Chapter 2
Jack
She didn’t look like a con artist or escaped mental patient, but looks could deceive, as I knew very well.
The woman was maybe an inch shorter than Tess’s five-eight, but considerably rounder. She had golden-brown skin, long black hair, and dark eyes. She wore blue jeans beneath an orange vinyl raincoat, though the sky was cloudless blue, and carried a bright orange tote bag clutched beneath one arm.
I glanced through the window at the empty parking lot and then gently nudged her aside, unlocked the door, and stepped outside to scan the area. Still nobody, and I couldn’t hear anybody skulking around the edges of the building, either. Her car, a dusty old Toyota sedan, sported Georgia license plates and a series of scrapes down the driver’s side doors.
I headed back inside. If I’d been wrong, and the woman was a threat, I didn’t want to leave Tess alone with her. Not that Tess couldn’t take care of herself, as I knew very well after the events of the past year.
The woman was standing across the counter from Tess, pulling something out of her bag. “My grandmother was a celebrated jazz singer. She always had men chasing after her, and they gave her money and jewelry and cars and even houses! She wasn’t even beautiful or, to be honest, a great singer.”
She blew out a breath and held out a hand. “I’m Ursula, by the way.”
Tess smiled at her. “I’m Tess. I’m sorry, I don’t shake hands. Germaphobe.”
I walked up next to them and shook Ursula’s hand. “I’m Jack. So, what’s the bottle about?”
She’d pulled a rose-colored crystal bottle with a tulip-shaped stopper out of her bag and placed it on the glass countertop. It looked solid and girly, and I could tell Tess liked it.
“This is her perfume bottle. She gave it to me on her deathbed and made me swear never to let it out of my possession and definitely not to sell it.”
Tess nodded. “So, why are you here?”
“I want to sell it.”
Tess and I exchanged a look, but we weren’t surprised. Deathbed promises weren’t very valuable these days. Tess saw a lot of this in the pawn business.
“May I?” Tess indicated the bottle, and Ursula nodded.
My girlfriend—still getting used to the idea of that—bent her head and absently shoved her braid of gorgeous red hair over her shoulder, bending down to study the bottle. “It’s Depression glass, of course.”
Ursula nodded.
“Depression glass?”
Tess aimed her big blue eyes at me. “During the Depression, nobody had money for fancy glassware anymore, so glass manufacturers started mass-producing this cheaper product in pretty colors. It was a way to keep the factories going and employees working. You can tell authentic Depression glass by its imperfections like uneven color saturation.”
“And see this?” Tess pointed at the bottle. “Air bubbles often got into the glass, too. The imperfections are really what added to the collectability.
I grinned at her. “Beauty and brains. You’re like an encyclopedia of old stuff.”
She laughed. “It’s my job, after all. Your uncle Jeremiah taught me to learn everything about everything in this business.”
“Is it valuable?”
Both women shrugged.
“Depends on the market. I couldn’t offer a lot for this bottle, unfortunately,” Tess said. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep it? The sentimental value must be much higher than?—”
“You don’t understand,” Ursula broke in, looking desperate. “I need to get rid of it. I know you won’t believe me, but the bottle … it’s … enchanted.”
“Uh huh,” I said, yawning. Hadn’t had enough coffee.
“Sure,” Tess said, resigned.
Ursula stared at both of us. “Didn’t you hear me? It’s?—”
“Enchanted,” Tess and I said together.
“It’s not our first rodeo,” I said cheerfully. “We’ve had it all here in Dead End Pawn.”
The woman blinked at us, her mouth hanging open for a moment before she collected herself. “Well. Okay, then. Then you know why I have to get rid of it.”
“What does it do?” I asked her. “Play rude music?”
Tess: “Steal Christmas presents?”
Me: “Tell doom-and-gloom fortunes?”
Tess: “Compliment your wide hips and birthing potential?”
Ursula’s head kept whipping back and forth between us like she was a spectator at a tennis match. When we wound down from listing some of the many enchanted items we’d encountered over the past year, she held up a hand.
“Stop. Birthing potential? No. Never mind. I don’t want to know. The perfume makes me irresistible.”
“To who?” I asked.
“To whom?” Tess said, her lips quirking up.
