Previously Loved Treasures (Serendipity #2)(6)

That week Ida began to ready the house. She cleaned and polished even the most forgotten corners of rooms that had long gone unused. She scoured yellow grime from the top of the refrigerator, swept away the dust balls at the far back of the closets, and dusted beneath bric-a-brac that hadn’t been disturbed in more than a decade.

With the help of a young man who lived three doors down, she made room for a bed in the sitting room and set the burgundy velvet sofa out for the trash man. At one time that sofa was the most beautiful piece of furniture she’d ever seen, but that was forty years ago, before James left home and left a hole in her heart. As she returned to the house Ida glanced back for one last look at the sofa, and for the flicker of a second she saw James jumping up and down on it.

During the night Ida heard the rumble of thunder, and then came the rain. It didn’t start as a drizzle but came rushing in like an angry river. Ida thought of the sofa. It was old, not worth much perhaps, but the thought of it sitting out there in the rain pained her heart. She climbed from the bed and stood alongside the window, watching. Remembering the good times. Regretting the bad ones.

The next morning when she awoke, the sofa was gone. There was no trace of it ever having been there.

~

That afternoon Ida went shopping for a bed. The downtown area of Rose Hill was hardly what one could consider a downtown. It was little more than a scattering of stores that stretched along the last four blocks of Hillmoor Street. For as long as she could remember, Ida had shopped up and down Hillmoor and she knew every store on the street.

That’s why she came up short when she saw the carved headboard in the front window of a store that had sat empty for decades.

Two days ago the store was nothing more than a black hole behind soot-covered glass. It had been that way for more than twenty years. Ages ago it housed a silver shop, an elegant place where a dark-eyed young woman sold silver tea sets and bracelets that jangled. It was rumored that the girl was a gypsy and the silver came from the graves of her ancestors, but such rumors are seldom more than old wives’ tales. That’s what the residents of Rose Hill told one another, until the morning they found the girl with a silver dagger stuck straight through her heart.

After that no one dared rent the store, and it remained empty. Two years later Parker Henry, the thirty-two-year-old owner of the building, suffered a massive heart attack and died. That was enough to convince the residents of Rose Hill that the rumors were true. So the building sat there, an unclaimed eyesore, for decades.

Ida squinted at the bright gold lettering stretched across the front of the store. “Previously Loved Treasures,” it read. In the bottom corner of the front window there was a row of tiny letters too small for her to read from where she stood. She crossed the street and walked up to the glass. It was not just clean, it was sparkling, and the words she’d been unable to read from a distance read “Peter P. Pennington, Proprietor.” Ida touched her finger to the glass and felt a pulse, a heartbeat almost.

“Oh,” she said, and stepped back so quickly she almost stumbled.

A hand reached out and steadied her.

Ida thought she was alone; she’d not seen anyone coming. Yet there he was, standing in back of her lest she topple over. “Where on earth did you come from?” she asked.

The man was small with the slight build of a boy and heavy wire-rimmed glasses. Despite the warmth of the Georgia sun he was wearing a black suit, white dress shirt, and red bow tie.

“I pop up whenever I’m needed,” he said and gave a mischievous grin. He extended his hand. “Peter Pennington.”

Ida laughed and returned his handshake. “So you’re the owner of this store?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded proudly.

Ida eyed the front window display. If you looked only at the beaded vest you might think it a clothing store, or the crystal perfume bottle might mean an apothecary, but then there were several other unrelated things and in the window was the carved rosewood headboard, none of it the sort of junk you’d find in a thrift shop.

“What exactly are previously loved treasures?”

Peter Pennington pushed the heavy glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “They’re the things you need, things other people no longer needed.”

“How would you know what I need?” Ida said doubtfully.

“I read the need in people’s face,” he replied. “Right now I can see you’re in need of a bed, and you’re considering this rosewood beauty in the window.”

Ida laughed. “Read the need, indeed. You saw me looking at that bed from across the street.”

“That may be,” he said, “but you have to admit that I did have the bed here ready and waiting when you were in need of one.”

“Oh, I get it.” Ida chuckled. “You tell me the bed was special ordered for me, then charge twice what it’s worth.”

He shook his head side to side. “No, ma’am. That bed is fair-priced at five dollars.”

Ida’s jaw dropped open. “Five dollars?”

He pushed the glasses back onto his nose a second time and nodded.

“Five dollars is not fair-priced,” she said indignantly. “I may not be wealthy, but I’m certainly not looking for charity!”

“And I’m not giving any,” Peter replied. “You’ve got to understand, when people sell previously loved treasures it’s not about the money. It’s about finding the right home for something they’ve spent years loving.”