“No,” he cut her off. “No. Just tell him she’s, no—tell him to look for a package in the mail. I’m not sure when.”

Jane smiled to herself. This guy had something—a brooch, a coin, a book—something that he thought was worth some money, maybe something he’d found in his grandmother’s closet. She’d seen it a dozen times. They acted like they’ve found the lost city of Eldorado—they’d come in with it tucked in their coats, or wrapped in a thousand layers of tissue paper and tape. (The more tape, generally, the more worthless the item would turn out to be—there was an equation there somewhere.) Nine times out of ten it was crap. She’d watched her father try to finesse their ego and gently lower the owners into disappointment, convince them that the sentimental value made it priceless, and that he, a lowly secondhand-store owner, couldn’t presume to put a value on it. Charlie, on the other hand, would just tell them that he didn’t know about brooches, or coins, or whatever they had and let someone else bear the bad news.

“Okay, I’ll tell him,” Jane said from her cover behind the coats.

With that, the tall man was away, taking great praying-mantis strides up the street and out of view. Jane shrugged, went back and turned on the lights, then proceeded to search for cushions among the piles.

It was a big store, taking up nearly the whole bottom floor of the building, and not particularly well organized, as each system that Charlie adopted seemed to collapse after a few weeks under its own weight, and the result was not so much a patchwork of organizational systems, but a garden of mismatched piles. Lily, the maroon-haired Goth girl who worked for Charlie three afternoons a week, said that the fact that they ever found anything at all was proof of the chaos theory at work, then she would walk away muttering and go out in the alley to smoke clove cigarettes and stare into the Abyss. (Although Charlie noted that the Abyss looked an awful lot like a Dumpster.)