Just Killing Time

by Julianne Holmes

  “I used to think he loved clocks more than anyone else in the world, except for . . .”

  “Your grandmother, right?”

  “Right,” I said, feeling a bit self-conscious.

  “And you too. You know that, I hope. He called you his girls. It broke his heart that he lost you both. Getting back in touch with you meant the world to him.”

  “I just wish I hadn’t waited so long, and that we’d had a chance to talk.”

  “Oh, Ruth, I lived with a long list of wishes and regrets that kept me from being happy for so, so long. Too long. Your grandfather helped me realize that. He rescued me. I know that sounds old-fashioned, but so be it.”

  “You must have made him very happy,” I said. And it wasn’t a question. As much as my grandfather’s presence was in the shop, Caroline was here too, now that I knew where to look. A shorter stool at the back workbench. The selection of teas upstairs. Post-it notes with reminders, likely from her, on the wall calendar.

  “Happy? I don’t know. I think I made him less lonely, and that was good. And he enjoyed being part of my son, Levi’s, life. He was a wonderful role model for him.”

  “He was good at stepping in for missing parents.”

  We both concentrated on our coffee. I was a little uncomfortable with how much I’d shared, and maybe Caroline was too. I was a hard person to get to know. I’d been told that several times, most recently by my boss at the museum. And I was, but it was less of a character flaw and more of a layer of protection, sort of like a turtle’s shell. In Caroline I recognized a fellow turtle. The half-answered questions. Vague pronouns. Maybe someday she’d tell me her secrets, but I wouldn’t push. I had some of my own.

  “So Pat’s putting in a bathroom? I didn’t know he was a plumber too,” I said.

  “While I was away, they brought a plumber in, hoping to surprise me. Pat’s doing all of the finish work, and is moving right along. He did the same thing out at the house, oversaw a bathroom project. He’s good at it, so it is a good solution for both of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the work at the house needed to be done on a budget, but done well. Pat had the time and needed the work. And we could live with some flexibility in the schedule.”

  “Caroline, I appreciate your going over the business records with me. And your understanding about the will and the shop. But we need to talk about this a little, if you don’t mind. You’re showing me the books, but tell me about the business. All these clocks? I hate to even ask how you could afford them all.”

  “We took a mortgage out on the cottage,” Caroline said.

  “What? You mortgaged your home?”

  “We thought if we turned the clocks around, we could pay it back. But, of course, the clocks go with the store. Which is as it should be. You’re the only one who can get them ready for sale.”

  “But you need the money in order to pay back the mortgage,” I said, stunned.

  “Ruth, we don’t need to talk about this now.”

  “Of course we do. Are you going to lose the house?”

  “No. I can get through the next couple of months. And then, who knows, perhaps I’ll move up to be closer to Levi.”

  “I want you to do what you want to do. But G.T. wouldn’t want you to be forced to make a decision because of his business deal. We’ll figure this out.”

  Caroline smiled and nodded. It was a taciturn agreement, the “we.” But I meant it. Caroline being homeless was not part of my grand plan. Not that I had a grand plan, though doing what G.T. would have wanted had become my focus.

  “I called Jeff Paisley on my way over,” Caroline said. “Still no idea when they are going to release Thom’s body. I know he didn’t want one, but I think we should schedule a memorial service soon. I want to make a few more calls first and let people know.”

  “If they haven’t heard already,” I said. “It’s been in the news.”

  “I know. But a phone call is still a nice gesture.”

  It was a nice gesture. And it bought us some time. I know it wasn’t rational, but I didn’t want to have a memorial service before we knew what happened. It didn’t seem right to say farewell to him until we could really let him rest in peace.

  “Let’s go back to the workroom,” I said. “I’ll show you some of the work I’ve been doing.” Caroline didn’t comment on the changes in the space, but I could tell she was taking them all in. We walked over to the desk area, and Caroline stared at it.

  “The accounting logs, did you find them?” she asked.

  “The log is upstairs. Pat also showed me the database Levi set up. I’m glad you were starting to computerize.”

  “We were keeping paper shadow systems until Thom trusted the computers. He wasn’t a big fan of technology. Though I do understand his reluctance on one level. Looking through his notebooks, and thinking about the way his mind worked, I don’t know if a computer could have kept up with him,” she said, smiling a little.

  “I was surprised to see digital watches in the store. Yesterday I did a couple of electric repairs. I suppose that was more of the business these days. I’m surprised he was selling electric wall clocks, though. He never would have let them in the front door back in the day.”

  “I let them in the back door, and he pretended not to see them. Before the investment in the clocks, we had some lean times. Not selling electric clocks just didn’t make sense.”

  “I was looking around the attic yesterday and saw a bunch of clocks that G.T. had made. Why didn’t you sell those?”

