Alibis and Amethysts

INTERMIX BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA)

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not have
any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

ALIBIS AND AMETHYSTS

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY

InterMix eBook edition / August 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Sharon Pape.

Excerpt from
Sketcher in the Rye
copyright © 2013 by Sharon Pape.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized
editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA),

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-1-101-63525-4

INTERMIX

InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group

and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA),

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA)

Dear Reader,

I’ve always loved mysteries. I was hooked on them even before I found Carolyn Keene’s
Nancy Drew books and her Dana Girls series, which I have to admit I liked better.
I can no longer recall the name of the series that first introduced me to the mystery
genre, but I do remember the excitement I felt when my friend and I unexpectedly came
across another book in the series at our local library. It was like finding hidden
treasure. I don’t think we would have been more excited if we’d come across a pirate’s
chest overflowing with doubloons. (I should probably emphasize that we were really
young at the time.) But to this day, the musty smell of old books beckons to me with
the allure of undiscovered treasures.

There’s another kind of mystery I’ve always loved—the mystery attached to paranormal
phenomena. Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean horror or books with what I call
“the boo factor.” I’m talking about what I like to call “paranormal lite.” I’ve found
that traditional mysteries coupled with a paranormal twist can be twice as entertaining
and lead to some really funny situations.

Alibis and Amethysts, the first book of my new Crystal Shop Mysteries, has a paranormal
subplot, along with the murder mystery. When Jaye Saylor follows her best buddy, Sierra,
out to Sedona, Arizona, life is far from the peaceful, small town experience she’d
imagined. Both women have to find new ways to make their living in Sedona. Jaye gave
up teaching geology to open a crystal and gemstone shop. And Sierra, with her indomitable,
can-do spirit, opens a bakery, even though she’s never done any baking.

They haven’t been in Sedona long, before they find themselves the prime suspects in
the murder of Sierra’s competition. Daniel Yazzi, their full-blooded Navajo friend,
joins them in their quest to find the real killer. Along the way, they get some unexpected
help from a strange, little animal they’ve never seen before and can’t find on any
internet searches. But Daniel’s grandmother, who comes from a long line of medicine
women, has her own theory on the origin of their new furry companion.

I’ve been having a great time working with the characters in this new series. I hope
you’ll visit them and all their quirky friends, who live and work among the majestic
Red Rocks of Sedona, when Alibis and Amethysts debuts on August 20th, from InterMix.

Sharon Pape

Chapter 1

Jaye Saylor was already late. She turned off the lights that bathed the little crystal
and gemstone shop in a rosy glow during business hours and switched on the harsher
security fluorescents for the night. Her last customers, two middle-aged sisters,
had dawdled and browsed, dithered and debated for over an hour before finally settling
on a small fluorite pendant for a friend dealing with arthritis. Normally Jaye didn’t
mind the lingerers, but this day had been one of her busiest since opening Crystal
Clear. She hadn’t even had time for lunch, so she was hungry as well as tired. And
Sierra was no doubt holding down a coveted table in the cozy back room at Finnegan’s
Fajitas, waiting for her. As a general rule, Quinn Finnegan wouldn’t seat anyone until
their whole party was present, but he made discreet exceptions for the other shopkeepers.
Sedona was, after all, a small town with a residential population of ten thousand.
This was a fact that could easily be overlooked, since the tourist presence could
swell that number well into six figures for a good portion of the year.

Jaye stole a quick look at herself in the mirror atop the display case. Her ponytail
had survived the long day, except for a few stray wisps that had escaped the elastic
band. Her face was another matter. She looked as drained as she felt. Nothing that
a bright punch of color on her cheeks and lips couldn’t fix, but that would mean running
upstairs to her apartment over the store. The natural look would have to do. Patience
was not one of Sierra’s virtues.

Jaye plucked her handbag and a sweater from beneath the counter, set the security
system and double-timed it to the front door. She had turned the “Open” sign to “Closed”
as soon as the sisters had cleared the threshold, so all she had to do was lock the
door behind her.

She hadn’t even had a chance to poke her head outside for a breath of fresh air until
now. Inhaling deeply, she thought about how much cleaner that air must have been back
before Henry Ford. To her way of thinking, the government had dropped the ball when
it came to Sedona. The entire Red Rock area should have been declared a state or national
park long ago, before contractors with dollar signs for scruples started chopping
it up and selling it off. To their credit, most of the architects had made an attempt
to blend their structures into the natural landscape. But how much more spectacular
would it have been if left untouched by human hands?

A cool breeze caught Jaye as she hurried across the tiny parking lot to her car. It
was mid-April, and the temperature had been lolling in the fifties for a week now
as if lacking the energy to make a run for higher numbers. Although Arizona didn’t
switch to daylight saving time with the rest of the nation, the sun was still a good
hour or more away from setting. It was perched atop the westernmost cliff as if it
had been snagged by that craggy summit and prevented from continuing its journey to
the horizon.

