“Oh, dear God, I
… before she was expected to open and become a crucial part of the local community.
The store didn’t look significantly better than it had yesterday although, in all fairness, it didn’t look any worse. It was a bright, sunny morning, but the light spilling through the windows seemed unwilling to move very far away from the glass.
“All right, then.” She took a deep breath and flicked on the overhead fluorescents, banishing some but not all of the more interesting shadows. Piled high on tables, spilling off of shelves, in boxes opened for rummaging—the amount of crap gathered together in this one place was overwhelming. What were the odds of finding a clue to her grandmother’s disappearance in that amount of crap?
“I am so screwed.”
If she’d dragged half a dozen cousins to Calgary with her, they might have a chance to bring something resembling order out of chaos.
Actually…
She flipped open her phone.
And closed it, frowning, half an hour later wondering what the odds were that every single cousin she’d called was busy and expected to remain busy for the immediate future. Betsy, after a winter of almost no teaching gigs, had been called in to finish out the school year in Odessa. Uncle Don had fallen out of the mow and broken his leg, leaving Carol and Theresa to deal with the fieldwork. Sandi, ready to give up acting and become an accountant like her mother, had actually gotten a part as Chava’s understudy in a revival of
Allie had her doubts that the aunties put any effort into it, relying instead on reputation, but she wished Bonny luck and snapped the phone closed.Until the younger kids finished school, it looked like she
“Well, don’t I feel special.”
On her own, the store would take her months to catalog and, unless she stumbled over her grandmother’s diary, months longer to start piecing together any relevant information even if she used the cataloging software she’d acquired at her last job.
And that was ignoring the time she’d have to put into running a business to pay the bills.
Not to mention ignoring whatever had flown over the store at dawn.
Actually, ignoring whatever had flown over the store at dawn seemed like a great idea. Any weirdness going on in the airspace over the city of Calgary was not her concern.
“Here’s a thought,” she said to the obligatory velvet Elvis fronting a box of bad art. “Why don’t I assume Gran knows what she’s doing and, if she’s not dead, she’ll fill us in when she’s good and ready?”
Velvet Elvis offered no opinion.
All things considered, Allie was actually pretty happy about that.
Instead of a cash register, Gran had a heavily charmed cashbox containing four hundred and seventeen dollars and twenty-seven cents on a shelf under the counter. Next to it, three ledgers that looked liked they’d been picked up at a yard sale given by a Victorian mortgage broker. In mint condition, they’d be worth serious money to a collector although
On the wall behind the counter was a seven-by-three grid of cubbyholes numbered from one to twenty-one. Some of them held…
“Mail?” Allie stared down at the envelope she’d pulled from cubby number one. The name looked vaguely Eastern European and the address was definitely the store’s. Gran seemed to have been allowing the homeless to use the store as a mail drop. Surprisingly community minded, Allie allowed, putting the envelope back in the cubby where she’d found it.
Next to the cubbyholes, a locked cabinet.
Turning to pick up the keys from the counter, she screamed.
The translucent young man, face and hands plastered to the glass as he peered into the store, jumped back, mouth open, eyes wide.
Heart pounding, Allie took a deep breath and then another, and reminded herself that most of the lingering dead were harmless. Granted, some of them had issues they took out on the living, but this redheaded twenty-something she could see traffic through seemed more the former sort. He’d been at least as startled by her as she was by him.
She could almost hear the aunties telling her to ignore him.
