Just Killing Time (4 page)

I
went into the bathroom and splashed some cold water on my face. I stared at my reflection for a while. Any relaxation I'd felt after leaving the retreat, which I will allow was limited, was gone. I pulled out the ponytail holder and ran my wet fingers through my auburn Medusa-like curls. The swollen red marks that rimmed my blue eyes looked permanent. The bags under my eyes had been features these last few months, but at one point last week I thought maybe they'd go away. Not anytime soon, that's for sure. Turning thirty had been quite a journey so far.

I knew a shower would make me feel better, so I turned on the taps. From cold to tepid. Verging on warm. I got undressed and stepped in, fighting the circle of shower curtains that stuck to my wet skin. The clawfoot tub had a shower attachment, but it was too short. I decided to opt out
of washing my hair until I had more energy. I pulled on my sleeping T-shirt and a sweatshirt and walked back to the box Pat had left.

I pulled out the bottle of wine. A screw top. Pat always thought of everything. Wine and cookies. Not the healthiest of dinners, but I would have to make do. Bezel peered up at me from the center of the bed, blinking a few times.

“Bezel, I need to make the bed. How about if I give you some dinner? You can come back when I'm done.”

I went into the kitchen and poured some fresh dry food from the cabinet into a dish. I rinsed out a clean coffee mug and took it and a small plate back to the bed. I went back to the box and unscrewed the wine.

“I'll let it breathe,” I said aloud. I pulled out the sheets that Pat had left, and started to make up the bed. I stopped every few seconds to run my hand along the footboard. I'd heard the story of this bedroom set so many times I knew it by heart, and heard my grandmother's voice telling it to me.

Her grandmother had come from money. But then she fell in love with the farmhand her father had hired. Their love was forbidden, but they wanted to marry anyway. She defied her father and ran away with the love of her life. Her father never spoke to her again, but a year later, after the birth of her first child, this bedroom set was delivered. It was a gift from her mother, who began to visit once a week in order to know her grandchildren. No matter how hard things got, my grandmother held on to this bedroom set. And it had been passed on from generation to generation, through the women in the family. “
And someday
,” I could hear her say, “
it will be yours
.”

I guess someday was now. I blinked a few times, and
grabbed a cookie. Yum. I remembered them from my childhood. Nancy Reed's Kitchen Sink Specials. My grandmother always named recipes after the person who gave them to her. They were basic oatmeal cookies with anything and everything tossed in. I tasted coconut, chocolate chips, walnuts, and either cherries or cranberries. I took another bite. Cherries. Delicious.

I remembered the armoire that was next to the bed. It used to be in the hall at the cottage, a coat closet of sorts. I tried to pull open the door, but it was locked. I reached around and ran my hand along the back, feeling a small hook. I followed the path of the hook and felt a ribbon hanging down. I picked it up and, sure enough, there was a key hanging on it. Clagan family security at its best. Lock your cabinets, but hide the keys where the tall people in our family could find it easily.

The armoire was packed with stuff. I pulled out a box with notebooks spilling over the top. I put it down next to the bed and then sat on the edge of the bed. Bezel harrumphed her unhappiness at my intrusion, gathering her paws beneath her, but didn't move. I picked up one of G.T.'s notebooks, running my hand along the cover. I checked the inside, and noted the dates. July 1995–June 1996. I started flipping through the pages. Like my own notebooks, this was as much a journal of his life as the notes of a horologist. The visual musings of a brilliant clockmaker. Notes on materials and orders. Some numbers in the margins that I vaguely remembered as part of his archiving system. I looked through the book, recognizing a couple of pieces that he'd made, but there were dozens of others that had stayed drawings. These were his daydreams. I walked back
to the kitchen to get my own notebook. I dragged my entire bag back with me and put it on the side of the bed next to the wall. Bezel hissed and moved away. She gave me quite the look before turning her back and going back to sleep.

I stopped and looked very closely at one of his more elaborate designs. The physical measurements of the clock indicated it was supposed to be a mantel clock, medium sized. But the detail he wanted to create and the movement he envisioned needed a much bigger case. I looked at a couple more sketches and saw the same theme throughout many years. My grandfather was meant to work on a much larger scale. He needed to design a huge clock, the size of a building. He knew it, and I knew it. And we dreamed about it together for years. But looking at these sketches, I realized how much the world had lost because he hadn't done it. His genius was something I aspired to.

I got up and opened the armoire again. I noticed the paper model on the top shelf and pulled it out carefully. I smiled, remembering the summer I helped G.T. build this paper model of the clock tower. I took it out and put it on top of the armoire, stepping back to take it in.

