Maggie and the Mourning Beads Read online

  Maggie gave a pointed look to the pale pink pearls on the tray in front of Nora, the same color as the pink opal ring she unconsciously touched whenever she thought of her dead daughter. "We're being honest in this class, Senior."

  Nora looked down at the pearls. "And that, too," she said softly. "My daughter was a McJasper. I wanted to keep that connection between us."

  Maggie leaned over and hugged her. The older woman reciprocated, then straightened up and returned to her normal gruff demeanor. "But that's me. Why do you feel you need to keep the name?"

  "I spent a third of my life as a McJasper," Maggie said. "More than half my adult life. It feels natural now." She looked down at Jasper. "And my boy's name is Jasper McJasper—"

  The dog punctuated the mention of his name with a cheerful bark that made everyone jump.

  "—so I guess I want a connection to my boy as well."

  She looked around at the group. "And so this is the topic of our class: Mourning Beads." She handed around a printout on purple paper, explaining the Victorian tradition of making memorial jewelry for dead loved ones out of jet beads, onyx, and glass.

  She talked about it for a bit, explaining that people would weave locks of hair, or nail clippings, or old photographs of those they'd loved and lost into pieces of jewelry as a way of working through the grieving process.

  "But we're not being quite so literal in this class," she said. "If you want to remember someone you lost, or let go of something from your past, or just want to play with black beads and crystals, feel free to interpret the theme any way you want."

  She looked down at her own tray of beads. She had picked out dark purple and silver for this project, with jet seed beads she would weave into some sort of Celtic knot in the center. "My ex-husband's father had been Scottish, and his mother had been Irish, so it seemed appropriate," she explained.

  Lauren had Crystal Mystic Black Swarovski pearls in her tray, and had selected a glorious black ceramic angel with outspread glass wings as the centerpiece. But when Maggie asked if she wanted to talk about her choices, she shook her head. "It's for someone I care about very much," she said. "He's gone now."

  Lauren unwound a length of silk thread and threaded her needle to begin the knotting of the pearls. She was an expert with pearls, so she didn't need help. So Maggie just gave her an encouraging smile and turned to the others.

  Abby was making a small bracelet in alternating black-and-white crystals. Maggie didn't need to ask her what she was mourning, so she just gave her the space to do her own thing.

  Nora was not experienced with beads at all, so Maggie worked with her on a simple bracelet pattern, just her chosen charms and beads strung onto a cord and finished with a clasp.

  Then she turned to the teens. She figured they had signed up for the class because of the dark themes of the jewelry, so didn't expect much soul-searching from them.

  "And how about you?" she asked the sullen boy who sat across from her. "What are you grieving?"

  She had expected a sarcastic remark about blackness and death being cool, but he said softly, "my dad."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "How long ago did he die?"

  He shook his head. "He isn't dead. He's just dead to me."

  "Oh, I see," she said, though she really didn't.

  "He said if I wanted to paint my hair purple and get tattoos I was dead to him and had to leave his house. So he's dead to me."

  But he wasn't, of course. The pain in the boy's downcast eyes and quiet tone said his father wasn't at all dead to him, and Maggie felt sorry she'd been so quick to judge him.

  He looked at the assortment of beads and charms on the table. "I don't know where to start," he admitted.

  "What would you think of as a symbol of your father?" she asked him. "Something that immediately makes you think of him?"

  "A dollar bill," he said shortly.

  She led him to a pegboard with little charms displayed. She picked out a dollar sign and handed it to him.

  "What else?" she asked softly.

  The boy reached for a little brass leaping trout. "We used to go fishing," he whispered. "When I was little. But we stopped after a while. I don't know why."

  "That's where we'll start," Maggie said.

  Willow was stuck. She didn't like any of the stuff on the table. She was such a desperately unhappy fifteen-year-old, and Maggie was at a loss to help her. Willow's mother was as dead to her as Grey's father was to him, but she was less articulate about explaining it than the boy had been.

  "There's nothing that fits her," the girl had whispered, unable to explain her mother's craziness. "There's nothing she loves in the whole world."

  Not even her daughter.

  "Let's try over here," Maggie said, leading her to the wall of charms.

  The girl's gaze roamed across the little dangling motifs. Finally she picked out a crown and a skull, both black. "The queen of death," Willow muttered. "She destroys everything she should love."

  They went back to the table and Maggie leaned over her, showing her how to add the little charms to the black leather cording she'd picked out.

  "Maybe you can show it to her sometime," Maggie told her. "Explain how you feel."

  "Maybe I can strangle her with it. I'll have just as much luck getting through to her."

  Maggie couldn't think of anything to say in response to that.

  Chapter Four

  After the class left, Maggie finally got around to opening the package that had been delivered earlier.

  "Oh, terrific," she muttered.

  Abby looked up from where she was clearing the table for the next class. "What's wrong?"

  Maggie held up a big bag.

  Abby frowned. "What are those?"

  "They're supposed to be volleyball-shaped beads for that event the coach hired me to do next weekend. Remember?"

  "Oh, yeah," Abby said. She came over and looked at the package. "It's for a beach volleyball camp, right?"