Jaye slid into the driver’s seat, as wowed by the stunning beauty of the red monoliths
as the first time she’d seen them. It was easy to understand why Sedona had been an
artist’s community even before it became a mecca for tourists and New Age enthusiasts.
She’d lived there for nearly six months now, but it never got old. She’d taken to
factoring a few extra minutes into any errands she had to run, because somewhere along
the way she was bound to lose herself in the view. There was simply no point in fighting
it. She’d also given up trying to keep her car the sparkling white it had been when
she’d proudly driven it off the dealer’s lot. After a month of diligent but futile
washings, she’d learned to love the dusty red patina it so quickly reacquired courtesy
of the local sediment.

She eased into the traffic that was thankfully beginning to thin out at that hour.
According to the locals, the congestion had been worse before the introduction of
the roundabouts that did away with a lot of the traffic lights and the long queues
of cars that built up at them. Unfortunately, on the weekends even the roundabouts
often became bogged down in gridlock. The merchants all grumbled about the situation,
but good-naturedly and in the nicest of terms. After all, tourist dollars supported
the town, and with the exception of a small airport atop Airport Mesa, those tourists
needed cars and buses to transport them there.

The location of Jaye’s shop at one of the three entrances into Sedona was also a mixed
blessing. While it gave her the jump on a lot of the other crystal shops in the center
of town, it was hard for her to attend to mundane necessities like shopping for groceries
or going to the post office and dry cleaners during the abbreviated lunchtime she
usually allowed herself. She’d been thinking of hiring some part-time help if business
continued at its present clip. Even then it would be hard to stay away for too long,
since her success in such a saturated market was due in large measure to the expertise
she brought to the subject.

Back in her sophomore year at Cornell when she’d elected to major in geology, she
could never have imagined that after teaching earth science to middle schoolers for
eight years, she’d find herself the proprietor of a crystal shop in the middle of
Arizona. And all because her college roommate and best friend had come through Sedona
on vacation, fallen in love with the place and decided to stay. A fairly common occurrence
in the town, as it turned out. When Sierra had called Jaye to tell her that she wouldn’t
be returning to the East Coast and that she was opening a bakery in Sedona, Jaye had
literally dropped the phone.

“Do you even know how to bake?” she’d asked once she’d retrieved it.

“Not exactly,” Sierra had hedged, “but I always watched my grandmother bake. Anyway,”
she’d added brightly, “how hard could it be?”

Jaye hadn’t felt equipped to answer that question. All she had were a few hazy memories
of helping her mother bake brownies and cupcakes. But that was before she’d turned
seven. She was very sure about the timing of it, because on her seventh birthday a
drunk driver barreling down the highway in the wrong direction had left her an orphan.
Although she didn’t remember if baking was difficult or if it took a specific talent,
common sense told her that it would require being awake before the roosters. She’d
felt obliged to point out this inescapable truth, because Sierra was hard to drag
out of bed before noon; the girl loved her sleep.

“Have you considered the fact that you’ll have to be up before dawn every day in order
to have fresh inventory when you open?” Jaye had asked. There’d been a brief pause
during which she could picture the wheels spinning madly in Sierra’s head as she tried
to navigate around this little speed bump.

“Then I’ll learn to be a morning person,” she’d said finally and with an edge of pique,
indicating that she’d not only committed to the idea but slammed the door firmly shut
on any further debate.

Jaye inched past the entrance to Tlaquepaque, the open-air arts and crafts mall that
resembled a lovely, old Mexican village. As she stopped to leave room for a car that
was exiting the mall, she reflected on the irony of her current situation. After trying
to play devil’s advocate for Sierra, here
she
was a year later, having followed in her friend’s “westward ho” footsteps. Uprooting
herself had been a lot easier than she’d anticipated, mostly because she was pretty
much rootless. With no close family to take her in, she’d grown up in a series of
foster families who’d treated her well for the most part but had shown no interest
in adopting a child already half grown. Since moving from one family to another often
meant switching schools, her first enduring friendship had been with Sierra, and Jaye
was grateful every day that fate and Cornell University had brought them together.

Had she not known Sierra, she would never have moved to Sedona or opened her shop,
probably the two best decisions of her life. Working with the crystals and gemstones
appealed to an artistic side she hadn’t even known she had. And dealing with tourists
was almost always an upbeat experience. People on vacation were people at their most
carefree and happy.

She’d reached the intersection where the road to the left led to West Sedona, where
most of the stores and businesses that served the resident population were located.
Sierra’s bakery, Cravings!, was to the right in the quaint, touristy section known
as Uptown Sedona. During the day, parking along the main street there was close to
impossible, but at six twenty in the evening Jaye had her choice of several prime
spots, including one right in front of Finnegan’s. She found Sierra, as expected,
in the restaurant’s back room. She was sipping an apricot margarita, heavy on the
salt, and drumming her fingers on the tabletop.

