by Fiona Grace
Lacey couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the odd pair. Was the wife incapable of asking her own questions?
“Got any chocolate?” the man she’d referred to as Buck asked. Or, more like demanded, since his tone was so boorish.
“I do,” Tom said, somehow keeping his cool in front of Loudmouth and his limpet of a wife.
He showed them over to the chocolate display and gestured with a hand. Buck grabbed one in his meaty fist and shoved it straight into his mouth.
Almost immediately, he spit it back out. The little gooey, half-chewed lump splattered onto the floor.
Chester, who’d been very quietly sitting at Lacey’s feet, suddenly sprang up and launched for it.
“Chester. No,” Lacey warned him in the firm, authoritative voice he knew full well he had to obey. “Poison.”
The English Shepherd looked at her, then mournfully back at the chocolate, before finally going back to his position at her feet with the expression of a scorned child.
“Ew, Buck, there’s a dog in here!” the blond woman wailed. “It’s so unhygienic.”
“Hygiene is the least of his troubles,” Buck scoffed, looking back at Tom, who was now wearing a slightly mortified expression. “Your chocolate tastes like garbage!”
“American chocolate and English chocolate are different,” Lacey said, feeling the need to jump in to Tom’s defense.
“You don’t say,” Buck replied. “It tastes like crap! And the queen eats this junk? She needs some proper American imports if you ask me.”
Somehow, Tom managed to remain calm, though Lacey was seething enough for the both of them.
The brute of a man and his simpering wretch of a wife swirled out of the store and Tom fetched a tissue to wipe up the spit out chocolate mess they’d left behind.
“They were so rude,” Lacey said incredulously, as Tom cleaned.
“They’re staying at Carol’s B’n’B,” he explained, looking up at her from his hands and knees as he circled the rag over the tiles. “She said they’re awful. The man, Buck, sends every single meal he orders back to the kitchen. After he’s eaten half of it, mind you. The wife keeps claiming the shampoos and soaps are giving her a rash, but whenever Carol supplies her with something new, the originals have mysteriously disappeared.” He stood up, shaking his head. “They’re making everyone’s life a misery.”
“Huh,” Lacey said, popping the last bit of croissant into her mouth. “I should count myself lucky, then. I doubt they have any interest in antiques.”
Tom patted the counter. “Touch wood, Lacey. You don’t want to jinx yourself.”
Lacey was about to say she didn’t believe in such a superstition, but then she thought of the elderly man and the ballerina from earlier, and decided it was better not to tempt fate. She tapped the countertop.
“There. The jinx is officially broken. Now, I’d better go. I still have tons of stuff to value before the auction tomorrow.”
The bell above the door tinkled and Lacey looked over to see a large group of kids come hurtling inside. They were dressed in party frocks and were wearing hats. Amongst them, a small, tubby blonde child dressed as a princess and carrying a helium balloon, yelled to no one in particular, “It’s my birthday!”
Lacey turned back to Tom with a small smirk on her lips. “Looks like you’re about to have your hands full here.”
He looked stunned, and more than a little apprehensive.
Lacey hopped off the stool, pecked Tom on the lips, then left him at the mercy of a bunch of eight-year-old girls.
*
Back in her store, Lacey got on with valuing the last of the Navy items for tomorrow’s auction.
She was particularly thrilled with a sextant she’d sourced from the most unlikely of locations; a charity store. She’d only gone in to buy the retro games console they had displayed in the window—something she knew her computer-obsessed nephew Frankie would love—when she spotted it. An early nineteenth-century, mahogany-cased, ebony-handled, double-framed sextant! It was just sitting there on the shelf, amongst novelty mugs and some vomit-inducingly cute models of teddy bears.
Lacey hadn’t quite believed her eyes. She was an antiques novice, after all. Such a find must’ve been wishful thinking. But when she’d rushed over to inspect it, the underside of its base had been inscribed with the words ‘Bate, Poultry, London’, which confirmed to her she was holding a genuine, rare Robert Brettell Bate!