  "Yeah. You know how those camps are—all about team building and getting the team working together before the season starts."

  Abby glanced up at her from her five-foot-zero height. "I wouldn't know about beach volleyball, Maggie. I can practically walk under the net without ducking."

  Maggie laughed. "Anyway, the coach wanted to give the girls a reward on the last day of camp, so she asked me to hold a special class where they'd make volleyball earrings in the team colors."

  She set down the bag of volleyball beads. They hit the wooden counter with a thud.

  "I realize those high school girls on the team are taller than me," Abby said, "but I don't think their ears are quite that big."

  The beads weren't the cute little charms Maggie had visualized from the catalog picture. They were solid stainless steel balls about an inch in diameter, and weighed a ton.

  Maggie opened the bag and spilled the beads onto a tray. They clattered against the metal dish with an ear-shattering din.

  Jasper barked at the clanging, and Maggie said, "I agree, Boy. This is ridiculous."

  Abby picked up one of the beads. "These are really heavy. They can't possibly wear these as earrings."

  "I know." Maggie wrinkled her nose at them. "What am I going to do? The event's at the end of the week."

  "Well," Abby said. "You've got two choices: you can order some different beads and hope they arrive in time, or you can start a new fashion trend of girls stretching their earlobes down to their elbows."

  "Thanks a lot for your advice," Maggie muttered.

  "That's what I'm here for," the younger woman said.

  Later that day the final class let out. Maggie was exhausted, but thrilled that she'd managed to have two full classes of students who'd all gotten inspired and bought bunches of beads for their projects. It felt good to have the shop busy with customers all day.

  One of the students in her second class had actually gone down the list of course offerings and signed up for every single class. The woman's s
on had just left for college, and she was fighting empty nest syndrome with a vengeance. Maggie was thrilled to help her through it.

  Jasper was snoring under the table, and Abby had left for her late journalism class at the university, so the shop was quiet. She puttered around for a while, clearing the table, straightening chairs, and stopping to glare at the oversized volleyball beads every time she passed them sitting there on the counter.

  She set the box they'd come in on the floor and examined them. There was no way these would work for earrings. She held one of the beads in her palm. Maybe she could make necklaces out of them. She'd promised the coach earrings, but maybe she would be flexible.

  She texted the coach and then waited, stomping on the cardboard box to flatten it for the recycling bin.

  The coach texted back. She really wanted earrings, and Maggie couldn't afford to lose the contract, so she crossed her fingers and promised the class would go on as scheduled.

  Then she pulled up the wholesale bead site on her laptop and searched for some tiny volleyball charms. She found some brass ones, which wouldn't go as well with the blue-and-white school colors she was trying to match. But she was out of time, so she got out her credit card and placed an order for them. She'd find a way to make the new charms work.

  She shut her laptop while saying a quick prayer to the delivery gods that the shipment would arrive in time, then picked up the flattened cardboard box and took it out to the alley to throw it away.

  She stepped out with her head held high, bracing herself for more melodrama from her neighbor.

  But all was quiet.

  The alley, though originally intended to be a street, was actually too narrow for cars because of all the clutter that had accumulated there over the years. So the space was silent, with no through traffic.

  Maggie stepped out further into the alley, seeing only the four closed doors of the businesses that shared the space, an assortment of empty pallets that no one would agree to pay to remove, a persistent clump of pampas grass that had rooted in a crack in the pavement and refused to die, and the cluster of garbage cans at each back door, all illuminated by the waning afternoon sun which cast shadows in the narrow little space.

  But no screaming fights. No knocked-over trash cans. Nothing at all.

  Except the door to the art gallery, standing open.

  Maggie started to tiptoe past it to get to the big recycling dumpster on the other side of it, but then realized she was letting that awful woman bully her, so she marched resolutely past the opening, head held high.

  Right past Alexis's body, prone in the doorway.

  Alexis Norris had been stabbed in the back. The knife stuck out of the body, exactly like it had looked when it had been used to slash her lovely paintings.

  Maggie didn't touch it. She was sure Alexis's fingerprints were on it. And Willow's. She'd seen both of them touch it. And now, hopefully, the fingerprints of the murderer were on it, too.

  She pulled out her phone and called Lieutenant Will Ibarra at the police department.

  He was there in minutes, striding through her shop and coming out the alley door.

  "Her gallery's front door is locked," he said when he saw Maggie. "Did you do that?"

  Maggie shook her head. "I haven't moved from this spot since I saw the body." She held up the cardboard she had been recycling. "I was headed there." She motioned to the recycling dumpster.

  "And the kids?"

  "What kids?" she asked, though she knew what he was asking.

  "Willow and that boy she's always with, calls himself Grey. You seen them?" He was crouching down in the doorway, examining the body.

  She didn't answer, and he glanced up at her.

  "Um, sorry. I'm just a bit freaked out by the body," she explained, though that was only half of the reason.

  Ibarra wasn't dumb, and he knew her. He straightened up and came over to her. He started to speak, but then his team arrived, and he set them to work collecting evidence.

  Maggie still didn't move. When he came back to her side, she raised the cardboard. "Can I set this down?"

