Snake in the Glass (7 page)

“Places to go, people to see. How about you?”

“What day is today? Monday, right? Yes, it’s Monday. That means the shop’s closed, so I’ll try to get some work done, I guess. You and Nessa have plans?”

“Dinner maybe. I was going to go back to the show, see some of my mates, if you want to come.”

“You know, I think I’d like that. Feels kind of like playing hooky, but business is so slow during the show weeks that I’m not going to miss much. But I can’t take the whole day, because I think this professor guy is coming back—with a check, I hope. So, uh, not to change the subject, but . . . do you think Allison will get in touch with you? I mean, you did tell her you’d be in Tucson, right?”

He shook his head. “I did, but I’m not sure she’d contact me, not from over there. But listen, she’ll come round, in her own time.”

“I thought she had signed up for a class at the university this term, but I don’t know that she’s taking anything for credit. What do you think she should think about doing, long term?”

Frank leaned back in his chair, coffee in his hand. “I’m not the one to ask. She’s a bright enough girl, no question. If things with Jack had turned out, she’d have had a brood of kids. . . .”

“Who’d pretty much be grown by now. You a throw-back, Frank? You want to keep women in the kitchen?”

He grinned. “See, I told you not to ask me. And for the record, I like my women independent. Still, I think Allison wanted kids.”

Damn. Another thing I hadn’t considered. Cam and I had never discussed offspring; for most of our adult lives it had been a moot question, since there was nobody in our lives to have children with. Our own parents, who had died more than a decade ago, hadn’t been the greatest of role models. But I could see Cam as a father. He’d be offhand, sheepish, and adorable. I could even see the children that he and Allison might produce—with red-gold hair and plenty of brains. I shook myself: what was I thinking?

“Well,” I said crisply, “that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have a job, or something else in her life. And any woman should be able to support herself.”

“You’ll get no argument from me, Em. Are you headed downstairs?”

“I am, as soon as I finish my coffee. You?”

“I’ve a meeting or two lined up. You want me to stop by later, see if you want to go back to the show?”

“Sounds good. And maybe Cam will have touched base and we can all have dinner together.”

“Grand. See you later, then.” Frank said good-bye to the dogs and headed out the door. I had no idea how he was getting around a city he didn’t know well, but I had faith that Frank would be able to manage just about anything, with a minimum of fuss.

After I’d finished my coffee and tidied up a bit, I walked the dogs again, more for my own exercise than because they needed it, and then I meandered downstairs to the studio, running through what I wanted to work on. I figured I’d better use my time wisely, because once the gem folk moved on, business would return to normal, and the classes I taught would resume—I’d put them on hiatus while I went on vacation—eating again into my precious free time. I sighed and started gathering my tools.

I hadn’t had a chance to start a gather—I was still waiting for the glory hole to heat up—when I heard a tentative rapping on my back door. It was Denis Ryerson, and this time he’d brought a woman with him. Blast! So much for my getting anything done. I opened the door to him and said, “I thought you were going to call first? All right, come in.”

He sidled in, uncertain. “I hope I haven’t come at a bad time? I took a chance you’d be here. I was hoping to get started today. Oh, sorry—this is my wife, Elizabeth.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said with minimal courtesy. Elizabeth looked too brittle to me, and it was clear she didn’t want to be here. In any case, I really was itching to get started on my own work and I had no patience for social chat. “It’s okay, Denis.”

“Great! Oh, I brought that check along.”

“Good.” I took the check from his outstretched hand, folded it, and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans.

Denis turned to his wife, who looked as though she was afraid a glass piece would jump out and bite her. “Why don’t you go look at the items in the shop? I won’t be long.”

“All right,” she said. She paid no attention to me.

When Elizabeth had taken herself to the shop, I asked, “Have you told her what you’re doing?”

“No. I said I was investing in your business, and I’d promised you a check today. Can we speed this up? She wants to get to the office—she’s in insurance—and I told her I’d drop her off.” He glanced nervously at his wife.

