Chime and Punishment

by Julianne Holmes

  chapter 10

  I unlocked the front door of the Cog & Sprocket and took a deep breath. The faint scent of motor oil, cleaning solutions, old furniture, and family history never failed to calm my nerves, no matter what state they were in. The front counter was up, and the curtain that blocked the pass-through between the open-backed shelves that divided the workroom and the shop itself was open. The shelves held some of our stock—the carriage clocks and shelf clocks that deserved public viewing and were for sale. We made it a point to have clocks at all price points, and some featured in-progress work to let folks know what was possible for their family heirloom. I always left a clock being repaired on the front counter. My secret was the clock, and three others like it, were never going to be fixed. They were there for demonstration purposes or as conversation starters.

  Instead of heading to the back stairs, I walked over to the right and sat on the settee. It was an old piece, one that my grandmother had had in her bedroom. Camel backed, with mahogany claw feet that grasped orbs. Some value had been lost after years of refinishing and reupholstering and everyday use. But that was as it should be. I ran my hand over the black fabric with its white, ’50s-inspired starburst pattern. The entire room was like that—old furniture recovered with midcentury fabric in black, white, and grays, with an occasional red or yellow accent. Everything was meant to be sat on and used, rather than admired. The furniture matched my clock philosophy. It may be valuable, but it couldn’t be so precious that it couldn’t be used. In my opinion, there was nothing sadder than an old clock that was only a piece of furniture, rather than a wondrous machine that continued to keep time.

  I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes. There was much more comfortable furniture upstairs in my apartment, but I wanted to process this down here, where the ghosts of the Cog & Sprocket regularly gathered to inspire. I felt a push against the side of my foot and opened my eyes to look down. Bezel roughly pushed her face along the length of my foot. She looked up at me and headbutted my knees. I patted my lap, but in typical Bezel fashion she ignored me and jumped up beside me instead. After she’d settled down she did reach out and put her paw on my lap. At least there was that.

  Bezel was usually kept captive up in my apartment, but Saturday night into Sunday was her roaming time, when the pet door that was installed on my apartment was unlocked. Cat dander wasn’t good for clock parts, or for Caroline’s allergies, but thirty-six hours of Bezel didn’t cause too much damage, especially since we had an air filter on all the time.

  “Bez, Kim Gray was killed today,” I said.

  She squeaked at me and tilted her head. “You’re right, I don’t know that for sure. But she did die. Someone crashed her head in with the bell we were going to use in the tower.” Another squeak. “Good point, Bez. That wasn’t a perfect bell, but still. I hate that part of the clock is involved in this.” I petted her head and then ran my hand down the length of her body. She sighed and closed her eyes. I did the same thing, but kept petting her. Bezel had taken my grandfather’s death as hard as any of us. It took her a few weeks to trust me, but now we were a unit. Even with Ben and Blue in our lives, Bezel still owned me, and knew it.

  There was a slight rapping on the glass door to the shop and I instinctively shrunk down on the couch. I should have gone upstairs. Lights on meant an open shop to a lot of folks. I sighed and stood. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Bezel.

  I parted the old-school metal venetian blinds that covered the front door. Like others items in the Cog & Sprocket, these blinds were well used and had been both repaired and restored over the years. Opening and closing them had been part of the daily routine of the Cog & Sprocket for as long as I remembered, which was the primary reason I didn’t get rid of them in the rehab. I didn’t see anyone at the front door, but suddenly Moira Reed’s face appeared. I jumped back, and then I opened the door.

  “You scared me to death,” I said, wincing at the word death.

  “I wasn’t sure you were here,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d gone out to the cottage.”

  “No. Caroline invited me, but I wanted to be alone.”

  “Do you want me to go?” she asked, gesturing behind her out the door.

  “No, come in.”

  “Do you have wine?” she asked.

  “I do, upstairs.”

  “Well, that’s good. We need something to go with all this food.” She held up two canvas bags, both of which were loaded to the very top.