  "You alone at the shop?"

  She nodded. "Abby should be back as soon as her class lets out. But Jasper's in there. I need to…."

  She just stood there, at a loss, feeling all the burst of adrenaline she'd felt at discovering the body drain out, leaving her feeling empty, and weak, and unsure where to put her feet.

  Without another word Will took the cardboard out of her hand, then led her back into her shop and set her in a chair at the class table.

  Jasper came and sat in front of her, resting his head on her lap. She sat numbly while the dog tried to comfort her and Ibarra flipped the sign on the front door to closed.

  He sent a quick text to his team, presumably explaining where he had gone, then pulled out a chair to sit in front of her. "Tell me what happened."

  So she did, hating herself as she told about the fight between mother and daughter, and Alexis's tears as she ripped up her own paintings, and the kids in her class and their grief at the distance of their parents, and how they'd left after the class, though she didn't know where to, and how she'd held a second class, and then her assistant had left, and hours had passed since she'd seen Alexis, and how she'd gone out to get rid of the cardboard and found the body.

  She told him all of it, except the part about Willow joking about strangling her mother, because she hadn't been strangled with the mourning bead necklace, so surely it wasn't important, and because she just couldn't bring herself to believe the sad-eyed girl with the purple hair, and the boy who picked out a brass charm to remind him of the days he'd gone fishing with his father, would possibly have brutally murdered that awful woman.

  When Ibarra finished taking her statement he stood up, pocketing his notebook and pen. He leaned down to give Jasper a scratch under his chin, and then excused himself to go back to the crime scene.

  She sat there a while, just hugging Jasper and feeling numb. She saw lots of flashing blue and red lights going by on the boulevard in front of her, and eventually she got up and went out the front door, telling Jasper to wait for her inside.

  She wandered down to the art gallery's storefront next door and stood there with the crowd, who were staring in the window at the featured sculpture of a pair of dancers in marble and onyx, pulling away from each other while eternally connected.

  Chapter Five

  The gallery was lit up so the police were visible inside, examining things and collecting evidence, though nothing appeared to be out of order, and none of them seemed to be finding anything significant.

  A dark BMW pulled to a stop at the curb, behind the police cars. A man got out of the passenger side and ran toward them. "Alexis?" he shouted when he got there. "Alexis?"

  The police held him back from going into the gallery.

  "Where is she?" he yelled at them, trying to get past. "It's not true. It's not true."

  Maggie had never heard him shout before, and it was a jarring sound, jolting her out of her numbness.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Norris," an officer said to the man. He held him back from going inside, and finally Norris stopped fighting him and just stood there.

  Maggie went over to him. "Keith, I'm so sorry about your wife."

  Keith Norris looked just like what he was: a successful architect who designed upscale residential homes. He'd done the remodel of Casablanca when Maggie and her husband had decided to move to Carita, so she knew him as someone nerdy and persnickety and always dressed for success, like now, in a well-tailored tropical weight suit. He was the kind of preternaturally calm and collected man who could make witty cocktail party conversation, but was completely ill-equipped to handle any kind of violence.

  Now the eyes behind his aviator-style glasses were remote, as if what she'd said hadn't even registered to him in his grief, and his shock made him abrupt. "Maggie! What do you have to do with this?"

  "Nothing," she said. "I found her like tha
t—" she hesitated, then said, "I'm so sorry, Keith. The police will catch whoever did this."

  He froze. A look flashed across his face, wary and cautious. Then he shook his head. "Of course. Of course they will."

  "What is it?" Maggie asked.

  His expression bothered her, and her astuteness in noticing it bothered him. "Nothing," he said firmly.

  "What are you not saying?" she asked, glancing around to see if any of the police could hear. She took him by one arm. "What is it, Keith? Do you know who—"

  He shook his head again, warding off the thought. "But we know who did it, don't we?" he whispered. "Oh, Heaven help me. We know who—" He stopped. "How could this happen? It's my fault. I shouldn't have left them alone together."

  Lieutenant Ibarra came out and the other police parted to let him through, and unfortunately, he heard that last part.

  "What do you mean, Mr. Norris?" he asked.

  He didn't answer that. "You called me," he said to the cop. "You're the one who said she's… dead. Aren't you?"

  He nodded. "I'm Lieutenant Ibarra, Mr. Norris. I'm sorry for your loss."

  "Are you sure? Could there be a mistake? Maybe it isn't her?" He was grasping at straws, looking for some answer other than the obvious one none of them were saying aloud. "Maybe the body is a customer of the gallery, and Alexis is somewhere else, and she's fine—"

  "I'm sorry," the lieutenant repeated. "You'll need to officially identify her, but we know it's her."

  Keith stood there, growing very still as it sunk in that all this was real. He was more in shock than grief so far, Maggie realized, having recently been in the same situation herself.

  "Mr. Norris," Ibarra asked. "Do you know where your daughter is?"

  Keith reared back, the meaning of the wariness becoming clear now as the police narrowed in on what he'd clearly already thought himself. He shook his head. "No. It wasn't her. It couldn't be. It has to be that kid. That horrible kid."