Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (Signal Bend)(5)
This last push before Christmas Day, the Marketplace was hopping. Iris smiled. She’d been young when she’d really lived in Signal Bend, but she remembered the days when the town was barely keeping its feet. When her dad talked about those days, he’d say it was ‘pure, ornery stubbornness’ that had kept the town from collapsing into a dead heap, but Iris knew it had been more than that. The Night Horde MC had kept the town going. And now it thrived.
Her father’s club. He was a hero. They all were.
There was a new shop just across the street from Fosse’s Finds: Jubilee Antiques & Curiosities. Iris had never seen it before, and she was, well, curious. When she saw Rose’s reflection approaching in the window, Iris turned and waved at Dora. “Thank you so much for all your help, Dora! Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas, ladies! I’ll see you Friday!”
Christmas Eve in Signal Bend. A big gift donation drive and then the party at the Horde clubhouse. Iris grinned. She loved this town.
She opened the door into a blast of frigid air—no snow yet this season, but plenty of cold—and jumped off the boardwalk to cross the street.
“Iris! Wait! We need to put this in the car!”
“Go ahead—I’ll just be in here,” she called without pausing. Rose could handle the package.
A little bell tinkled overhead as she opened the door to the new shop. Every shop on Main Street had the exact same bell—Iris’s thought stopped as she looked up and saw a shiny red bell dangling from a gargoyle’s extended tongue. Okay, not every shop had the exact same bell after all.
Cool! But she probably wasn’t going to find anything for Shannon in here, either. Their stepmother wasn’t exactly the gargoyle type.
“Welcome to Jubilee!” A male voice pulled Iris’s attention back to normal eye level. A guy who was probably middle-age-ish, dressed like he’d bought his whole outfit off an Eddie Bauer mannequin, stood in the center of the shop.
“I’m Geoff with a ‘G.’ Are you on the hunt for anything in particular today?”
“Hi, Geoff-with-a-G. I’m Iris.” Having already decided that the place was probably too weird for Shannon, she was going to say that she’d just look around for a few minutes. But she didn’t get the words out. She was too interested in what she was seeing. The shop was nothing like anything else in Signal Bend.
For one thing, it wasn’t packed to the rafters with stock. This room—she could tell that there was at least one more room—had a lot of space on the stripped-wood floors. The pieces displayed were high end, even Iris could tell that, and everything was set out for maximum highlight.
On closer inspection, it was pretty normal, really: estate sale furniture and décor. Lots of heavy, ornate wood, and brass and silver, and depression glass and milk glass. A case full of stoneware crocks. A shelf full of glass bluebirds. All the old antique-shop standards. But this stuff had been reconditioned to be beautiful and a little funky, and it was displayed unusually.
“Doing some Christmas shopping, Iris?”
“Yeah. For my stepmom. I don’t have a lot of money, though.”
“Well, then”—Geoff-with-a-G stepped to her side with a friendly grin—“this might not be the right room. There are others, though. What does your stepmom like?” Though there were three other customers Iris could see, Geoff seemed ready to give her his full attention.
She let him lead her toward the door to the other room she’d noticed. “Maybe nothing here. She’s girly and…elegant, I guess.”
“Hmmm. Girly and elegant. We might be able to find something.”
They were in the side room, and Iris gaped. This room was obviously where the ‘Curiosities’ in the store name were kept. It was darker than the main room, and here, stock was packed in tightly, and nothing was like what the other shops sold. In this room, there was a stuffed—as in had once been alive, and had since been subject to taxidermy—owl with its feathers dyed cobalt blue and with big pink crystals for eyes. A black case against one wall held nothing but identically-sized jars full of strange powders and liquids. Across the top of that case sat a long row of large bird skulls.
She’d walked into Edgar Allan Poe’s basement.
Iris wasn’t into goth stuff, like at all, but the room fascinated her nonetheless. She found it curious that people would think to make stuff like this. What kind of person looked at an owl carcass and thought, This would look great on the mantel. The only thing it’s missing is pink jewel eyes. And maybe some blue dye.
She liked thinking about what made people tick and why they liked the things they did. One of her favorite courses in college, called Anthropology of Modern North American Cultures, had asked a question like that, albeit on a larger scale. They’d had a whole unit on Hoarder Culture. Iris wouldn’t have ever thought of hoarding as a culture before that class, but she sure did now.
She meandered through the crowded room, smiling at the oddities. Not everything was as dark as the bird skulls or the strange dead animals, but everything was at least a little bit weird.
“Does your stepmother like jewelry?” Geoff asked. He held out an ornate pair of earrings with dangling red stones like drops of blood. Very much not Shannon’s taste.
“She does, but I don’t think this is going to work for—” She stopped as her eyes landed on a beacon of bright blue in the middle of this strange, dark room. On a small, round table with a marble top sat an old-fashioned bell jar. Inside it was an arrangement of about a dozen bright blue butterflies. It was so beautiful, Iris’s breath literally stopped for a moment.