Tick,Tock,Trouble (A Seagrove Cozy Mystery Book 5) (7 page)

Chapter Six

Sadie woke the next morning to the sound of her phone. She picked it up groggily to find Justin Ives was waiting outside the shop.

“Can I speak to you for a minute?” he asked.

“What time is it?” Sadie asked squinting at her phone.

“It’s eight,” he said. “Don’t you usually open the shop at eight?”

“Look at the sign, Justin. The shop doesn’t open until ten. And today it may be noon.”

Lucy and Betty had stayed late and, in fact, had gone home only when Zack had come by at two a.m. He’d been driving by and seen the light on.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I could come back later…” he sounded a little sad.

“No. I’m awake now. Give me five minutes.”

Sadie got up, brushed her teeth and threw on some clothes. She stuffed her feet into a pair of Keds without bothering with socks, and then she went downstairs.

“Come on,” she said to Justin as she stepped out of the shop. “I need coffee.”

Justin followed her into the bakery, the shop next to hers. She ordered coffee and two pastries and sat at her usual table. John, the shop owner who normally would have  sat with her, saw she had company and nodded, but stayed behind the counter.

Justin ordered a cup of tea and sat on the edge of the wooden chair across from Sadie. She took a couple of gulps of coffee and then waved her hand in a gesture for him to begin.

“I’m awake now,” she said. “What do you need, Justin.”

“I came by to tell you that Tamsin’s lawyer bought me a new car. You are a miracle worker.” He smiled at her tentatively.

“He never would have caved if you hadn’t done whatever you did.”

“I did what you should have,” Sadie said. She was tired and a little more direct than she might have been if she’d had more sleep.

“I found evidence that you were telling the truth and Tamsin was lying. If you’d had a little imagination, you could have done it yourself.”

“But how did you do that?” he asked.

“I asked to see the security footage from Town Hall,” she said.

“There are cameras all over that place. It clearly showed Tamsin running into your parked car. It also showed you walking down the street when it happened. Even Tamsin’s lawyer couldn’t dispute that.”

“I didn’t even think of that,” Justin said sheepishly.

“You need to start thinking for yourself. You’re a college professor, for Pete’s sake, you aren’t a child anymore, Justin.”

Sadie glared at him over her coffee cup. She hated being mean, but really, the boy needed to start taking care of himself or everyone in this town was going to take advantage of him.

“I guess I’m used to my mom taking care of everything for me,” he said. “But she couldn’t help with this. She was as clueless as me.”

“Well, it’s time for you to stop expecting other people to clean up messes for you. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t bring this on yourself. You need to learn to problem solve and figure out solutions to your problems. You need to take care of yourself. That’s what adults do.”

Sadie took a bite of her pastry. It was wonderful, as usual in the bakery. She closed her eyes and savored it.

“Can you teach me how to solve problems?” Justin asked. “Help me figure it out?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Let me think about it. Maybe if you get stuck, but I think you just have to start thinking for yourself. Instead of running to your mom, or to me, start by thinking about what needs to happen and then see if you can do what needs to be done.”

He sipped his tea. “I guess I could try that,” he said. “But could I call you when I get stuck?”

“You can call, but not until you’ve tried everything you can think of first. When you’re good and stuck, then you can call me. Deal?” She held her hand out for him to shake.

“Deal.” He shook her hand, already looking more confident.

“Good,” she said. “Now go teach classes, I need to go see someone.”

“Okay,” he said, looking a little confused. “But you haven’t finished eating.”

“I’ll just take it with me,” Sadie said. “There is someone I need to see.”

Sadie took Mr. Bradshaw for a walk in the park with a plastic bag to pick up the results of his morning constitutional. Her bag deposited in the dumpster behind the shop, she drove out to
Chomps
to talk with Reggie Smith.

It wasn’t until she got out there that she remembered
Chomps
wasn’t open for breakfast. She took Mr. B down the road to a public beach for a run. She wouldn’t wait around until noon, but they might as well take advantage of the empty beach while they were here.

Sadie let her terrier off his leash and he ran down the beach, chasing waves and the shadows of the gulls on the sand. The breeze was brisk and chased any remaining sleepiness from her head. She remembered she’d seen Reggie Smith’s address when she was at the police station watching him be questioned.

She let Mr. Bradshaw run a while longer and then loaded him back in the car for the ride down the coast to Reggie’s apartment.

It was a little collection of tiny houses in a three-sided square around a patch of lawn. Reggie was sitting outside his little cottage smoking a cigarette when Sadie walked up. He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it as she and Mr. B approached, and stood to greet her.

“You were with the police chief the other day, weren’t you?” he asked. He looked nervous.

“I was,” Sadie agreed. “And you can sit down, I’m not a cop.”

“I wondered,” Reggie said.

“Cops don’t usually travel with tiny dogs.”

