Secondhand Spirits

by Blackwell, Juliet

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, what is that?” Maya recoiled. Twenty-three years old chronologically, but closer to forty on the cynicism scale, Maya had dark dreadlocks dyed bright blue at the ends, ears edged with silver rings and cuffs, and an aversion to makeup because, she’d explained earnestly, it was “too fake.” Why the bright blue hair didn’t strike her as equally artificial I wasn’t sure. Maya attended the San Francisco College of the Arts part-time, but her passion was visiting the elderly of her community and recording their stories for an oral history project.

  I had met Maya a few weeks ago as she sat on a blanket on the sidewalk, halfheartedly peddling the 1940s-era beaded sweaters some elderly friends had given her in their attempt to “make a lady out of her.” That quest was doomed to fail, but in the course of our conversation Maya and I discovered we had mutually beneficial business interests: Now she scoured her friends’ closets and attics for inventory for my store, and I paid her a generous finder’s fee.

  “I believe it’s called a Vietnamese potbellied pig,” I said. “Apparently George Clooney has one.”

  “Had one,” Bronwyn corrected me.

  “Okay . . .” Maya said. “Why?”

  “A friend couldn’t keep it,” I said. “It’s only here temporarily. Sort of a foster situation.”

  “We eat things like that in my neighborhood,” said Maya.

  “Hush, child!” scolded Bronwyn, clapping her hands over the pig’s ears and whispering, “He’ll hear you.”

  “He’s a pig, Bronwyn,” Maya pointed out. “In case you didn’t notice.”

  “He’s not deaf. And he’s a special pig. I love my little Oscarooneeroo.”

  “Hey, whatever floats your boat,” Maya said with a shrug and an enigmatic smile.

  Today Maya was taking me to meet a woman who had lived in the same home for more than fifty years and who, according to Maya, had never thrown away a single item of clothing. That description was music to my ears. Hunting down high-quality vintage clothing was a competitive sport in the Bay Area, and elderly pack rats were my bread and butter. Besides, I was on a mission lately: I needed to find the perfect wedding dress.

  Not for myself, mind you. Me and romance . . . well, it’s complicated, to say the least. But Aunt Cora’s Closet was my first attempt at running a legitimate business, and I was so determined to do well that I wasn’t above giving the Fates a nudge. On the last full moon I anointed a seven-day green candle with oil of bergamot, surrounded it with orange votives, placed malachite and bloodstone on either side, and, after scenting the air with vervain and incense of jasmine, I cast a powerful prosperity spell. Two days later the fashion editor at the San Francisco Chronicle called me with a fabulous plan: Her favorite niece was getting married, she wanted to outfit the entire wedding party in vintage dresses, and could I be a doll and help her out?

  As my grandmother always said, Be careful what you wish for. After weeks spent haunting estate sales, thrift stores, and auctions, I had managed to rustle up several options for each of the eleven bridesmaids, as well as a half dozen gowns that could be altered to fit the bride. But, anticipating bridal jitters, I wanted to have plenty of options on hand. Maya’s lead on two more gowns, if they were in good condition, would bring the selections up to eight. Surely one would catch the bride’s fancy.

  The bridal party was scheduled to arrive tomorrow at two o’clock for a mammoth try-on session, and Bronwyn suggested I make the afternoon an event by closing the store to passersby and serving mimosas, which sounded like a good idea. I hoped. I wasn’t what you’d call an experienced hostess.

  In fact, as we used to say back in Texas, I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers.

  “Lily, you ready to go?” Maya asked.

  “Sure am.”

  I grabbed my 1940s cocoa brown wool coat from the brass coat stand near the register and pulled it on, securing the carved bone button at my neck. It was only four in the afternoon, but a wall of fog was creeping in, dropping the temperature a good fifteen degrees in the past five minutes. Late-afternoon or early-evening fog is not unusual for San Francisco since it sits on a thumb of land between an ocean and a bay. Still, recalling Barnabas’s warning—Mark the fog—I wondered if the weather had anything to do with Aidan Rhodes’s visit. Spooks loved the fog.

  The thought gave me pause. If Aidan’s witchcraft was powerful enough to command the weather, I would have to be careful around him.

