually looked toward Violetta to see if we could glimpse any sort of reaction, which could tell us if she knew the truth about these beads.

  There was nothing but a smile on Violetta’s face. “I know these beads. They came from Marco’s family. He said he found them in his nonna’s basement.”

  “They look new to me,” Rosie said, keeping up the charade.

  “Ah, but the patina—”

  “Acid etching is easy,” Rosie said, accusing Violetta of using chemicals to make the beads look older than they actually were. “Or maybe someone used a rock tumbler to get this matte finish.”

  “But you don’t often see these rare colors,” Violetta said, sounding more and more desperate to convince Rosie that these beads were valuable and legitimate.

  “Rare colors? I’d say some of these colors look too modern to be as old as you say they are. This purple, they never made beads in this color,” Rosie said, tossing the beads back onto the table. I had told her what little I had learned from Mr. Chu. In reality, she had no idea what colors were old and what were new, but Rosie was on a roll.

  “I’m sorry you don’t like what you see,” Violetta said. “I can assure you these are real Venetian beads from a century ago. Perhaps you’d like to take some time by yourself to look?” Violetta said, grabbing her cigarettes and heading out the door.

  “What do you think?” I asked Rosie, once Violetta was out of earshot.

  “She thinks they’re real, even if they’re not,” Rosie said. “That’s my gut reaction.”

  “I think so, too. She seems to be earnest about what she’s selling,” I said. “Mr. Chu could be wrong. The beads truly could be old. What do you think, Tessa?”

  “She’s a liar.”

  TWENTY

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “What do you know about Venice?” Tessa answered my question with a question.

  “It’s the most important city in the world for glass, other than Seattle,” I said. “And it’s full of canals, built on a lagoon…”

  “Right. She said Marco had found these beads in the basement of his nonna. I’ve got news for you: There are no basements in buildings in Venice, only water and pillars that hold the buildings up. She knows the beads are fake,” Tessa said.

  “She’s lying about where they came from?” Rosie asked.

  “Or Marco was lying about where they came from,” I said.

  “That’s a good point. Maybe he made them, treated them with chemicals to make them look old, and passed them off to Violetta to sell,” Tessa said. “They could have been in this scam together.”

  “So, now what? Am I supposed to buy some of these beads? Because they’re a real rip-off,” Rosie said.

  “Exactly. A real rip-off. And now we need to figure out who was ripping off whom,” I said.

  Violetta returned from her cigarette break.

  “Thanks for showing me your beads. I can’t buy them right now. Outside my budget,” Rosie said, abruptly standing and heading for the door.

  “Scusi? May I speak to you, Tessa?” Violetta said with tears in her eyes.

  “I need to get back to the shop.” Rosie stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, with no patience for crying or comforting.

  I dropped Rosie off and headed back to Tessa’s studio. While I didn’t mind missing Violetta’s presentation about vintage glass beads, I did want to see Dario’s demonstration using some of the murrine we made over the last few days, that is, the murrine everyone else had made.

  There were envelopes with students’ names on them in the middle of the table. Each was filled with slices of pattern cane, murrine we could use today while we made beads. I grabbed my envelope and poured its contents on the worktable. Instead of brightly colored flower patterns, all that were in my envelope were murrine with letters on them.

  I called Tessa over.

  “Very funny, Tessa. Did you do this?”

  “No. I picked up the envelopes from Abby and brought them here. Why is yours full of letters?”

  “I haven’t been able to make any canes. I’m the remedial student, remember? This must be some joke. Or maybe it’s a message from Marco’s killer. Well, we certainly need to try and decipher it.” I said, moving murrine around. “How about this?”

  NUDE EXIT

  “Plus, I’ve got a couple of letters left over,” I added.

  “No,” Tessa said, scrambling the letters up again. “Let’s see. I was always pretty good at these games when I was younger.” Tessa slid the last letters into place and gasped.

  YOU DIE NEXT

  “Maybe it’s a message from the killer. Whoever it is, they’re trying to scare me,” I said. “It’s not going to work. They’re probably hoping I’ll go home and not come back to class.” While that was tempting, I was going to finish this class, and blow some glass, if it was the last thing I did. And if the murderer got his or her way, it would be the last thing
I did.

  “Okay, everyone, gather around,” Dario said, as he sat at one of the torches in Tessa’s studio. He held a few thin murrine slices in his hand. “I’m going to show you how to make a glass bead in the torch and add these murrine to it.” He started by lighting the torch. He melted a long rod of black glass in the torch’s flame, then wrapped the glass around the mandrel, a metal wire coated in a clay-like substance on its tip. After applying the glass to the mandrel, he used a small graphite paddle to shape the glass into an oval bead.

  “Now, I’ll pick up a chip of murrine and gently heat it, then I’ll press it onto the bead,” Dario said, holding the murrine in tweezers and waving it in the torch’s flame, attaching it to the bead, then using the graphite paddle to smooth out the chip. Fascinated, we watched as he continued adding murrine to the bead until it was entirely covered in tiny flower designs. “Now, I am finished and will put the bead in the kiln to anneal.”

  As Dario put it in the kiln, we all applauded the completion of the perfect miniature work of glass art.

  “Now, everyone, please light up a torch and practice the skills I have demonstrated for you.”

  I decided to head home since I had no murrine of my own other than the ones that formed a death threat, which I might make a fun bead with—someday—if I lived long enough.

  Coming into my studio, I found Gumdrop curled on top of the quilts in the trunk Tessa and I had pulled out of the attic a few days before. In my haste to grab the ivory whale carving, I must’ve left the lid to the trunk open. He looked up at me as I sat next to the trunk. I gave him some long strokes down his back.

  “Okay, Gummie, what can you tell me?” I picked up the fat gray cat and held him in my lap. He sent me exactly zero psychic vibrations, not even his usual “yellooo.” I have always thought my cat was psychic, ever since he’d advised me to move to Seattle. Of course, I’d been ready for a change, and leaving Miami behind was the best decision I’d ever made. While my cat was never helpful in any other way, I was still grateful he’d helped me make my decision to move. And even though I missed my parents and my sister Connie, who still lived in Miami, I was happy to be here in Seattle in this home I’d inherited from my great-aunt. I looked at the quilts in the trunk. There was one for my brother Andy, who already told me he didn’t want his. But what about Connie’s quilt? I called her.