“Fine.” I led him over to the space between my furnace and my annealer, where the glass kiln sat. It was a top loader, maybe three feet high, with controls on the front. “I told you about the kiln here. What you see is what you get. The temperature control is here on the front, and you’ll have to give it time to heat up.” I opened the top lid. “You just place your material on the floor inside, here. Do you have a strategy for temperatures for your stones?”

“I thought I’d start by trying a range of temperatures and a range of times, then narrow it down. This is just preliminary. It might not even work.”

“What kind of volume are you talking about? I mean, a couple of stones at a time, or a couple of pounds?” I wondered how many stones he was willing to sacrifice to his experimenting.

“Oh, not much at once. A handful maybe. The unpolished stones—the rough—are not very valuable at this point—heck, you can buy them by the pound. So it’s no great loss if this doesn’t work. I just look at it as a business investment. How do you recommend I put them in the kiln?”

“I’ve got some small crucibles that should work, and I’ll show you how to get them in and out of the kiln. You have to remember everything is hot, even though you can’t tell by looking at it.” An awful thought occurred to me. “Is this process dangerous? Because I’m not sure my insurance covers activities outside of normal glassblowing.”

He shrugged. “Sometimes stones have been known to blow up.”

“Then you’re wearing safety goggles, at a minimum. Not negotiable. And maybe you’d better sign a standard liability waiver.” I made my students sign something, but I wasn’t sure if that would apply here. Still, it would be better than nothing. I was beginning to wonder what I had let myself in for.

“No problem. I understand your concerns, and I certainly don’t want to put myself at risk, or anyone else. Not for a bunch of stones.”

Elizabeth stuck her head in the door. “Are you about done, Denis?”

“Just another minute or two,” he replied. He turned so that his back blocked his wife’s view of us. “Would you like to see what I’m talking about?” he whispered.

“I guess.” I watched as he reached into his pocket and fished out a bag filled with what looked like gravel.

Denis opened it and poured a portion of the contents onto his hand, where they glinted with a dull green light. “Arizona rough. Not very impressive, I’ll admit, but they look a bit better when they’ve been cut and polished. I’m hoping to make them even better than that.”

“What’re you aiming for?”

“If I’m lucky, they’ll come out a darker, richer green, closer to emerald, although they’ll probably always have a yellowish cast, as opposed to emerald’s rather bluish tone. Something to shoot for, isn’t it? In any case, darker is better—and more valuable. Is there anything else I should know about the kiln?”

I thought for a moment. “No, I think we’re good.”

“Terrific! I think I can fit in the twenty hours during the next week.”

A week? This guy really was in a hurry. Still, I had no reason to say no, as long as he stuck to the rules I had laid out. “Let’s get that paperwork out of the way. I’ll show you the crucibles and the tongs, and how to turn the kiln on and off, and you’ll be all set to start later today. Remember to leave time for it to heat up.”

“Great!”

Denis certainly was enthusiastic. I tracked down some standard boilerplate forms for studio rental and liability, and we duly signed and copied them. I collected five or six crucibles from wherever they had wandered to in the studio, and showed him how to manipulate them with the tongs. When I glanced at the clock, I realized that it was after ten. “You’ll be back later? I should be back here by four, maybe five.”

“That’s good for me. I’ll be here.”

“Denis!” Elizabeth stood in the doorway, looking annoyed.

“All done here. Thanks, Em,” he said in a falsely hearty voice.

“Later,” I said, and politely hurried Denis and his petulant wife out the door so I could actually work.

The furnace seemed to be functioning just the way it should, and I had a nice batch of clear glass waiting for me. I still felt a little rusty, so I started working on a series of tumblers, which always sold well, matched in size but varied in color, thanks to the different color frits I added. I was stowing the last of an even dozen in the annealer to cool when I realized it was noon and Frank should be back soon. I shut down the glory hole I had been using, checked the settings on the annealer, tidied up, and went into the shop.

I was startled when the phone rang. “Shards,” I said crisply.

“Your cell’s off.” Matt.

“Hello to you too. I wasn’t expecting any calls, and I was working. Anyway, I’m in the shop at the moment. Did you want something in particular?”

