Clock and Dagger (17 page)

I
left Flo fussing over the boxes in her shop. I was tempted to offer to stay and help, but the gears in my brain were starting to shift, and I needed some time to process. I walked the few steps to my own back door and called out when I walked in. Silence met me.

I wasn't used to that. Even though I technically lived alone, I had actually spent very few waking hours alone since I moved back to Orchard. There was always something to do at the Cog & Sprocket or out at the workshop at Caroline's house. A clock to repair, a shelf to clean, a box to unpack. My days were full, as was my heart. I had found my place, and now someone had unsettled it by killing Mark.

I walked up the stairs to my apartment, checking the door on the stairs to the attic. Still locked. I was tempted to go
in, but thought better of it, for now. I needed a shower and something to eat. I also needed to start a new notebook.

The notebook habit was part of the Clagan DNA. Large hard-covered sketchbooks, mostly black. Upstairs in the office we had built in shelves around the perimeter of the room, two rows of them, that served as a tabletop for clocks and files. But the shelves themselves were becoming the Clagan family archives. Pat had built them, and he'd added sliding doors on them all. There were locks on the doors—after the events of last fall, we'd both agreed that there were likely a few undiscovered treasures, and perhaps some assorted skeletons, that needed to be protected from prying eyes.

I had gathered all the notebooks I could find here in the shop, and I'd scoured the attic and workshop out at the cottage, with Caroline's blessing. There were over one hundred of them, dating back to when my great-great-grandfather had bought the shop over a hundred years ago. Fortunately, most of the notebooks had a start and end date on the inside cover, so they could be sorted chronologically.

Unfortunately, they didn't have a table of contents. I was still working on a process for chronicling what was in them. I needed to hire someone to help, and I was hoping that Nadia would be that person. She'd been doing a great job on the website. Despite her “whatever” attitude, she was also fascinated by the history of the shop, and loved learning about clocks. There was something holding me back, though. Something I didn't trust. But was it Nadia I didn't trust, or Tuck? I needed to sort that through.

When I took over the shop, I started a new notebook and kept up with the plans for the shop, on the work I was doing,
and on the ideas for the future. I noted who was doing what when, but I was careful to keep the gossip off those pages. Or, more accurately, I annotated the gossip. As had my grandparents, and my great-grandfather.
Will stopped by. Business closing.
A simple note made in 1931 by my great-grandfather about the closing of the bank across the street, a move that had started a spiral in Orchard that continued for decades. I found a letter he'd written to his brother that detailed the entire transaction, including the shady dealings that had gotten Will arrested, eventually.

Last summer my grandfather had noted the passing of his friend, Grover Winter, and he'd written a note that said
It came on fast, no one knows the real reason
. I learned later that my grandfather's observations were leading him to a startling conclusion, one that rocked Orchard forever.

So I was trying to adopt the family motto of being cryptic, but today it wasn't working. After I took a shower and made myself some lunch, I sat down at the kitchen table and unwrapped a new notebook. This one was smaller, and turquoise, but still unlined paper. Out of habit I dated the inside cover. I left a few of the front pages blank, hoping to create a new habit of a table of contents moving forward. For now, I rolled my pencil in my hand a few times, and then I started to write. Or rather, to draw.

I took a bite of sandwich. Yum. Curried turkey with walnuts, apples, and raisins. I opened a big bag of chips and put a few on my plate, and then wiped my hands on my napkin. I wrote Mark's name down and a few bullet points about him underneath. Then I wrote Tuck's name. And Nadia's. And every other name I could think of from the past few days. I circled each name, and put a number in the circle.

It wasn't any good. I couldn't concentrate. There was nothing new to add, just a bunch of loose ends. I took my plate over to the sink and rinsed it before putting it into the dishwasher. “I'm heading down to the shop,” I called to Bezel. She stretched with her whole body, spreading her tiny pink toes, before snuggling her face even deeper into the sofa cushion, wrapping a front paw around her forehead. Sometimes she was so adorable that it hurt.

Down in the shop, there were a few jobs that needed tending. I looked at one of Mark's unfinished projects and took a deep breath before taking it out of the bin. A lovely antique that kept losing time. The clock movement needed an overhaul, and I had been working on it with Mark a few days before Christmas. I checked the notes that were included in the bin. Just as I'd suspected. The case was with Pat for some repair and careful restoration. Mark had started to take the movement apart, but hadn't finished. I would have chastised him for that. I wished he were there so I could. Instead I did a quick inventory, then I finished taking the clock movement apart. Twenty-six pieces.

