Page 5 of Eye on the Ball
I didn’t like that at all and considered going for my bat again.
Turning to us, she bent over, put her hands on her thighs, and breathed so hard I thought she might be hyperventilating.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Who’s after you?” Jack said, eyes narrowing as he headed toward her.
“Everybody! They’reallafter me,” she shouted, still gasping for breath.
“Why?”
She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and straightened. “Because they’re all in love with me.”
I closed my eyes and sighed.
Here we go again.
2
Jack
She didn’t look like a con artist or escaped mental patient, but looks could deceive, as I knew very well.
The woman was maybe an inch shorter than Tess’s five-eight, but considerably rounder. She had golden-brown skin, long black hair, and dark eyes. She wore blue jeans beneath an orange vinyl raincoat, though the sky was cloudless blue, and carried a bright orange tote bag clutched beneath one arm.
I glanced through the window at the empty parking lot and then gently nudged her aside, unlocked the door, and stepped outside to scan the area. Still nobody, and I couldn’t hear anybody skulking around the edges of the building, either. Her car, a dusty old Toyota sedan, sported Georgia license plates and a series of scrapes down the driver’s side doors.
I headed back inside. If I’d been wrong, and the woman was a threat, I didn’t want to leave Tess alone with her. Not that Tess couldn’t take care of herself, as I knew very well after the events of the past year.
The woman was standing across the counter from Tess, pulling something out of her bag. “My grandmother was a celebrated jazz singer. She always had men chasing after her, and they gave her money and jewelry and cars and even houses! She wasn’t even beautiful or, to be honest, a great singer.”
She blew out a breath and held out a hand. “I’m Ursula, by the way.”
Tess smiled at her. “I’m Tess. I’m sorry, I don’t shake hands. Germaphobe.”
I walked up next to them and shook Ursula’s hand. “I’m Jack. So, what’s the bottle about?”
She’d pulled a rose-colored crystal bottle with a tulip-shaped stopper out of her bag and placed it on the glass countertop. It looked solid and girly, and I could tell Tess liked it.
“This is her perfume bottle. She gave it to me on her deathbed and made me swear never to let it out of my possession and definitely not to sell it.”
Tess nodded. “So, why are you here?”
“I want to sell it.”
Tess and I exchanged a look, but we weren’t surprised. Deathbed promises weren’t very valuable these days. Tess saw a lot of this in the pawn business.
“May I?” Tess indicated the bottle, and Ursula nodded.
My girlfriend—still getting used to the idea of that—bent her head and absently shoved her braid of gorgeous red hair over her shoulder, bending down to study the bottle. “It’s Depression glass, of course.”
Ursula nodded.
“Depression glass?”
Tess aimed her big blue eyes at me. “During the Depression, nobody had money for fancy glassware anymore, so glass manufacturers started mass-producing this cheaper product in pretty colors. It was a way to keep the factories going and employees working. You can tell authentic Depression glass by its imperfections like uneven color saturation.”
“And see this?” Tess pointed at the bottle. “Air bubbles often got into the glass, too. The imperfections are really what added to the collectability.