“Ah, afternoon, pal.” He raised his eyebrows pointedly. “If you’re done scaring the other customers, I can get your order from the back.”
“Perfect, lovely.” The old man smiled, oblivious.
Other customers.
Rowan nodded kindly.
“Back in a sec,” he said then jogged to the door behind the counter.
“Well?”
I blinked at the man.
“Sorry, I don’t—”
The old man rolled his eyes. The dog at his heels whimpered, although whether it was expressing sympathy with the man or me, I couldn’t tell.
“Did you manage to fix the stitching? That house of yours has a bad habit of catching one’s seams.”
Another fool’s tale about my damned house. I took a calm breath.
“If this is about the house being haunted or—”
“Haunted!” He barked a short sharp laugh that startled the dog. “What nonsense. Haunted, my God.”
Thank Christ. Some sanity at last.
“That’s what I thought, but—”
“That house isn’t haunted. It’s a mirror.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“I’m sorry?”
The old man peered at me closely.
“Oh dear,” he said. “It’s got away from you, hasn’t it? I tried to warn you”—he shook his head—“back when it was hanging off you by a thread. Now it’s got free, climbing the shelves of the pantry, running across the roof, hiding in the basement—”
“Here’s your order.” Rowan appeared suddenly to my side. He handed over a small plastic postal bag. A lump gently weighed down one of the corners. Rowan nodded at the sleeping woman in the wheelchair. “Though you might want to tell the missus there are better ways of ordering embroidery thread.”
The old man took the package and tucked it into one of the giant, rustling pockets of his coat.
“She insisted I order through you.” He winked at me. “I’m just the messenger.”
The wheels on the chair squealed to a start, as the old man shuffled toward the door, dog pattering in tow. Outside, he wandered away, dog dancing a zigzag in the wake of his sleeping wife’s chair. Inside, I was still trying to process what he’d just said.
My house is a what now?
CHAPTER 22
“Okay,” said Rowan, eyeing me in confusion. “What was that about?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know.”
The alert on Rowan’s phone went off again. He checked the screen then looked at me.
