The Gift
The Pocket Watch Chronicles
By
Ceci Giltenan
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, locations and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental. Any actual locations mentioned in this book are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
All rights are retained by the author. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. The unauthorized reproduction, sharing, or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.
Copyright 2018 by Ceci Giltenan
www.duncurra.com
Cover Design: Earthly Charms
ISBN-13: 978-1-942623-83-0
Produced in the USA
Dedication
To the little girl with the crown and pink scarf. I didn’t even know your name, but you are permanently lodged in my heart.
And, to my soulmate, my beloved husband, Eamon.
Acknowledgements
As always, I owe a huge thank you to Lily Baldwin and Kathryn Lynn Davis for their help and guidance with this book. I love you both—to the moon and back.
I also owe a special thanks to Jen Coleman, who was the first beta reader for this book and the last proofreader. You are an amazing friend.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
About The Author
About Duncurra
Other Titles from Duncurra Authors
“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life — that word is love.”
~ Sophocles
Chapter 1
The Apartment above Hooked Restaurant and Bar
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Cassie Calloway sat looking at the smartphone in her hand. It was her younger sister, Sloan’s, birthday. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to call her sister; she loved Sloan. It was just that she feared the call wouldn’t go well. The last time they had been together, harsh words were said. Sloan, along with most of the rest of the family, had made it very clear that Cassie was no longer welcome in their lives.
Still, she couldn’t ignore her sister’s birthday.
Cassie entered her Sloan’s number, wondering if she would even answer. After a moment the call connected but there was silence on the other end. Cassie decided she was going to have to speak first. “Hi, Sloan. I was just calling to say happy birthday.”
“Cassandra.” Her family refused to call her Cassie and Sloan could manage to make her real name sound like an expletive. “You didn’t have to call. I got your card.”
“I wanted to call anyway.”
“I cannot fathom why.”
“You’re my sister. I love you.”
“You have a funny way of showing it.”
“Sloan, you never let me explain.”
“There is no possible explanation. You arrived home on the weekend of my coming out party—bald. There is no excuse. First you broke mom’s heart when you refused to have a coming out of your own, but you couldn’t leave it at that, could you? You had to ruin mine. It was thoughtless, immature, and selfish. You are an embarrassment.”
It was a bit of a stretch to say she had ruined Sloan’s party and she hadn’t been completely bald. It looked like more of a buzz cut because it was beginning to grow in already. But when their parents saw Cassie’s shorn hair, like Sloan they refused to listen to her reasons and banned her from the event. Excuses were invented—Cassie was desperately ill with the flu—and the party went on as planned.
Frankly, when she had shaved her head she hadn’t thought of Sloan’s party, which was over five weeks away. Still, even if she had remembered it, it wouldn’t have changed anything. “I’m sorry, Sloan.” After a pregnant pause, she asked, “So, how are you? Are you excited to get back to Vassar in a couple of weeks? Do you have any classes that you’re looking forward to?”
“I’m fine. I’m not you, I don’t get excited by the prospect of new notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils and this conversation is over. Don’t call again, Cassandra. You’re not my sister anymore.”
Sloan disconnected.
It was no worse than Cassie had expected. Still, it hurt.
She sighed heavily, glancing at the time before laying the phone aside. She worked downstairs as a server at Hooked and needed to get dressed. Her shift started soon.
Michael Roberts, the owner of Hooked, had renovated the old building to look like the inside of an old fashioned sailing ship, with a pirate theme. For that reason it was hugely popular with tourists. But locals frequented it as well. Hooked served a wide variety of locally brewed craft beers and some of the best crab cakes and Maryland crab soup in the area.
Of course the wait staff were costumed to match the theme. The guys had it easy—black knee britches, white stockings, loose fitting white shirts that laced at the neck, and red pirate sashes. On the other hand, the women’s uniforms were more involved and meant to bring in male patrons. They wore low cut peasant blouses, tight fitting bodices intended to create a little cleavage on even the flattest chests, short red skirts, black boots, and a brightly colored pirate bandana around their heads.
Cassie dressed quickly and popped in the bathroom to apply a little makeup and adjust her bandana. She stared at her reflection for a moment.
She stood barely five foot two inches tall and was very slender. Too slender. She had lost weight over the last few months. Her light brown hair had grown in a couple of inches now and with her diminutive size and delicate features her friends said she looked like a pixie.
Cute.
Sloan was beautiful.
Their mother was the picture of elegance.
Cassie was cute.