“To everybody,” Ursula said.
I’m naturally skeptical, so I shrugged, picked up the bottle, opened it, and sniffed.
Then I sneezed.
Loudly.
“That is a truly horrible scent. No offense, Ursula,” I told the woman, who was scrambling back and away from me, hands held out like I might jump on her.
“Nothing?”
I shook my head and sneezed again. “Possibly I’m allergic to it.”
She frowned. “Wait. Let me put some on. Maybe it has to be on a person.”
Ursula took a deep breath, dabbed the stopper to her wrist, and stared at me with terrified eyes.
I shrugged.
And sneezed again.
“Nothing?”
“Nope.”
When Ursula put the stopper back in the bottle, Tess took it back out and dabbed some on the back of her wrist.
“I already have a different scent on the other side of my arm,” she answered my inquiring glance. “Try this.”
“It’s not a fair test.” I let a wicked smile slowly spread across my face. “You’re always irresistible to me.”
Tess blushed, which made me think delightful thoughts about what we’d been up to the night before. But she held out her arm, and I bent to sniff. And sneezed.
“Irresistible,” I told her, when I stopped sneezing.
Tess’s eyes widened, and I laughed. “But no more irresistible than usual.”
“That is so weird,” Ursula said, frowning. “It has been the bane of my existence for two solid months.”
I knew I shouldn’t ask, but … “Why didn’t you just not wear the stuff? And I’m sorry, but why are you wearing a raincoat?”
She looked puzzled. “I always wear a raincoat. It might rain. And it’s not that easy to avoid the perfume. At first, it was fun to wear. Men and even some women were throwing themselves at me. It was outstanding for a while. But then, it got weird. Stalker-y, even. And it seems like the more times I wore it, the longer it took for the effects to wear off.”
“And now? You want Tess to sell it to some unsuspecting person?”
Ursula had the grace to look embarrassed. “Well, I thought she could dump it out, maybe. Wash it and it’s just a pretty bottle, you know? I think it’s the enchantment working on me, but I’ve tried to dump it out, and yet I just can’t bring myself to do it. Even now, part of me wants to keep it and go try it out in Hollywood in a room filled with rich guys or something.”
Tess held the bottle out to her. Ursula hesitated, but then shook her head. “No. No, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Can you give me anything for it?”
I thought it was a bad idea, even though the perfume clearly wasn’t enchanted at all, but Tess was the kindest person I’ve ever known, and she agreed to buy the bottle, stinky perfume and all. They completed the transaction quickly, and Ursula, looking immensely relieved, turned to leave.
When she reached the door, she looked back at us, biting her lip. “This is odd, but I should probably tell you. Grandma said it can affect animals, too, so to be careful. But I have three cats, two dogs, and a parrot, and none of them showed the slightest interest.”
“Okay …” Tess said faintly, and then the woman was gone.
“The raincoat was weird, though, right?”
Tess tilted her head. “That’s what you’re curious about?”
“Just weird. Anyway, she was trying to run a scam or a little … confused, right?”
“Who knows? But I have someone coming in for an interview in an hour and we’re probably about to get busy, so I’ll deal with it later. What are you up to this morning?”
I glanced at the Spartacus clock. I could see the time, even though the little gladiator was sneaking up on a taxidermied raccoon. “Going to go home and eat breakfast?—”
“We just had breakfast!”
“Eat a second breakfast and then do some lawn work at my place and yours.” After a decade as a rebel soldier in the trenches in the vampire war, now I was a guy who owned a small business and mowed my lawn. It still surprised me, but I liked it.
Tess hugged me—one of the few perks of lawn work—and I kissed her goodbye. The kiss had just gotten interesting when the chimes over the door tinkled, and several customers bustled in.
Tess pulled back, laughing. “Okay, hot stuff. I need to get back to work now. I’ll see you this evening.”
I was in my truck driving away before I remembered I hadn’t learned the deal about the mysterious softball ceremony. Oh, well. I’d find out soon enough. Knowing Dead End, it was going to be something weird, like we had to invite the leprechauns back to town to dip the softball in peanut butter.
I suddenly realized my standards for “weird” had changed a heck of a lot since moving back home to Dead End.