  “Go ahead and close up if we’re not back by seven,” I said to Bronwyn, gently tugging on Oscar’s ear. “And you behave yourself, young man, or I’ll send you right back to where you came from.”

  “Don’t you listen to her, Oscar Boscar Boo. Mama Bronwyn won’t let mean old Aunt Lily send you anywhere ,” she crooned to my would-be familiar as Maya and I walked out into the cool March mist.

  Shape-shifting creatures and meddlesome witches aside, the quest for really cool old clothes must go on.

  Chapter 2

  When we exited the store we decided to leave my vintage cherry red Mustang convertible sitting at the curb, instead choosing to take the more practical purple van in the driveway. The graphics on the side read:AUNT CORA’S CLOSET

  VINTAGE CLOTHING AND QUALITY

  ACCESSORIES

  CORNER OF HAIGHT & ASHBURY

  BUY—SELL—TRADE

  IT’S NOT OLD; IT’S VINTAGE!

  I steered while Maya guided me across town. Along the way, she gave me the scoop on what to expect.

  “The source is Frances Potts. She’s lived in her home near Hunters Point for fifty-two years, ever since she married Ronald. The Pottses lived together, one great big happy family, for years.”

  “Potts, Frances and Ronald,” I repeated. “Got it.”

  “Frances and Ronald had two daughters. They lost one as a child—so sad; that just seems so wrong, doesn’t it?—but the other married well and has a couple of kids of her own. Anyway, the in-laws died not long after the little girl, some thirtysomething years ago, leaving the house to Frances and Ronald. Ronald died not too long after that; don’t know from what. Must’ve been pretty young, don’t you think?”

  “Seems like. So it’s just Frances? She never remarried?”

  “Nope. And she inherited everything from her in-laws, including from her mother-in-law’s sister, Bessie. And like I told you, Frances has never thrown anything out.”

  My kind of woman.

  “Where does she store everything?” Cloth could last for hundreds, even thousands of years if it was properly cared for. But as one soon came to discover in the vintage clothing business, that was a big “if.”

  “The basement.”

  My heart sank. Basements were rare in earthquake country—in a temblor the last place you want to be is belowground, where the trouble originates—and those that did exist were generally small and only partly finished, with the rest left in its natural state of dirt. Damp dirt.

  “Don’t worry—everything’s hung up on racks; plus she’s got a dehumidifier down there. She has a bunch of costume jewelry as well, mostly from the thirties. I think it belonged to her in-laws. Oh, and a swell collection of old Chock full o’ Nuts coffee cans.”

  Maya and I shared a smile.

  “One can never have enough of those,” I remarked.

  As we neared the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood the environs deteriorated, piles of trash increasing in inverse proportion to the condition of the cars lining the streets. Most of the storefronts were boarded up, and the only sign of commerce—other than the drug dealers lurking in the alleys—was a liquor store, its dirty neon sign flashing,—QU-R. Seagulls announced our proximity to the bay, but there were no expensive waterfront homes here. In its heyday, Hunters Point had been home to a working port and a naval station. It now qualified as a Superfund toxic cleanup site.

  Most of the homes were two-story stucco duplexes with peeling paint and crooked shutters, interspersed with a smattering of 1970s bunker-style co
ncrete apartment buildings. All in all, the ambience did not scream, “prosperous followers of high fashion,” and I wondered what we would find at the Potts residence.

  To my relief, Frances Potts lived in a once-grand Victorian that must have been built when the neighborhood’s residents were middle-class. It sat high above the street on a huge corner lot, encircled by a four-foot-tall stone retaining wall topped with a crooked filigreed wrought-iron fence. The yard was dense and overgrown, but the varieties of rare plants suggested it had once had a Mediterranean theme. A widow’s walk topped the main turret. Cheap metal grates covered the first-floor and basement windows, and a rain gutter had detached itself from the eaves and hung limply near the front stoop. Bright green moss obscured the elaborate design of the old roof shingles; it would be only a matter of time before they rotted away completely.

  Throw in some cobwebs and a ticket booth, and the Potts home would be a dead ringer for a theme park’s haunted house.