She fingered her hair, remembering the moment she had decided to cut it off.
After two remissions and relapses, Tom’s doctors believed his best chance for a long term remission was a bone marrow transplant. The chemotherapy before the transplant was rough. The side-effects lasted for days. Cassie visited him every day, staying as long as she could. Classes had ended right before he went in the hospital and she had cut her shifts at Hooked to two a week.
She was with him one day, only a few days after he had received the bone marrow and he
was miserable. His mouth was full of sores, he had terrible stomach pains, and was exhausted.
She had been thinking about it and decided just to ask him. “So what would you think if I shaved my head?”
“I’d think you were trying to steal my great new look.”
“No, really.”
“I guess it depends. Why do you want to?”
“A couple reasons. When I come to visit, I see so many kids who are battling this disease—so many little bald heads. There is this one little girl who wears a crown with a pink scarf floating off the back of it. It’s adorable. Anyway, I have all of this hair, which is just hanging around, not doing anything. I think I want to donate it to one of those charities that makes wigs for kids who’ve lost their hair. And really, Tom, we can’t let all of these little upstarts get away with stealing your great new look.”
He gave a half-hearted chuckle. “You know you don’t have to cut it all off to do that.”
“I know. But I think they want at least ten inches. If I cut that much, it’ll be really, really short anyway so I may as well go the whole way.”
“Go big or go home?”
“You got it. Go big or go home.”
“You said you had two reasons. What’s the other one?”
Cassie smiled, knowing he couldn’t see it through the mask she had to wear when she was with him. “If you think this is stupid, tell me and I won’t do it. But I thought maybe…well, every time you see my bald head, it’ll be like a big neon sign blinking I love you. It’ll remind you that our souls are entwined…that my heart beats with yours. And someday, when we get through this and my hair is long again—it will be a symbol of triumph.”
He looked away for a moment. When he turned his head back to her, tears stood in his eyes, but he had the big goofy grin on his face that she adored and hadn’t seen for days. “It’s not stupid, Cassie. I think that big neon sign would be great.” Then he said, “I’ll love you forever, Cassie.”
“To the moon and back, Tom,” she answered, as she always did when he said that.
So, the next day she had her head shaved and Tom loved it.
Two weeks later he died of complications from the transplant.
God, she missed him so much. She wiped the tears from her face with her knuckles, to keep from smearing her makeup—although she’d switched to waterproof mascara months ago for this very reason.
Tom had been her normal. He was the life she desired, the life she had dreamed about.
Her family hadn’t known about him and that was how she had wanted it. He had been her secret since freshman year.
He was a hard secret to keep. Her father was Sanford Calloway, billionaire owner of Calloway Technologies, one of the richest, most powerful men in the world. Her mother too had an impressive pedigree. She was born Alexandra Wren, the only child of Jonathon Davis Wren, one of the twentieth century’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Cassie had pissed them off royally by choosing to attend an ordinary public university to study history and literature. Her father finally agreed to let her go, but he insisted on a security detail. Cassie begged the men paid to guard her not to tell her parents about Tom. Eventually, she resorted to bribery. She had a substantial trust fund—somewhere north of twenty-five million—left to her by her grandfather, Wren. It didn’t take long to learn that a few hundred thousand bought discretion.
All of this effort wasn’t because she was ashamed of Tom. On the contrary, it was to prevent him from being hurt. She had feared if her family found out about him, they would have chewed him up and spit him out, but only after having gone through his entire life with a microscope. Frankly, as much pain as it caused her now to be estranged from her family, it did make some things easier. She no longer had to defend every decision she made about her life, ad infinitum, and her father had removed her security detail.
Eventually, she did tell Tom about her family. It’s hard to hide a security detail, even a very discreet one, from the man you’re dating. But she kept her private life secret from everyone else. She had never been comfortable being Cassandra Wren Calloway, preferring to simply be Cassie Wren.
And at this moment, Cassie Wren needed to get downstairs for the start of her shift as a waitress. She was never late.
She loved Michael, the owner of Hooked. Michael was another bit of normal in her life. He was both her boss and her landlord. Because of him, she had a job, a place to live and was able to pay her bills with her own money. She preferred to just leave her trust fund alone if at all possible. She hurried down the back steps and into the main room of the tavern below.
Today, perhaps more than most days, Cassie needed to see Michael’s huge, warm smile, and she wasn’t disappointed. He was a big guy, in his late fifties and was the kindest, most hard-working and simply wonderful man she knew. He was certainly more like a dad to her than her own father. One of the girls she worked with was fond of saying, “His heart is as big as his ass,” but in truth, Cassie knew it was much bigger.