“To invite you to dinner. At my place.”

Oh. Dinner at Lorena’s—no, at Matt’s house. I guess I was ready to handle that. “Tonight?

Matt laughed. “Yes, tonight, if that works.”

I took a breath. “Sure, sounds good. Shall I meet you there?”

“If you don’t mind. You know the way?”

“I can find it.” I didn’t admit I had driven by the house once, a long time ago, when I had thought . . . “Seven?” I figured I’d have to babysit Denis for a while, make sure he didn’t blow himself up.

“Seven would be fine.” He hung up before I could change my mind.

Frank arrived as I was hanging up the phone. “Are we on for another go?” he asked me.

“I am indeed, Frank. I had fun yesterday, and now you tell me there’s more?”

I locked up, and we set off along the same path as the day before.

“I need to be back by four, if that’s okay. My peridot guy really wants to get started, so I said I’d give him a few hours today. Tell me, can just changing the color of some stones make them that much more valuable?”

“Ah, that’s a tricky question. Maybe, at least at first, until the market catches up. There’s often a stampede to a new thing, and then the interest fades.”

“Well, he said he was working with Arizona stones and they hadn’t cost him much, so he didn’t have a lot to lose if things didn’t work out. Would he have gotten the stones from those people we talked to yesterday?”

“Most likely—they’ve got a pretty good grip on local output, I hear.”

This time when we arrived at the convention center, Frank had a word with the person at the entrance, and once we were inside, he headed for a section we hadn’t seen before, down a long hall away from the main hullabaloo. There was a sign over the door at the end of the hall: “Dealers Only.” Frank presented the man at the door with a ticket of some sort, then nodded toward me. “She’s with me.” We were ushered through with no trouble.

Inside I took a moment to get my bearings. There were similarities to the main space: rows of booths filled the room. But the booths were both larger and less crowded with merchandise, and there were far fewer people, not many of whom were tourists or browsers. Most looked intent and serious.

I turned to Frank. “Are you doing business today?”

“Maybe. It’s always good to talk to some of these guys, find out what’s going on in the markets—as much as they’ll tell me, anyway.”

“You mean they don’t always tell the truth?”

Frank flashed me a smile. “Not all of it. Come on, let me introduce you to one of my old pals.”

He led me to a booth across the room, with a man and a woman behind it. Both greeted Frank warmly. “You old crank, what got you out of Oz and all the way to Tucson?” the woman asked. She was a striking woman whose age fell somewhere between mine and Frank’s, although it was hard to pin down since her skin showed evidence of time spent in the sun. A lot of time. I wondered if she and Frank had had . . . something, sometime.

“Ah, Miranda. It was your siren call, of course.”

“Go on! And don’t make Stewart here defend my honor.”

“Bosh—I could take him one-handed. How are you, then?”

“Couldn’t be better, Frank,” Stewart boomed. “Wish the economy would improve, but we’re holding our own. You buying or selling?”

“Neither right now, although if the right deal came along . . . Let me introduce you to Em Dowell—she’s a glassblower here in Tucson.”

“And how do you know this lovely lady, so far from home? Has he been telling you he’s a millionaire ten times over?”

I laughed. “Does Frank have money? Actually we met because his niece took a class from me.” That was an oversimplified explanation, but true.

Stewart turned back to Frank. “You have relatives, man? I thought you were a lone wolf.”

“That would be your sister’s daughter, Frank?” Miranda said more softly. I’d guessed right—they must have been close at one point, if she knew about Frank’s family.

“She is, all grown up now. Back in Ireland for the moment. So, tell me . . .” Frank and Stewart leapt into an arcane discussion of international gem markets that left me baffled.

Miranda was kind enough to notice. “Are you interested in stones?”

“Until yesterday I would have said no—I’ve got my own business here, and any spare cash I have goes right back into that. But there’s some lovely stuff here. Have you been doing this long?”

“Most of my adult life. It kinds of gets into your blood, always hunting for something new or better. The diamond industry has changed quite a bit over the past decade or two, so it’s exciting to try to stay on top of things.”