Chapter One

 

Riley Anderson pushed into the door of Friday’s Curious Shop in a rush. The doorbell overhead rang with a chaotic tinkle that only seemed to emphasize the lateness of Riley’s entrance. The store, as always, was its usually wild collection of old and new stuff from every era and across every interest. Clothes bins and racks and an entire toy section with collectible lunch boxes next to old board games and weirdly sharp Jacks sets. Glassy-eyed dolls were piled near to old gardening equipment, which were around the corner from delicate music boxes and a handful of wooden crates thick with old vinyl albums.

The records reminded her a little of her grandmother, so she didn’t mind dusting that section of the store.

Most of her job involved dusting. And rearranging stuff. And helping the occasional customer who walked into the secondhand store. There weren’t usually very many of those, though. The store was located in a weird part of Queens, on a side road with little foot traffic, in a triangle of land surrounded by roads and the elevated subway a block away. Outside, you heard the cars and the subway. Inside, occasionally things rumbled when the subway went by, but otherwise, the insulation in the place was very good because Riley almost never heard any traffic or the trains going past.

This particular area was surrounded mostly by storage businesses and the occasional car dealership. There was a really good sandwich shop a few blocks away. A gas station opposite the point in the triangle. And a few small dollar stores and bodegas up the street. But the entrance to Friday’s was on the quietest side of the triangle, the back of the building facing the main road.

Despite this, they still did get customers coming in. Browsers and pickers and collectors, and sometimes just people who’d wandered in from who-knew-where to waste a little time before going on to the next thing.

Riley didn’t generally mind the quiet days, though. She found Friday’s Curious Shop weirdly peaceful. Almost relaxing. Like she belonged here more than she belonged in the two-bedroom apartment she shared with three other people so they could all afford the rent on a place that wasn’t anything her grandmother would be impressed by. It worked. They mostly all got along. But Riley never minded leaving to come into work.

Friday’s was owned and run by a brother and sister who Riley also got along well with, and she supposed that helped. Doreen Sinclair spent a lot of time either in the office handling the books, or at the wooden register desk, where they had the surprisingly modern cash register, looking through industry magazines. Riley hadn’t realized there would be industry magazines for secondhand thrift stores, but apparently there were. And Doreen studied them.

Her brother, Ian, spent a lot of time either playing with the new gadgets or acquiring new merchandise for the store. He came and went a lot. But he was always a comfortable and friendly presence when he was in the store. He was also a huge bear of a man, and for some reason Riley found that reassuring whenever a strange customer came in. Though, to be fair, Doreen could be equally intimidating when necessary.

Because Riley liked her bosses, and liked working at Friday’s a lot—not only did it pay rent but it was peaceful and no one here harassed her—she was never late for work.

Never.

Except today. Today, everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. From her keys to the apartment going missing—one of her roommates took her set as well as his own on accident—to the water in the apartment going out unexpectantly—the super was on it—to spilling orange juice all over her first-choice outfit. She’d had trouble finding her purse and her subway card. She stepped into an icy puddle of half melted snow in shoes that were not waterproof. The subway got stuck between stations for twenty minutes because of signaling issues, then it skipping her stop for some unexplained reason, so she had to get on the return subway to get back to her stop. It wasn’t even a weekend and there was no explanation for why the train skipped her stop.

Just All The Things had gone wrong. And even though she’d sent a text to Doreen, she wasn’t sure if her boss had gotten the message because sometimes Doreen left her cellphone in her purse in the office and forgot to check it.

“Sorry I’m late,” she shouted as she hurried toward the back of the store where the register and office and storage room were. “Stuck on the train. Roommate took my keys. One of those mornings. Sorry!” She realized as she wove through the tables and shelves piled with random things, that no one shouted back at her and she couldn’t even hear the siblings talking.

Riley winced when she realized there could be customers in the store, and here she was shouting and making excuses. Probably should have checked for people first. Just to add insult to injury this morning. She didn’t think they’d fire her for one late day and all the shouting, but she couldn’t afford to lose this job.

She scanned the store as she moved past a stack of wooden crates for storing oil paintings leaning against a table covered in boxes with random pieces of material in them. With all the things in the store, it was impossible to see into every corner. In fact, she couldn’t see to the register until she broke through some of the piles and stacks. But she didn’t hear anyone talking, or moving. Nothing rattled. And there was no one sitting behind the raised wooden register desk when she reached it.

Strange. But not completely unusual. If Ian was out and Doreen was in the office and there were no customers, the place could be empty. Or the siblings could be in the back storage room, though normally they didn’t go back there together. And Riley wasn’t allowed back there without one of them. Which was fine. Thinking about the storage room gave her the creeps, though she wasn’t entirely sure why if she considered her reaction too closely.

The door to the storage room was closed, thankfully. She tucked her purse beneath the register counter, in its usual spot, and slipped out of her coat, hanging it on a hook behind the desk, near the door into the storage room. The door to the office was closed too. She hated to disturb Doreen when that door was closed, but since no one was on the main floor, and the front door was open—anyone could walk in and steal something, though Friday’s didn’t seem to have a problem with people stealing things—she needed to let someone know she was here.

She knocked on the closed door. Waited for a few moments as she continued to scan the main floor. An overhead florescent bulb at the far end of the store was flickering. She’d have to get out the step ladder and change that later. That would help make up for being late. The florescent lights weren’t nearly as irritating as Riley assumed they’d be when she started here. Really, the only drawback to the place was the constant dust that irritated her allergies. But thanks to the job, she could afford allergy meds now and that helped.

