High Strung: A Glass Bead Mystery (The Glass Bead Mystery Series)

by Janice Peacock

  The person who stood on the doorstep pleasantly surprised me. Allen was on the shorter side, but at least taller than me. He had curly brown hair, dark brown eyes, and the most terrific smile ever, revealing a set of teeth that must’ve cost his parents a fortune in orthodontia. He was wearing a tweedy jacket, a white button-down shirt, cords, and some stylish leather boots. I always like to check out people’s shoes. You can learn a lot about a person by looking at what they wear on their feet. Me, I usually stick to clogs in the studio, Mary Janes for dress up, and sneakers for the rest of the time. I’m not sure what this says about me, other than I’m practical and like to be comfy. But, for Allen, his footwear meant he cared about how he looked, and he didn’t mind spending money to buy something that truly pleased him. He looked at little preppy, but that wasn’t the worst thing he could be. For instance, he could be an ax-murderer, but I doubted it. He was older than me, I thought, by a couple of years.

  I realized I was so busy assessing him that I had not invited him in. I just stood there with my hand clutching the doorknob. Allen made a slight move toward me, figuring, I suppose, if I weren’t going to invite him in, at least I wouldn’t stop him from barging in. That small movement helped me gain enough focus to remember what I needed to do next.

  “Oh, please come in!” I said, hoping he hadn’t noticed my momentary lapse of graciousness.

  Allen stepped inside. “Okay, let’s see.” I was flustered. I felt like I didn’t know what to do in my own house. Do I offer him a drink? Do I see if he needs to use the bathroom? Do I give him a tour?

  “Okay, let’s see,” I said again, feeling like a record stuck in a groove. My palms were feeling sweaty, and I ran them down the front of my jeans. Now wasn’t the best time to start having hot flashes. I was pretty sure it was just nervousness, and not hormones.

  “Would you like something to drink? I could make you a cocktail, but unfortunately, I can’t have one until after I show you a beadmaking demonstration. Even a small amount of alcohol ruins my small motor skills.” I realized I was babbling, and couldn’t seem to stop. “But if you—”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Allen said with a smile. “Perhaps we can both have one after your demo.”

  His smile helped calm me down. He seemed kind, and that was a good start.

  “Down this hall at the very end is the studio. Let’s head on back,” I said, feeling more confident.

  We entered the studio and I was glad I’d spent time to clean it up last week. My workspace looked professional, not in utter chaos as it usually is.

  I pulled out some trays of beads. The best ones were sitting at Rosie’s right now, but these would give Allen an idea of what I made.

  “These are the beads I make using a process called lampworking.”

  “Lamp working? I don’t see any lamps,” he said, looking around the studio.

  “Early glass beadmakers didn’t have the high-tech torches we use today that are powered by propane or natural gas, and oxygen,” I explained. “Instead, they used an oil lamp and bellows to make a flame that was hot enough to melt glass.”

  “Is it the same as flameworking?”

  “Exactly, and sometimes you’ll hear it called ‘torching,’” although that wasn’t my favorite way of describing the process. To me, “torching” sounded like what an angry mob of people with pitchforks would do once they reached the door of a bad guy’s house, in one of those old movies.

  “I’ll give you an overview of what I’ve got here in the studio,” I said, looking around and trying to think of an organized way of presenting information to someone who didn’t know a thing about a topic with which I’m deeply knowledgeable.

  I brought him over to the workbench.

  “This is a torch attached to the table. It’s called a Minor Bench Burner. It gets hot—I mean really hot, over 2,000 degrees, which is why I can melt glass with it. See these long hoses? This one attaches to the house’s natural gas line.” I turned the lever to open the gas line. I was happy I’d spent the money to have natural gas piped back to the studio. It meant I didn’t have to bother with propane tanks.

  “Natural gas, isn’t it dangerous?” asked Allen. “What if it leaks?”

  “Natural gas has no smell, but an odor is added to it so you can tell if there’s a leak. Anyone who works with it, or with propane, knows that if they smell skunk, it is likely a gas leak.”

  “What do you do if that happens?”