He'd tried to get permission to fix the clock tower at the old Town Hall for years, but something had always stopped it. The designs weren't approved. The funding was cut. Or G.T. and a selectman or a member of the zoning committee or a member of the chamber of commerce had a falling-out and a wrench was thrown in the plans. G.T. had a knack for upsetting folks who could get in the way of getting the clock tower project from paper to reality. But that didn't stop him from planning, dreaming, and designing. I closed the notebook and shuffled through the rest of them, looking on the
back-inside covers for the green sticker. Where was the clock tower notebook?

I'd put a shamrock sticker on it one summer day when I was ten or so. I asked G.T. about the figures he'd drawn, and how did the clock tower mechanism work? And what were the drawings of the moving figures? How did they work? And why did this lady look like Grandma? And so he gave me my first lesson in horology, and let me in on his vision. My world changed forever. I started my love affair with the family business. And I also found a way to get to know my busy grandfather. My grandmother had always defined love for me, but he had always scared me a bit. But not after that day.

Here it was. I looked through the notebook, pleased to realize that when I made a comment or did my own drawing, he dutifully included them in the notebook. This particular notebook was a chronology of my long summer visits with my grandparents, the beginning of my life, actually. I flipped through to the end, but I couldn't read a word. The tears came back, flooding my eyes and dripping on the notebook pages. I wept like I hadn't for years. At first I tried to stop. But why? I'd stopped myself from crying so many times in my life, and where had that gotten me?

Funny thing about that. Permission to cry dried my tears. And stiffened my resolve. I pulled my notebook out of my bag and opened it up. When I'd sent that postcard, I'd begun to imagine talking to him about my work and asking him for advice on some of my own designs. I'd wanted to impress him. Too late for that now, but maybe I could honor him in another way. I opened up a new page in my notebook and named it “Clagan Clock Tower.” I stood up and took some
pictures of the model with my phone. I'd import them into my computer later.

“Game on, G.T.,” I said aloud. Bezel woke with a start and hissed irritably. “Sorry, Bezel. Just making a promise. We're going to make this happen.”

I
woke up to a feeling of pressure on my chest. I opened my eyes and saw a gray ball of fur coming toward me. I stopped the head-butt with a kiss, which Bezel seemed to like. She stepped off my chest and let me sit up. I looked down at the closed notebook on the floor, barely remembering putting it down there. I heard a crash coming from downstairs. I threw on my yoga pants and grabbed my fleece. I picked up my phone again, dialing a nine and a one, with my finger hovering over the other one.

I crept down the stairs, crouching down as I reached the bottom. I pulled back the curtain at the foot just enough to peek through. A woman was bent over the alarm clock toward the front of the shop and the toppled box I'd left in front of the door. Bezel bounded down the stairs beside me, gathering speed as she hurled herself across the shop. She
used a box as a springboard and jumped up on the countertop. She made a terrible sound that was the cross of a yowl, a meow, and a hiss. She jumped down from the counter and slunk over to the woman.

“Good heavens, Bezel! You'd have liked to have given me a heart attack, wouldn't you? No, don't come closer. You know that I can't . . .”

The slim, petite woman looked up and saw me standing at the foot of the stairs. She reached up and patted her perfectly coiffed hair.

“Oh my,” she said. “Are you Ruth? I'm Caroline Adler. I didn't realize you were here already. Pat did say he'd gotten a call from Kristen, but I hadn't heard from you.”

“I didn't know about any of this until yesterday morning.” I walked forward, wishing I'd had time to get dressed and brush my teeth. The light wasn't great, but from what I could see, Caroline Adler was very put together. Black trousers and a black turtleneck with a houndstooth jacket on top. I leaned forward to see her shoes, which were actually black clogs.

“Did you get my messages?” she asked. Her voice was getting raspy, and I could hear her labored breathing.

“I haven't really listened to my voice mail,” I admitted. I'd actually skipped her messages, but I wasn't going to tell her that.

“Well, you're here now. That's what matters. Don't come any closer. No, not you, Ruth. Bezel. I'm terribly allergic to her, and didn't take my medications.” She took an inhaler out of her purse and had a deep, long pull on it. “I'm so sorry. I just can't. I'll call you later—would that be all right? There's a HEPA filter that we can turn on. Oh my, I really need to leave. We'll talk soon.”

I moved toward her, but she was out the door in a flash. I peered behind the window shade, but she was already crossing the street and she didn't look back. Then I saw Pat Reed round the corner with a tray of coffees. I looked down and raced back upstairs to get changed into something more presentable.

“H
ello, Pat. I'll be right down,” I called out as I heard him open the front door. I pulled on my leggings and added a pair of hand-knit socks, jamming my feet into my boots. I threw on a tunic, added a belt, and pulled my hair back with a large barrette. That was as good as it could get in five minutes. I stopped by the bathroom and quickly brushed my teeth.

I walked down the stairs, instinctively ducking so my head would clear the doorway.