  We reached the broad wooden porch and Maya rang the doorbell, which we could hear echoing inside the house. I looked out over the disheveled garden, trying to quell my nervousness. After a childhood of being shunned, I always felt butterflies in my stomach when waiting on someone’s doorstep, hoping for admittance. It still seemed like a minor miracle when someone actually invited me into their home.

  A child’s high-pitched voice rang out on the other side of the door: “Who is it?”

  “It’s Maya. Is that you, Jessica?”

  The door opened wide to reveal a little girl, maybe seven or eight, with long, glossy black hair and huge eyes to match. Her grin took up half her face.

  “Hi, Maya! I was just helping Mrs. Potts peel potatoes and carrots for her dinner. She’s having company.”

  “Yum,” Maya said. “This is my friend Lily.”

  “Hi!” Jessica swung around and hopped away, holding her hands in front of her like paws. “Guess what I am!”

  “A bunny rabbit?” I asked.

  “A kangaroo!” She flashed a smile over her shoulder as she hopped down the shadowy hallway.

  Maya and I stepped into the dim foyer and closed the door behind us.

  “Jessica’s a neighbor,” Maya spoke in a low voice. “I get the sense that her mom has to work a lot; I met her last time I was here.”

  “Come in. Come in.” A petite, white-haired woman emerged through a doorway near the end of the hall and beckoned us into the kitchen.

  The savory aroma of roasting meat greeted us in the bright kitchen, which featured high ceilings, large windows, and a worn terra-cotta tile floor. Old crockery, iron skillets, and copper pots adorned the shelves willy-nilly; huge mason jars full of flour, sugar, and pasta lined the green-tile counter. Stitched dolls sat high on a shelf along with several embroidered, heart-shaped pillows. A pan on the stove held raw peeled and quartered carrots, potatoes, and onions. A platter of sugar cookies sat under a glass dome.

  “Mrs. Potts, this is Lily Ivory,” Maya introduced us.

  “So nice to meet you. Please, call me Frances,” Mrs.

  Potts murmured in a soft Southern drawl. I felt an immediate kinship to her, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. She wore a faded floral housedress, support hose, and fluffy pale pink slippers. By her slow, deliberate movements she appeared to be in her seventies. But there was a nervous vitality to her . . . a simmering energy just under the surface. Hard to say. I’m sensitive to auras and vibrations, but I’m no mind reader.

  “You’re here to look at the wedding dresses?” Mrs.

  Potts asked.

  “And any other vintage clothing you might be willing to part with.”

  “Vintage.” She laughed and waved a hand. “They’re just plain old. But they’re yours if you’d like them. I don’t quite know why I’ve squirreled them away all these years.”

  “For my sake, I’m glad you did,” I said.

  “Jessica, you’d best run on home, dear,” Mrs. Potts said to the girl, lifting the glass cover off the plate of cookies. “Your mother will wonder where you are. Take a cookie.”

  “M’kay. Bye, Mrs. Potts! Bye, Maya!” With a sugar cookie as big as a salad plate in one hand, the little girl hopped toward the back door, then stopped and looked back over her shoulder. Her big, near-black eyes landed on me, and she hesitated before adding, “Bye . . . lady!”

  Frances led us down a short, high-ceilinged hallway to a door that opened onto the basement stairs. Her descent down the creaky wooden stairway was slow and arduous. Weak shafts of late-afternoon light filtered in through the high, grimy basement windows, but it was impossible to see anything clearly. Near the bottom of the stairs Frances stretched to her right, reaching out in the darkness to switch on the lights.

  Women’s clothes—mostly high-quality dresses and skirt suits—crowded a rack that ran the entire circumference of the concrete half basement. Dozens of hats, pocketbooks, gloves, and scarves wrapped in plastic rested on shelves above the rack. In the very center of the room sat a stack of cardboard boxes neatly labeled MOTHER POTTS and BESSIE POTTS.

  I had met a lot of people who held on to a lot of things over the years, but this was truly impressive.

  As I stepped off the stairs and into the confined space, I was hit by a wave of dizziness. The air reeked of moth-balls and cedar, and like most homes that had embraced a number of souls over the years, the room swam with sensations, both good and bad. But there was something more—an undercurrent of bleak desperation. This went beyond the average vicissitudes of a typical human life. I glanced over at the diminutive Mrs. Potts, wondering how her young daughter had died.