  “Open the doors and windows, turn off the gas, and get out of the building quickly if the room is filled with it. In the worst case, a whole studio can go ‘Kaboom!’”

  I’m sure I’d startled Allen at this point, and he looked around the studio casually to locate the closest exit.

  “Here’s the oxygen tank that, along with the natural gas, gives the torch a super-hot flame.” I turned the knob on the tank’s regulator to pressurize the hose that fed the torch.

  Allen took a few notes as I continued.

  “And here’s my kiln,” I said flipping its switch to the ON position so it could heat up to a toasty 940 degrees.

  “Now, over here is the glass I use,” I said, taking Allen over to the stacked tubes full of different colored, pencil-thin glass rods that lined both sides of the table. “They come in a zillion different colors, both transparent and opaque. The colors of glass are amazing, and the combinations you can put together are endless.”

  “I can’t believe there are so many colors.” Allen bent down to get a closer look at the sticks of glass. “How can you choose what to use?”

  “It’s a challenge, but it’s also part of the fun. Why don’t you go ahead and pick a few different colors, and I’ll use them to make some beads for you. Okay?”

  Getting visitors excited about glass by allowing them to choose their own colors always worked for the Girl Scouts, and I hoped it would work on grownups too.

  “Wow, a challenge. How do I pick?”

  “I’d pick—”

  “That was a rhetorical question,” he said coyly, while he studied the colors. “I’ll pick purple, blue, and green,” he decided pulling out a couple of glass rods of each of those colors and handing them to me.

  “Nice choice.”

  “My favorite colors,” he added with a smile.

  “Mine, too,” I admitted.

  “Here,” I said, trying to ensure that this would be successful demo. “Let’s also pick some basic neutral colors that will help us make good beads:black, white, and clear.”

  I wasn’t looking forward to this next part. “Now, we have to protect our eyes. These are called didymium glasses, and I wear them to help me see the glass in the flame while I’m working.” I handed a pair of ugly horn-rimmed glasses to Allen, and I put on a pair too.

  “My dad had a pair like this when he was in the army,” Allen told me. “He said that all the men called them BCGs, also known as ‘birth control glasses.’”

  I’d called them that myself, and was hoping I didn’t look too terrible in them. Allen didn’t look half bad in his nerdy glasses. His dad had evidently found someone to make babies with, so his birth control glasses didn’t seem to have caused him much of a problem.

  I decided to move right along, because I really didn’t want to talk about birth control with a guy I’d met only a few minutes ago. Allen was very cute, with or without BCGs.

  “The first thing I do is to light the torch, like this,” I said, turning the red knob to start the flow of gas, and using a metal striker to make a spark. The torch had a small yellow flame at this point, like you’d see from a cigarette lighter. “I’ll add some oxygen to increase the temperature.” I now had a fierce eight-inch blue flame flowing out the front of the torch.

  “Amazing.”

  “This is a metal mandrel I wrap glass around.” I showed Allen a foot-long metal wire covered at the tip with bead release.

  Now, I’ll take this glass rod, and slowly start to put it in the flame. The glass will start to heat up
and turn orange and start glowing. Then it will become soft enough that I can work with it.”

  “Jax, this is so exciting,” Allen said. All I could think was, if he thought this was exciting, then clearly he needed more excitement in his life.

  “Once I have a nice blob of molten glass, I wrap it around the mandrel. I can use this tool called a marver, which is a flat piece of graphite, to smooth out the glass by rolling the bead back and forth along it.”

  “It’s kind of like a little ironing board.” Allen was standing right behind me, bending down to see what I was doing. He felt very close—too close, really. I hoped I didn’t smell too much like burnt chocolate cake.

  I continued making the bead, rounding it out and adding some small squiggles before completing it. It was a good bead, and a type I’d made hundreds of times over the last few years. I was glad Allen hadn’t distracted me too much. It would have been embarrassing to make a terrible bead while I was trying to impress someone.

  “Bravo!” Allen said, applauding.

  I smiled, glad he was such an enthusiastic audience. “And now the bead is done, and I’ll just put it right here in the kiln.” I turned off the torch and quickly removed the BCGs. No need to leave those on a minute longer than necessary.

