A Murderous Glaze Read Free Page A

covered the walls in the front half of the shop and checked our inventory of bisque-fired pieces, just in case we were busy today.
    Most folks don’t realize it, but to glaze a pot, it almost always takes two trips to the kiln. The first firing is the bisque stage. That hardens the clay into a porous ceramic and makes it easier to glaze in the next step. After the pieces are decorated with paints and then coated with glaze, they are fired again. The results are dramatic, going from dull, faded pieces to elegantly glazed and shiny pottery.
    At Fire at Will, we offered mugs, salad plates, full-sized dinner plates, bowls, vases, and other items for our customers to decorate. At each of the four tables in the paint-your-own section, we had brushes, stencils, and sponges, along with a selection of glazes and paints from which customers could choose. The paints were all nontoxic, so they could eat and drink out of their wares once we’d fired them a second time. There was a long table for snacks, or it could double as a buffet if someone were having a birthday party, a wedding celebration, or some other catered event. In the back space we had three pottery wheels, four kilns, a bathroom, a small couch, a tiny office, and a storage area. It was a business I’d always dreamed of owning, and though it took a great deal of hard work to keep it afloat, Fire at Will was a labor of love for me.
    As we checked our inventory levels, David asked me suddenly, “You don’t have much faith in Sheriff Hodges, do you?”
    I shook my head. “He’s hanging on to his job until he can retire with full benefits. I doubt he’d recognize a clue if it snuck up and bit him on the nose.”
    David nodded. “I thought you’d probably say that. You know what that means, don’t you?”
    “That the killer will probably never be caught?” I asked.
    “Not unless we find him ourselves.”
    I frowned, then asked, “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?”
    “Hey, I believe in girl power as much as the next guy. Okay, let’s go find her, then.”
    “David, what makes you think we can solve this ourselves? I’m a pottery-shop owner and you’re my assistant. We’re qualified for raku firing, not police work.”
    “We can get help, then,” he said enthusiastically. “You’ve got lots of connections.”
    “You can’t be serious.”
    He nodded. “Just hear me out. We can start with the Firing Squad. Jenna Blake is a retired judge; that means she’s got to still have friends in the legal world. Sandy Crenshaw is a reference librarian, so I doubt there’s a topic she can’t research.”
    “Enough. This is foolishness.”
    “Is it?” David asked. “Butch Hardcastle could help, too. You know he could.”
    Butch was a retired and reformed crook, a big and burly man who loved decorating porcelain figurines. “I suppose you think Martha could help, too.”
    “Are you kidding me? She knows everybody in town. I’m telling you, we can do this.”
    “All we need to do is check on the firing from last night,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about us solving this ourselves. Agreed?”
    “Fine,” David said reluctantly.
    I was restocking the cash-register till with money when David came back up front. I didn’t like the look on his face.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “You turned the kilns on yesterday evening, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, of course.” I’d had to admit to the sheriff that I hadn’t been sure, but I wasn’t about to tell David.
    “That’s funny.”
    “What?”
    “It’s nothing. The firing should be done by now, but the witness cones are still upright. Something must be wrong with the kilns.”
    The best way to tell if a firing is done is when premade test cones of clay droop in the heat of the kiln at the proper temperature. In theory, a perfect firing would see the cones bent over at ninety degrees, so they should have been sagging like a dowager’s chin by now. “Wonderful. That’s just what we need,