  • • •

  “This is really good,” I said for the third time. Other than that sentence, we’d eaten in silence for fifteen minutes, devouring a fig-and-cheddar-melt panini with a side of homemade potato chips in between sips of a particularly hearty Malbec.

  “A Freddie special,” she said. “I tried to tell her that no one wanted to eat a melted sandwich that wasn’t piping hot, but she told me they’d eat these. She melts the cheese on both sides, then puts the fig jam in the middle, and it seals it up. I’ve gained five pounds since she started working for us. Sandwiches aren’t even her best thing. Try this.” She took a cardboard to-go container out of her bag and opened the lid. She grabbed a spoon and added a dollop of coleslaw to my plate.

  “I like these to-go containers, by the way. Recyclable?” I took a fork and dug into the slaw. Bacon, blue cheese, red cabbage, grape tomatoes. A vinegar-based dressing. Yum.

  “Indeed they are. Make Orchard Green. Just like the bags. The only thing Beckett, Ben, and the Clarks have ever agreed on.”

  “When I first heard that tag line I thought they meant Beckett Green, and it made me a little sick to my stomach.”

  “My mother said the same thing,” Moira said, laughing. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  “Now that it’s in your head you won’t be able to see his new T-shirts without feeling a little nauseous. The ‘Green’ part of the logo is five times the size of ‘Make’ and ‘Orchard.’”

  “Well, he’s contributing the recycling garbage cans to downtown, which is great,” Moira said.

  “It is.” I nodded. “One a block, though. How many folks visit Orchard in the summer? Seems like overkill to me.”

  “Well, we have a fair amount of traffic since we’re on the back route between Tanglewood and Marytown. Plus the students over at Harris University tend to wander over here during the summer.”

  “What’s the attraction?”

  “Aside from excellent food and coffee? The river adventure.”

  “The river adventure?”

  “I keep forgetting you haven’t been around for a few summers. The Hamiltons have a kayak/canoe rental outfit that runs Memorial Day to Labor Day. Did run. Kim shut them down this year. Claims they didn’t have permits to run the business.”

  “Did they?”

  “Probably not. The whole point of Orchard is that it isn’t a permit kind of place, you know? Needs to be safe, and compliant with laws, of course. But Kim added layers of bureaucracy to everything. You know that better than anyone.”

  Indeed I did. She kept me hopping with the clock tower. Or rather, she kept Nadia hopping. My patience with Kim had worn out before the spring thaw. Long before.

  “Is the Hamilton family Fred’s family?”

  “Yup. The Hamiltons do a lot to cobble together a living out here. So do most folks. All the pieces work together to make enough to get by.”

  “Kim made it harder,” I said.

  “She did. It’s like she had it out for them,” Moira said, grabbing a handful of chips. We ate in silence for a bit.

  “What’s Kim’s story?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She isn’t from here, is she?”

  “No, and that was a big deal when she got hired, trust me. Grover Winter met her when he was a state representative, and he hired her to work in his office. After he retired, he stayed i
n touch with her. She went up to Vermont, then over to upstate New York. Municipal jobs. When they decided to create the position for Orchard, he suggested she throw her name in the ring.”

  “Did Grover know she was a nightmare before he passed, or is this new behavior?” I asked.

  “I remember him saying she’d changed since her husband died.”

  “She was married? Did she have kids?” I knew nothing about Kim Gray’s life. I never bothered to ask, or thought much about it. I assumed that anything worth knowing would get to me via the gossip network.

  “No kids, that I know of. Wow. I don’t know.” Moira took a cookie off the plate. She broke it into bite-sized pieces, but didn’t eat any.

  “I know. Ever since I heard the news, I’ve been wrestling with something. I feel badly that Kim died. Maybe it was natural causes—”

  “Fat chance of that around here.”

  “Nice.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know. But no matter what happened, I feel terrible that I don’t feel terrible.”

  “Well, at least you’re not celebrating,” Moira said.