  “They weren’t perfect. Your grandfather could admire the craftsmanship of other people’s clocks, including the imperfections, but he wasn’t as kind to himself. I kept trying to tell him that perfect was the enemy of good, but he wouldn’t budge. This hole was off-center. That clock face was crooked. The tone of the chime wasn’t satisfactory. A million excuses for them to go upstairs to the Clagan clock graveyard. His term. So, anyway, we needed to start to get creative about the work we brought in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We started to try and do a volume business. Pat would create cases, almost as a side business, and Thom taught him how to put electrics into them. Then Thom checked them. The clocks in the attic were more traditional. These new clocks could be built to order. To match cabinetry in a high-end kitchen, for example.”

  “Did it help business?”

  “It did, actually. Pat got a few custom orders, which we filled. People coming into the shop to pick them up saw the rest of the merchandise. And then, of course, there was the new inventory from the estate. I was starting to think about opening up the entire front of the shop, making it a showroom.”

  “There’s a lot of merchandise,” I said. “What were the plans for all of it? I met Jonah on Sunday and he mentioned the deal he had with you and G.T.”

  “He and his sister Delia. Did you know Delia? She was the oldest daughter.”

  “I think I do remember Delia, but more by reputation. She got sent to boarding school when she was in high school.”

  “Probably the best thing that happened to her. She lives down in New York now, barely ever came up to visit her folks. But she seems to have made her way in the world, not like Aggie.”

  “Aggie?”

  “Aggie Kurt. She drives a delivery truck.”

  “We met the other day. She’s Jonah’s sister? I just didn’t make that connection.”

  “She would have been long out of high school by the time you moved to Orchard. Jonah is the youngest,” Caroline said.

  “This is going to sound terrible, but she seems a little off.”

  “Far be it from me to speak ill of anyone, but I agree. She certainly put her poor parents through it. She married badly by all accounts. I never met her husband; he died a couple of years ago. She used her poor mot
her like a bank. After Harriet passed, Aggie asked her father to fund her latest venture, a high-end clothing store in Marytown. He agreed, but told her that was it, her inheritance.”

  “I take it by the fact that she’s driving a truck that didn’t go well?”

  “Not at all. By high-end she was talking New York and Boston prices, high fashion.”

  “In Marytown?”

  “In Marytown. Marytown is a college town. And high fashion and the Berkshires don’t go hand in hand. Plus, her merchandise was ugly. I couldn’t even find a scarf to buy the first time I went in, but Thom told me to patronize the store, talk it up.”

  “I can’t imagine Aggie running a high fashion store.”

  “She cleaned up well. But her taste was suspect. Once a month I went over and bought a small piece and then tried to use it for a couple of days until I could put it away.”

  “How long did the store stay open?”

  “Longer than it should have. She took the closing hard, but her father was true to his word and finally turned the taps off. She was cut out of his will for the most part. Now, why were we talking about Aggie? I’d hate you to think I was a gossip.”

  “We were talking about the deal you had with Jonah.”

  “Ah yes, poor Jonah. His sisters both had legacies, but Jonah is the executor along with Thom. He was stuck in the middle of a family feud. He didn’t know how to get rid of the clock collection while honoring his father’s wishes, so he and Thom came up with a deal. We bought the collection, will sell it, and once we make a profit, they’ll get a cut.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “More than fair. Thom was taking care of his friend’s family. Even Aggie saw that, after a fashion. It took her a while. She kept hammering at Thom, wanted to look at the clocks, questioning when they would go on sale, how he was going to price them, all of it.”

  “Did you have a plan for selling them, aside from opening up the shop and putting more clocks on display?” I asked gently. I didn’t want to sound like I was judging, but at the same time, having a crowded showroom would not get rid of dozens of clocks. I hadn’t decided what to do with the shop, but no matter what, the merchandise needed to be dealt with—and soon. I had to help Caroline pay that second mortgage back. It felt like a heavy burden that the sooner I figured out the better.

  “I was trying to get more information on each piece when I had to leave town. I worked on it while I was up in Vermont. My son taught me how to use the Internet to do the searches. It saved me hours on research.”

  “Not just the research,” I said. “A webpage could help sell some of the clocks online. Do you have a webpage yet?”

  “Levi set one up. I was going to show it to Thom. Sounds like you two are going to gang up on me. He said the same thing about going online.”

  “No ganging up, just helping however I can,” I said, laughing, and silently thanking heaven, and Levi, that I didn’t have to teach Caroline how to Google.

  “Well, I’d also done some sketches for Thom to look at. I thought we should take this wall down,” she said. I wondered if Caroline would have more success than my grandmother had?

  chapter 30

  The Cog & Sprocket was more than just a clock shop, and it always had been. Back in the day, horologists were a commodity, so people started to travel to Orchard to get their timepieces tended to. And Simon Clagan built clocks as well, which brought a higher-scale clientele into town. The shop didn’t turn Orchard around on its own, but it played a part.

  Simon’s son was my great-grandfather Harry. From the stories I knew, the tradition of the horological gene skipping a generation started with Harry and continued with my father. My grandmother called Harry a bon vivant, but she always smiled when she said it. Harry was the reason the Cog & Sprocket still stood.

