The Case of the Missing Pendant

In early March, I won a pendant on Ebay that was everything I could not find in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. It was a huge,lustrous orange in a Navaho shadow box style, without the garish silver to detract from the sunny stone. The size was unusually large for a shell, which tends to fragment. I waited and waited; meanwhile, the seller's bad feedbck grew due to no shows, until he was eventually banned rom Ebay. I began working with the store directly, as they had left a phone number in their feedback. The store employee I began dealing with, L, did his best and soon ascertained that my piece had been sent to Joe, a jeweler on a reservation near Albuquerque, which was closed on Good Friday. L did not give me Joe's exact pueblo or number due to privacy concerns, but I did hear through a 3-way telephone conversation we all had, that the pendant was in Joe's possession. Which seemed incredibly inconvenient at the time, but turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Fast-forward to 2 weeks later, and the disconnection of all of the seller's telephone lines. I wrote to the other buyers who left feedback about being burned, and began to correspond with another buyer, PL. He let me know that the seller had skipped town with all of the jewlery in his possession. Fortunately, I knew, mine was not in that unfortunate pile. PL gave me the name of the seller's wife, who gave me Joe's number. Joe just sent me the pendant COD, as I had to pay him the repair fee and shipping the missing seller would never give him. I still came out ahead in the deal. The pendant is a work of art, exactly what I anticipated. And now I can say with confidence that it is Indian made. Many thanks to Joe.