High Strung: A Glass Bead Mystery (The Glass Bead Mystery Series) (12 page)

The Animal Control center was located in a not-so-charming neighborhood that had a hazardous waste disposal depot at one end, and a water treatment plant at the other.

“
Did any gray cats arrive in the last day?” I asked the woman behind the counter. She’d looked like she was doing some important work on the computer when I came in, her thick glasses pressed close to the screen, her dry red lips pursed in concentration.

“
Nope. Sorry ma’am. Only a kitten and an orange tabby,” she said, distractedly, her eyes still on the computer screen. “You’re welcome to go and look, if you want. What you see back there is what we got.”

I had to see for myself. As I turned the corner to go into the kennel area
, I saw what was consuming the clerk’s attention: YouTube cat videos. Oh yes, extremely important work. You’d think if she needed to see some cats, she’d walk about twelve feet and see some real live ones who could use some attention, and I’m sure would be doing adorable things, if only given the chance.

The first aisle was filled with rows and rows of
cats in cages. Many of them sat still, paws tucked beneath them staring out through the bars, quiet and solemn. Others were asleep, and few meowed urgently, trying to get anyone’s attention. It was excruciating to see all of these missing and unloved cats, and I wished I could adopt them all. As I looked in each cage, I hoped to see Gumdrop’s big green eyes staring out at me, but no luck, he wasn’t here.

I turned the corner and
walked by the wall of cages that held barking dogs of all sizes and colors. At least a dozen mutts were jumping against the wire cages. I felt sick for the poor dogs that must be scared to death and missing their owners. If Marta were here she’d correct me and tell me these animals were missing their guardians, not their owners. And then I’d have to punch her in the mouth.

As I passed one cage, I stopped to look at a small dark-colored dog with a white stripe across
his head that was barking and pawing at the metal doors. He looked like many other dogs here at the pound—except this particular guy looked well cared for and pudgy around the middle. I put my finger up to the cage, and he lunged at it. “RRRRRRRAFFFF!”

“
Wait a second. I know you! You’re Cheeto, or Tito, or something! What in the world are you doing here?” I said to the furry little monster.

The dog was jumping around wildly at this point, recognizing me, recognizing his name, or maybe just being a small hyper dog. I went out to the front counter to talk with the attendant.

“Do you know anything about the dog in kennel seven?” I asked. “I think he may belong to a friend of mine.”

The clerk typ
ed on the keyboard, and a few mouse clicks later, I had an answer. “He was brought in earlier today. Someone dropped him off, said they found him running on the street. No tags.” She had pulled back from her screen and squinted at me, trying to refocus her eyes at a distance farther than three inches away.

“
I am certain this dog belongs to a friend of mine,” I said. “How much will it cost me to spring him from jail?

“
It’s $62.50.”

I handed her my VISA card.
“Sold.” At least someone was getting her pet back today.

I jotted my number down on a scrap of paper and handed it to the woman.
“Call me if a big fluffy gray cat comes in.”

She nodded, and resumed her close inspection of whatever it was on the computer screen
, so close her nose was nearly touching the monitor. It was probably a video of a cat playing a piano.

Luckily, I already
had Gumdrop’s carrier in the car, so I jammed Tito inside, making sure I didn’t lose any fingers in the process, and drove straight to Aztec Beads.

Tracy wasn’t at her usual station by the front door when I arrived at Aztec Beads with Tito. Not knowing what else to do, I took him out to the small yard and released him from the carrier. I was glad he decided not to attack me. Instead, he ran off to mark his territory in the dense greenery around the patio.

As I stood under the balcony, I looked up and saw a thin wire hanging down between the floorboards of the deck above me. It looked like the kind of cord that
had held Rosie’s necklace together. I decided to take a closer look. Maybe this wire or something else on the balcony could give me a clue about what had happened the night before.

There was a jewelry workshop going on in the classroom
, and no one was in the shop. Tracy was probably still at the hospital with her mom. The coast was clear. I could go upstairs and take a look around without anyone wondering what I was doing.

I crept up the back stairs and onto the balcony. The thin
beading wire was wedged between two planks near the top stair. It didn’t look like anyone from the police department had spent any time here looking at this as a crime scene. There was no crime-scene tape or fingerprint dust. That must have meant Detective Grant was still trying to decide if Rosie’s near-fatal strangulation was simply an accident that didn’t need any investigation, or if it was an attempted murder. I looked to see if there were any beads from Rosie’s necklace lying around. I didn’t see any, but I did see the scrapes on the stairs where Rosie had struggled to get her feet back underneath her.

I decided to
be bold and see if I could look around the apartment. Maybe something in there would help me discover whether Tracy was involved in her mother’s “accident” and perhaps help me determine if there was any reason to think Tracy would want Misty dead.

