The Persian Helmet Read online

Begun about 6-24-2013

  (Update F9)

  FOREWORD 3

  Chapter 1: A Three-Sided Bottle 4

  Chapter 2: Trash Heads 7

  Chapter 3: Helmet In A Box 10

  Chapter 4: He Ain’t From Around Here 14

  Chapter 5: Memorial Day Parade 18

  Chapter 6: The Cellar 22

  Chapter 7: Clench Bargo 25

  Chapter 8: Fourth Of July 29

  Chapter 9: Lock, Stock, And Gun Barrels 33

  Chapter 10: Cafe Society 36

  Chapter 11: Concealed Carry 39

  Chapter 12: The Long Arms of the Law 40

  Chapter 13: Mrs. Ebrahim 44

  Chapter 14: The Scarf Comes Off 47

  Chapter 15: Another Cup of Coffee 50

  Chapter 16: Debriefing 54

  Chapter 17: Media Jihad 57

  Chapter 18: They Ain’t From Around Here 60

  Chapter 19: Rendezvous 64

  Chapter 20: Revelations 66

  Chapter 21: Heroism Addict 69

  Chapter 22: Showdown on Main Street 73

  Chapter 23: The Mills of Law Grind Slowly 76

  Chapter 24: Just Business 79

  Chapter 25: Men in Black and Blue 82

  Chapter 26: Enter Adeleh 85

  Chapter 27: Greenline Station 89

  Chapter 28: Crime Scene 92

  Chapter 29: Go To It 95

  Chapter 30: Information Exchange 98

  The Persian Helmet

  FOREWORD

  The Persian helmet in this story is a real helmet, that I really found in a trunk on a curb in the suburbs of Kent, Ohio, in the 1970s. It remains a real mystery. But any resemblance between characters in this story and real persons is purely coincidental.

  As was explained in The Wish Book, The Rag and Bone Shop is where Clare Bower sells new merchandise she orders at the original prices from decades of old Sears catalogues.

  Chapter 1: A Three-Sided Bottle

  Clare Bower opened the bill from the storage company in Akron, and thought maybe she ought to get everything out of the storage unit.

  When she opened The Rag and Bone Shop the year before, after coming to Aunt Del’s house in southern Ohio for a quiet vacation, she’d left all her stock from her flea market stall in storage, after her brother ran things for her for a couple of weeks, and didn’t think about it in the excitement of opening the store. She’d even forgotten about her favorite free-time activity, shopping yard sales, estate sales, and auctions for old (cheap) stuff. Her store full of old stuff, brand new from old Sears catalogues, took all her time and attention. She still could hardly believe that her luck still held. She was still buying everything from all the old Sears catalogues at the original catalogue prices, and selling them at quite a decent markup. So far, she still sent in her weekly orders and Jackson, the mysterious delivery van driver, still came to town every week and unloaded sparkling new 1937 wringer washers and 1919 bottles of opium-laced ladies’ drugs (which she hadn’t had the nerve to put on sale) and 1956 furniture, now called “mid-century modern”, and sold everything almost as fast as it came in.

  But what to do with the old old things?

  Her apartment and furniture in north Akron had been easy. Since it became apparent that she was going to be living in Aunt Del’s house indefinitely, her friend Roxy Barbarino was subletting the apartment, furnished, and had even driven down to Greenline with all Clare’s clothes, and books and music and personal things, in a van.

  Storage for the flea market stock didn’t cost very much but it was wasting money, and the items were going to waste too. While Clare didn’t require a lot, neither did she skimp on herself, but there was no point in throwing money away. She had to make a decision.

  This could be a glass of wine over dinner decision, or a coffee and pie decision at the Greenline Café. Too early for wine, which in any case would have been at home since the town didn’t have a place to sit and drink. The Greenline was strictly three meals between dawn and dark, and no alcohol. She’d think about it at lunch.

  Over her all-beige meal — country fried steak with gravy, mashed potatoes with gravy, and rolls (well, there was a little green salad; pie would come later in the day) — she thought about storing all those nifty little items in the basement. But why not sell them?

  A new idea began to form in her mind. She’d open a room in The Rag and Bone Shop for the really old things. An adjunct shop. Simple.

  The plan was confirmed when one of the locals stopped in after lunch, wanting to sell an old bottle.

  “Well, I know you don’t sell things like this,” said Clench Bargo, a lanky farmer who worked part-time in the shop, “but it’s kind of cool. I know it’s old. I dug it up when I was digging a hole for a grape vine. We’re planting a small vineyard out back.”