Lacey had called Percy straight away, knowing he was the only person in the world who’d be as excited as she was. She’d been right. The man had sounded like all his Christmases had come early.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked. “You’ll have to hold an auction. A rare item like that can’t just be popped on eBay. It deserves fanfare.”
While Lacey had been surprised someone Percy’s age knew what eBay was, her mind attached to the word auction. Could she do it? Hold another one so soon after the first? She’d had an entire estate’s worth of Victorian furniture to sell before. She couldn’t just hold an auction for this one item. Besides, it felt immoral to buy a rare antique from a charity store, knowing its true value.
“I know,” Lacey said, hitting on an idea. “I’ll use the sextant as a lure, as the main attraction of a general auction. Then whatever proceeds I make from its sale can go back to the charity shop.”
That would solve two dilemmas; the icky feeling of buying something under its true value from a charity, and what to do with it once she had.
And so that’s how the whole plan had come together. Lacey had bought the sextant (and the console, which she’d dropped in her excitement and almost forgotten to pick back up), decided on a naval theme, then got to work curating the auction and spread the buzz about it.
The sound of the bell over the door pulled Lacey from her reverie. She looked up to see her gray-haired, cardigan-clad neighbor, Gina, waltzing in with Boudicca, her Border Collie, in tow.
“What are you doing here?” Lacey asked. “I thought we were meeting for lunch.”
“We are!” Gina replied, pointing at the large brass and wrought iron clock hanging on the wall.
Lacey glanced over. Along with everything in the “Nordic corner,” the clock was amongst her favorite decorative features in the store. It was an antique (of course), and looked like it might have once been attached to the front of a Victorian workhouse.
“Oh!” Lacey exclaimed, finally noticing the time. “It’s one-thirty. Already? The day’s flown by.”
It was the first time the two friends had planned to close up shop for an hour and have a proper lunch together. And by “planned,” what really had happened was Gina had plied Lacey with too much wine one evening and twisted her arm until she caved and agreed to it. It was true that pretty much every local and visitor in Wilfordshire town spent the lunch hour inside a cafe or pub anyway, rather than perusing the shelves of an antiques store, and that the hour closure was very unlikely to dent Lacey’s trade, but now that Lacey had learned it was a bank holiday Monday, she started second-guessing herself.
“Maybe it’s not a good idea after all,” Lacey said.
Gina put her hands on her hips. “Why? What excuse have you come up with this time?”
“Well, I didn’t realize it was a bank holiday today. There are tons more people around than usual.”
“Tons more people, not tons more customers,” Gina said. “Because every single one of them will be sitting inside a cafe or pub or coffee shop in about ten minutes’ time, just like we should be! Come on, Lacey. We talked about this. No one buys antiques over lunchtime!”
“But what if some of them are Europeans?” Lacey said. “You know they do everything later on the continent. If they have dinner at nine or ten p.m., then what time do they have lunch? Probably not one!”
Gina took her by the shoulders. “You’re right. But they spend the lunch hour having a siesta instead. If there are any European tourists, they’ll be asleep fo
r the next hour. To put it into words you might understand, not shopping in an antiques store!”
“Okay, fine. So the Europeans will be sleeping. But what if they’ve come from further afield and their biological clocks are still out of sync, so they’re not hungry for lunch and feel like shopping for antiques instead?”
Gina just folded her arms. “Lacey,” she said, in a motherly way. “You need a break. You’ll run yourself into the ground if you spend every minute of every day inside these four walls, however artfully decorated they may be.”
Lacey twisted her lips. Then she placed the sextant down on the counter and headed for the shop floor. “You’re right. How much harm can one hour really do?”
They were words Lacey would soon come to regret.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’ve been dying to visit the new tearoom,” Gina said exuberantly, as she and Lacey strolled along the seafront, their canine companions racing one another through the surf, wagging their tails with excitement.
“Why?” Lacey asked. “What’s so good about it?”
