Chapter 14 #2
“You’d know better than me. Are they?” I waggled my eyebrows.
She sputtered a laugh. “They aren’t antiques, that’s for sure. But a few people might want them for nostalgia. No big money. I can see why he wanted to offload them.”
“Donate them out of the kindness of his heart,” I corrected.
“Offload worthless dead stock onto kids who don’t have anything better.”
“That’s a cynical take.”
“That’s a good business take.”
“Maybe he was going to get rid of everything anyway,” I said. “I think he was going to sell the building.”
“He must have had a big payout recently. Or been expecting some big money to come in. Men like that are always looking for the big hit. Then they run.”
I leaned back and put my fork down. “Did you know him, Aggie?”
She studied the change in me and put on a happy face again. A happy face I was beginning to realize was false.
“Oh, I knew men like him. They’d come to the antique shop, think they were big players. Think they had some item worth millions. Thieves, every one of them. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to take them down a notch.”
“You’d underbid the value of their items?”
She made a rude noise. “Half of the time there was no value at all, no matter what they thought.”
“The other half the time?”
Her gaze sharpened and there was a calculation in them I hadn’t seen before. “The other half the time I gave them what they deserved. And made a lot of profit on the way. You can’t be that naive, Piper. That’s how all businesses work.”
“Not the diner.”
“The diner is a dinosaur.”
“An antique?” I countered. She wasn’t doing much for making me think she was innocent. Maybe she had known about Pandora’s box. Maybe she was the one Hugo was trying to meet at the diner.
“Sure. But the Blue Owl isn’t worth much. You don’t know…you can’t imagine the things I’ve gotten my hands on. People knew to bring me the rare stuff. Vandre might have thought he was running the show, but it was all me. I made deals he wouldn’t have had the guts to try.”
“Lot of passion in antiques.”
“There is because it’s all about power. When you possess something that people will pay filthy money to get their hands on, well, then, you’re holding all the power aren’t you?”
“Power isn’t everything.”
She hummed, considering. “Once you have it, it is. Some of the antiques I sold were more like artifacts. Statues, stones, things people thought had power, things people thought were cursed. Everyone wanted them.”
“Cursed items?”
“Sold better than the finest art. Tell someone a doll was haunted and it’s worth hundreds. Tell them it had killed someone and it tripled in price.”
She softly slapped her palm down on the table, her fingers flexing like she was holding on tight.
“What would you say if I told you there were magical things,” her voice lowered, “real magical things in the world?”
I lowered my voice too. “I’d say you were trying to make money. Curses sell.”
“Exactly! Haunted sells, lucky sells—you have no idea how many rabbits’ feet I’ve sold to the top bidder. I think someone in this town is sitting on a very special item. It might even be a magical item.”
There were several dozen someones who had magical items in this town. Heck, most of the town itself was magical.
I leaned toward her. “What kind of item?”
I had a feeling I knew what she was talking about. Pandora’s box. That’s why she’d wanted to know if I’d checked Hugo’s pockets. She thought he had it.
She thought he’d stolen it.
Or maybe he had contacted her to set up a time to assess it, just like he’d contacted Vandre. Maybe he’d been killed before they could meet.
It would explain why she had such a bad opinion of Hugo. She’d missed out on proving her antiquing ability.
“It’s a bear,” she said, derailing my Pandora train. “It’s one of those talking bears Kenny had in his shop.”
“A bear?”
“What? Did you think it was something else?”
“No.” (Yes.) I leaned back. “Is the bear…um…haunted?”
“Not exactly. But I think it’s carrying a powerful curse.”
“Is it that anyone who puts it in a shop window will go bankrupt. And be killed?”
She gave me a swift smile. “You know how this stuff is. Most of the hauntings and magical stuff is just talk, so what it actually might do depends on who’s doing the talking. But I’ll tell you this.” She leaned forward. “I think whoever finds that cursed bear is going to make good money.”
“They’ve been donated, packed away. The bears are going to kids.”
“They won’t if you and I go through the boxes and remove them.”
I was already shaking my head. “We can’t do that.”
“Isn’t there a master list that tracks which donation is going where? All we have to do is get our hands on the master list and pull the bears. You said there were only two dozen.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Okay, look at it this way. If it’s true, if one of the bears is cursed, then you’ll be giving a child a cursed object. A child, Piper.”
That wasn’t good. A real curse could do real damage.
“I’ll talk to Bertie. It’s her charity drive. She’ll know what to do.”
“Like she’ll believe in a cursed object,” she grumbled.
“You don’t know her. She wouldn’t want a cursed item out in the world doing damage to someone.”
“I say we take care of it ourselves. We’d be good at it, we’d be fast at it, and I promise whatever deal I make selling the bear, I will cut you in on it.”
Futures flashed:
And none of them were good.