Chapter 9

I’d just been open the next morning for ten minutes when I spotted a familiar face lingering outside of Memories and Dreams. She was clearly working up her nerve to come inside, but after watching her pace back and forth for a full minute, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

“Myra, are you coming inside, or are you just out there standing guard?”

“What would I be guarding out here?” she asked, clearly puzzled by my question.

“You wouldn’t be, but then again, I don’t understand why you’d be afraid to come into my shop.” I had a sudden thought. “You’re not waiting for someone, are you?” I looked around for Lucy, but if she was nearby, she was too good at hiding for me to spot her.

“I’m here all alone,” she said in a strong, definitive manner that sounded a bit rehearsed to me.

“Got it. So, are you coming in or not?”

“Of course I am,” Myra said. She took a deep breath as she started to follow me inside the building, hesitating at the front door, and I found myself wondering if she knew that Memories and Dreams was haunted. Or was it? I used to associate haunted houses with ghosts that were bound to their buildings with some supernatural tether, while Midnight, and now Summer Bentley, seemed to come and go at will, following me around the county like a pair of long lost puppies. I was glad that I hadn’t said that last bit aloud. I didn’t know how Summer would feel being associated with canines, but I had a pretty good hunch that Midnight would have been peeved by it. My formerly living cat was many things, both in this life and the next, but doglike was not among them.

I must have been quiet for too long, because when I looked up, I found Myra staring at me oddly. “Is there something wrong?” I asked.

“That’s what I was about to ask you. You kind of went away there for a few seconds, Christy.”

“Somebody must have just walked across my grave,” I said, immediately regretting my choice of words. I had too much contact with the Other Side to make glib comments like that. “Is there anything in particular that you’re looking for today, Myra?”

“I don’t know for sure. It’s hard to say. I suppose that I’m in the mood for something large,” she finally said.

What an odd request. I’d had people come in asking for quite a few strange things since I’d been at Memories and Dreams, including the man who’d come by desperately looking for cows recently, but no one in my memory had ever asked for anything strictly by its size. “I have a dancing jellybean in back,” I said. “It’s nearly eight feet tall.”

“Nothing that large,” she said, admonishing me as though I’d forgotten the rules to a game that I’d never played before.

“You’re going to have to help me out, then. Your parameters are kind of foggy.”

“I should explain,” she said. “My aunt Ramona is turning sixty next week, and she has everything in the world that she could ever want.”

“Wow, it must be really nice being Aunt Ramona,” I said.

“I suppose that it is. At any rate, for the last few years she’s preferred odd gifts that are unique, the bigger the better, to some extent. One rule is that it has to fit on one of her curio shelves, so that tops it off at three feet. I must also add that the gaudier the better.”

Wow, this was going to be fun. I had a host of white elephant items that were usually just useful for games of Dirty Santa where each person tried to stick the next one with the most useless gift imaginable. “Follow me,” I said as I led her to the section of the shop where I kept my oddities.

“My, that’s quite a selection you’ve got here,” she said as she picked up a hand-carved-and-painted gnome over two feet tall. This particular gnome was clearly drunk, a handcrafted piece of Americana that hadn’t found a proper home since it had first walked through my door.

“I see that you’ve made a connection with Harry,” I said.

“Is that his name?” she asked with repugnance.

“Not officially, but that’s what I like to call him. Would you like to take him home with you? I can make you a good deal.”

“No, I’m afraid Harry will have to stay with you a little longer,” Myra said after a moment’s hesitation. “How about this?”

The item she was referring to was a ceramic rooster that was covered in decoupaged old red bandanas from top to bottom. “What’s his name?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Why, is that important?”

She looked a little flustered as she shook her head. “No, not at all. I just assumed that since you named the gnome, this would have a name as well.”

“You’re in luck,” I said with a grin. “You get naming rights yourself if you buy it today.”

“It’s perfect,” she said.

I couldn’t believe that this was what she’d settled on, but I wasn’t about to talk her out of her purchase. I’d never been a fan of the rooster, and if I were being honest about it, I would have considered paying her to get it out of the shop. “Would you like a bag, or will you take it as it is?”

“Oh, that won’t do,” she said. “Didn’t I say? My aunt doesn’t live around here. I need it wrapped carefully and boxed up. You do that as well, don’t you?”

“Of course, for a slight additional fee,” I said. She hadn’t started haggling yet, and maybe she was one of those blessed folks who took a price tag as a final statement rather than a place to start negotiations. There were more of her kind in the world than I ever would have expected before becoming involved in Memories and Dreams, and I was thankful for every last one of them I met.