I turned on the ultrasonic cleaning tank and took out the mesh basket. I put the pieces in the basket, looking each of them over. What a mess. I could already tell that a few badly done repairs needed to be fixed, and a few pieces might require replacing. I couldn't really tell until they were all cleaned up, and that would take time. I submerged the basket into the tank.

The routine had relaxed my mind, just as I hoped it would. I took out the notebook and opened it to a new page. I sketched out a map of Orchard center, specifically the shops. I looked back at the notes I'd started earlier and put the
numbers I'd associated with people inside every shop. I stared at it for a few minutes, but my next steps didn't emerge. I knew from my work patterns that forcing it wouldn't work.

I took the mesh basket out of the cleaning solution. I used a pair of long tweezers and lifted out the clock's count wheel. Still gunked up. A very technical term for a clock owned by someone who used WD-40 instead of bringing the clock into a shop for proper cleaning. I'd let the ultrasonic cleaning tank do its work for a while longer. If I tried too hard to clean the pieces with a brush, I might do more damage.

I went back to the notebook and tried something else. I wrote down the time I found Mark's body in the center of the page. As I started to create a timeline, I worked to the start of the open house, but it didn't satisfy me. I needed to start earlier—maybe that morning?

No, I needed to start earlier than that. Another page. I thought back to when I'd first hired Mark, and wrote down the date. I kept flipping back and forth to the first section, where I'd numbered the people, and used that system as I built a narrative from the first time I met Mark.

I took another look at the clock pieces. The cavitation was complete. I took the pieces out of the cleaning tank, then laid them out, rinsing them in a drying solution. The next step was to use a soft brush and a peg to finish cleaning them up. As I brushed each piece, I laid it out for reassembly. When a thought came to me, I'd go back to the notebook and jot it down. I kept up the dance: writing, brushing, cleaning, writing. I filled page after page with notes, circling some, adding triangles to the side, drawing arrows. I ran out of ideas and clock pieces at the same time.

I turned on my phone. Almost three o'clock. I rolled my
shoulders back and flipped backward through the notebook, amazed by my burst of energy, and of ideas. Using numbers instead of names was inspired, if I did say so myself. Interesting in that they helped me recognize patterns without prejudice. I wondered if Jeff used a similar system. Like I'd ever get enough courage to ask him. I imagined his face when I told him what I was doing, and closed the notebook.

I took out another box, this one lined with cloth. I laid out all of the clock pieces in the box and put a cover on top. Tomorrow I'd look them over one more time, straighten some of the levers, double-check that the pallets were clean, and broach the holes. I made a few careful notes on the repair documents and carefully put everything back in the bin.

I went back upstairs and looked over my notes on the murder. One thing was for sure. I needed to talk to Beckett Green. His number, 6, kept coming up. We needed to straighten out a few things, including his encroaching on my clock business.

Then I heard the bells.

P
at Reed and I had discussed ad nauseam what to install on the front door to alert us of customers. I remembered our first discussion.

“It sounds like a buzzer into a prison—hardly the effect I'm looking for for my customers.”

“Ruthie, if you're working in the shop, you need to be able to hear someone come in.”

“Since we'll be able to see folks come in, that won't be a problem.”

Pat Reed had pursed his lips, but didn't say anything. He'd lost that fight. The front of the shop had a countertop with a pass-through. The wall behind the counter was actually beautiful cabinetry, three-foot-tall cabinets with varying-sized rectangular and square shelves on top. During the Great Depression, the Cog & Sprocket had become a
WPA project for Orchard, with my great-grandfather Harry stepping in to make sure people kept working. There wasn't enough clock making work to keep people working, so Harry found things for people to do, and paid them or bartered clock making services. The cabinetry in the shop was one of those projects, the first. In short order, Harry moved over to the old Town Hall and its clock tower, setting free artisans and craftsmen on what eventually became a destination for the region.

From the shop side, the front cabinets were always open on the bottom half. That is where finished work was put in a bin and slid in place for pickup by its owner. When we were doing a walk-through, we removed the back of the upper cabinets. I loved the light and the illusion of space, and decided on the spot that we would keep them open. Pat disagreed, but I wouldn't budge. The battle of the buzzer was next.

