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

by Janice Peacock

  Post Falls…Sherlock. Where had I heard that before?

  Ellison’s Post Falls Sherlock Stanton. Also known as Stanley.

  Marta was from Post Falls, Idaho, just a few minutes from Spokane. I was sure that meant that Rosie and Marta knew each other.

  Marta was involved in this weekend’s mayhem. There was no doubt about it. I turned off the torch, and decided to call Detective Grant. He needed to know there was something strange going on. I was certain Marta had taken Rosie’s dog, and that Marta and Rosie most likely knew each other.

  What horrible things was Marta capable of doing?

  I found my phone and pressed Detective Grant’s number on the recent calls list. The number rang and rang, and then flipped over to voicemail. He probably saw I was calling and decided not to answer, not wanting to hear my latest wacky theory.

  I left a simple message. “It’s Jax. Please call me. It’s urgent.”

  “Hellloooo!” Val called, letting herself in, which she had recently started doing without any encouragement.

  “Val? I’ve got talk with you. I need help figuring something out,” I said, heading down the hall. “I just couldn’t get away from the idea that Tito’s collar somehow fit into the strangulations.

  “Oh Jax, darling, it smells funky in your kitchen. Have you been trying to cook again? Well, not to worry because I brought us a snack. Biscotti and Sauvignon Blanc.”

  When I got to the kitchen I realized what Val was talking about. It smelled terrible. But not like food, like skunk. And not like skunk, but like natural gas. I smelled gas—the front of the house was filled with it.

  “Val! Val! We’ve got to GO!”

  “But, we need to—”

  “No no no! Time to get out of here!”

  “Really, because—”

  “Dammit Val, out the door right now!” I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the door. Her high heels were striking the floor as we ran, and I hoped they wouldn’t make a spark. If they did, we’d be blown to bits.

  We ran out the door, Val still holding the plate of biscotti and her bottle of wine. We left the door open with the hope that some of the gas would dissipate. Gumdrop immediately ran out the door, and headed for Mr. Chu’s. At least I knew where I’d find him later.

  We stood across the street, trying to figure out what to do.

  “Call 911,” I said.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “I’m on it.” Val pulled a rhinestone-covered phone out of her pocket. Since her nails were too long for her to use her fingertips, she used a knuckle to press the keypad.

  We sat down on the curb and waited for the fire department to arrive, hoping we were not about to witness Seattle’s biggest fireworks display, when my house, both halves, were blown to smithereens.

  “Biscotti? Wine?” Val suggested, completely ignoring the severity of the situation. “Sorry, no glasses, unless you want to risk going back inside.” This was what I loved about Val—she never took anything seriously. Even though she might be about to witness the destruction of everything she owned, it didn’t seem to bother her, as long as she could have a glass of wine while it happened.

  “It’s okay, I can drink right out of the bottle,” I said, taking a swig of tart white wine followed by a bite of biscotti.

  “What did you say was in this cookie?” I said, choking, and wondering why it tasted like Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo. I swallowed the dry chunk of biscotti and washed it down with more wine.

  “Oh, it’s got some rosemary from our front garden, and you know, some anise, and a little bit of mint. I added some extra to give it a kick.” I hoped it was really mint and not Gummie’s special catnip. And I wished Val would stop experimenting with her recipes.

  Fire trucks arrived, followed by two police cars, an ambulance, an emergency response vehicle, and the hook-and-ladder engine. It was an impressive response to our crisis.

  “Hunky firefighters,” Val said, nodding in their direction as they piled out of their red trucks.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, taking another bite of cookie, which didn’t taste any better than the first bite. I sat there wondering if my house was all going to go up in a giant KABOOM, and knowing there was nothing I could do about it. I’d just have to trust the firefighters would do all the right things.

  When a police officer approached, we told him we could smell natural gas, and that it smelled like it was coming from the stove in the kitchen. I said that I had not been cooking in the kitchen since the day before, and that I didn’t think my houseguest had done any cooking, either.

