LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      “Devin! Devin!” The handsome young man shouted her name, reaching out his hand as he ran alongside the bus she was on. The gap between them widened and his voice grew desperate. “Come back! Please don’t leave!”

      She stood and, gripping the edges of the seats to keep her balance, staggered up the aisle of the moving vehicle. It seemed to take forever to reach the front.

      “Please, you must stop,” she begged the driver. “I must get off.”

      The man merely shook his head. “Next stop is Grand Central. You need to take your seat, ma’am.”

      When she looked out the window again, all she saw were cars. The man was gone.

      “No! No! No!”

      Devin Abernathy shot up on the mattress, gasping for breath. Her throat ached from screaming. She was alone in her apartment, a glance at the clock confirming that it was time to get up for work. But she couldn’t. Not yet. Lying back on the pillow, she covered her face with her hands and wept.

      It was already nine o’clock when she arrived to open Yesterday’s Closet, the vintage clothing store she owned in New York’s East Village. Her younger sister was waiting outside, blowing on her bare hands and shuffling her feet to ward off the November chill. Emily was a sophomore at New York University, but she worked at the shop three mornings a week.

      Seven years earlier, their parents had died in a car accident on their way home from a New Year’s Eve party. Devin, in college herself at the time, had moved from campus housing to a tiny efficiency apartment in Lower Manhattan to ensure that she and Emily, who had been barely thirteen, were able to stay together. It had been just the two of them ever since.

      “I was getting worried,” Emily said.

      “Sorry.” Devin unlocked the door and deactivated the alarm. As they walked inside, she added, “I overslept and missed my train.”

      Another person might not have thought anything of the excuse. Emily, however, stopped in the process of unwinding the hand-knitted scarf from around her neck. Her expression reflected concern. “Everything okay, Dev?”

      “I had the dream again.”

      No need to be more specific than that. Her sister knew exactly the dream to which Devin referred. Devin had told her about it often enough. It featured a man, a very handsome man, who seemed achingly familiar, even though Devin couldn’t recall ever meeting him in real life.

      It always began with him calling her name. She would turn and spy him a short distance away. As soon as their gazes connected, he would smile and start toward her. The situation was always different. One time they were on opposite sides of a street that had been closed for a parade. Another time she had been seated on a subway train while he stood on the crowded platform. And now the bus.

      Regardless of the scenario, the dream appeared to take place during her favorite decade, the 1940s, and it always ended the same. He was never able to reach her before she woke.

      The first time Devin had the dream she’d been a senior in college. She’d experienced it a couple more times before graduation, and then off and on ever since. During the past year, however, it had begun recurring more and more frequently.

      “That makes three times this month,” Emily remarked.

      “I know.”

      “What happened this time?”

      “Same thing as always. We never got together.” Lost in recollection, Devin frowned. “He seemed more frustrated in this one. As if the situation was…urgent.”

      “Urgent how?”

      Devin sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

      “I still say you should undergo hypnosis. Your subconscious is trying to tell you something.”

      “Yes. It’s telling me I haven’t had a date in nearly a year.” Devin said it dryly, but in her heart she knew it was more than that. She couldn’t shake the feeling that time was running out. But for what?

      Doing her best to push thoughts of both the handsome man and the dream aside, she told her sister, “Come on. I want to get the new inventory catalogued before we open today.”

      “An estate sale, right?”

      “Of a sort. The elderly owner was recently moved to a hospice facility, and he had no immediate family,” Devin said as they made their way to the back room.

      “That’s sad.”

      Devin nodded. It was sad.

      “You said it was on the Upper East Side.” Emily smacked her lips and grinned. “Ritzy.”

      “Exactly. I still can’t believe how lucky I was to spot the sign.”

      Devin had been on her way back from another sale in the same neighborhood when, on a whim, she’d taken a detour and had come across the hand-lettered notice out front of a stately looking brownstone.

      Walking

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