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To Swear by the Stars
Cara Clemens, a vibrant twenty-eight-year-old elementary schoolteacher, loved antiques. From the elegant Depression ware she kept on display at her home in the china hutch to the 1914 pocket watch her great grandfather had owned, the collection she kept had been building her whole life. When she was a child, she received a porcelain doll dating back to Germany, circa World War II, its painted eyes and mouth faded from such a long journey. But its scars and nicks told her the story of its travels, and it wasn't long before a passion grew. The history behind each piece made these items worth much more than what their price tags read.
Cara taught third grade at Hollow Oaks Elementary, located on the far north side of town, and home to the recent 2017 fifth-grade touch-football champions. Go, Raptors! She'd been teaching for five years and loved brightening fresh young minds with science and history.
As Cara stood in the doorway of her modest two-story home, looking at an empty street and a lazy four-way intersection, she sipped a mug of cold tea. The wind had picked up, and it shook the smaller branches of an enormous elm that shaded most of her front lawn. A nip in the air hinted that fall really was here. October had always been her favorite month. She repeatedly said the moon looked different when a cold chill was present, that it gave the town an eerie feel—but in a good way, of course.
The proud collector had resided in Frostford, Colorado, her whole life. Her parents' home was only one block north, and most of her childhood friends had never left. Sure, the town was technically within Tornado Alley, and winter snowstorms could be deadly, but, while the rest of the world seemed chock-full of violence and hate, Frostford rested peacefully between two mountains, Mount Olivious and Forman Peak; the 11,000-foot-tall snow-covered Alps almost seemed to shield the town from the rest of the country's problems.
Before Colorado was a state, the territory where Frostford now stood was known for its rich history involving the Underground Railroad and its settlers' attempts at fighting slavery. More recently, however, Frostford was known for its hundreds of reputable Big Foot sightings in and around Roosevelt National Forest, just west of the town. Word of such sightings brought tourists, filmmakers and loads of amateur Big Foot hunters. Also, it didn't hurt that the town never skimped on its luxurious four-star hotels; after all, tourism accounted for over twenty-five-million dollars in profit each year.
A delivery truck, marked Anton's Antiques, pulled to the curb. Cara smiled as she watched two men exit their seats and trudge to the back of the vehicle. They opened the rear doors, and one man climbed inside. The other, waiting to accept an antique Cara was dying to glimpse, pushed himself against the truck's bumper, leaning far in to help his associate move the item equal to their own combined body weight. When they carefully lowered the antique to the street's asphalt and let it stand on its own, Cara opened her screen door and stepped onto her porch to get a better view.
The elegant mirror stood six feet tall, bordered with carved mahogany, and, even from this distance, Cara could see the black specks within the aged mirror's face, which rocked a bit back and forth in the strengthening breeze.