  “What?”

  “I hear that the rounds were on the house over at the Beef and Ale.”

  “Keeping it classy.”

  “Always. Anyway, I get what you’re saying. I’m the same. Not to say that I’m glad she’s dead, but I’m not mourning her loss. Not many folks will be. Jeff’s trying to reach her family. Mum and Jimmy Murphy are figuring out a public memorial service, probably the end of next week. They’re hoping whatever happened gets figured out by then.” Moira sighed and went back to moving her cookies around the plate.

  “I’m sure Jeff will get it all sorted out.”

  “Listen, I have complete faith in Jeff. I’m crazy about the guy. But here’s the thing. The suspect list is really long if this was a murder—”

  “Who do you think is on it?” I asked.

  “Half of Orchard, for starters,” she said.

  “Seriously,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Moira said. “I’m not good at this sort of thing. Jeff is. You are.”

  “Moira, I’m not—”

  “Just stop. I’m just saying that Jeff’s going to need some help.”

  “He’s got Ro.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What?”

  “Ruth, like it or not, you have a talent for putting more together than clocks. Do me a favor, get out ahead of this.”

  “Ahead of what?”

  “This is the third death in a year. Four, if you count Grover. I’m worried about Orchard. There’s a cancer that’s been growing here, and we need to get it cut out. I know Jeff’s up to the job, but you’ve got a different set of skills. He’d never ask, but he needs your help. We all do.”

  • • •

  Moira had left around ten. I’d looked at my phone and saw that I’d just missed a text from Ben. Won’t make it tonight. Sorry about that. You OK?

  I had a rule of thumb about texting versus calling. Only cowards text rather than call to break a date. Sure, we didn’t have firm plans, but I’d hoped he’d come by tonight. I’d texted him back. See you later, unless you’re busy. Passive-aggressive, sure. But at least I wasn’t a coward.

  • • •

  I woke up in a foul mood. Strong coffee, usually an elixir with mood-altering properties, didn’t work its magic this morning. Even Bezel, being her loviest, didn’t help, though petting her calmed me down. After I’d settled down at the kitchen table with my eggs, more coffee, and a new notebook, she sat underneath the table and put her paw on my bare foot. I made a note to get her nails clipped, but didn’t move my foot. It was, after all, the thought that counted.

  I unwrapped the new notebook and sighed deeply as I opened it. My grandfather had passed on the notebook habit. Large, black hard-backed notebooks. Blank pages, used for lists, notes, doodles. Sketches of clocks to fix and clocks to make. I’d found years’ worth of his notebooks, and I kept them all upstairs. Nadia had been working on getting them in chronological order, and then she was going to start to index them soon. G.T. was a creature of habit, and that made the job a little less daunting. He started a notebook, put the date on the inside cover. Once the notebook was filled, he put the end date on the back inside cover, and then went to the next book.

  All the years I’d been married to Eric, I hadn’t filled up one notebook. Even when I started making art pieces and clocks, I hadn’t done a lot of daydream sketching. Life with Eric had boundaries, and even my imagination stayed within them. I don’t think G.T. had limitations, but he was focused. Everything was about the shop, and clocks. Other thoughts were put in the same notebook, questions in the middle of a page, or lists that meant something to him, but would take years to decipher. Once I’d realized what had happened to Grover Winter I’d gone back and looked at G.T.’s notebooks. Now random sentences made sense, and lists showed the way he was putting facts together. But you had to know what you were looking for to find it.

  Harry Clagan had been a different animal. He kept the books for the shop in ledgers. We’d used similar ledgers up until this winter, and Caroline still insisted on keeping them as backup for the computer system we’d put in place. I’d found other notebooks that told other sides of Harry. One was a journal, with a running history of Orchard from his point of view. That had been invaluable while reconstructing the story of the clock tower. I’d also gotten a glimpse into the complicated soul of Harry Clagan—the despair he felt when his wife died, leaving him alone to raise his young son. His concern for Orchard’s citizens during the depth of the Great Depression. His pride in his son’s great talent. His love for his daughter-in-law. The stories of Harry the bon vivant passed down from my grandmother to me, but he died long before I was born, so I hadn’t gotten a chance to know him, until now. These days I felt his presence was as much a part of the Cog & Sprocket as my grandparents’ were—three benign ghosts who watched over Bezel and me.

