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

the winter and short sleeves in the summer. I’d promised myself I’d try and look my best for this important weekend.
    The t-shirt I was wearing was speckled with chocolate, thanks to Val ’s culinary catastrophe. I changed into a clean top and decided jeans and clogs were going to have to be good enough for today. I ran my hands through my light brown hair—my version of combing since I’d cut it short.
    No one should ever arrive at a bead event without wearing beads. I found some fun earrings , each with a purple cone-shaped bead dangling from the ear wire. I knew I’d have to try and dress better tomorrow. Val was forever after me to look nice and act pretty. Or was it look pretty and act nice? I could never remember. I wasn’t particularly good at either—at least not at the same time.
    I went back to the studio to get ready to go. Stacks of beads in boxes and trays were in every corner and on every shelf. When I created jewelry, I used all sorts of beads to complement the ones I made. My stash had everything from the tiniest seed beads to large silver pendants from Thailand. It was my creative zone, the place I was happiest—a place I could work and play, and most of the time there was no difference between the two.
    This week t he chaos wasn’t too bad. Since I’d had a group of Girl Scouts over last week for a jewelry-making demonstration, I had had to clean up a little, well, a lot, before they arrived. I’d put the bits and pieces of necklaces in progress into small ceramic bowls to try and corral everything from each project into the same place: sets of glass beads, along with all the components to complete a necklace, silver beads, other small beads I’d purchased, and a clasp. Since making jewelry was less intense than working at a torch that spewed a foot-long flame, I’d work on necklaces and earrings each night to relax.
    The necklace project bowls ran in long rows along the table below the back window spanning the length of the room. Those windows let in gorgeous light, even on the dreariest of days.
    This had been Great-Aunt Rita’s sewing room, where she’d created stunning quilts well into her eighties. She’d left behind four massive tables with bolts of fabric stored on shelves below each work surface. The bolts were gone now, replaced by trays of beads and equipment for working with glass. On the widest table I had set up a torch, attaching it firmly to the work surface I’d covered with old kitchen tiles I’d found in the attic. They’d probably been there since the house was built at the turn of the century. Not this century, the one before it.
    On the smallest table by the back door were trays of the beads I’d made, and a necklace made with them. Everything was packed and ready to take to Aztec Beads, the new bead store in town. The owner, a woman named Rosie, had decided she’d have a gallery show and sale featuring the work of glass beadmakers as part of a grand opening celebration. She’d added some free workshops on how to make jewelry, hoping to get customers into her shop. She hoped they’d buy everything they needed to complete the projects they’d learned about in the workshops.
    Rosie had teamed up with a woman named Judy, who was a member of the local bead society that had recently, and unfortunately, been renamed JOWL. Judy was coordinating the exhibition, sales, and classes at Aztec Beads.
    I packed my lovely red VW Beetle , the Ladybug, with the trays of beads, and headed for Tessa’s glass studio. It was going to be a great weekend, I thought happily.
    But, it didn’t turn out as I expected.

     
    THREE
    Tessa, always the smart businesswoman, had decided she’d host some demonstrations on Friday before the weekend’s events at Aztec Beads. It was a great plan for getting people to come to her studio as well as to Rosie’s bead shop. A few years ago Tessa had been able to rent the perfect place in Seattle’s funkiest neighborhood, the Fremont district.