Hazardous Device Team Responds to Local Store

Hazardous Device Team Responds to Local Store

By Charlene Brubaker, North County Register

The Marsten-Whitlow department store has long been hailed as the anchor of downtown Greenwood. It survived the collapse of the local coal industry in the 1960s. It was somehow left untouched as three successive hurricane-driven floods left rival stores permanently closed in the 1970s. When shopping malls became the center of retail and social life in the 1980s, Marsten-Whitlow remained unfazed, prompting some locals to joke that time moves differently there. And this century, although obituaries of brick-and-mortar stores unable to compete with online retailers are as common as reports that the local baseball team has fired yet another manager, Marsten-Whitlow enjoys one record-breaking sales year after another.

“Frank Whitlow was a hero,” Greenwood Mayor Mark Thompson remarked recently on the anniversary of the store founder’s death. “More than once, that store kept our business district from collapsing entirely. The foot traffic it brings in gives new entrepreneurs a head start when they rent one of the smaller storefronts on that block. Frank always paid his people well and went out of his way to keep them employed during rough times. Above all, the store contributes to a sense of community. Our senior citizens and our teenagers alike gather together at Marsten-Whitlow.”

The basement soda fountain and the wooden escalators certainly recall a bygone era. Controversy swirled when the store was exempted from a state ordinance prohibiting the sale of commercially-bred pets. (Marsten-Whitlow has always maintained that the cats and dogs for sale in its pet shop are sourced from responsible breeders and treated humanely.)

But the very same high school students who so vehemently protested the store’s special treatment are seen perusing an extensive collection of prom dresses each spring. It is considered a rite of passage for prom-bound students to repurpose product labels from the fifth-floor bakery as name tags. “Hello, I’m walnut brownie,” one young woman was heard to say recently, to gales of appreciative laughter from her friends. A former bakery manager recently admitted, on the condition of anonymity, that the bakery does, in fact, produce additional labels during prom season so the students may “steal” them with impunity.

Marsten-Whitlow shoppers of all ages especially enjoy the third floor, where anything an informercial ever assured viewers was “not available in any store” seems to be available. The Holla-Hula Exercise System is a perennial best-seller, as is the Better Butter Slicer.

But today’s events were unusual even for Marsten-Whitlow. Police responded to a report that a potentially destructive device had appeared in a shopper’s bag without her knowledge or consent.

Surveillance footage shows Greenwood University sophomore Amy Miller passing through the store’s main entrance at 10:13 a.m. At 10:54 a.m., she dialed 911 from inside the store. Sources close to the investigation say Miller told the dispatcher that she “heard a rushing noise” and then “felt pulled, like down a drain.”

“It has to be destroyed,” Miller told responding officers, showing them a large marcasite pendant hanging from a heavy silver chain. “It has to be detonated safely.” Appearing genuinely terrified, she claimed that the necklace “knew my name” and “tried to show me something.”

A representative of the Greenwood Police Department stated that pyrite— the mineral used as a gemstone in marcasite jewelry— is not a potentially dangerous substance.

Miller refused to speak to members of the media before she left the premises, physically unharmed but with her damp hair wildly tangled. One eyewitness reported seeing Miller emerge from the electronics department looking “As if she’d just gone swimming with her clothes on. But there’s nothing back there other than televisions and computers. There’s not a fountain or even a bathroom in that part of the store. I don’t know how she could have gotten so wet. They had to bring in a mop before someone slipped on the puddles she left behind when she ran out of here.”

Witnesses overheard Miller insisting that she did not purchase the necklace and does not know how it found its way into her shopping bag. A sales receipt, also found in the bag, identified the jewelry as “Sciolino necklace,” on sale for $20 (usually retails for $40).

“The receipt is a bit odd,” acknowledged store manager Nathan Smythe. “It says that the customer paid in cash, but there was no cash in the register. Most of our customers don’t use cash. I think the salesperson may have been so flustered that he made change out of his own pocket. We’ll look into it.”

In addition, the receipt is printed in purple ink the store hasn’t used in forty years. That, according to Smythe, is not particularly suspicious. “We have a lot of longtime employees who remember how things were done last year, last decade, last century,” he explained fondly. “And you never know what you’re going to find in the storage rooms in a place like this. It could have been done by accident. It could have been done on purpose, as a nostalgic joke. So far no one has fessed up. But it’s our current paper stock, and the logo is current too. We just tweaked the logo last year. That receipt hasn’t been hanging around since 1985.”

Asked to comment on the necklace itself, Smythe admitted, “There’s no record of it in our inventory. We have a few similar necklaces. There’s a dolphin-shaped marcasite pendant, and a peridot pendant that looks a lot like the one our customer found. But we’ve had so many different styles come in and out of the jewelry department over the years that it isn’t surprising that one didn’t get logged. We stopped logging things manually in 2004.”

An employee, who requested anonymity, said she remembers tagging a pendant that “looked kind of like that one” last summer. “But I don't think it was on that chain. And I didn’t price it at twenty bucks. Maybe someone was messing around with old inventory.”

Chief Executive Officer Frances Whitlow, granddaughter of the store’s founder, stated simply, “nothing happened.” When asked whether the necklace could be linked to a secret gateway to another dimension, she replied, “I’m definitely not aware of a portal hidden in the soda counter walk-in freezer that allows my unhinged ancestor to come here and wreak havoc until someone manages to chase her back to her own time. And she’s definitely not incredibly dangerous because she stole a gem that contains the sum of human knowledge for the next ten centuries.”

The Greenwood Police Department reiterated that there is no active threat to the public.

Whitlow urged shoppers to remember that the semi-annual anniversary sale will begin next weekend. For a limited time the soda counter and the bakery will both offer applewood-smoked bacon and turkey sandwiches to hungry shoppers at half price.