“Hey, girl—I was about to give up on you.”

“I doubt it,” Jaye said with a grin, “unless you were planning to take your drink
home in a doggie bag.” She slid into the seat across from her friend. “You forget
that I know all your secrets. Anything apricot is impossible for you to pass up.”

“Okay, you’ve got me there. But you still owe me big-time—I packed away a whole basket
of tortilla chips while I was waiting for you. I don’t even want to guess how many
calories and fat were involved.”

Jaye smiled and shook her head. “Put it on my tab.” They’d started “running tabs”
for each other back in college when Jaye had agreed to a double date with Sierra,
her boyfriend at the time and his cousin. The cousin had proven to be as arrogant
as he was nerdy—a hard combination to beat. As payback, Sierra had had to do Jaye’s
laundry for a month.

A busboy appeared to replace the empty basket of chips with a full one and to give
them some fresh salsa. Quinn Finnegan came by right behind him to tell Jaye how glad
he was to see her there. The man had restaurant savvy down pat. He made every patron
feel as if he’d opened his doors specifically for them. Plus his kitchen served up
great food at reasonable prices.

“Susana made some great fish tacos tonight,” he said. “Even better than Luisa’s,”
he added in a discreet whisper.

“Who’s Susana?” Sierra asked.

“Luisa’s cousin; she’s filling in while my wife’s down in Mexico visiting her family.
Would you believe I ate ten of those tacos today?”

Jaye had no trouble believing it. Quinn was looking more like a red-haired Pillsbury
Dough Boy every day. The shirt buttons over his ballooning waist were on the verge
of popping like mini champagne corks. But in spite of Quinn’s glowing recommendation,
when the waiter appeared to take their order, the two women passed on the tacos and
ordered fajitas instead, chicken for Sierra, vegetable for Jaye.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Sierra said, shaking her head.

Jaye loaded some salsa onto a tortilla chip. “What’s that?”

“Being a vegetarian for so many years without ever falling off the wagon. When I tried
it, I didn’t make it past the first week.”

“Yeah, and I remember that week. You weren’t any fun at all. What was your name then?”

“Brooke,” Sierra said. “I figured if I was going to be a vegetarian, I should sound
like I was in sync with nature.”

“Let’s see. . . . By my count ‘Sierra’ is . . . number eight?”

“Legally I only changed my name five times,” Sierra said. “Besides, different stages
in life call for different names. Of course, you have to know your limitations. Personally,
I could never pull off ‘Tiffany’ or ‘Lola.’ But with your looks, you could pull off
just about any name—maybe even ‘Gertrude.’”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“Of course not.” Sierra smiled in bemusement. “Dark hair, green eyes, heart-shaped
face . . . Seriously, girl, why would anyone be complimenting you?” She took a moment
to drain the last of her margarita. “You can’t tell me you’ve never wanted to change
your name,” she went on. When Sierra hooked into a subject, it wasn’t easy to change
the trajectory of the conversation.

“Actually, I did think about it once during our freshman year. You were calling yourself
‘Hannah’ at the time, because you thought it was a good, solid name, the name of a
scholar who would work hard and earn a high GPA. I guess I was intrigued by the concept
of taking on a different persona��sort of like starting over.”

“You never told me that.” Sierra sounded surprised and a bit offended that her friend
had been holding back.

Jaye shrugged. “It wasn’t worth mentioning. After all of two seconds I realized I
could never do it. My name is the only thing I have left from my mom and dad.”

“Okay, I get it,” Sierra said. “But FYI—you shouldn’t play the ‘poor little orphan’
card too often.”

If those words had come from anyone else, Jaye would have immediately deleted that
person from her list of friends, both on and off Facebook. But since they’d come from
Sierra, she found herself laughing instead. “You’re rationing me?”

“I’m just looking out for you. You don’t want your material to lose its punch, do
you?”

Jaye nearly choked on the chip she was nibbling. There was no way to predict what
might come out of Sierra’s mouth at any given moment. She’d made Jaye so wary and
uncomfortable when they’d first met that Jaye had considered asking for a different
dorm assignment. But after a month of living together in close quarters, it had quickly
become apparent that there was no one kinder or more compassionate than her eccentric
roomy.

Dinner arrived, sizzling hot and smelling richly of peppers, onions and garlic. Conversation
was suspended while they went about assembling their fajita wraps.

“I forgot to tell you—Peggy Krueger literally crashed into my cart in the supermarket
yesterday,” Jaye said, using her napkin to blot a drop of sauce that was working its
way down her chin. “I guess I should be grateful we weren’t in our cars. She rounded
the corner into the cereal aisle like she thought she was at Daytona. It took a while
for my arms to stop vibrating from the impact. She got all flustered and started to
apologize—until she realized it was
my
cart she’d hit. Good-bye, apology; hello, venomous glare.”