Most towns have a place folks forget on purpose. Piedmont had a place folks forgot by accident.

It sat on the far end of Ladiga Street, just past the old peach orchard that had long since turned into a jungle of thorn bushes and opportunistic grapevines. If you walked that way with no intention at all, you might catch a glimmer of somethin’ behind the kudzu. A sag in a roofline. A broken porch step. Maybe even the ghost of a sign that used to hang over the door like a crooked smile.

That was The Penny Whistle Store.

Nobody alive in Piedmont today remembers when it was open except the handful of old-timers who still know the words to hymns that haven’t been sung since Noah caulked his ark. But every child in town knew of the Penny Whistle Store, because in summertime it gave off the faintest, sweetest smell of peppermint and dust, like the memory of candy that had never finished leavin’.

I came across it by accident when I was about nine years old. I had wandered through the orchard tryin’ to catch a grasshopper that had made a fool of me one too many times. After losin’ the grasshopper and most of my dignity, I pushed through some vines and found myself standin’ in front of a building that looked like it had gone out of business during the Hoover Administration and nobody thought to bury it.

The door was stuck half-open, half-shut in the way of doors that have not made up their minds in years.

Inside was a whole world forgotten by time.

Wooden shelves bowed under the weight of empty jars that once held licorice, lemon drops, sour balls, horehound sticks, and jawbreakers large enough to crack the teeth a dentist had not even counted yet. There was a faded checkerboard on the counter, two pieces mid-game, as if the players got called home to supper sixty years ago and never came back.

And a single penny whistle.

It lay in the dust like it had been waitin’ on me personally.

Now, Piedmont rumors had always claimed that whoever played the penny whistle would call forth the last sound the store ever heard. Some said it was laughter. Some said it was a hymn. Some said it was the groan of the roof complainin’ about all the candy barrels.

I picked it up anyway.
I was nine.
You could have told me it summoned banjo-playing ghosts, and I still would have tried it.

I wiped it on my shirt, put it to my lips, and blew a single note.

Just one.

And Lord have mercy, the whole store answered.

The shelves creaked.
The jars rattled.
The sunlight dimmed like it was holdin’ its breath.
And somewhere from deep in the back, where the shadows gathered like gossip, came a thin, wavering hum.

Not a ghost.
Not a hymn.
Not a roof joist groanin’ under its burdens.

It was a refrigeration unit.

Long dead.
Long forgotten.
But tryin’ its best to start up again, bless its heart.

The place shivered once, like an old man rememberin’ he used to know how to dance. And then everything went still again.

I dropped that whistle so fast you might’ve thought it had burned me.

Turns out, I was not the first kid to find the Penny Whistle Store, and I was not the last. Every child in Piedmont somehow stumbled on it at one point or another, in a season of life when curiosity outweighed common sense. And every one of us told a different story about what we saw or heard inside.

Some said the ghost of the old shopkeeper still counted change behind the counter.
Some swore they heard ice tinkle in a bottle of RC Cola that had not been cold since Eisenhower. Some claimed the penny whistle summoned the laughter of children from long ago.

But all agreed on this part.

You only ever found the store when you weren’t lookin’ for it.

And once you grew old enough to forget what summer felt like on bare feet or how it sounded when a jar of marbles hit the floor, well, you stopped findin’ it at all.

Years later, when developers bulldozed half of Ladiga Street to put in new gas lines, they called the city council in a panic. There was no store there. Never had been, accordin’ to the records. Just trees and vines and an old well nobody had used in half a century.

The Penny Whistle Store had slipped right back into the crack between memory and imagination, which is where most childhood treasures eventually go.

But sometimes, on the hottest day in late July, when the air is thick enough to chew, folks claim they catch a faint little tune floatin’ over the orchard.

Thin.
Sweet.
Lonely.

The kind of sound you only hear if you once believed in magic and still hope it might be real.

And if you follow that sound, y’all, you just might stumble across a forgotten place that only reveals itself to those who never quite stopped bein’ nine years old.

*****

New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.