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Leslie grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

She ran over to the register area, bent over, and hefted something up from behind the counter. Ernie hadn’t been kidding when he’d said it was big. And Leslie hadn’t been kidding when she said it was exceptional. I walked over to the sculpture, like it was luring me. It was somewhat abstract, but not really. I had to touch it. Feel it beneath my fingers. My hands. Stroke it.

“Alabaster, right?” I asked Leslie.

“Peach alabaster,” she confirmed. “Isn’t it stunning? It looks like intertwined flames.”

“Or arms intertwined, and at the very top, their fingers pointed to the sky,” I whispered.

“Holy hell, Zoe, did I just hear you say smarmy shit?” Ernie asked.

I was so entranced by the piece, I didn’t care what in the hell he said. “Tell me about the base.”

“It spins. It’s battery operated, so no messy cords. Here, I’ll show you.” Leslie flipped a switch, and a soft light illuminated the sculpture from below, and the base began a slow twirl, as the arms and hands reached ever upward.

“My God, Leslie. Who made this, and how much is he selling them for?”

“That’s the thing. His wife finally got sick of not being able to park her car in the garage, because it was filled with all of these sculptures. She showed them to their granddaughter, Alex Sharp.”

“I know Alex. She comes in every week like clockwork to check out our latest selection of earrings and belts.”

“That’s her. She asked if we could sell them for her Pop-Pop. She brought in this one and one other, as well as dozens of pictures. About fifty percent are carved out of sandstone and are recognizable as animals or nature, the other fifty percent are abstract like this.”

"Here’s a soapstone one. Look."

Leslie left the alabaster piece on the counter, then reached behind the register and lifted out something wide and low. A clam shell, carved from soapstone, the glaze a deep muted olive-green that shifted from rich olive along the ridged curves to something almost bronze in the deeper grooves. And nestled between the two open halves, resting in the hollow like it had always lived there, was something that simulated a perfect, smooth pearl.

"Oh," I said softly.

"Right?" Leslie set it on the counter between us.

I reached out and ran my fingers along one of the ridged shell halves. The stone was silky, almost waxy, the way good carving felt when someone had taken the time to get it exactly right. "The same man made this?"

"Yep. Pop-Pop has range."

"No kidding." The pearl itself wasn't soapstone. I crouched down and looked. It was a river stone, tumbled smooth, warm grey-pink that sat against the green of the shell like it had grown there. "He put a real stone in it."

"Alex said he finds them in the creek."

I took a moment to step back and admire both pieces.

"Ernie," I said, without turning around.

"What?"

"Talk to me about pricing."

A pause. I could hear him calculating against his will. "The shell is a touch-buy. Somebody's going to pick it up, fall in love with it, and not put it down until we've run their card. Retail, I'd say six-fifty easy. We take forty percent, so we net two-sixty. Pop-Pop walks with three-ninety."

"And the alabaster?"

The silence that followed was longer. More pained.

"That's your window piece," he said finally, like he was confessing a crime. "One of a kind. Rotating lighted base, peach alabaster, probably eighty to a hundred and twenty pounds of stone before he carved it down. You factor in the raw stone, freight, the base, abrasives, polishing, a foam-lined crate just to ship the thing—" He exhaled. "His hard costs alone could run anywhere from six-fifty to fifteen-hundred dollars. And that's before you count a single hour of his labor."

"So, what do we sell it for?"

"Twenty-eight hundred," Ernie said flatly. "We keep eleven-twenty. Pop-Pop gets sixteen-eighty."