“Ah well, there she is now,” he said softly. I walked down the stairs slowly, feeling shy all of a sudden. He brushed his tears aside and opened his arms wide. “There she is indeed. And a beauty she is too.”

I ran the final three steps, throwing myself into his arms. His red buffalo plaid shirt felt scratchy and wonderful
against my cheek, and I inhaled his aftershave. I held on for a while, but let go first.

“Pat, it is so great to see you.”

And it was. I had known Pat my whole life. He and his wife, Nancy, were the parents I always wished I had. Loving, doting parents to Moira and Ryan. And present. Very present. I couldn't even imagine what that was like, though Grandma Mae tried her best. Even when I was a little girl, I had developed a tough shell—a loner with no expectations of anyone else but myself.

“It is good to see you, Ruthie. It has been too long.”

“Too long. And too late,” I said. I looked over my shoulder toward the back of the shop.

“Don't do that. He wouldn't want you to do that. There's no point. What's done is done.”

“It's what you do now that counts,” we said at the same time, reciting one of my grandmother's favorite expressions. Easy to say, difficult to live. Funny, I'd thought a lot about that expression last week on the retreat. Even thought about making a sampler of it.

“What do you think of the place?” Pat asked.

“It feels smaller than I remember. And I don't ever remember seeing so much inventory,” I said.

“It's a lot and we still haven't started organizing it. We were almost done with inventory when it happened. When Thom passed. We got slowed down when Caroline's son had an emergency appendectomy and she had to go up and take care of him. She was up there when it happened; came right down as soon as she heard.”

“Does she have other children?”

“No, just the one son. Levi. Good kid.”

I had nothing to say, nothing to add. I barely knew her name. I knew only that she was a few years younger than my grandfather and had married him less than a year after my grandmother died. For the past five years, that had been enough.

“I think she was coming by this morning to drop off some files,” Pat said.

“We met. Sort of. She had to run out. She says she's allergic to Bezel.”

“I should have turned on the air last night to help clear the space. Let me do it now. See this box? Just flip this switch right here. Usually that helps, plus we keep Bezel upstairs when she's here.”

“Why do you have a shop cat if she is so allergic?”

“She hates mice.”

I shuddered. We had that in common.

“Well, at least she wasn't allergic to me.”

“It's really none of my business, so I am only going to say this once: she's good people. After Mae passed, I never thought I'd see Thom get right. He was in a bad place when you went back to school. But meeting Caroline, it was like a light went on. Not the same light as he had with your grandma, but a light all the same. And she was good for the business. Got Thom to join the chamber. You know how hard your grandma tried to do that.”

“Okay,” I said. Pat tried staring me down, forcing me to say more, but he had no idea who he was dealing with. I could stare down the best of them. “So tell me more about the clocks.”

Pat shrugged and looked around the shop. “They bought out two estates last spring. The Stockbridge lot had three grandfathers and a few more pieces. The plan was to spend
the fall working on those and get them sold. Very doable. But then the Winter estate came up. Do you remember the Winters? Their kids were a little older than you, but you knew the Chairman.”

Everyone in Orchard knew Grover Winter. He'd been chairman of the Board of Selectmen for years, as close to a mayor as Orchard ever had. Like most towns in the Berkshires, Orchard citizens ran the town, with a Board of Selectmen voted in to administer it. Grover Winter had family money and was a successful lawyer. But his service to the town of Orchard always came first. He'd served in the State House for a few years, first as a representative, then as a senator. He'd come back to Orchard after he'd served two terms, even though he easily could have been elected for a third. Orchard was home, he always said.

“You know what good friends Thom and the Chairman were, don't you? They'd gotten really close these past few years. Anyway, he'd come into the shop a few times to buy a clock or bring one in, so I knew him. And, of course, we'd all gone out to the estate for the Fourth of July picnic.”

“I remember those picnics. Out in their orchards, right?”

“Right. But I'd never been through the entire house before I went with Caroline and Thom last month. The Winters were clock collectors. I've never seen so many anniversary clocks in my life. A half-dozen grandfathers. Two dozen Viennas. I lost count of the mantel clocks. And some stunning shelf clocks. Collections of miniatures, intact. At least a dozen cuckoo clocks.”

“Wow. I do remember that they had clocks, but I had no idea they were serious collectors.”

“They were passionate collectors. Some clocks were very
valuable, but some were collected for the joy of them. It took us a week to do the inventory and for Thom to come up with an offer.”

“It must have been a huge offer,” I said.

“It took all the cash Thom and Caroline had,” Pat said. He paused for a second and regrouped. “They'd talked about going for a second mortgage on the house or the store if they needed to. Jonah Winter, the son, just wanted to get it done. Maybe he could have gotten more, but he trusted your grandfather to give him a good deal.”

“Are all the clocks here?” I asked.