“Nothing in particular,” Gina replied. She lowered her voice. “It’s just that I heard the new owner used to be a pro-wrestler! I can’t wait to meet him.”
Lacey couldn’t help herself. She tipped her head back and guffawed at just how ludicrous a rumor it was. But, then again, it hadn’t been that long ago that everyone in Wilfordshire thought she might be a murderer.
“How about we take that hearsay with a pinch of salt?” she suggested to Gina.
Her friend “pfft” her, and the two set about giggling.
The beach was looking particularly attractive in the warmer weather. It wasn’t quite hot enough for sunbathing or paddling, but plenty more people were starting to walk along it, and buy ice creams from the trucks. As they went, the two friends fell into easy chatter, and Lacey filled Gina in with the whole David phone call, and the touching story of the man and the ballerina. Then they reached the tearoom.
It was housed in what was once a canoe garage, in a prime seafront location. The prior owners had been the ones to convert it, turning the old shed into a somewhat dingy cafe—something Gina had taught her was referred to in England as a “greasy spoon.” But the new owner had vastly improved on the design. They’d cleaned the brick frontage, removing streaks of seagull poop that had probably been there since the fifties. They’d put a chalkboard outside, proclaiming organic coffee in the cursive writing of a professional sign writer. And the original wooden doors had been replaced by a shiny glass one.
Gina and Lacey approached. The door swished open automatically, as if to beckon them inside. They exchanged a glance and went in.
The pungent smell of fresh coffee beans greeted them, followed by the scent of wood, wet soil, and metal. Gone were the old floor to ceiling white tiles, the pink vinyl booths, and linoleum flooring. Now, all the old brickwork had been exposed and the old floorboards had been varnished with a dark stain. Keeping up with the rustic vibe, all the tables and chairs appeared to be made from the planks of reclaimed fishing boats—which accounted for the smell of wood—and copper piping concealed all the wiring of several large, Edison-style bulbs that hung down from the high ceiling—accounting for the metallic smell. The earthy smell was caused by the fact that every spare inch of space had a cactus in it.
Gina gripped Lacey’s arm and whispered with displeasure, “Oh no. It’s … trendy!”
Lacey had recently learned during an antique-buying trip to Shoreditch in London that trendy was not a compliment to be used in the place of ‘stylish’, but rather had a subtext off frivolous, pretentious and arrogant.
“I like it,” Lacey countered. “It’s very well designed. Even Saskia would agree.”
“Careful. You don’t want to get pricked,” Gina added, making an exaggerated swerving motion to avoid a large prickly-looking cactus.
Lacey “tsked” her and went up to the counter, which was made of burnished bronze, and had a matching old coffee machine that surely must be decorative. Despite what Gina had heard, there wasn’t a man who resembled a wrestler standing behind it, but a woman with a choppy, dyed blond bob and a white tank top that complemented her golden skin and bulging biceps.
Gina caught Lacey’s eye and nodded at the woman’s muscles in a see, I told you so, way.
“What can I get ya?” the woman asked in the thickest Aussie accent Lacey had ever heard.
Before Lacey had a chance to ask for a cortado, Gina nudged her in the ribs.
“She’s like you!” Gina exclaimed. “An American!”
Lacey couldn't stop herself from laughing. “Erm… no, she’s not.”
“I’m from Australia,” the woman corrected Gina, good-naturedly.
“Are you?” Gina asked, looking perplexed. “But you sound exactly like Lacey to me.”
The blond woman instantly flicked her gaze back to Lacey.
“Lacey?” she repeated, as if she’d already heard of her. “You’re Lacey?”
“Uh… yeah….” Lacey said, feeling quite odd that this stranger somehow knew about her.
“You own the antiques store, right?” the woman added, putting down the little notepad she’d been holding and shoving her pencil behind her ear. She stuck out her hand.
Feeling even more bemused, Lacey nodded and took the hand being offered to her. The woman had a strong grip. Lacey briefly wondered whether there was any truth to the wrestling rumors after all.