No one called to her from behind the door so she knocked again, a little louder but winced when she did. If Doreen was on a call, she’d hardly be able to respond to Riley’s knock.

Except, Riley couldn’t hear any voices inside the office. The door was thick and sturdy, but not so thick that she couldn’t hear when Doreen was on a call usually. And where the heck was Ian? It was really odd that they’d both left the main floor unattended like this. She tried the office doorknob and when it turned in her hand, she pushed the door open.

The narrow office was empty.

Oh kay.

So this was weird. She looked at the storage room door. She really didn’t want to go back there. The first door opened onto a storage closet with all the cleaning supplies, and that part wasn’t too bad. But then there was the door at the back of the storage closet that opened into the huge storage room behind the shop. She was sure the fact that she thought of it as huge was a trick of her imagination because there wasn’t enough space behind the store for there to be a huge room out that way.

She’d only been back to the storage room once or twice. Maybe? She couldn’t really remember. Seemed like maybe only twice and she’d been working at Friday’s for almost a year now. Only twice? Yeah. Something like that. She just never went back there. She left that to Doreen and Ian, and even they never went back there at the same time.

As she thought about that, it seemed weird that they’d never be back in the storage room at the same time. But then again, they’d always need at least one of them out front, right?

No one was out front now, though. No one was in the office. And she still couldn’t hear anyone moving around the main floor. It might be impossible to see through all the stuff to every corner of the store, but sound carried.

“Doreen? Ian?”

No one answered her.

The silence was starting to creep her out a bit. Had there been an emergency? Had they both had to leave for some reason and just forgot to lock the front door? If that was the case, she was sure one of them would have sent her a text. Maybe they were both in the storage room and just hadn’t heard her come in? But then, why had they left the front door unlocked without anyone here to watch things? It wasn’t like locking the door in the middle of the day would have scared away a lot of customers. There weren’t any at the moment. And the streets outside were pretty empty thanks to the harsh wind blowing around the city, making it significantly colder than the temperature indicated. Not exactly pedestrian friendly weather.

She stared at the storage room door for a long moment, debating. She wasn’t supposed to go back there alone. She didn’t want to go back there alone. And if the Sinclairs were back there, then it was better that she didn’t go back there to find them and just stayed out here to watch the floor.

Except they could be in trouble. And there were no customers to worry about.

Better just double check that last point before doing anything rash. She wove around the perimeter of the store, adjusting things as she went, picking a dropped scarf up off the floor and returning it to a wooden box full of silk scarves, restacking a pile of gardening books on the table where they sat next to some decorative pots.

She opened her mouth to call out for the Sinclairs again, but stopped, remembering she was looking for customers. She hurried through the toy section of the store because there was a new collection of marionettes hanging from wires in a display box that creeped her out, though she wasn’t sure why. The marionettes odd shaped, caricature faces reminded her of plague masks for some reason. And their jester outfits poked at something in her imagination that scared her. Like a nightmare she couldn’t quite recall.

Giving the display case a wide berth, she headed into the music section of the store. There wasn’t a lot of organization to all the collections and stuff, but she’d been slowly rearranging things so it was a little more orderly. The toy section was one of the few areas of the store that had been grouped appropriately when she started working here. The music section was her current, personally-assigned project.

She’d gotten all of the instruments moved and rearranged into the front corner of the store, even arranging a violin and acoustic guitar into the display window. She still had some rearranging to do so she could get the vinyl records to this part of the store, and there were some old concert posters she wanted to arrange here, too. But she had all the instruments in one place and the books of music. As well as a small, freestanding wooden shelf of books about music and musicians. It was one of the areas of the store she felt most comfortable in, so she liked when she had time between all the dusting to work on the area.

Today, though, she was too agitated to really enjoy strumming her fingers over the various guitars and adjusting the violin bow so it angled just right next to the violin. Between being late and not being able to find anyone in the store, she was too anxious. She still slid her fingers over the electric keyboard on the way past. It wasn’t plugged in so the sound was just dull thunking of the keys, but she didn’t mind.

When one of the keys issued an actual musical note, though, she paused. Hit the key again. Just a dull thunk.

Huh. She’d swear that key had made a proper sound. She was even certain it had been a G, and a grand piano G at that. But after hitting the button multiple times and it continuing to just thunk, she decided she must have imagined the note.

She finished her circuit of the store and turned up not one customer but also no sign of the Sinclairs. Outside, though it was the middle of the morning, the sky darkened as clouds rolled in. The interior of the store darkened along with the sky, despite the hardworking florescent bulbs overhead.

Riley reached the back counter and stared over it at the door to the storage room again.

Her pulse pounded in her neck, her ears rang a little. She did not want to go back into that room. Not alone.

She wasn’t supposed to be back there alone.

She looked around again, at the empty store.

She was going to have to go back to the storage room alone.

***

Thanks for joining the Spooky Season Calendar! I hope you enjoyed this first chapter of A MELODY IN G, a Friday's Curious Shop Story.

For the record, this one just gets spookier and creepier and I LOVE IT! It gave me the creeps (in the best possible way) while I was editing it. And I wrote it! LOL. If you'd like to read the full story, it is out now in HAUNTS AND HOWLS THROUGH GHOSTLY VEILS, so be sure to check it out!

And if you'd like to read the other Friday's Curious Shop stories (all also published in Haunts and Howls collections as well as standalone eBooks), check them out here.

HAPPY SPOOKY SEASON!