Page 104 of The Witching Hours

“Maybe you should. You could deposit McDreamy into the wish box.”

“Hmmm.” That was vocalized without commitment, but also without rejection of the idea.

“What about travel? Where do you want to go that you haven’t gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please don’t make me agree that you might be boring because, if my best friend is boring, what does that make me?” I laughed. “Everybody wants to go somewhere they haven’t been.”

“Do they?”

“Yes!” she said emphatically. “Come on. Paris? New Zealand? Venice? Buenos Aires?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“I promise. I won’t laugh.”

“The only kind of travel that really interests me is time travel.”

You have to give her credit. She managed to hold onto her composure for a full three seconds before she bent overlaughing. “Good one. I could’ve guessed all day and never come up with that.” She shook her head still laughing. “Time travel. Wow. Definitely not boring.”

We reached the end of the show. We’d gone up and down the rows and Cass hadn’t bought a thing. What we ran into at the end of the temporarily erected tents were permanent storefronts on Westheimer.

“Hey. Let’s go in here before we head back. I haven’t gone junking for ages. It’ll be fun.”

“Junking?”

“Yeah. Mostly junk with an occasional treasure. If you find a treasure you feel like you’ve scored one of life’s little surprise victories.”

That was intriguing. “Okay.” I looked at my watch. “But at 12:30 I’m going to claim my prize lunch!”

“Prize? You get a prize for living to forty?”

“Well. Yeah!”

She smiled. “Okay. 12:30.” Her gaze wandered to something past my right shoulder. “Oh, look. They’ve got a Heriz!”

I didn’t know what that was, but all indications were that it was juicy because Cass practically ran toward the back of the store.

The store had industrial overhead doors opening to the front and it was a nice enough day to have them open. I was grateful for small favors and didn’t want to imagine what the place smelled like when the doors were closed. I began browsing, wondering what sort of person would buy the stuff they were selling. I’d also heard those stories about other people’s stuff clinging to physical objects and going home with the unaware. By stuff I mean sorrow, sadness, and sins. Nobody would mind buying an antique chest loaded with optimistic, cheerleadingenergy. I was being extra careful not to brush up against anything. Just in case.

Cramped would’ve been a polite way to describe the way the store displayed their inventory. In places it looked a deal gone bad onStorage Wars. Things were stacked haphazardly in some places. In others things were thrown into piles suggesting little value to say the least. Hundreds of items might’ve been sitting there, waiting for a new home, since 1950.

I looked across the store to see what Cass was doing. She appeared to be arguing the price of a rug with the ease of a merchant in a Moroccan marketplace. I knew that sometime soon I’d see that rug in Cass’s condo, cleaned up and looking like a million bucks. She was one of those people born with style points.

Turning back to the path I was making through the store, I saw it - that thing Cass was talking about that had the power to make you feel like a professional treasure hunter. It was a large brass vase about two and a half feet high with two rings on the sides for handles and a dome-shaped lid attached by tiny hinges. It didn’t look much like brass because it probably hadn’t been polished in decades, but I saw through the dull dark brown with ugly streaks of green and orange and knew what it would look like when it was cleaned up and polished. My mother had some brass trays that she let me polish for extra spending money. We never let them tarnish that badly, but I recognized the telltale signs. Months of neglect or just one drop of liquid could ruin the looks of brass or copper.

I found someone rummaging around with an apron on and asked if she could give me a price. She fetched a step stool so that she could reach the vase, brought it down, and set it on top of a rococo desk. I felt ridiculous when I realized that I was holding my breath, waiting to hear the price. I mean, I didn’t want itthatbad.Did I?

She turned it over to see if there was a price sticker on the bottom. Nope.

“Hmmm,” she said. She was pricing on the fly. “One seventy-five.”

I jumped a little, hearing a voice too close behind me. It was Cass, but she’d crept up like a ninja, without a hint she was there. Cripes. If she could do that in wedges, imagine how scary she’d be in tennies?

“Are you kidding?” she asked the woman with a belligerence I was glad she never turned on me. “We’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five!” Now it was the merchant who was offended. “It’s brass! Probably museum quality.”