To Bead or Not to Bead, Glass Bead Mystery Series, Book 4

by Janice Peacock

  We walked to the Starbucks across the square. While I ordered us all Venti coffees, Tessa snagged a grouping of comfortable leather armchairs. I brought over the coffee, along with sugar and stir sticks, and set them down on a metal table between the chairs.

  After a few sips of coffee, Daniel started to relax and open up.

  “Austin. He helped all those kids, you know. He helped me personally on so many things. And to see him there, crushed…”

  “Crushed?” I had visions of a pillar from a faux new-wave castle falling over on the poor man.

  “And everyone at the Homeless Advocacy Team is going to be crushed, too,” Daniel said, after taking a large swallow of coffee.

  “Of course, everyone will be crushed to hear of Austin’s death,” Tessa said.

  “No, the chandelier—it’s crushed. All that money HAT could have raised, shattered into a million pieces all over the stage.” Daniel sucked in a shuddering breath.

  Tessa and I were starting to put things together. I didn’t want to be the one to say the horrifying truth out loud: Austin Greer had been crushed by the Vega chandelier. The sheer thought of it made me shiver. What a horrible way to die—and what an awful thing to have seen, even after the fact. No wonder Daniel was so shaken. Tessa and I had seen a couple of dead bodies, and I could honestly say I never wanted to see another one. This death seemed particularly gruesome, and I tried not to think of how horrible it must have been.

  “Well, accidents happen,” Tessa said. “It sounds like maybe the chandelier was installed incorrectly. Certainly, you have more to worry about than the fact that the Homeless Advocacy Team won’t have the chandelier to auction off,” Tessa said. And she was right, there was more to worry about than the chandelier. I had to wonder, though, if this really had been an accident. It certainly seemed strange the chandelier would fall at all—and awfully convenient that it had fallen on someone. If the cables that held the chandelier in place had failed, what were the chances it would hit someone? I decided to keep this theory to myself, and not risk upsetting Daniel further.

  “Tessa’s right. You’ve had a big shock, and you need to take care of yourself. I’m sure HAT will find another way to raise the money they need,” I said, finishing the last of my coffee.

  “With Austin gone, I’m all that theater has left. I can’t stop now. I’ve just got to keep going.”

  While I approved of Daniel’s work ethic, I worried he’d have a nervous breakdown if he couldn’t pull himself together.

  “And—who’s going to clean up that mess? I don’t want to have to deal with all the blood and broken glass,” Daniel said. This seemed like a strange thing for Daniel to fret about, but he must have been worried it would end up being him. Sometimes people who are in shock can think of the strangest things. He seemed to be the only one who worked at the theater on a full-time basis, especially now that Austin was no longer among the living.

  “There are companies you can hire to clean up messes after something like this happens,” Tessa offered, always practical.

  “We’re rehearsing a show—you must know Hamlet opens next week. Even with Austin gone, we’ve got to keep going. As we say in the theater, the show must go on!”

  “Right. And we’re hoping we’ll still be able to have our gala, too,” Tessa said.

  “We’ll just have to see how long the police need to investigate. The theater will probably be shut down for a day or two,” I said.

  “A day or two? With Austin gone, there’s no reason for Amanda to keep the theater running. She could shut us down permanently! Oh, my God, I hadn’t thought of that. I could lose my job, I could—” Daniel was starting to tear up again. Tessa pulled a tissue from her purse and handed it to him. He blotted his eyes and blew his nose, then stuffed the tissue in the top of his empty cup.

  Poor Daniel was a wreck, but he did have a point. The future of the theater was in jeopardy. With Austin gone, who knew whether Austin’s wife would be interested in continuing with her support of the theater? I was sure she’d be devastated by the loss of her husband, and it would be up to her to decide what to do with the theater.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We have to carry on without Austin. That’s all we can do. I’m sure everything will work out fine.”

  I had no way of knowing it was already too late for that.

  FOUR

  Tessa and I walked back from the coffee shop with Daniel. He seemed to have gotten a little steadier on his feet.

  “So, what now?” Tessa asked when we arrived back at the parking lot behind the Chanticleer Theater.

  “I’m going to stay here and wait until the police are gone and then maybe I can get backstage and get some work done,” Daniel said, his eyes widening as he watched two uniformed officers tote plastic bins out the backstage door. “Excuse me—what are you removing? You have no right to take that stuff!” He rushed toward one of the officers to look inside a bin.

  “Evidence,” one of the officers replied, tapping on the lid of the tub with his free hand.

  “What kind of evidence? We’ve got a show to do. You better not be taking any of the props!” Daniel replied.

  “I don’t think you’ll be needing this. It’s just a bunch of glass bits,” the officer said.

  My heart sank. They were carrying away the chandelier, all one million pieces of it. Another officer exited the building, pushing a cart loaded with a mangled lighting fixture. It didn’t look like it was part of the destroyed chandelier.

  “Oh, no—you can’t take the ghost light. Every theater has to have a ghost light,” said Daniel, rushing toward the cart to try and grab the fixture. The officer held up a warning hand to keep Daniel back.