“Of course,” she said. “How much extra would it be?”

I quoted her a flat fee, and happily, she agreed without hesitation. “That would be perfect. I have just one more request,” she said, and I wondered what it could be. I didn’t have long to wait. “I noticed those nice packing boxes you picked up at the Bentley farm auction. Since I’m paying full price for the rooster, would you mind using one of those boxes for the gift?”

“I can probably do that, if I can sort them out,” I said, wondering why she was making such an odd request.

“It’s important to me, so if you can’t find one in particular, I’m afraid that there’s not going to be a sale after all.”

“Which one did you want?” I asked, trying not to show that I was growing more and more suspicious by the second. I was beginning to doubt the existence of her aunt, and instead, I was wondering if this was all a ruse just to get the box. If it was, Lucy couldn’t be far away from the scheme.

“While I was at the Bentley place, I noticed that one of the boxes had a small red X marked on the back of it,” she said. “That’s the one that I want.”

“If I can find it, it’s all yours,” I said. “This might take a few minutes. Would you like to come back in ten minutes and pick it up after you pay for it?”

“No, I’m happy to wait right here for it,” she said.

“Okay. Let’s take care of the paperwork, and then I’ll wrap it for you.”

“Excellent,” she said, clearly relieved that I didn’t seem suspicious. I wanted to get this woman into a poker game. She would be terrible at bluffing.

After I collected her money, happy for the infusion of cash into the business, I handed her a receipt and told her, “I’ll be as quick as I can. Feel free to look around some more in the meantime. Maybe you’ll even find something that you’re interested in for yourself.”

“Perhaps,” she said, and I moved in back to hunt that box down.

One thing was certain; there was no way that Myra was getting the box in question before I had a chance to look at it myself.

I thought I’d found it in my pile of boxes, but when I searched the exterior of the box, there were no red Xs present, at least not any that I could find. After digging a little deeper though, I found the one that I was looking for. The only difference between it and its twin was the small red X, so I knew that I had a winner. I picked it up and studied it as closely as I could, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find anything that made it extraordinary. Why would Myra, or most likely Lucy, want a box from the auction and not its contents? I’d been under the impression that Lucy had been after the engagement ring hidden in the wrapping paper, but this made me wonder if she’d even known about it.

I probably should have packed that rooster in the box she wanted. Myra was certainly paying me for the privilege. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I put the box in question beside its near twin, and then I grabbed a red marker I kept for special sale prices. Matching the X as closely as I could in size, location, and structure, I was quite satisfied with my forged results. I blew on it for a moment to dry the ink, and then I carefully packed the rooster into the fake box before I forgot which was which. Okay, the box wasn’t fake; it was as real as the other one, but the mark on its back was certainly not the genuine article. Instead of using wrapping I’d gotten from the Bentley auction, I grabbed some butcher paper I had on hand and made sure that the rooster could stand any transit, though by now I was certain that the only place this particular white elephant was going was straight into Lucy’s hands. I felt a little bad about the deception as I taped the top securely, but if Lucy had anything to do with the murder, I’d get over that in a heartbeat. And if she hadn’t? Well, she was still getting a box that I’d acquired at the auction.

Just not the one that she’d been interested in.

I compared the markings one last time after I finished my wrap job, and they were so close that I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart myself if I hadn’t shoved the rooster into the wrong box before the marker ink could thoroughly dry.

Putting on my happiest expression as I walked out of the back with the wrapped barnyard animal in hand, I gave it to Myra. “Here you go, guaranteed to make just about any journey in one piece. Did you find anything else while you were waiting?”

“No, but I must say, you’ve got quite an eclectic collection here for sale, don’t you?”

“That’s what we specialize in,” I said. “Tell your neighbors and friends.”

Myra clearly didn’t get me, but she offered a slight smile, anyway. “Of course,” she said.

Once she was gone, I wasn’t sure how long I had before she discovered that she had the wrong box, but I was betting that I’d hear from her or Lucy before too long.

It was time to search the box and see if there was anything that I missed the first time I’d examined it.

I studied that box again carefully, both inside and out, but I still didn’t find anything at all remarkable about it, except for the thickness of the cardboard at the bottom. There was nothing else to do but take a razor knife to it to see if there was something that I was missing. Extending the blade, I slid it through the tape and opened all of the edges of the box up to the light of day.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting to find when I opened it, but I dropped the knife when I saw what was tucked under one of the taped flaps of the box’s bottom.