  My houseguest. I looked down the street and saw Marta rounding the corner. “There she is now,” I said.

  Marta saw all of the fire engines, and then she saw me sitting on the curb. She turned and started to run in the other direction, poor Stanley trying to keep up on his short basset hound legs.

  “Do you think she has anything to do with this?” the officer asked, since running away was usually considered a suspicious activity.

  “Yes, I think so,” I said. “I definitely think she has something to do with this.”

  It was easy for the cops to catch up with Marta—she was middle-aged woman with a dog who couldn’t run without stepping on his own ears, and they were two fit thirty-year-old police officers. They were driving their police car, so that made it even more of an unfair race.

  They caught up with Marta, and we could see her talking and waving her arms around excitedly. The police officers were equally animated. They were too far away for Val and me to hear anything. We could see poor Stanley watching the conversation like a tennis match, his head moving from side to side as he listened to each person yell at the other.

  They put Marta and her dog in the back of the police car, and then drove toward us. One of the officers rolled down his window. “We’re taking them in for questioning.”

  “Them? You are seriously going to take the dog in for questioning?” I asked.

  “No, actually, we were going to drop the dog off at Animal Control until we can figure out whether to keep Ms. Ellison in custody.”

  “What? No! You can’t take Stanley to Animal Control. He’ll die in there!” squeaked Marta, from the backseat of the cop car. “He’s a pure-bred dog, a champion, not some dirty mutt.”

  “Not some mutt like Rosie’s dog?” I asked her.

  “Rosie didn’t deserve to have that dog. She deserved to lose everything!” Marta yelled, coming unglued right before our eyes. “I wanted to take everything she loved. Her dog. Her store. Her daughter. Everything!”

  “Her daughter?” I asked, my head swimming, taking this all in. “You wanted to take her daughter away from her?”

  “Rosie has everything—a family, and a wonderful life here with her new shop. Me, I have nothing,” said Marta, tears welling up in her eyes. “She needs to know what I feel like, having lost what I wanted most.”

  “Marta, I lost my cat for a couple of days—and I have to say it was terrible to have lost something as precious as a pet,” I said.

  “Animal comp—”

  “Shut up, Marta. Look, I lost Gumdrop, and it hurt so much. Imagine how you’d feel if you lost Stanley?”

  Marta gasped for air, and then said, “I can’t bear to think of it.”

  “Then think of Rosie.”

  “That bitch stole my dream. Stole it right from underneath me.”

  “How’d you know Rosie?” I asked. “How’d you get to the point where you wanted to hurt her so badly?”

  “I worked with Rosie in Spokane at the Godiva Call Center. You’d think working for a company that was all about chocolate would be heaven, right? Well, it wasn’t. It was just like any other stupid job, and I hated it. All I wanted to do was get out of that God-forsaken place,” Marta said.

  “Every day I’d look online for the perfect place to live and work—a place where I could open a dog-supply shop and doggie spa,” she continued. “I had the perfect dream, to find a cute little neighborhood where
I could sell my dog necklaces, with an upstairs apartment, and a yard where my dog could play. I found my perfect place in an online ad, and I showed it to Rosie on my laptop during one of our lunch breaks.”

  “Rosie’s shop? Rosie’s apartment?” I asked.

  “It was supposed to be my shop. My apartment,” Marta said, wrapping Stanley’s leash around her hands and pulling it tight. “When I decided to come here this weekend, I thought maybe I’d discover that the place wasn’t that great, and I could feel better about what happened.”

  “But didn’t Rosie notice you at the shop?”

  “I wasn’t at the shop until the party. Besides, when she saw me, she knew I was a beadmaker, so there was no reason why I shouldn’t be there. And I told her there were no hard feelings. That, of course, was a big fat lie.”

  “And me? Why try to kill me?”