“What happens if you are upstairs? Don't you want to know when customers come in?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “I don't want to jump out of my skin dozens of times a day.”

“Maybe a dozen. We don't get that many folks coming into the shop.”

“We didn't,” I corrected him gently. “We will in the New Year.”

“I like your optimism,” Pat said, still not looking entirely convinced.

“Not optimism—strategy. Anyway, how about some bells?”

We had gone through four different bell combinations since our first discussion. I reluctantly had to admit I couldn't
hear most of them, but Pat rose to the challenge and had devised a new system. He'd installed most of it over the weekend, but the bells themselves hadn't been put in place. Pat must have been by earlier and done that, since I heard a cacophony of sound coming from the front of the shop, and I went down to investigate.

Cacophony
wasn't a fair term. Rather than a tinkle of a bell, it was actually a combination of sounds that cascaded throughout the shop. As I got toward the bottom step, the bells sounded again. I saw Caroline at the front door, hand on the door handle. She opened and shut the door again.

I looked up and noticed for the first time the series of gears that had been placed close to the ceiling. I could be forgiven for not noticing them before, since the airplane wire that ran throughout the system was almost invisible. A dozen or so bells of varying sizes had been hung throughout the web of wires, not on the wires themselves, but dispersed, so that the movement of the wires triggered them somehow.

“Do it again,” I said. Caroline complied, opening and closing the door. The system came alive for another brief moment, but how it worked was still a mystery.

“Pat has outdone himself,” Caroline said.

“He must have installed this when I was out for my run. This is fabulous. I wonder how it works.” I looked around for a chair, hoping to get closer to the ceiling so I could look at the mechanics.

“Don't,” Caroline said, putting her hand on my arm. “Let Pat show you. Don't take his moment away from him.”

“You're right, of course,” I said, still sort of itching to inspect the mechanism. I reached into my pocket and texted him: “Love the bells! Show me how it works!” I put my
phone back in my pocket. I looked over and noticed my car keys on the front counter, sitting on a piece of paper.
Fixed
was all the paper said, in Pat's familiar scrawl. What would I do without him?

Caroline and I looked at each other. I bent down and gave her a quick hug, which she returned. We both stood up, a little surprised by my display of affection.

Affection it was. Though Caroline was twice my age, I felt protective of her, even more so since finding out about her terrible first marriage.

I wanted to ask where the devil she had been, but I bit my tongue. “How are you?”

“I know you left me a message. I'm sorry I haven't called you back,” Caroline said. “I needed to take some time. Do you mind if we sit?”

“Let's go upstairs and have some tea,” I said. Caroline headed up as I confirmed that the front door was locked before following her up the stairs.

•   •   •

C
aroline was busy setting down two large bags when I reached the top of the stairs.

“Yeesh, Caroline, I didn't realize you were carrying so much stuff,” I said. “I should have helped you.”

Caroline picked up one of the bags and put it on a chair. She put her hands on the handles and twisted them closed. She was biting her lower lip, which looked dry and cracked. Her hair was in its normal twisted bun, but the normally smooth top had bumps, and there were chunks of flyaway hair. She looked like a hot mess. Usually that was my role.

I walked over to the sink and filled up the electric
teakettle and switched it on. I pulled out a plate and took out some cookies from the tin. One of the good things about knowing the Reed family is that I get test cookies delivered for my opinion, or extras at the end of the day. It was also the bad thing about knowing the Reed family. After the holidays I had given up wearing pants that buttoned. Leggings were part of my look, sure. But they also had an elastic waistband. Desperately needed these days.

I poured a little milk in my white porcelain creamer and put it in front of Caroline. I spooned some loose tea into the matching teapot, and poured the hot water over it. There was something about her that called for a level of formality. She probably would have been fine with the carton on the table, but it wouldn't kill me to use some of the pieces, like the creamer and teapot, that my grandmother left me.

I was tempted to ask Caroline if she wanted something stronger, but I refrained. I used the strainer and poured her a cup of tea. “Caroline, why don't you sit?”

“I hope that you don't think less of me, after my story yesterday.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I understand bad marriages and how they can suck you in, better than most.”

“Not that. Not only that, I mean. I participated in perpetuating a fraud. I broke the law. Dozens of laws, in fact.”

“Did you know you were breaking the law when you were working on the pieces?”

“No,” she admitted. She poured a dollop of milk in her tea and stirred it absently. “I had no idea he was selling the pieces as originals. I thought we were creating excellent replicas.”

