Buttons (Haunted)

Buttons

An excerpt from my short story

Buttons 

Gail Z. Martin 

"More buttons, Cassie? I swear, you read those things like a steamy novel." Teag Logan sailed into the shop and never even slowed his pace. 

Some people read novels. I read objects, especially buttons. I can glimpse the dizzying highs and shadowed lows of a stranger's life in a single, beautiful button. 

I'm Cassidy Kinkaide, and I own Trifles and Folly, an estate auction and antiques shop in beautiful, historic, haunted Charleston, South Carolina. Truth be told, we were also a high-end pawn shop on the side. I inherited the shop, which has been in the family since Charleston was founded back in 1670. We deal in antiques, valuable oddities, and, very discreetly, in supernatural curios. It's a perfect job for a history geek, and even more perfect for a psychometric. My special type of clairvoyance gives me the ability to 'read' objects and pick up strong emotions, sometimes even fragments of images, voices, and memories. 

"Shipment from the weekend auction just came in," I called to Teag. "I love Mondays." 

"Let me know if you find any sparklers or spookies," Teag answered. "I'll get the mundanes out on display." Over the years, Teag and I developed our own private language. 'Mundanes' are items that are lovely but lack any psychic residue whatsoever. 'Sparklers' resonate with the psychic imprints of their former owners. I'll set those aside until I can go through them. 'Spookies' reek of malevolence. They go into the back room, until Sorren, my silent partner and patron, can safely dispose of them.  

Most people think Trifles and Folly has stayed in business for over three hundred years because we're geniuses at offering an amazing selection of antiques and unique collectibles. There is that, but it's only part of the story, a small part. It's the back room that keeps us in business. We exist to find the dangerous magical items that make their way onto the market and remove them before anyone gets hurt. Most of the time, we succeed, but there have been a few notable exceptions, like that quake back in 1886 that leveled most of the city. Oops. 

"This is all from the Allendale house south of Broad Street, isn't it?" Teag asked, coming back in with a steaming hot cup of coffee.  

"The house itself was impressive," I answered, "but it was packed to the gills. Old man Allendale was a collector and a hoarder." 

"Bad for the family; good for our business," Teag replied. "It's not often we need four full-day auctions to clean a place out, and that was after the family took what they wanted and got rid of the trash." 

"The crowds came for the Civil War relics," Teag pointed out, brushing a strand of hair out of his eyes. He's in his late twenties, tall and skinny, with a skater-boy mop of dark hair, and a wicked sense of humor. He looks more like a starving artist than an aspiring art history Ph.D. candidate, but he's ABD (All But Dissertation) at the University of Charleston. Blame Trifles and Folly for derailing his ambitions. One summer's part-time job working with the amazing antiques and oddities that come through this store, and academia lost its attractiveness. Now he's my full-time store manager, as well as assistant auctioneer, archivist, and occasional bodyguard. 

"The guy spent a lifetime wandering around battlefields, since he was a kid in the Twenties," I replied. "If you think the pieces we got for auction were good, imagine what the museum took. They got first pick, for the new Edward Allendale Memorial Exhibit." I glanced at the pile I was sorting. Mostly small stuff, like musket balls, belt buckles, old postcards, and buttons. A big glass jar of buttons. 

I shifted in my chair, trying to get more of the draft from the air conditioning. Summer in Charleston was brutal between the heat and the humidity, and my strawberry blonde hair was more frizzy than usual. I tucked a lock behind one ear because it refused to stay in a pony tail. One look at me and you could guess my ancestors' Scots-Irish background, with the green eyes and pale skin that had a tendency to burn the instant I stepped out into the hot South Carolina sun.