  “You’d have figured out about Tito’s collar, as soon as you talked to Rosie. She would’ve told you she didn’t place a special order, and then you’d know the only reason I had the collar was because I’d taken it off Tito when I dropped him at the pound. Then Rosie, and everyone else would know what I was up to. It was perfect, really. I realized I could just leave the stove on in the kitchen. You were back there, working in your studio. You’d light your torch, and BOOM, you’d be gone. It would look like a studio accident. Easy. No one would suspect a thing.”

  “Ma’am, we need to take this woman down to the police station. It seems like we have several things to talk about with her,” said the officer in the passenger seat, bending his head low to look at me out of the driver’s side window.

  “Jax, Jax, I beg you,” Marta called to me. “Take Stanley, please. Help me in just this one way. I know I shouldn’t have done these things. I couldn’t take it. Rosie had taken so much away from me, I just wanted to see how she would feel to have what she loved taken away from her.”

  Val piped up. “Let the dog out. I’ll take care of him until this is all settled.”

  “Thank you,” said Marta, wiping the tears off her cheeks.

  The officer opened the back door and let Stanley out. Then he got back in the car and drove away.

  We could see Marta’s face staring sadly out of the back window as the police car got smaller and smaller, and then disappeared from sight.

  “So, Stanley. I guess you are going to be with us for a while,” Val said, reaching down and giving him a big scratch between his two floppy ears with her long nails. Stanley’s eyes closed as he enjoyed the attention.

  “Us?” I asked.

  “Well, you know, joint custody. I wouldn’t be taking him if you hadn’t had the bad judgment to invite a crazy killer into your house.”

  Stanley was listening to us, and wagging his tail. He was kind of cute, but I was sure Gumdrop would hate him.

  “And dogs, guys love dogs. Dogs are guy-magnets!” Val said, trying to convince me. I wasn’t buying it.

  Just then, a cute firefighter came over. “Your gas has been turned off. Looks like you left your stove on,” he said. I knew who had left the stove on, and it wasn’t me.

  “Thanks,” I said, finally relaxing now that I knew my house and all of my belongings weren’t going to explode.

  “Nice dog,” the fireman said, as he reached down and gave Stanley a big pat on his side. “What’s his name?”

  “See? See?” Val whispered in my ear. “This dog’s a magnet.”

  “Stanley,” I answered.

  We finally were able to go back inside the house. We went into the kitchen and poured our wine into glasses.

  “So, Val, I have some news,” I began. I needed to broach the subject of Rudy gently. “It’s about Rudy.”

  “Oh yes, Rudy! Doesn’t he look amazing? I think he looks so handsome now that I’ve cut off his icky ponytail and cleaned up those long sideburns. He looks like someone I could date.”

  “See, that’s the thing. Rudy’s married. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Oh, no he’s not. You see, I’ve started to ask every new guy I meet that question.”

  “Val, I am not sure you’d ever get a truthful answer,” I said. “I mean, really, what guy who wants to go out with you is going to say ‘yes, as a matter of fact, I am married?’”

  “I’ve gotten a variety of answers, and at a variety of levels of truthfulness,” she admitted. “But, here’s the thing. Rudy did answer me, and it was the weirdest answer I’ve ever heard, and believe me, I’ve heard a lot of strange answers. Rudy said he wasn’t really married, but sometimes he pretends to be.”

  “What?”

  “It’s super-sweet. He said he does it as a favor for a friend. In fact, when I talked to him a while ago, that’s what he said he’d done today—helped a friend get out of the hospital, because they wouldn’t let her leave without a family member.”

  “Well, I think I know who the friend is. It’s Rosie.”

  “Thank God he’s not married to Rosie,” Val said, taking a big gulp of wine.

  “I’ll drink to that!”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The phone rang around nine on Saturday morning. Fortunately, I was already up and drinking coffee at the kitchen table, with plans to take Stanley over to Tessa’s to romp around with Joey in the backyard for a while.

  My phone rang, and I recognized the number. It was Detective Grant. I pressed the Answer button.

  “Good morning, detective,” I said.

  “Good morning, Ms. O’Connell.”

