April at the Antique Alley Read Online Free Page A

McCartney and when he pulled the crash hat off George Harrison’s hair tumbled out. He had a twenty-four karat smile and a three karat emerald in the ring on his left pinky.
    I took a deep breath and heard Jill let out an audible wanton sigh. He was either polite or deaf because he made no comment about her little lust noise.
    Perhaps the boy had grown use to hearing such audible gasps from females upon his arrival.
    Fredrick introduced Donald as his son and we quickly brought him up to speed on the recent events. I swear I saw a small tear roll down his cheek when we spoke of Lola’s death.
    His handshake was fierce and he made sure to tell both Jill and I that he was twenty-seven and single. He claimed to know Lola, but he too had no ideas about how we might contact next of kin. He told us about the one breakin we had heard about from Parnell. I am sure Jill and I would have stayed and chatted for a good deal of time but Donald excused himself so that he could head for home and we had little more use of his father so we moved on to the next store.
     
    Next door to Antiques of Dallas was a store called Buy It Bare. This shop differed from the other antique stores in several ways. They were trying to tap a new market of do-it-yourselfers, so what they did was sell only wooden furniture, and no matter what shape the piece was in when they bought it, they would strip the wood of its finish. Then, rather than refinishing it like so many of the other stores would do, they simply sold it stripped down. That way the customer could pick out the pieces they wanted, and finish them to match. The idea was attractive to the store owner because all of the pieces in the store would potentially match so a customer might buy several pieces instead of just a favorite find. In addition, the business of stripping and refinishing furniture was expensive and time consuming so they were cutting that process in half. To the prospective buyer the idea was attractive because the furniture all looked just like they wanted it to if they simply used their imagination. Additionally the furniture would be a little less expensive to buy. This meant though that their customers would generally be younger people, perhaps having their first antique buying experience.
    As soon as you walk into Buy It Bare you notice right away that the entire store has nothing but blond wooden furniture stacked everywhere, and then the smell hits you. The chemicals they use to strip the furniture are strong and have an
     
    odor. To most the odor is not necessarily a bad odor, but it certainly is a noticeable odor.
    I flagged down a tall blond woman who I expected was the store owner.
    Shelly Mizell was not quite as tall as me, and not quite as blond as me, and she also was not the store owner. When I introduced myself and my partner Jill, Shelly told us she was the store manager and that the store was actually owned by a small corporation and was the third store they had opened. The first one had been in Atlanta and was considered the flagship store. The other was in Houston. She had worked in both stores and they had picked her to open this third store up less than a year ago.
    There were no customers in the store at the time so Shelly took her time showing us around as she explained how the store worked. She claimed to not know Lola well. She, of course, knew who Lola was and recognized her by sight, but could not recall a single long conversation they had ever had. Eventually she took us in the massive back room of the store which is a work shop where they strip the newly acquired furniture of its varnish and paint. It was a smelly crowded room with several large fans blowing furiously, several projects in various stages of progress, and a man wearing a gas mask using a paint sprayer to wash down a kitchen chair.
    Shelly made enough distraction so that the man in the gas mask stopped his work, took off the mask, and spoke with us impatiently.
    Rubert Glaston (but usually