“Yes. At least I think so.” Pat looked away from me and around the Cog & Sprocket. “We were planning on moving some out to the shop at the cottage for storage after we were done with inventory.”

“Shop at the cottage? You mean the one in the barn? Is that good for storage?”

“It is now. They redid it last winter. Airtight, climate controlled. Plan was that Thom could work from there more often.”

“Why? For more space?”

“More space. And he'd been making noises about retiring. We're none of us getting any younger. But we both know he'd never stop working. Anyway, we've been doing an inventory to assess what exactly we have. I'm happy to say that the Chairman and his wife kept great records, and several of the clocks were sold or repaired here, so they were already in the system.”

“In the system?”

“Caroline's son, Levi, spent one summer working with the clock cards. You remember them, don't you?” Pat gestured toward the old library card catalogs along the wall.

Remember them? I had dreams about them, and not all of them pleasant. The clock cards were G.T.'s filing system on the clocks he'd worked on. He'd inherited the system from his father. Each clock was coded with a series of numbers and letters that made its identity unique. Usually the clockmaker, type of clock, and year we worked on it, with some more specificity added. The numbers were put on index cards, and everything about the clock was recorded on the card. They were then filed, by number. Heaven help the person who misfiled a clock card. She'd have to spend hours finding the mistake. Once it took an entire day.

“I remember them,” I said, grimacing.

“Thought you might.” Pat winked at me. “Anyway, Levi was always a bit of a brain. He created a database for the inventory, based on the Clagan system. See these labels? We put the number on them and then we'd affix it to the clock in a place where it wouldn't get noticed.”

“Wouldn't that take away from the value of the clock? Adding a sticker?”

“No, we were careful. If the clock was of huge value, we wouldn't add the label. But then again, those really valuable clocks are few and far between.”

“I heard there was a robbery last month? Five clocks were taken, all around a thousand dollars? That's pretty valuable.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“I think it was Kristen Gauger who told me about the clocks. Or maybe it was Beckett what's his name? From across the street?”

“Beckett Green. He's a troublemaker, that one. I think
those clocks were overvalued, to tell you the truth. But yes, five clocks were taken.”

“And do you think the robber came back and attacked G.T.?” I asked quietly.

“No, I don't think it's the same person,” Pat said, putting his arm around my shoulder and giving me a quick squeeze. “But the chief will be able to answer your questions better than I can.”

“I'll make sure and give him a call today. Do you think he's working on a Saturday?”

“Jeff Paisley works every day even at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times. He'll be more than happy to talk to you whenever, I'm sure.

“Now, what were we talking about?” Pat said, letting go of my shoulder and walking over to the counter. He picked up a coffee and held it out. I took it and removed the lid, savoring the smell. I took a sip and smiled. A nice dark roast, but not at all bitter. Wonderful.

“I think we were talking about all the clocks? Inventory systems?” I was just guessing here, since we'd gone on so many tangents. My hands itched for my notebook so I could start writing some of this down. Stolen clocks. A troublemaker for a neighbor. A workaholic police chief. I felt compelled to start making lists. It was how I dealt with stress.

“And besides,” Pat said, as I realized he was still talking. “Thom got a work plan in place, so we will have some of them ready for sale by Christmas.”

“Some of what, the clocks? By Christmas? That's less than three months from now.”

“Maybe he didn't mean this Christmas.” Pat laughed and
then stopped. He stared into the shop, with a far-off look in his eyes. I reached over and rubbed his arm. He looked at me and smiled.

“This must be hard for you. Are you all right here by yourself, Ruthie? Is there someone I can call for you?” Pat asked.

“No one,” I said.

“Your husband?”

I shook my head and rubbed the place where my wedding band had been up until last month.

“No husband. Not anymore.”

Pat paused, but good New Englander that he was, he didn't press.

“Moira would love to see you,” he said, changing the subject.

“I'd love to see her.” And I would. I had, so far, resisted using the social media networks that would have helped us reconnect. I lurked on Facebook, but hid my profile. And my Twitter handle had nothing to do with my personal life. @ClaganClocks barely tweeted. My entire life had been hovering on the edges, but now I longed for a connection, any connection.

“She's two doors down.”

“At the diner? Were you meeting her there?”

“No, she owns it. The Sleeping Latte. A terrible name, but don't tell her I said that.”

“Wow, that's terrific.” Terrific, but surprising. Moira had always talked about leaving Orchard in her rearview mirror. I wondered what brought her back.

“I can call Moira and have her bring some food over.”

“No, that's all right. I'll walk down and say hello in person.”

“Good for you. I'll keep on working on the inventory. And, Ruthie?”

“Yes?”

“When you see Moira don't ask her about Ryan. It's a long story; I'll tell you later. In the meantime, you settle in and call me on this number anytime, day or night.” He pulled a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. “Day or night.”