  “What can I do for you?” It was hard to believe that a week after the murder at the bead shop he’d need to follow up with me, on a Sunday morning, no less.

  “I thought you might want to know there’s an excellent article in the Seattle Times about you and your glasswork.” The detective’s voice was missing the snarl I’d heard in it before. Off the clock he seemed like a different guy.

  “That’s terrific news. I wasn’t sure when it was coming out.” I’d have to run out and grab the paper after I got off the phone. For now, I had a few questions for the detective.

  “Can you tell me what happened with Marta?”

  “She confessed to murdering Misty Lawton—a case of mistaken identity. Apparently her target was Tracy Lopez,” the detective said. “Marta saw a young woman in the darkness on the patio the night of the party and thought it was Tracy. Ms. Ellison said she had some ‘dog necklaces’ in her purse. Does that make sense to you?”

  “As a matter of fact, it does. ‘Dog collar’ is probably a better description.”

  “She used one of those collars to strangle Misty, and then threw her in the dumpster.”

  “That’s what I had pieced together from what she said before the police officers took her away,” I said. “She wanted to take everything from Rosie, it was just hard to figure out how Misty fit into that.”

  “We’ve also charged Marta Ellison with the attempted murder of Rosie Lopez. In Ms. Ellison’s confession, she said she showed Ms. Lopez an advertisement for a property for lease in Seattle, and that Ms. Lopez had beaten her to it, by renting the property the same day,” the detective explained.

  “Rosie stole what Marta desperately wanted,” I said. It was hard for me to believe that Marta, or anyone, would kill because of a piece of property.

  “Precisely,” the detective said. “Oh, and you didn’t hear any of this from me, right?”

  “No, Detective Grant, you didn’t tell me a thing.”

  “Oh, and you can call me Zachary.”

  I was on a first-name basis with the stern detective? This was an interesting development.

  “And you can call me Jax.”

  We were quiet for a moment. And then the moment grew into an awkward silence.

  “Okay, Jax, well, I should be going.”

  “Thanks for calling, Zach.”

  “Zachary, never Zach,” he corrected.

  The detective, even when trying to be nice, was a little prickly around the edges.

  “Maybe we’ll run into
each other again someday.”

  “I hope so,” said the detective, and then hung up.

  I hope so?

  I tipped-toed barefoot out to the curb to get the newspaper. Since it had been raining all night, and I didn’t want to get my slippers wet, I’d left them inside. This made sense to me, but I can’t really explain why.

  I flopped down on the couch, and Gumdrop curled up next to me, kneading his paws into my thigh.

  “Ouch!” I said as I removed Gumdrop’s sharp claws from my PJ bottoms.

  I found the article in the Arts and Leisure section. The article was, in a word: Wonderful. Allen had done a terrific job explaining how glass beads were made, and about the difference between artisan-made beads and those made in China that are churned out by the thousands. The article had great things to say about me, and my work, and the images Allen had chosen were brilliant. I couldn’t believe it. I figured I’d blown it, after having accused him of stealing beads and watching him march out of my house.

  My cell phone rang. It was Allen. I answered, not knowing what else to do. I suppose I could have let the call go to voicemail, but I was curious to talk with him.

  “Jax, it’s Allen.”

  “Yes, Allen, I saw it was you calling.” I was trying to stay calm, cool, and collected. The last time I’d seen him, he was making a fast escape from my house after I’d confiscated some beads from him.

  “I have something for you. Can I stop by?”

  “Sure. Give me about thirty minutes?” I needed to get out of my jammies and either fluff up or glue down my hair. I was pretty confused about Allen at this point. He’d written a great article about me. It made it difficult to be mad at him, and hard to believe he was angry with me. I was confused, but I figured I’d keep an open mind and see what happened.

  Allen arrived a half hour later, and Stanley and I greeted him at the door. Gumdrop was sitting on the kitchen counter, a place he’d discovered where he could be safe from Stanley. Of course, he also hoped he could score some catnip from time to time by sitting there.