One
of the best things would be to discover something that would clear Tessa as a suspect. I tried the sliding glass door, but it was locked. I pulled a pen out of my handbag and used its lid to see if I could pop the lock on the door. No such luck. I simply wasn’t as competent as MacGyver, from the eighties television show, when it came to improvising tools. If MacGyver were here, he’d have had this door open in about thirty seconds, using only a piece of dental floss and the lint from his pockets. I decided I could at least get the wire out from between the floorboards with my pen, and I knelt down at the bannister to see if I could get it free. I had just grabbed hold of the end of the string and was giving it a good tug when the sliding glass door behind me flew open.

“
Get out of here!” It was Tracy, standing in the doorway, her body silhouetted by the lights in the living room behind her. She looked much stronger than I’d seen her before, hands held tightly, elbows bent, like a boxer, right for a fight.

I jumped up.
“Hey, wait, Tracy. It’s Jax,” I said, trying to calm her.

“
Wh- wh- what are you doing here? I thought you were trying to break in. We’ve had some trouble with that before, people coming up from the alley and trying to unlock the sliding glass door.” Had she seen me only seconds before, I would have been one of the people she caught trying to do just that.

“
I wanted to check around up here. About your mom’s accident.”

Tracy was still wound up.
“Why would you want to do that, Jax? Coming back to the scene of the crime?”

“
No, I dropped off Tito—did you know he was missing?” I said, grasping at anything that might turn her away from the idea that I had anything to do with Rosie’s injury. “Look, I saw some beading wire stuck between a couple of the boards up here. I wanted to check it out and see if it might be a clue.”

“
Well, you can stop snooping around and get out of here.” Tracy’s voice trembled.

“
Hey, slow down, I’m not doing anything wrong here. I’m trying to help. I’d like to figure out who hurt your mom.”

Tears streaked Tracy
’s face. “It was you, Jax!” she shouted.

“
How could that be?” I said, shocked. “I tried to save your mom. I was right there with you, trying to save her!” I was shouting now, too, so frazzled from the last two days of craziness that I couldn’t keep myself pulled together.

“
I didn’t see anyone with my mom when I first found her choking. You could have pushed her and left her to die,” Tracy said. “Then you came back to finish her off.” Her shouting decreased as she wiped the tears from her face. Tracy was afraid. I couldn’t tell if she was afraid of me, or if it was the thought of losing her mom that frightened her more.

“
Tracy, look, I wouldn’t do that,” I said, forcing myself to relax. My hands were balled into fists, and I opened them, palms out, trying to show her I meant no harm to her or her mother. But she wouldn’t let down her guard.

“
Jax. Get out!” she demanded. “Just leave before I call the police!”

I sat in the Ladybug, my heart pounding. I needed some answers and there was one person who I knew might be able help—if she was well enough to talk to me. I headed for the hospital. I hated going back after having been there late last night. Hospitals give me the heebie-jeebies.

I hoped Rosie would finally be conscious, and help sort this mess out. If she said she had simply tripped or fallen, then we could all take a big step back and stop pointing fingers at each other about who had tried to murder her. We could instead focus on who killed Misty. Better yet, we could let Detective Grant figure out what happened,
and all of us could get back to some semblance of a normal life.

I found Rosie
’s room and knocked quietly on the closed door. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a big guy with a beer belly hanging over his belt yanked the door open. He looked like he was expecting someone else.

“
Hey, you here to see Leona?”

“
Is Rosie here?” I asked in my quiet voice reserved for hospitals and libraries. But, as I heard the ruckus from inside the room, I realized there was absolutely no need to be quiet. There was a slew of people in the room—all family and friends of Rosie’s roommate Leona. They had spread a big picnic across the hospital bed, and everyone was diving into fried chicken and coleslaw. Was that a cooler on the floor?

“That grumpy, bossy
woman?” Leona’s friend asked. “Yeah, she’s here, but she’s not talkin’ so much since they gave her a shot. She’d gotten all up in my face about us bein’ so loud.”

I could imagine. Rosie was an expert at
“up in your face,” although I couldn’t see how she could have done it while wearing an oxygen mask.

“
Well, you guys
are
being a bit loud,” I said, but Leona’s friend wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. He was opening a giant bag of chips with his teeth and checking to see if he could find a baseball game on the TV.

I sat down next to Rosie’s bed
. She wasn’t moving, but she wasn’t really asleep. If you’d asked me, she looked like she was pretending to sleep. My sister Connie and I used to pretend like that when our mom came to our room and accused us of playing instead of sleeping. I hoped Rosie was just pretending.

“
Rosie?”

Silence. All except for Leo
na’s party going on about eight feet away.