  Clench Bargo was a veteran of Iraq, and decided to stay on the family farm when he got home. He had new ideas for diversifying the business.

  “Oh yeah? Fantastic.”

  He held out a small three-sided milk glass bottle, possibly an old medicine bottle.

  “This is very nice, Clench,” Clare said, turning it over in her hands. “No chips or cracks or anything. I’ll tell you what, I was just thinking about opening another room for old stuff like this. Not the Sears stuff. But I haven’t decided how to do it yet. I mean, I don’t know whether to just buy it from you or take it on consignment, and just pay you when it sells. Do you want to leave it here while I think about it?”

  “Yeah, I could leave it. How much do you think it’s worth?” he asked.

  “Well, you know it depends on what someone wants to pay for it. How much they want it. It might go for $5, but you’d have to give me a cut. Like a dollar. Then if you tag it ‘make an offer’ but with a minimum price … hard to say. Well, I’m going to have to give this some more thought and see what’s best for both of us.”

  “OK. Try $5. You want me to leave this here? So I won’t break it.”

  Clare smiled.

  “OK, if you trust me.”

  “Yeah, looks like you’re dug in here.”

 

  Before she could get her things out of the storage unit, Clare would have to set up a new room, and then plan on restocking it, if possible, without spending as much time driving around looking for stuff to buy as she used to. Maybe more of the local people would have things to sell in the shop.

  She’d expanded from the empty Woolworth’s into an empty bakery on one side and an empty shoe store on the other. She would need another space if she wanted to get serious about selling more than the Sears merchandise. Next to the empty shoe store was an empty dress shop.

  Greenline, like so many small American towns, had become almost a ghost town as family farms declined or consolidated into corporate farms, jobs disappeared, and people moved on. It wasn’t as bad as in the sparsely populated towns of the west, since in Ohio some people could and would commute to the closest city if jobs were available; they were willing to drive an hour each way, or more. Still, the old style small town was disappearing. Seldom would you find a main street in a small rural town with a five and dime, hardware store, bank, department store (clothes, housewares), furniture store, shoestore and shoe repair shop, men’s and women’s and children’s clothing stores, beauty salon and barbershop, drugstore, movie theater, library, fire and police, professional offices, and one or more churches. These essential businesses and services migrated at first to indoor malls, then over the years to the again-popular strip malls near newly constructed housing developments. Even city halls and city services might move to new buildings away from the central downtown. The services and products were available but there was no more center. Online shopping rep
laced the Sears catalogues for many, but old people who were slower to change their habits drove to a WalMart.

  Some little towns tried to keep the old center alive with antique shops or malls, fancy bakeries and restaurants, needlepoint shops and art galleries. People who wanted to stay in their home towns, or who had an urge to slow down and live in a small town, tried to survive with “creative” work. For a while this trend was driven by aging hippies, though entrepreneurs who hoped to avoid higher rents and taxes, and lure city people into driving out of town to specialty shops, took a stab at boutique-ing the small towns. The churches might or might not still be open, but little shoebox churches, and psychic parlors, opened in empty storefronts.

  Where the farm economy was still thriving, Mexican laborers, who had once been seen mainly in the southwest, arrived in Ohio in greater numbers and some stayed, opening their own restaurants and bodegas. Here and there were little groceries and restaurants run by Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, and Middle Easterners, though for the most part they lived and worked in the cities.

  Clare speculated on whether she might be able to buy some interesting tchotchkes from any late arrivals to add variety to her stock. You never knew.

  But speculation sold no tchotchkes. She could rent the empty dress shop but she’d want an inside door connecting it with the main store. But it might not be possible to put a door in the shared brick wall. Or she could clean up the Woolworth’s basement and open up down there. There was a working elevator, since the old Woolworth’s had used the basement for stock. Windows wouldn’t matter. She could put a small display in the big store windows promoting the new room. She went to the Greenline Café to celebrate with strawberry rhubarb pie and coffee.

  She told Jeanette about her plans for the new adjunct.

  “That’s great, Clare! I mean I love what you’ve got there but it would be nice if we could sell some of our old junk too. I mean stuff. I mean collectibles. I mean my mom’s costume jewelry.”

  “I thought you liked to wear that jewelry,” Clare said.

  “I do. See, I’ve got one of her pins on today.” She pointed to a rhinestone pin on her uniform blouse.

  “I like that. Love rhinestones.”

  “The problem is there are so many clip-on earrings and nobody wants to wear them. I sure don’t. I mean sometimes I used them for pins on my blouses, but not on my ears.”

  “Well, you could convert them. Maybe I could sell the converter kits.”

  “Good idea. You want that pie warmed up?”