  This winter I’d found another notebook hidden in one of the floorboards. This Harry notebook held accounts for the people of Orchard. I couldn’t always tell what the accounts were for, but they weren’t for clocks. I was still deciphering the codes he used, but I’d come to suspect that Harry may have been a bootlegger during Prohibition. And he may have run a card game. I kept this notebook, and its secrets, to myself, but I was determined to break the code.

  Harry had been famous for keeping Orchard running during the hard times. Clock repair business hadn’t been robust during the Depression, but Harry kept people employed in the shop, and in building the clock tower. The mystery notebooks helped me understand how. Surely the statute of limitations was done on any misdeeds Harry had done? Besides, he’d done them for the best of reasons. I didn’t intend to judge, only to know more about my family history, sordid or not.

  Once I’d moved back to Orchard, I began a new notebook in honor of this new phase of my life. But part of Harry had been passed down to me, and I’d started a second notebook that was more of a journal where I processed my feelings about the changes in my life, and listed five things I was grateful for every day. The inner-thoughts writings were skimpy, but I’d kept up with the gratitude journal. For the last two months, Ben had made the list every day. I sighed and ran my hand down the notebook.

  I’d started a new notebook again when Mark Pine had died, and made notes of the investigation as it had progressed. I’d even made notes after the case had been solved, and then I put the notebook in the new hiding place I’d created in the bottom of a grandfather clock that was in my bedroom, along with Harry’s secret notebook. This new notebook was my casebook for the death of Kim Gray. I didn’t like polluting my other notebooks with my ruminations on murder, but found writing and drawing to be very helpful.

  I laid out my pencils, my pencil sharpener, and a
large eraser. Then I started to write. I wrote down everything I remembered from yesterday. I made a timeline. I drew a diagram of the room, the vestibule, and the portico. I kept adding details on different pages, trying to categorize details into different lists, while keeping myself from jumping to conclusions. I wrote and drew. At one point Bezel left and went back into my bedroom, presumably to take a nap on my bed. And still I wrote. When I finally looked up I’d been at it for over an hour.

  I stood and stretched. Almost ten o’clock. I’d put in the broad strokes. More details needed to be filled in. I wasn’t sure if I could add them all myself. But I’d need to try. Later. Right now I needed a shower, and to start working on a clock, my favorite way to calm my mind.

  chapter 11

  “What are you up to?” Pat said as he came in the back door of the shop carrying a large wooden box. He hip-checked the back door to close it again.

  “Working on Flo’s clock for the barbershop,” I said.

  Flo had found an old tin barbershop sign and asked me if I could turn it into a clock. Of course I could. I’d spent some time figuring out how to make the clock work so that it would be aesthetically pleasing to Flo but wouldn’t make generations of Clagan clockmakers roll over in their graves. I’d decided to make the clock guts, as Flo called them, visible on the front of the sign. Or seemingly visible. The cogs and wheels didn’t actually run the clock, they only looked like they did. The real clock guts were in the back, with an eight-day winding mechanism.

  Pat stood behind me and peered at the clock. “That looks terrific, Ruthie,” he said. “She’s going to love it.”

  “I hope so. I’m going to show it to her after I’ve got a few more details working. You did a great job cleaning up the sign,” I said. The sign had been slightly dinged up, with spots of rust and faded lettering. Now it still had weathered charm, but looked refreshed, with the rust spots gone, the lettering redone in black against a white background.

  Pat smiled and went over to another worktable. He put the wooden box down on a stool and went over to grab a black cloth to cover the surface. The black helped us keep track of parts while we took apart clocks.