  “There are the wedding gowns,” said Mrs. Potts as she gestured toward two ivory dresses hanging on the end of one rod. “I had them dry-cleaned.”

  They were lovely, and in excellent condition. The older of the two was a 1920s flapper style made of Normandy lace, with a high neckline and long fitted sleeves. A sheer net-and-lace skirt fell from the drop waist, and featured at least seven inches of a floral embroidered area at the knee. The second underskirt then fell to a scalloped, embroidered hemline. Paired with it was an ecru net-and-lace veil with a flowered headpiece and an eight-foot-long lace-trimmed train.

  The other gown was a tea-length early-1950s dress composed of two parts: a simple white satin sheath underneath, with a gauzy long-sleeved overdress that cinched at the waist before flaring out in a skirt made wide with crinoline.

  Either dress might have to be lengthened with rows of lace or ruffles to accommodate my customer’s measurements, but that was simple enough. I felt a small thrill of success . . . and relief. Seeing into the future wasn’t one of my talents, but I had the definite sense that tomorrow’s bridal fitting session would go well.

  Frances took the simpler dress off the rack and held it up to her body with both hands, smoothing the fabric over the length of her torso and swaying slightly to make the skirt dance.

  “Can you imagine? I once fit into this!”

  “I have that very same reaction every summer when I put on my swimsuit for the first time,” I said.

  Frances and Maya both laughed and nodded, and I felt a wave of pleasant surprise. This was the kind of “girl talk” I had never been privy to, much less a part of.

  “Where are you from, Lily?” Frances asked.

  “West Texas. A small town not far from El Paso.”

  She nodded. “I’m from Louisiana originally, but I’ve lived here so long I’ve lost my accent.”

  I smiled. I always think I’m losing my accent, too, until I realize people keep asking me where I’m from.

  Next we turned our attention to Mrs. Potts’s impressive collection of everyday clothing. Maya went right to work opening boxes and pawing through “Aunt Bessie’s” things, many of which had been carefully wrapped in dry-cleaning bags. Storing cloth in plastic wasn’t the best plan, as it didn’t allow garments to “breathe.” Thus a lot of the fabric showed signs of rot and moth damage, but some of it could be sa
lvaged. I had developed a careful multistep laundering process to gently bleach and clean even the most delicate silks and laces, and Maya’s mother, Lucille, was an excellent seamstress who helped me with minor repairs. Customers who sought out rare vintage clothing usually took a mend or two in stride as the cost of wearing such beauty.

  I started flipping through the hanging clothes, at the oldest end first, noting a number of designer names and labels from chic boutiques. Mrs. Potts must have been quite the clotheshorse in her day—this was high-quality stuff. The garments were primarily circa the 1950s and 1960s, with a few that harked back to the forties. These outfits would sell well; the clothes of the postwar decades were very hot right now. I held each one of the articles of clothing in my arms for a moment before setting them into one of the Hefty plastic bags we’d brought with us. As I cradled them, I felt for their vibrations, sensed their history.

  I reached for a deep red shirtwaist from the mid-sixties. As I touched it, I felt a physical shock, as though I had been scalded. This was the garment responsible for those dreadful sensations I had felt at the bottom of the stairs. Letting go immediately, I dropped the dress in a scarlet heap on the ground.

  Mrs. Potts looked up from the box of once-white gloves she had been matching and met my eyes.

  “Perhaps we’d better leave that one,” she said.

  “Yes, perhaps,” I murmured as I hung the dress back up.

  In the vintage clothes business, there was a call for items that gave off less-than-positive vibrations. Some people are drawn to darkness, not in order to replicate it but because of a kind of deep understanding of, even kinship with, the shadow side that helps them resolve to set things right in this life. After all, without shadows, things lose their definition, their contours. A lot of perpetually sunny people don’t understand that. On the other hand, a truly dark item in the wrong hands . . . That could be dangerous. As I knew only too well. As an impetuous young woman I had searched for the truth about my father, and when I found it, I barely survived. Even now the memory made me shiver.