“You never had doubts?”

Caroline took a sip of tea. “One day I came home early and found two people searching our apartment. They ran, but I called the police, gave them the best descriptions I could. Wallace was more concerned about what they'd taken than he was with my safety. That didn't sit well with me. I didn't think more about it, but then we went to Prague.

“Wallace didn't like me to come with him on business trips, but I'd insisted. I'd even left Levi with a babysitter for a few days. It was the first time we'd done that, but I'd always wanted to visit Prague. Anyway, he told me he had business all day, and that I should keep myself occupied. I went to the Astronomical Clock first, of course. Have you ever seen it?”

“Not in person, no.”

“You must, someday. Extraordinary. Built in 1410, and still working. Really a marvel—”

“I'll add it to my bucket list. What happened in Prague?”

“I talked to a few people and explained my interest in clocks and watches. One very nice man gave me the name of a private museum, which had limited hours when it was open. I think about that sometimes. If I hadn't met that man, and hadn't heard about the museum, and then the museum hadn't happened to be open when I was there, would I ever have discovered the truth?”

“I'm not following you.”

“I went to the private museum, which was really quite lovely. There were a number of pieces, all of which proclaimed to be originals. Then I happened upon a Biedermeier Vienna wall clock. I recognized it as something I'd worked on a couple of years ago—”

“How did you recognize it?”

“I recognized the workmanship on the weights.”

“What do you mean?”

Caroline looked miserable and took a long sip of tea. “It was filigree pattern. I was pretty good about matching patterns, and taking weights of the same age and making them match. Again, I have to emphasize, I thought we were making replicas. Anyway, on this particular clock I'd had to do a lot of work and decided to have some fun. I kept it in the pattern, but added my initials:
CAS
. It was part of the leaf. You needed to know it was there, but once you did, it was obvious.”

“So maybe the collector knew it was a replica?”

“And displayed it as original? I thought the same thing. I asked a couple of questions, but I was assured that the clock was original. The docent was quite adamant on the point, letting me know that the collector had paid a fair sum for the clock from a private collector.”

“Did you ask Wallace about it?”

“No, I didn't. I assumed that the owner was creating his own reality. What did it hurt? It was a private museum, unbound by ethics. The clock wasn't for sale; it was just for display.

“When we got back to the shop, I looked up the sale. I tracked back the receipt, and then I realized that Wallace had a second set of books, a second business, set up. The second business was in the antiques business. He mostly dealt with private collectors, willing to pay exorbitant rates for antique clocks. The gentleman in Prague thought he had an original, because Wallace had sold it as such.”

“That wasn't all, was it?”

“No. As it turns out, Wallace had started to do another
side business, using the clocks to smuggle jewels and other works of art. Of course, I didn't know that until much later, during the trial prep.

“A few days after we got back, two men showed up, both wearing suits. They weren't the police. They were with Interpol. It turns out that someone in our shop was actually working for them, and she'd realized I'd been looking at the books and going through the files.”

“Why did she tell them about you?”

“The break-in had really shaken me up. She knew me well enough to know that if I thought that Wallace was putting our family in danger, I'd turn on him. She was correct.”

“So you began to work with them. That must have been scary.”

“Scary, exhilarating, justified, heartbreaking. Stories for another day—is that all right?” she said, and I could see the exhaustion in her eyes. “For now, I want to show you these.” She opened one of the bags and handed me a manila envelope. I opened it up and took out the six pictures, laying them out on the table. The clock in the picture was a lovely wall clock. It looked like a Gustav Becker wall clock, either that or a replica. I couldn't tell. The clock also looked vaguely familiar.

“Is that a Becker? Viennese regulator? Lovely wall clock. Dated around 1880 or so?”

“You know your clocks. Yes, it is, but a replica. It was sold as an original.”

I whistled slowly. “That's a twenty-five-hundred-dollar difference right there.”

“Minimum.”

“Your work?”

“Yes. You can tell by the mark here—do you see it?”

She pointed to a place on the clock face. The numbers themselves were ornately painted, with large serifs that had dramatic dips and swirls. Behind the numbers there was fainter scrollwork that covered the edge of the clock. She was pointing to a place that looked a little different. I couldn't see it, but I'd take her word for it. Her mark.

“Why does this clock look so familiar?” I asked, turning the image, trying to get a better look at the clock.

“Because Beckett Green has it hanging in his shop.”