Displaced in time?

It was lovely Saturday, so my wife, Cathy, my daughter, Brynne, and I decided to go for an excursion to Fort Langley (a small, heritage town with several antique and artisan stores). One of the antique stores we shopped in caused an interesting glitch in the day…

The store had two small rooms of furniture and assorted knickknacks and paraphernalia upstairs and two small rooms with more stuff downstairs. Cathy is a more thorough shopper than I am, and I descended the stairs before her. Brynne came down with me, and we slowly circled from one room to the next, back to the first, and then upstairs. Before we went up, we looked for Cathy, but couldn’t see her downstairs (Brynne said she’d seen her come down, so I assumed she was in the other downstairs room). When we got back upstairs, the proprietor asked if we’d seen the back room and the basement: I said, “Yes, but I seem to have lost my wife.” It was an off-the-cuff remark, and she gave an odd little laugh, but I didn’t think anything of it until later.

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Brynne and I roamed around the two upstairs rooms again, waiting for Cathy, but she didn’t appear and I decided I should look for her downstairs (we checked both rooms upstairs, but she wasn’t in either. There is only one passageway between rooms). Brynne stayed at the top of the stairs in case Cathy came by, and I quickly, but thoroughly, checked the two rooms below, but couldn’t see her.  When I came up and told Brynne I hadn’t seen her Mom, she gave me one of those ‘you’re kind of a useless old dude’ looks, and then she went down to look, but she couldn’t find Cathy either.

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Brynne’s cell phone was on, but she hadn’t gotten a message from her Mom. I turned my cell-phone on (both Brynne and Cathy have ‘smart’ phones; mine is definitely non-sentient, but folds into a small enough package to fit easily, and comfortably, in any pocket). There was no ‘missed call’ message on my phone. We searched methodically upstairs and decided that we should leave the store, but stand in front, on the sidewalk, and look around for her (perhaps she’d needed some fresh air). We couldn’t see her, so I flipped open my phone to call her, but Brynne saw her on a bench on the other side of the street. Cathy saw us then; she looked mad.

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Apparently, she had seen us go back up the stairs and followed us shortly afterward. She looked for us upstairs, but couldn’t find us. Then she went outside, to the sidewalk, and looked around. Then she went back into the store and searched for us; again, she couldn’t find us. She repeated her outside/inside search routine a couple more times, phoned us (more than once), and assumed we had left the store and weren’t answering our phones.

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We told her we hadn’t left the store until that moment, but at first I don’t think she believed us. Suddenly Brynne’s phone received messages from her Mom, and shortly after that I got a message as well.

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Cathy vows she will never go inside that store again: she thinks something sinister happened.  I think it was a fascinating experience (there were a few anxious moments, but it ended well).

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I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, but the store was not large, it hadn’t been crowded, and it should have been easy to locate each other very quickly (the building was not modern; only wooden materials, so I’m curious why there was no cell-phone service). Perhaps someone had been temporarily displaced in time…

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