“Sorry, but how do you know who I am?” Lacey queried, as the woman pumped her arm up and down vigorously with a wide grin on her face.
“Because every local person who comes in here and realizes I’m a foreigner immediately goes on to tell me all about you! About how you also moved here from abroad on your own. And how you started your own store from scratch. I think the whole of Wilfordshire is rooting for us to become best friends.”
She was still shaking Lacey’s hand vigorously, and when Lacey spoke, her voice shook from the vibration.
“So you came to the UK alone then?”
Finally, the woman let go of her hand.
“Yeah. I divorced my hubby, then realized divorcing him wasn’t enough. Really, I needed to be on the other side of the planet to him.”
Lacey couldn’t help but laugh. “Same. Well, similar. New York isn’t exactly the other side of the planet, but with the way Wilfordshire is, sometimes it feels like it may as well be.”
Gina cleared her throat. “Can I get a cappuccino and a tuna melt?”
The woman seemed to suddenly remember Gina was there. “Oh. I’m sorry. Where are my manners?” She offered her hand to Gina. “I’m Brooke.”
Gina didn’t make eye contact. She shook Brooke’s hand limply. Lacey picked up on the vibes of jealousy she was giving off and couldn’t help but smile to herself.
“Gina’s my partner in crime,” Lacey told Brooke. “She works with me in my store, helps me find stock, takes my dog for playdates, imparts all her gardening wisdom to me, and generally has kept me sane ever since I came to Wilfordshire.”
Gina’s jealous pout was replaced by a sheepish smile.
Brooke smiled. “I hope I get my own Gina, too,” she joked. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both.”
She retrieved the pencil from behind her ear, making her sleek blond hair swish back into place. “So that’s one cappuccino and tuna melt...” she said, writing on the notebook. “And for you?” She looked up at Lacey with expectancy in her gaze.
“A cortado,” Lacey said, looking down at the menu. She quickly scanned everything on offer. There was a wide array of very tasty-sounding dishes, but really the menu consisted solely of sandwiches with fancy descriptions. The tuna melt Gina had ordered was in fact a ‘skipjack tuna and oak-smoked cheddar toastie’. “Erm… The smashed avo baguette.”
Brooke noted the order down.
“What about your furry friends?” she added, pointing her pencil between Gina and Lacey’s shoulders to where Boudicca and
Chester were pacing around in a figure eight motion in their attempts to sniff one another. “Bowl of water and some doggie kibble?”
“That would be great,” Lacey said, impressed by how accommodating the woman was.
She would make a great hotelier, Lacey thought. Maybe her job back in Australia had been in hospitality? Or maybe she was just a nice person. Either way, she’d made a great first impression on Lacey. Perhaps the Wilfordshire locals would get their way and the two would go on to become firm friends. Lacey could always do with more allies!
She and Gina headed off to choose a table. Amongst the vintage patio furniture, they had the option of sitting at a table made of a door on its side, thrones made out of tree stumps, or one of the nooks, which were made from the halves of sawn up rowing boats filled with pillows. They went for the safe option—a wooden picnic table.
“She seems absolutely lovely,” Lacey said, as she slid to seating.
Gina shrugged and flopped down on the bench opposite. “Meh. She seemed alright.”
She’d gone back to jealously pouting.
“You know you’re my fave,” Lacey told Gina.
“For now. What about when you and Brooke buddy up to chat about being expats?”
“I can have more than one friend.”
“I know that. It’s just, who will you end up wanting to spend more time with? Someone your own age who owns a trendy store, or someone old enough to be your mother who smells of sheep?”
Lacey couldn’t help but laugh, though it was without malice. She reached across the table and squeezed Gina’s hand.
“I meant it when I said you keep me sane. Honestly, with everything that happened with Iris, and the police and Taryn’s attempts to drive me out of Wilfordshire, I really would’ve lost my mind if it hadn’t been for you. You’re a good friend, Gina, and I don’t take that for granted. I’m not going to abandon you just because a cactus-wielding ex-wrestler’s arrived in town. Okay?”