Timeless

CHAPTER 1

I n a small town, there lay an even smaller antique shop. This wasn’t one of those sprawling stores with everything in it, from a twenty-year-old table worth a few dollars to a three-hundred-year-old pocket watch worth more than most people made in a year. It wasn’t one of those places where people could get lost going into corners and alcoves, looking and picking things up, wondering what they were for or where they came from. It wasn’t one of those places where people could go in one door and out another because, at some point in the shop’s past, the owner bought up more property and expanded their offerings.

It was the kind of shop someone might find in an old European village; a forgotten-about way of life in modern-day America. People used to walk up and down one-lane roads, going from shop to shop, picking up the items they needed, and having chats with proprietors about how little Timmy was doing in school and how the weather had been recently before they left with their one or two purchases since nothing was a mega retail store back then. If this weren’t modern-day America, people might have stopped by this shop to buy something. As it was, though, this shop, in this tiny town, had more window-shoppers than people buying its wares. It was, perhaps, true that if people knew more about this shop, they might have purchased something from it or given it the time of day, as opposed to driving past it on a two-lane road with the town’s first stoplight installed about twenty years ago on the corner of this road that split the small town in half and led to a bustling four-lane highway.

The owner of this shop had bought the building a few years ago now, riding the initially booming tourism the town was receiving due to that very highway, a factory moving in a town over, providing the town with much-needed jobs, and a small museum attached to it that drew in more tourists to watch the manufacturer make what they were known for making. That owner, Quinn, had decided to go against the advice of everyone in her life to buy it, after dropping out of school, and all of those people thought she’d turn it into a coffee shop or even a pet groomer – anything that stood a chance of making money, really – but when she’d visited this town one day, right after leaving school and not knowing what she was going to do with her life, she’d seen this shop and something in her told her to not only buy the building that was for sale and not for rent but to keep it as an antique shop.

There was something comfortable and familiar about this town that she just couldn’t stop thinking about. It was almost as if something had been pulling her toward it, and she hadn’t left since, not even to go on a vacation or visit family. If they wanted to see her, they could come here. For some reason, Quinn was compelled to stay, and whenever she thought about going too far away, her mind, or maybe it was her heart, suggested otherwise. She’d used every dime she’d had to buy up the inventory within it and to market the place with tourists, and five years later, the shop was still there. Big purchases, which were handled online through her website that she’d built herself and had taught herself how to market, kept the doors open. As much as she knew that she should sell or, at least, turn the building into one of those popular local coffee shops that just kept popping up next to each other yet always seemed to have enough customers to go around, she couldn’t. She couldn’t sell. And today, the fact that this was still an antique shop was very, very important.

Not knowing why today mattered but feeling it all the same, Quinn opened a few minutes earlier than usual, turning her sign on the front door from closed to open. Expecting no one to walk in right away, she went back behind the counter to pack up an online order and drink the coffee she’d gotten from the newest coffee place a few blocks down from the shop. Always a fan of trying the newest hot spot in her beloved town, she found that this new place had bitter coffee and decided that she probably wouldn’t go back. Most likely, if all of their products were like this one, they wouldn’t be around long, and someone else would try their hand at making that café work.

That had happened a few times already in her less than a decade of living here. Once a place had been turned into a bar, restaurant, or café, if the previous owner sold, the next person to own or operate it typically left it that way because of how places like that had to be built. To remodel and turn it into a different kind of space would cost too much money, and to buy a restaurant space that hadn’t been a restaurant before would, too. So, this place, if it failed, would end up another café, most likely, or at least a restaurant, and she’d try that one, too.

Quinn decided not to bother with the coffee and went to toss out the cup after dumping the liquid in the bathroom sink in the back. As her hand went to let go of the cup so it would land in the trash can, she heard the bell above her front door chime.

“Customer?” she asked herself and then quickly moved around the labyrinth of items in the stuffy back room that still needed to be inventoried and cataloged to be put online.

She made it just in time to see a man, carrying a box, turn around, about to leave.

“Hi,” she said a little too loudly, catching him as his hand landed on the door.

“Oh. I thought maybe the sign was a mistake, and you were closed,” he replied, turning back around.

“No, I just had to get something in the back,” she lied. “What can I do for you today?”

“Um… I’m a realtor, and–”

“Let me stop you right there,” she interjected, holding a hand up. “I’m not selling.”

“Huh?” he asked.

“I’m not selling the property. I’m the owner. I’m not selling it. ”

“And I’m not buying. I’m in residential real estate, not commercial.”

“Oh, sorry.” She shook her head from side to side. “I’m used to people coming in here, asking me to sell the building because they want to add some big retailer or something in this spot. I had a developer in here just last week.”

He walked up to the glass counter and set down his box. On the side of it, Quinn saw a price tag of twenty-five cents, and she couldn’t even remember when the last time was that she paid twenty-five cents for anything. Maybe one of those gumball machines at the grocery store? She’d been thinking about getting one of those for the shop but putting it on the street outside. She’d make a little money on that, at least.

“That whole box is only a quarter?” she teased.

“Sorry?” he asked.

“The price tag.” Quinn pointed.

“Oh, I don’t know. It must be left over from something. Maybe a garage sale or an estate sale. Anyway, I’m selling this old farmhouse not far from here. No one lived there, so we’ve got some stuff we’ve been selling, and no one wants an old box like this one.” He pointed down into the open box. “I could just throw it out, but it’s someone’s old stuff. I know it’s a long shot, but I thought I’d see if you’d take it.”

