Page 73 of A Seer and Present Danger

“It’s a lot of kindness.”

“I thought Kenny ran some kind of electronics business. How did he give you bears?”

“Repair. He repaired vacuums and electronics. But it was a pawn shop too. The bears were the kind that could talk. They had little tape players in them.”

“Oh, right. Aren’t those collectible?”

“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.