  “Sorry, sir, just following orders from the homicide division.” The words “homicide division” made me wince. It was likely those orders had come from my boyfriend, Zachary Grant, who was a detective working for the Seattle Police Department. If he wasn’t here now, he had been. I didn’t dare ask the officer if Zachary was here for fear it would get back to him. It also meant Mr. Greer’s death had not been an accident, as I had surmised.

  “I’m sure you can do without one for a little while,” I said. It had been a floor lamp on wheels—nothing special, and now it was just a pile of crushed metal tubing and wires. I couldn’t understand why Daniel was having such a conniption about it.

  “No! You obviously know nothing about show business. Every theater must have a ghost light.”

  “Why?” Tessa and I asked at the same time. It was likely something obvious, but we simply didn’t know.

  “It’s a theater tradition—a superstition. You leave a light on in the middle of the stage when the theater isn’t occupied. Every theater I’ve ever worked in has had a ghost light—every theater everywhere has one.”

  “Do all theaters have ghosts?” Tessa asked. Tessa and I had thought we’d encountered a ghost in an elevator last fall while we were attending a bead bazaar in Portland, Oregon. It turned out it wasn’t a haunting, but something far more mundane that had caused the creepy coldness in the elevator at the Red Rose Hotel. Turning to me, she added, “It’s fortunate Val isn’t here. She’d be spraying her perfume everywhere.” That was true. Val, who most definitely believed in spirits, thought perfume was a cure for the common ghost.

  “Some theaters do have ghosts, I suppose. But you know, the ghost light does more than keep ghosts away. It also prevents people from walking around in the dark and falling into the orchestra pit,” Daniel said. He had a good point—for safety’s sake, having a light on stage could prevent any number of accidents from happening in the dark. It was like having a giant nightlight.

  “Maybe I can help. I have an old floor lamp in the back seat of my car. I was heading over to Goodwill to donate it, but if you’d like it, it’s yours, at least until you can get one you like better,” I said. I was happy to give it t
o him. It would save me a trip to the donation center.

  “Yes, please. I think now more than ever, we need the light. With Austin dying on the stage, we probably have a real ghost now, if we didn’t have one before.”

  I retrieved the light from the Ladybug and handed it over to Daniel. “It needs a bulb, but other than that it should work fine,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Daniel said, examining the light and nodding weakly.

  He approached the police officers by the backstage door who had been unwilling to let us in earlier. After a few minutes of talking and gesticulation, Daniel gave up trying to convince them to let him back in and carried the light through the parking lot and around to the front of the building. The officers must have decided Daniel could enter the building, but not through the backstage door. I assumed this meant Daniel could work in the theater’s box office, but he wouldn’t be allowed onto the stage until the detectives and CSI personnel had completed their work.

  A blue Toyota sedan parked in a space nearby. The driver, a thirty-something woman in leggings and an oversized sweater, got out of the car. She saw us and headed our way.

  “Jaya Bakshi. I’m from the Homeless Advocacy Team.” She extended her hand to us. We each shook it and introduced ourselves to her. “I’m here for the auction meeting. What’s going on over there?” She asked, nodding toward the police cars.

  Apparently, she hadn’t yet heard about Austin’s demise.

  Tessa broke the news to her as gently as possible.

  “Oh, how devastating! So sad, of course, for Austin’s family, but it’s a sad day for HAT, as well. Mr. Greer was such an important donor and friend. I’ll have to talk with the board of directors to determine what they want to do. The board will want to go ahead and auction off the chandelier, at least.” Jaya shook her head as if to clear her mind of negative thoughts.

  Tessa broke the news to Jaya about the demolished chandelier.

  “Oh, no! That’s terrible. We were relying on those funds to keep our doors open. Without it, I don’t know what we’ll do,” Jaya said, trying to remain composed. “I guess we’ll just have to find another way to raise the money.”

  “Don’t worry. We’re going to make sure the event happens. We’ll raise that money, maybe not as much as we would have with the chandelier, but we’ll do our best,” Tessa said.

  I nodded in agreement.

  “Thank you, both. Really. The Homeless Advocacy Team has several worthwhile programs that are helping a lot of teens and young adults, but we can’t do it without funding, of course. I’ll talk with the board and let them know you’re willing to continue with the gala, and I expect they’ll agree to carry on. I’ve already sent out announcements to our current donor list about the auction. So, if you can somehow still make this event happen, I’ll make sure we have people to fill the seats.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Tessa said.

  “Now, I need to get inside and talk with Daniel. Thank you so very much for your support. Please call the HAT offices if you need anything,” Jaya said as she made a beeline for the backstage door.

  “You’ll need to go through the front door, the officers aren’t letting anyone in through the backstage,” Tessa called out to her.

  Jaya waved and nodded as she adjusted her course and headed for the front of the theater as Daniel had done a few minutes before.

  With nothing else to do at the theater, Tessa and I drove back to my house. We needed to call the volunteers and let them know what had happened and that rehearsals were canceled, at least for today.

  I had made plans to go out with Zachary that evening. We’d been dating since Valentine’s Day, and things had started to get pretty serious, although in general, he was far more serious about most things than I was. He was stern yet sexy, in just the right proportions. When he took off his glasses and looked at me, he could melt my heart.