  “You put the bead in the kiln to dry?” asked Allen.

  “To cool down. It’s far too hot right now. If I left it out on the counter it would cool down too quickly, and would crack into pieces.”

  “Oh, like when I put cold water in my wife’s nice coffeepot while it was hot, and broke the bottom out of it?”

  Allen has a wife. Dammit. I thought maybe this guy might be some serious dating material. But I draw the line at married men. Well, maybe he’ll write a nice article about me.

  “Yes. Like that. Exactly. Your wife must have been pretty mad,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. She had all sorts of terrible things to say about me, and my stupidity.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry—”

  “Guess that’s why she’s my ex-wife now.”

  “What? Oh!” I said using all of my best words in a very articulate way. I was happy to hear he wasn’t married, but it was time to change the subject before we spent any more time discussing his marital status.

  “Would you like to have a drink while we finish the interview?”

  “Sure, that would be great. If it’s not too much of a hassle,” Allen said.

  “Well, it is not going to be much of a hassle for me, because you get to make them. You know how to make a mojito?”

  “Absolutely. I was a bartender back a few years ago before my newspaper career took off.”

  “Great. I need to program the kiln to cool down overnight. If you wouldn’t mind starting the drinks, I’ll be right there. Most everything is already out on the counter.”

  “Where’s the mint?” Allen yelled from the kitchen.

  “In the upper part of the fridge,” I yelled back.

  “Okay. Got it,” I heard him say, and then he said something else. I’m wasn’t sure what, but it didn’t matter, I was on my way.

  When I came into the living room, Allen had just finished making the drinks and was walking carefully toward me with two full glasses.

  “Wonderful,” I said, as we sat down next to each other on the sofa, another thing I’d salvaged from Aunt Rita. Was Allen sitting extra close? Or was this just the normal way people sit next to each other? I was glad I’d cleaned the cat hair off the couch before he arrived. The velvet sofa was a cat hair magnet.

  Gumdrop came cruising into the room. He doesn’t like strangers, and usually makes himself invisible when someone visits. I was surprised when my cat started rubbing against our shins as we clinked glasses and took our first sips.

  “Delicious,” I said. It was the first moment all day when I felt like I could relax. I took a deep breath and released. Ahh.

  “Hard day?” asked Allen.

  “Eventful,” I said, sounding mysterious. I decided Allen didn’t need to hear about the exploding chocolate cake or the drama at Aztec Beads.

  Allen seemed like a great guy. He’d enjoyed seeing the studio and my work. And, he made a great mojito. I’m sure Val would approve of him. Gumdrop jumped up on the back of the sofa and was rubbing his head against my shoulder.

  “Gumdrop. You weirdo! Go away,” I said. “He’s never like this,” I added apologetically.

  The disaster happened so quickly I didn’t have time to prevent it.

  Gumdrop launched himself into Allen’s drink!

  He was like a cartoon clown leaping from a diving board into a Dixie cup of water. Allen dropped his glass into his lap, or more likely, Gumdrop knocked it out of his hand. It was hard to tell what was happening—all a frantic blur of gray cat and minty cocktail splashing everywhere.

  Gumdrop was writhing in Allen’s lap.

  “I am so sorry. Very sorry. Really, really sorry.” I sprinted to the kitchen for a towel. Allen was a sticky wet mess. Gumdrop was covered in liquid and continued to writhe around.

  “I just don’t know what has happened to my cat. It’s like he’s on drugs, or something.” On drugs. Oh dear.

  “Allen? The mint you used for the mojitos. Where did that come from?”

  “Oh, just like you said, in the top of the fridge. I didn’t see any in the fridge, but your freezer is up there too, so I thought maybe I misunderstood what you meant. And sure enough, you are so clever to make those little mint ice cubes so you always have fresh mint available. We used to do that at the bar—”

  “You used the mint in the freezer?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the pink ice cube tray?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, well, that explains it. You see, Gummie here,” I said, removing the sticky cat from Allen’s wet lap, “he likes catnip. A lot.”