He sat down and motioned for her to sit in an identical plastic chair. She sat cautiously, not trusting the chair to be sturdy or steady, but it held.

“This is none of my business,” she said.

“And I’m not here from the police or anything like that, but I feel compelled to give you some advice.” He paled a little and nodded.

“You’ve heard the adage ‘Never speak ill of the dead’?” she asked. He nodded.

“Well, that goes doubly when the person has been murdered. You got yourself in some hot water saying things about a person you didn’t really know. Do you realize what you said wasn’t true?” she asked.

“I didn’t then, but I do now,” he said. “I believed someone I shouldn’t have.”

“Exactly. You were repeating something you heard, not something you knew. My advice to you is not to spread rumors. If you don’t know something is true first hand, then keep it to yourself. You’ll keep yourself out of trouble that way.”

She stood up and Mr. Bradshaw looked up from the patch of grass he’d been sniffing. Reggie put his hand on Sadie’s arm.

“I never, ever want to go to jail again,” he said.

“So I am going to take your advice and keep my mouth shut. Unless I know something to be true, and then I’ll tell the cops, not a customer at work. I promise.”

Sadie patted his hand, proud of herself for getting the mom thing down. “Good for you, Reggie. Now the other thing you can do is to think about continuing your education and getting a job that uses your skills. Any fifteen-year-old can be a busboy. It’s time you figured out what you want to do with your life.”

“I’m the dishwasher,” Reggie protested.

“Same difference,” Sadie said.

“Anybody can be a dishwasher, Reggie. You are smart enough to do something with your life. Make a difference in the world. Not that clean dishes aren’t important, but you are capable of more. Do something with yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“That’s right. You need to occupy your mind with real life problems and solving them. You have too much time on your hands if you don’t have anything to say about a dead woman except that she deserved it.”

“I know.” He hung his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Learn, Reggie. Take it all in and learn from your mistakes. And, just in case you haven’t figured it out, never speak ill of the dead. Actually, never speak ill of anyone – at least in public.”

“I understand.” He still wouldn’t look Sadie in the eye.

“Reggie, look at me,” she said.

He looked up reluctantly.

“It’s okay to make mistakes, Reggie, as long as you learn from them. You do not need to be ashamed.”

She hugged him even though she knew it was violating his boundaries. He probably didn’t even know he had boundaries. He hugged her back and smiled ruefully as they parted, which made Sadie feel better. She patted him on the arm and pulled a business card from her bag.

“Here,” she said, handing him the card. “You can call me if you ever need to talk.”

“Thank you.” He bent down and patted Mr. B on the head.

“I appreciate that you came to talk to me. And I’ll think about what you said about doing something with my life.”

Sadie went back to town feeling better about Reggie. Maybe he would turn his life around, but if not, at least he would never cut down a dead woman again. That had to be a plus. Not much of a plus, but still an improvement.

She stopped at the stationhouse on her way home to see if all the loose ends had been wrapped up. Zack was in his office talking on the phone, but he waved her in when he saw her hesitating in the doorway. She sat with Mr. B in her lap while Zack finished his conversation and hung up the phone.

“What,” he asked leaning across his desk, “is up with that watch thing Tamsin left you? I’ve got two men crazy to get their hands on it, and that call was from a third who will give you some outrageous amount of money for it. And I mean outrageous, you could buy a small island in the Caribbean.”

“It’s a long story.” Sadie said. “Would you answer a couple of questions before I tell you?”

Zack leaned back. “Fire away,” he said.

“Hamilton killed Tamsin?” she asked.

“Over that same magic watch,” he said.

“Woo did not kill anyone, but he might have if we’d given him the chance. Come to think of it Sadie, I think you should get rid of it. I don’t want you getting murdered over the dang thing.”

“You might change your mind when you hear the story,” she said, but he just shook his head.

“So here’s the deal.” She set Mr. Bradshaw on the chair next to her where he curled into a ball.

“In the mid-1800s there was this watchmaker named Rumlin. He was known for his beautiful metal work; cut outs, jewels encrusted in the faces and covers of his watches. He was a real artist.”

Zack nodded his understanding and set his elbows on his desk.

“He was in his seventies when he got this strange idea about clocks and time. He either learned black magic or made up some kind of process that embued metal with power over time; some kind of temporal flux. The articles are really vague about that part and I don’t think anyone really knows what he was doing or why. Anyway, he designed twelve watches, each with their own special power. The one you have in the evidence room,”

“Yours,” Zack said.

“Mine,” Sadie agreed.

“It’s the only one that has a face that runs backward. It is supposed to slow time for the people who live in proximity to it. So they age slower and have more time to do things. Only from what I learned it didn’t really do that because the people slowed down, too. They spoke so slowly that normal people couldn’t follow their conversation. They lived longer relative to normal people, but everything about them slowed down, so they didn’t actually have more time, and they couldn’t function in society. They were out of sync.”