  Zachary called me as I unlocked my door and stepped into the studio.

  “Hi, how’s it going?” I asked.

  “Not so good. I’m sorry, but we can’t get together tonight,” Zachary said. I heard a tightness in his voice. The last time I’d heard it, I was mixed up in a homicide investigation he was working on.

  “What happened? A murder?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  Silence.

  “Where are you headed? Maybe I could tag along,” I said.

  “No, that would be inadvisable,” he said, the sternness in his voice escalating.

  “Maybe I can guess. You’re headed to the Chanticleer Theater—”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Aha! So you are heading to the Chanticleer Theater.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, exasperated.

  “But you are, right? Tessa and I were there earlier today.”

  “You always know how to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I suppose someone interviewed you?”

  “Nope. The officers wouldn’t let us into the theater and didn’t want to talk with us.”

  Zachary was silent, a sure sign he was perturbed with me—or with someone on his team who should have gotten my name and contact information.

  “Jax, this is a likely homicide. The Crime Scene Investigation techs have already determined that someone disengaged the safety chain on the chandelier, and the cord that held the chandelier in place had been cut.”

  “Not an accident?”

  “No way. That’s why I’ve been called in.”

  “I could help you, you know,” I offered.

  “Sorry, Jax. I’d rather not mix my professional life with my personal life.”

  “I’m part of your personal life. That’s good news.”

  “You are. And I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Right, me neither, but you can’t really control that…”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.” And then the line went dead. It felt a little like he’d hung up on me. It was possible his phone had died, or he’d entered an area with poor cell coverage. Or, he’d hung up on me. I didn’t want to consider that last option.

  I spent the evening making glass beads. It’s my job, but it’s also my passion. Lighting my torch, melting glass, and shaping it into beads had always been therapeutic for me. As I sat at my torch, I felt a calm settle over me that I often experienced when I worked creatively. I was making a bead with an ocean motif, complete with a sandy shore and turquoise waves. It felt like playtime to me and was helping me forget the horrible things that had happened today. I’d recently put a bumper sticker on my car that said Plays with Fire, and that was exactly what I was doing—pouring my creative energy into working with glass to take my mind off Zachary and forget about the death of Austin Greer. After working on the torch for a few hours and stuffing my kiln with a dozen new glass beads, I started the annealing program on the kiln so the beads would cool down slowly overnight.

  Around dinnertime, I wandered out to my kitchen and rummaged through the refrigerator looking for something to eat. I wondered if Val, who lived in the other half of the duplex, might be home and have something for dinner that would be better than the leftover sourdough bread and spray-can cheese I was contemplating. I admit I let Val take care of me, just a little bit. She advised me about making appropriate fashion choices, and she cooked for me now and then, among other things.

  Val’s cooking skills were inconsistent at best. She tended to use a little too much of everything in her recipes. Sometimes this worked to her advantage. Extra cheese and extra chocolate—those didn’t seem to take her down a disastrous path. However, additional chili powder, baking powder, or herbs had rendered many potentially delicious meals inedible.

  I opened the front door and nearly slammed into Val.

  “Hello, sweet cheeks!” Val said, her faux-leopa
rd clad arms cradling an oval tureen of soup. “I was hoping you would be home. I have a lot of this soup, and tomorrow’s a full moon, so I’ve got to get it out of my house before I eat it.”

  “What? Why?” I asked as Val barged past me and placed the bowl on my kitchen table.

  “Didn’t I tell you? I’m on the Werewolf Diet! I’m a teensy-weensy too voluptuous for my Princess Leia costume. I refuse to wear Spanx, so I’m going to drop a couple of quick pounds.” This was news to me. Val had never once mentioned the word “diet” to me, but it certainly wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned werewolves.

  “Werewolf Diet? Sounds drastic. Do you have to get bitten by a werewolf to be on the diet? Because if you do it may take some time to find one in Seattle. If you go out to Forks on the Olympic Peninsula, you’d likely find some werewolves.”

  “I’ve got news for you, darling, Twilight is fiction, so we won’t find any werewolves out there. But see, this diet, it’s all about the phase of the moon. When there’s a full moon, I can only drink clear liquids, and that’s tomorrow. So, I have to remove all the tempting food from my house. I sent all the cookies home with Rudy.”

  Dammit. I would have taken those cookies off her hands, no problem.

  “Thanks for the soup. It looks yummy.” I grabbed a ladle, spoons, and bowls from the kitchen and brought them to the table.

  “It’s cream of potato,” she said, ladling the soup into the bowls.

  I sampled the soup. Holy moly! I’d never tasted so much garlic in my life.

  “Wow! There’s a lot of garlic in this,” I said as I choked a little.

  “I added a few extra cloves because I adore garlic. Since I don’t have a boyfriend right now, I don’t have to worry about kissing anyone with stinky breath. Oh—but maybe you shouldn’t have too much if you going out with Zachary tonight.”

  “Nope. He called to say he was busy with an investigation. It wasn’t one of our better conversations.”

  “I’m sorry sweetums, you know he’s not always the best communicator when he’s stressed, and neither are you. I’m sure you two will work it out.”