Sketcher in the Rye: (27 page)

Keep reading for a preview of the first book in the Crystal Shop Mystery series by Sharon Pape

ALIBIS AND AMETHYSTS

Available now from InterMix

 

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 it would 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 pursued. 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 takig 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.”