“Hey, squirt, you okay?”
“Yeah, Mike, I’m fine.”
“You’d tell me if you weren’t?”
“Of course I would,” Cassie answered—but she probably wouldn’t. Hooked was successful but only because Mike worked like a dog to make it so. She wouldn’t willingly give him anything else to worry about.
Sundays weren’t usually their most hectic nights, but during the summer, all nights were busy. To make matters worse, another waitress, Alicia, had gone home early because her baby was sick. Cassie worked extra tables, so she hadn’t stopped running all night and was exhausted. On Sundays, Hooked stopped serving food at ten and alcohol at eleven. Usually the customers had all cleared out by midnight.
It wasn’t quite midnight yet, but the place was empty. The rest of the wait staff had already gone home. Mike was counting out the register and Cassie was setting the tables for tomorrow’s lunch crowd when she noticed a well-dressed, elderly lady sitting in a corner booth. She thought she’d bussed that table over an hour ago and usually the hostess didn’t seat anyone who arrived after ten, although they were welcome at the bar. How could Cassie have missed seeing her?
Cassie walked to the booth. “Hi. My name is Cassie and I’m one of the waitresses here. I’m sorry I didn’t see you when you came in. We stopped serving a few hours ago and we’re closing up now.”
“Aye, it’s late, I’m sure ye are.”
The old woman had a lovely Scottish burr and her voice sounded almost musical to Cassie.
“I won’t trouble ye for long. I was just wondering if I could have a glass of cold water. It’s a terribly hot evening.”
Cassie smiled at her. “Of course you can. I’ll just get that for you.” Mike wouldn’t mind.
“And while ye’re at it, lass, perhaps ye’d bring one for yerself and sit with me for a bit. Ye look dead on yer feet.”
Well, Cassie couldn’t deny that she was tired, and a few minutes rest, while the lady drank her water, would be welcome. “Yes, I could stand to sit down. I’ll be right back.”
She filled two glasses with ice water and picked up two beer mats bearing the National Bohemian logo. When she returned, she put the glasses of water on the beer mats and slid into the seat opposite the old lady. After taking a drink, Cassie heaved a sigh. “You know, on a night like this a glass of cold water tastes better to me than anything else.”
The lady nodded. “Aye, I have to agree.” She raised her glass saying, “Slàinte mhath.”
Cassie smiled. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means.”
“Oh, lass, it simply means good health.”
Cassie raised her glass. “Well then, to your good health also.”
Mike called, “Cassie, I’ve closed out the register and locked everything up. You should go on up to bed and get some rest.”
“Thanks, Mike. I will as soon as we’re done here.”
“Using the royal we now are you? I’ll lock you in.”
“The royal we? Well, ye know kings and queens refer to themselves in the first person plural—we. We are not happy. We are ready for our tea.”
Cassie laughed. “I understand that. I just don’t understand why he thought it. There are two of us here. We are a we.”
The old woman shrugged. “It’s possible he didn’t see me. In fact, it’s probable. I have a way of coming and going unnoticed if I need to.”
Cassie couldn’t imagine that Mike hadn’t seen her, but it didn’t matter. She supposed she should make conversation with the woman until she finished her water. “Do you live around here?”
“Nay, lass, I don’t.”
“Then you’re visiting? Are you here to see family or just our beautiful city?”
“I’m here to see you, Cassie.”
“Me?” Holy smokes. Should she be afraid? She thought the old lady was harmless.
The woman’s tinkling laughter filled Cassie with a sense of peace and contentment.
“Ye needn’t be afraid. My name is Gertrude and I’d like to give ye a gift—if ye’re interested.”
Cassie’s common sense told her that she probably should be cautious, but her heart instinctively knew Gertrude was not here to do her harm. “I…uh…it’s nice to meet you, Gertrude. It isn’t necessary to give me a gift. But if I can call you a cab or something…”
“Nay, lass. I have something for ye. I came to this spot on Earth at this particular time to speak with ye and give ye an important gift. But I must explain a few things first.”
Cassie wasn’t sure what to do. The old woman had an important gift for her? This was simply too bizarre. After her call with Sloan and the insanely busy night, she was physically and emotionally drained. All she wanted to do was curl up in bed and go to sleep. She should just ask the old lady to leave. They were closed.
The Gift: The Pocket Watch Chronicles Page 1