“Is that bad?”
“It’ssloppy.” He said it like sloppiness was a personal offense. Which, for Marcus, it probably was. “Sarah would have caught it immediately.”
Sarah. His wife. The woman in the photographs I’d noticed that first day, laughing in silver frames throughout the shop.
He talked about her more now. Not constantly—Marcus wasn’t the type for constant anything—but casually, naturally, like she was still just in the next room instead of two years gone.
“She knew antiques?”
“She knew everything.” He set the music box down carefully. “That’s how we met, actually. She came into my father’s shop in San Francisco looking for a Victorian mourning brooch. Very specific—jet black, with a compartment for hair. Most people thought it was morbid. She thought it was romantic.”
“Was it? Romantic?”
“It was for a museum exhibit. She was a curator.” His mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close. “I asked her to dinner three times. She said no three times. The fourth time, she said yes, but only if I could name the exact provenance of every piece in the front window.”
“Could you?”
“Of course. I grew up in that shop.” Now he did smile, small and private. “She said I passed. We were married six months later.”
I tried to imagine it—Marcus young, probably less grey, definitely less guarded, charming a museum curator with his encyclopedic knowledge of antique jewelry. It wasn’t hard to picture. Under all that grumpiness, there was something solid. Something worth leaning on.
“She sounds wonderful.”
“She was.” He picked up the music box again, turned it over in his hands. “She’s the one who found this place, actually. We were driving through Fairhaven on our way to somewhere else, and she made me stop the car because she ‘felt something.’ Said the town was humming.”
“Humming?”
“Her word for it. Objects that felt different. Places that resonated. She didn’t know why she was drawn to them, just that she was.” He set the box down. “She never called it magic. She called it intuition. But looking back, I think she sensed things. The way some people feel rain coming.”
Magical sensitivity. Sarah had been drawn to magical objects without knowing what they were. No wonder this shop felt the way it did—she’d filled it with things that hummed.
“Do you think that’s why I feel different here?” I asked. “Because of what she collected?”
“Maybe.” He looked at me—really looked, the way he sometimes did when he forgot to be guarded. “Or maybe it’s something else.”
The radio crackled, shifted from jazz to something softer. A song I didn’t recognize but felt in my chest anyway.
“The radio’s editorializing again,” I said.
“It does that.” He cleared his throat, suddenly businesslike. “Anyway. These music boxes need to be re-catalogued. If you’re going to keep coming here, you might as well be useful.”
“Is that your way of asking for help?”
“It’s my way of pointing out that you’ve been staring at the same box of brooches for twenty minutes.”
“I was organizing them by era.”
“You were organizing them by how ugly they are. That’s not a system.”
“It should be.” I held up a particularly aggressive piece—gold with tiny seed pearls arranged in a pattern that might have been flowers or might have been a skin condition. “Tell me this isn’t hideous.”
“It’s Victorian mourning jewelry. It’s supposed to be somber.”
“It’s supposed to be worn by someone who wants to be left alone at parties.” I turned it over, squinting at the back. “Why is there hair in it?”
“Memorial jewelry. The hair is from the deceased.”
I dropped it like it had bitten me. “THERE’S A DEAD PERSON’S HAIR IN THIS?”