  Harry was not a gifted clockmaker but he was a great salesman. Rumor had it that during Prohibition, the front of the store was a speakeasy, serving a special “tea” that was offered after business hours and was hidden in grandfather clock cases during business hours. After Prohibition, he made it a real tearoom, creating a secondary business during the Great Depression. G.T. once told me that the Cog & Sprocket did pretty well in those days even though Harry didn’t charge half of the people who came by for repairs or tea. Clocks were the family business, but keeping the business had required inventive thinking over the years. Harry may have been an average clockmaker but he was a very creative businessman.

  I looked around; my grandmother had always kept a few historical pictures of the Cog & Sprocket on the wall. These walls were bare, but I could see the shadows where they’d been. I didn’t really need to see them; they were etched in my memory. A picture of the old clock tower, before the fire. Another one of Harry on his wedding day. Another one of Harry and his father outside the Cog & Sprocket, sometime in the late 1800s. Harry had a smile that made him look like he was going to pop out of the picture.

  I remembered being in the parlor one afternoon, helping my grandmother clean up after a demonstration on how to wind an eight-day clock. I was looking at the picture of Harry beaming outside the shop and told her that sometimes I felt him in the shop with us, especially when we were having events.

  “I do too,” she said. “I knew him later in life, but he was still so charming and handsome the room stopped when he walked in. He was a wonderful man. And he did a lot of good in this town. A lot of good.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The Berkshires have seen their share of challenges over the years. Floods. A couple of mill fires that shut towns down completely. Orchard could have gotten lost, been taken over by the shadow of Harris University. But Harry, and your grandfather, have dug in over the years, making sure Orchard stands on its own and stays a place for people to have a small business, raise a family, be part of a community, have a good life. Not everyone appreciates what they’ve done, but they will someday.”

  When I was going into high school, my parents got the opportunity to go to Dubai to teach. I didn’t go with them, preferring to stay in the United States with my grandparents. The day my grandparents officially became my guardians when I was fifteen, my grandmother baked a cake and declared that henceforth every May 15 would be Family Day. My grandfather gave me a mantel clock that was broken, and a tool kit. I often wondered if my parents dumped me or if my grandparents rescued me, but whatever the reason, moving to Orchard saved me. I’d found a place to belong, and where I could just be a kid.

  “I love the idea of opening up the shop,” I said, pulling myself out of my memories and turning to Caroline. I hope she didn’t take that wrong. I still hadn’t decided if I should move out here or go back to Boston and face that set of demons. “Yesterday, when I was poking around upstairs in the attic, I saw some old pieces of furniture. When I was a kid, I always thought of it all as so heavy and terribly old-fashioned. But now I seek that kind of furniture out and get it re-covered with more modern fabrics. That mixed style would work really well in here. And get some of the inventory up on the walls.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” Caroline said.

  “I am really surprised that G.T. left me the store,” I said. It felt like I was finally greeting the elephant in the room with a big wave.

  “Thom changed his will a few times over the years, but you always inherited the Cog & Sprocket. Even though I worked here, it’s your family’s business. I know that. He seemed to think you loved it as much as he did.”

  “I did. I do. I’d forgotten how much.” I turned on the shop computer and pulled up the database. “We need to get this in the cloud so you can start inputting your research and I can work on getting photos of the clocks taken and attached to the database. That’s our best hope of getting the clocks online and sold.”

  “Our best hope?”

  “Caroline, I’m not sure what I am going to do with the shop. But
whatever I decide, there are a lot of clocks that need to be accounted for. I can’t begin to think of selling it yet, with so much money tied into the clocks themselves. I can’t do that alone and am hoping you’ll help. You and Pat.

  “Why don’t we walk through the shop and you can tell me what you were thinking.”

  We both grabbed our notebooks and walked back around to the front door of the shop. I’d turned the corner when someone banged on the front door and rattled the doorknob.

  Caroline walked around me and we met at the front door.

  “There’s still a sign on the door,” she said, sounding perplexed.

  “I know—I saw it,” I said. The blinds covering the windows weren’t the cheap, plastic mini blinds everyone was used to these days. These were old, heavy, metal blinds. Really old. They predated me, I think. The Clagan family motto had always been “fix, don’t replace.”

  I opened the blinds a bit and peered out. I hated the squeak that came out of me, but the large set of eyeballs staring back at me would have stopped anyone’s heart. The banging started again, and Caroline stepped in and looked out the window.

  “Aggie Kurt. Just what I need today,” she muttered. “May as well open the door. Woman’s like a dog with a bone when she has a delivery to make.” Caroline turned the locks and pulled the door open.

  “Aggie,” Caroline said, opening the door.

  “Caroline. I didn’t know you were here.” The two women were the same height, but whereas Caroline looked like she’d stepped out of a catalog, with her perfectly coiffed hair, timeless fashion sense, and perfect accessories, the angular delivery woman looked like she was attempting to mirror Caroline, but had failed miserably. It wasn’t just the ill-fitting uniform. Today her hair was barely brushed and her lipstick was even more crooked than it was when I first met her. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days, and she stumbled a bit when she came into the shop, heading toward the countertop. She stopped when she saw me.