It’s five-thirty, and the store closes at six.

 

 “Chloral hydrate,” the old man told her. Knockout drops, is how the guy killed her. That August night he found her half asleep on pills, he just tipped a bottle down her throat. Of course, a Mickey Finn shows up in the liver during autopsy, but everybody said she’d got the stuff in Mexico. Even her doctor who’d wrote the script for her pills, he said Mexico. Even he said suicide.

 

 Twenty thousand dollars.

 

 And Claire said, “Let me think.” Still watching the white murk inside the jar, she pushed back from the counter, saying, “I need to . . .”

 

 The old man snapped his fingers for her purse and coat and umbrella. If she was going to wander the store, he’d hang on to them.

 

 Without even taking the playing cards, Claire handed her things over the counter.

 

 Claire Upton, she could look at a polished trophy and see a young man still reflected there, smiling and beaded with sweat, holding a tennis racquet or a golf club. She can watch him getting fat, married, with kids. After that, the trophy shows nothing but the inside of a brown cardboard box. Then the trophy comes out, held by another young man. This one, the son of the first.

 

 But that jar, it felt like a bomb waiting to go off. A murder weapon trying to confess. Just putting your finger on it, you’d feel a jolt. An electric shock. Some kind of warning.

 

 While she wandered through the shop, he was watching her in the video monitors.

 

 In the dark lenses of old sunglasses for sale, she watches a man wrestle a woman to the ground and kick her feet apart.

 

 In the gold-tone tube of an old lipstick, she can see a face crushed inside a nylon stocking, two hands around the neck of someone in bed, then the same hands scooping the spare change, the wallet, and keys off the dresser beside the lipstick. The witness.

 

 Claire Upton and the old-man cashier, they’re alone in the shadowy store with pillows of yellowed lace. Needlepoint dishtowels. Counted cross-stitch pot holders. Silver-plate brush sets tarnished dark brown. Mounted deer heads holding wide racks of antlers.

 

 In the steel blade of a straight razor, the handle, chromium, scrolled and heavy—reflected there, Claire can see her future.

 

 There, among the shaving mugs and horsehair brushes. Tall stained-glass church windows. Beaded evening bags.

 

 Alone in the shop with Marilyn Monroe’s lost child. Alone in this museum of things that no one wanted. Everything dirty with the reflection of something terrible.

 

 Telling the story now, locked in the bathroom stall, Claire says how she picked up the razor and kept walking, down every aisle, always peeking at the blade to see if it showed her the same scene.

 

 Telling her story now, sitting in the bathroom at the back of the antique store, Claire says it’s not easy, being a gifted psychic.

 

 The truth is, Claire’s not easy to be married to. Over dinner at a restaurant, she may be listening, then her entire body will shudder. One hand will fly to cover her eyes, and her head will rear back and twist away from you. Still shaking, she’ll peek out at you from between her fingers. A beat later, she’ll sigh and put one hand against her mouth in a fist, biting the knuckle but looking at you without a word.

 

 When you ask her what’s wrong . . .

 

 Claire will say, “You don’t want to know. It’s too awful.”

 

 But when you press her to tell . . .

 

 Claire will say, “Just promise me. Promise you’ll stay away from all cars for the next three years . . .”

 

 The truth is, even Claire knows she can be wrong. To test herself, she picks up a polished silver cigarette-case. And reflected there is her future: her holding the straight razor.

 

 When it’s closing time, she walks to the front of the shop, just in time to watch the old man turn the sign from “Open” to “Closed.” He was pulling down the shade that covered the window in the front door. The shop display window was cluttered with egg cups. Chenille bathrobes and bedspreads. Perfume bottles shaped like Southern belles wearing hoop skirts. Dead butterflies framed behind glass. Rusted birdcages. Railroad lanterns with shades of red or green glass. Folding silk fans. No one on the street could see inside.

 

 The old-man cashier says, “Made up your mind?” The jar is back, locked in the glass cabinet next to his register. In the white murk, only a dark eye and the shell of a tiny ear show through.

 

 Reflected in the jar’s curved side, distorted there, while the old man had told the story of Monroe’s murder, Claire had seen something else: A man tipping a small bottle between two lips. A face rolling back and forth against a pillow. The man wiping the lips with his shirtsleeve. His eyes settling on the bedside table. The phone and lamp and the jar.