“Well, let’s see what we’ve got.” She looked down into the box and noticed a smaller one in there that looked like an old photo box. “Pictures?”

“Mostly, yes. I don’t imagine there’s a big market for these things… I thought about keeping some of them and using them to stage a house, making it feel a little homier with pictures of a fake family, but that seemed wrong somehow. I’m willing to just give it to you, if you think you can sell it. My guess is you’d only give me that quarter for all of this, anyway.” He chuckled.

“Oh. Well, if you’re just donating it, I can get you a receipt for tax purposes,” she offered.

“That’s okay. It’s not worth the line item on a spreadsheet. Like I said, I just felt bad about throwing them out. I was going to, though. I’ve had this box in my back seat for about a week. I was just grabbing some coffee and saw your sign said open, so I thought I’d check, but I was probably going to trash them later today. What timing, huh?”

“Yeah,” she replied.

“Well, do you want them? Can you even sell anything in there?”

“I’m sure I can,” she said, seeing a few old books in the box as well and wondering if any of them were worth anything.

“Okay. Well, it’s yours, then. I’ve got to run,” he said. “Good luck with it, I guess.”

“Thank you,” she replied.

The guy left the shop, clanging the bell above the door as he went, and she went in the back to make herself another cup of coffee. Once it was ready, Quinn returned to the box on the counter, despite having several other things to do, like cataloging and inventorying all the items that were stacked on top of each other and blocking her path from the front to the back in what was sure to be a violation of the fire code, but something told her to pay attention to this box that would make her no money at all.

“I sure do have an eye for business,” she joked to herself.

She pulled the photo box out of the larger box and noticed that it had dust on it, but that fingers had wiped some of it away, probably when they’d found it to begin with. She could make out fingerprints on the front of the long box as well. Those had been left when they’d opened it to see what was inside. That was one of her favorite parts of her job. She never knew what she was about to find when opening something like this. It could be photos, yes, but it could also be something that someone just needed to store somewhere. Maybe it would be old coins that she could sell online and make some decent money on. She’d found a few good stamps on envelopes once. They hadn’t been mint, but she’d made some money on those with a local collector she’d known since she’d moved here.

As she pulled back the old lid, Quinn wondered if the box itself was worth anything. It was just solid cardboard, so probably not, but she was sure that it held stories, at least. She loved stories. When people came in to sell her something or get it appraised – which she’d gotten certified to do after buying the shop, spending a lot of money to do that and still not making back her investment – there was always a story. She’d found old military dog tags in a box once. A woman had asked her to take a look at her father’s old things after his death, and she hadn’t known that his dog tags from World War II were in there. She’d opted not to depart with those and told the story of his time in the war.

When Quinn took a look inside this box, though, at first, she was disappointed because it was only pictures, but after her initial disappointment, she began pulling the old photos out one by one and setting them gently on the counter. Some of them were quite old, and she didn’t want to risk damaging them further than time already had. Some of them were so damaged that she couldn’t make out what they were pictures of. People, probably. Old photos were more purposeful than for pleasure or documenting landscapes, vacations, or your dinner for an Instagram post. People didn’t even smile in older photos because it was so expensive to have them taken. They were a way to almost catalog someone’s very existence because the only way to do that before would’ve been to commission an artist to paint a portrait, and most people didn’t have that kind of money.

“Wow,” she let out when she saw one of the photos. “She’s beautiful,” she said of one of the women in it.

Quinn picked it up and looked a little closer. Time had gotten to this photo, but she could still make out most of the details within it. Staring at it for longer than she should, she eventually set it back down and picked up one photo after the other. Deciding that they probably wouldn’t fetch much but that it was worth setting them out for people to at least look at, she put them aside to deal with later. She laughed because she’d decided to price them at only twenty-five cents apiece. Then, she checked out the few books in the box .

One of them was definitely an old romance novel with a bare-chested, muscled man on the cover, his long blonde hair blowing in the fake breeze, published in the 1980s. She giggled at that ridiculous cover and set the book aside. That probably wouldn’t sell here, but she might be able to give it to a thrift store or donate it to the library. The other two books looked more interesting, though. She wasn’t sure if they’d get much, but she would look them up later to see if they were worth anything at all. One looked to have been bound by hand. It wasn’t a journal, from what she could tell with a brief look, but it seemed like something someone had taken great care in making. She wasn’t sure what to do with that one just yet. Outside of an old spatula that was, for some reason, inside this box, and an old blue scarf that looked like it had been knitted by hand, there wasn’t anything else inside.

She kept the scarf, checked on the spatula because even old kitchen utensils and appliances could be worth something to the right buyer, and then went about adding the photos to another box of pictures she had. Tagging them with twenty-five cents, she set them in the front to give them the best chance of finding a new owner and returned to the books. She didn’t get any other walk-in traffic, which gave her time to look up the books’ possible value, label them, and put them in her book display case. After that, she had to get back to the orders that required processing and shipping out that day.

Still not sure why she felt so strangely calm about the day ahead, she went into the back, where she had her packing and shipping station set up. Using the security camera to keep an eye on the front as she worked, she thought about how if nothing happened today – besides this man bringing her a box that wouldn’t get her much money, if any at all – she’d be disappointed because something inside her had been telling her that today mattered. Then, while she was wrapping up an old candle holder, she heard the bell over the door.

“Oh,” she whispered to herself and smiled when she looked up at the person who had just walked in.