  Allen, his mouth half-open, stared at me in shock and tried to focus. I was holding a soggy feline who was wriggling and now trying to get to the other glass of catnip-laced mojito.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said as I ran with Gumdrop, holding him out from my body as far as possible, to the bathroom. I tossed him in gently, closed the door, and trotted back into the living room. Allen was standing now and staring down at his nice brown corduroys, which were soaked, with little bits of catnip and gray cat fur smashed into the fabric here and there.

  Allen looked in horror from his pants to me. He still hadn’t put it all together.

  “I keep a special supply of catnip in the freezer for Gumdrop, in those little ice cube trays.”

  Allen continued to stand there, dripping, holding his arms away from himself in an awkward position so he didn’t have to touch his sticky hands to his shirt.

  “You just didn’t see the real mint in the messy fridge. And that is totally understandable,” I said trying to make sure he understood this wasn’t his fault. Even though, really, it was his fault because he didn’t follow my instructions. Of course, it was also my fault, because I’d let him loose in the kitchen to make us drinks unattended.

  “Well, Allen. Let’s get you out of these sticky pants,” I said, reaching across the coffee table for his buckle.

  Allen jumped backward away from me. It was probably not a wise move—making me seem like all I wanted to do was take advantage of the situation by helping him remove his clothes.

  “I think I’ll be leaving my clothes on for now, thanks. What I’d really like to do is go and wash up, and I’ll be on my way.”

  Allen started to walk toward the bathroom.

  “Allen?” I said, cringing. “You don’t want to go in the bathroom. Gumdrop is locked in there right now.”

  As if on cue, Gumdrop let out a loud psycho-kitty howl from behind the bathroom door. Allen adjusted his course so he was now headed for the front door, his feet shuffling across the floor, legs apart so he looked like a gunslinger at high noon—a wide stance, arms held out from his body, ready to draw his gun.

  “You know
, Jax, it has been a lovely evening,” Allen said, now trying to act like this sort of thing happened all of the time. He was pretty unconvincing, because he was saying it through gritted teeth. And then he was gone.

  It was a lost cause. Things had been going so well, and boom, in a moment Gummie had ruined everything. I mopped up as well as I could. Fortunately for the sofa, most of the drink had landed on Allen. Unfortunately for me, I’d lost the great article Allen was going to write, and a possible boyfriend, too.

  As I padded down the hall to my bedroom, I remembered poor Gumdrop locked in the bathroom. I opened the door and he came out slowly, looking around to see if he was in trouble. I thought he’d be a sticky mess like Allen, but it looked like Gummie had spent his time in exile cleaning himself and gleaning every bit of catnip from his fur.

  I picked up the big gray fluff-ball and hugged him tightly to my chest. He had the faint smell of rum. “I’m going to change your name from Gummie to Rummie,” I said to him, as we headed down the hall to bed.

  SEVEN

  I woke up to the sound of dingdongdingdongdingdong.

  I was going to murder whomever was ringing the doorbell so early in the morning. I caught a glimpse of the kitchen clock as I headed for the door. Seven in the morning! Who would dare ring the doorbell so early in the morning? I figured it was Val, because most of the time it was Val. Maybe Val had come and brought me something lovely she’d made for breakfast—although with her constant tinkering with recipes, I wasn’t sure anything she cooked would actually be edible.

  I yanked open the front door. It wasn’t Val.

  “Oh, Marta! Wow. You...are...HERE.” Dammit. I forgot Marta was spending the weekend with me.

  “Hi, Jax!” said Marta, as she stepped inside. “Sorry I rang the doorbell so many times—I wasn’t sure if you had heard me,” she said sheepishly.

  “That’s okay, I needed to wake up anyway,” I lied, subtly scratching my backside.

  I’d only met Marta a couple of times before, at the glass beadmakers’ annual conferences. She was coming in from Idaho for the weekend’s events and had asked if she could stay with me. Other than being about my age, she wasn’t much like me—all squeaky clean and sporty, and wearing her coordinated sweat suits, ready to go for a jog or play a game of rugby at a moment’s notice. Even though I really didn’t know her well, I felt like I knew her well enough that she wouldn’t murder me in my sleep.