Rosie
’s hands, looking remarkably small, rested on top of the blankets by her sides. I put a hand on top of hers, glad to feel its warmth. I’d never seen her so calm, but right now I’d love to see her yelling at someone, to see she was back to her version of normal: high strung.

She had a gauze dressing around her neck, a clear plastic oxygen mask over her face and mouth, and all sorts of tubes and wires attached to her. Next to the bed a machine beeped and buzzed, and a read-out showed all sorts of things
: heart rate, oxygen levels, temperature, and possibly any recent seismic activity.

Her eyes fluttered and opened. She brought her finger up to her mask and tapped on the side of it. Her lips parted. She was trying to communicate. I pressed the nurse
’s call button. It was a major miracle when someone came in right away. The nurse looked more like a bouncer than a medical professional, but what we needed at that moment was a bouncer, so it worked out perfectly. The nurse’s nametag said Edward. Not Eddie. Not Ed. Edward. Edward was one big, serious dude in aqua scrubs.

“
Okay, Leona, time for everyone to go,” said the nurse. All of Leona’s friends and relatives looked disappointed. Their party was going to have to move. “All of you. Right now. Out of here.” Edward was holding the door open for the group of picnickers. Grudgingly, they each picked up something and headed out the door.

“
She was pointing to her mouth,” I told Edward. “I didn’t want to take off her mask without you here.”

“
Good thinking,” the nurse said. “People come in here and think they’ve seen enough medical shows on TV that they know what they should do, but they don’t.”

Edward reached down and gently pulled the mask away from Rosie
’s face.

“
Hello there, beautiful,” he said with a big smile.

In her weak state
, she beckoned him closer to her.

“
Thanks for getting rid of those assholes,” Rosie whispered.

I had trouble keeping a straight face.
One thing I knew for sure: Rosie was going to survive. Edward was a true medical pro, and he helped Rosie get comfortable, propped her up in bed, and gave her some juice. He checked her monitors and then left us alone. Leona was still on the other side of the curtain, but since all of her guests had left, the room was absolutely silent except for the machines humming quietly.

“
Do you feel like talking?” I asked.

Rosie nodded her head.

“I need to tell you I found Tito at the pound today and brought him back to your house.” It was probably not the best move I’d ever made, but I wanted Rosie to know it had happened, and that her dog was safe. I thought it was better to tell her about that, rather than mentioning that Tracy had found me lurking on the balcony of her apartment, and was ready to call the cops before I bolted out of there.

Rosie sat up in bed, the wires and tubes straining against her. She looked ready to jump out of bed and go check on Tito to make sure he was fine.

“It’s okay. He’s happy now that he’s home. It sounds like you didn’t know he was missing.”

“
I didn’t. Thank you, Jax, for saving him,” Rosie said, her voice stronger than I expected. Even so, I could tell it was hard for her to speak.

“
Rosie, what I need to know,” I said, “is what happened last night. Did someone try to strangle you? Did someone push you down?”

She
was quiet for a while before answering. I’m sure she was trying to piece her memories together, as I had tried to do when I was talking with Tessa about what had happened.

“
I was standing at the railing, looking down at the party below, and I was trying to relax after getting angry with Tracy. I was upset with myself for exploding.” Rosie swallowed hard, either from physical pain or from the memory of the fight with her daughter, but probably a little of both. “I heard someone come up from behind me. The person grabbed my necklace and started to pull it tight around my throat. After that, I’m not so sure what happened. I think someone pushed me, and I remember hitting the stairs hard, or maybe I tripped. I can’t remember. It’s all a blur.”

“
Oh, Rosie,” I said, now holding her hand with both of mine.

“
I was choking, choking, that’s all I can remember before everything went dark.”

“
Do you remember anyone there with you?” I asked.

“
You were, Jax, you were there.”

“
Right, right, I was there helping you get the necklace off and cutting you loose.”

“
I don’t know who else was there. All I remember is you.”

“
Do you remember Tracy being there?”

“Oh,
Tracy
was
there, that’s right. I don’t remember seeing her. But I could hear her crying and screaming.”

I heard a cell phone vibrate. It was on the nightstand
, wedged between an institutional box of tissue and one of those pink trays shaped like a kidney bean—I have always wondered what those trays were for. Rosie reached for the phone, and I grabbed it, glancing down at the screen as I passed it to her.

Six voicemail messages from a phone number that looked like
the one Detective Grant had scribbled on a scrap of paper and handed to me, and had popped up on my phone early today. When Rosie finally talked with him, she’d tell him someone grabbed her necklace and pushed her. And she’d tell him that what she remembered when she was being strangled was that I was there.

Rosie let the call go to voicemail
. I only had a short time to sort things out before she talked to the detective.

And then I was going to be in big trouble.