CHAPTER 11
1344 Words
CHAPTER 11Mara cranked away at the little wheel mounted on the right side of the black porcelain sewing machine. The needle jogged up and down, punching through the edge of the canvas bag, dragging the black thread through the material, creating a row of perfect stitches that sealed the top closed. At the client’s home, when she had picked up the device, it would not crank, and the needle was jammed up somehow. Now it worked perfectly, and all Mara had done was move it and unpack it. It had been weeks since she had physically repaired something. Now, it seemed, all she had to do was touch a broken device, and it would repair itself. It was taking all the fun out of her job. She’d have to ask Ping what to do about it.
Once she had completed feeding the canvas bag through the sewing machine, it occurred to her that she had rendered the bag unusable. Grabbing a pair of scissors, she wedged one blade under the thread and snipped, reopening the mouth of the bag.
The bell above the front door of the shop jangled, and Mara looked up.
A man in a green uniform was backing through the door pulling a dolly loaded with a tall narrow box behind him. Once he cleared the door, he let it close and swiveled around, revealing a grandfather clock that stood six feet tall.
“Hi, are you Mara?” the man said. She nodded, and he unhooked a clipboard dangling from his belt. “Then this here is for you.” He nodded at the clock.
“Wow. I wasn’t expecting a delivery. Who is—”
From the back of the shop, Bruce yelled, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. My grandfather called and said that Mr. Mickleson was sending over his clock for you to work on.”
“Got it,” Mara yelled back and turned to the deliveryman. “I guess I was expecting it. Could we roll it over here to the end of the counter?”
“You bet.” He tipped it up on the dolly’s wheels and rolled it where asked, sitting it next to the shelf where the Philco 90 radio sat. Mara signed his clipboard. He tipped his head and gave a small salute as he rolled the dolly back out the front door. As the door was about to close, Mara heard the deliveryman say, “Oops, almost gotcha, young lady.” The door swung back open, and Abby stepped inside.
“Almost ran me down,” she said, taking off her jacket and tossing it at the coat tree in the corner where it landed in a heap at its base. “What you fixing today? Granny’s electric butter churn?” She snorted.
“I’ll have you know I have repaired an electric butter churn before.”
“You’re making that up. There’s no such thing.”
“Yes, there is. It’s sort of like an electric ice cream maker with a motor mounted at the top of a big jar that churns the butter. Of course you don’t need to set it in a bucket of ice.”
Abby rolled her eyes. “What a geek. Butter churn. Next you’ll be setting up a still for a bunch of moonshiners.”
“It would be fun to work on a still, but that sounds more like something you’d see in the Appalachians than the Cascades, don’t you think?”
“Whatever you say, gadget dork.”
“Why aren’t you in school? Still majoring in truancy?”
“I am out today arranging an internship for my next semester. I’ve been told I can work part-time and get credit, if I write a paper or some nonsense like that.”
“I did that my last semester. Right here at Mr. Mason’s shop.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
Mara turned pale. “Huh?”
“I’m here to sign up. I want to intern.”
“Here?”
“Yeah, why not? You did.”
“You’re pulling my leg. You don’t know how to hold a screwdriver much less fix a broken gadget.”
“The point is to learn, isn’t it?”
“What are you up to? Spill it.”
“I’m not up to anything. I want to do an internship, and I think I could contribute a lot around here. It’s a business, isn’t it? I don’t have to fix things to help out. I bet I could modernize your back-office operations. I’m great with a spreadsheet and numbers, and I’m very organized. I also can take orders, do pick-ups and deliveries, and run errands. And, not to be too critical, but this place could use some dusting and mopping. I can do that.”
“You want a janitorial internship?”
“Look, it’s a chance to get some practical experience, and it would be great for us to work together, right?”
“I’m not buying it. Besides, your counselor isn’t going to let you do an internship reporting to me. I only finished high school a few months ago myself, and Mr. Mason doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to come back to work.”
“I’ll work out the details. Ask Mr. Mason. He’ll do it if you ask.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“So what is the issue?”
“I don’t know. You’re a little high octane and high maintenance for a place like this. I think you will go nuts around here.”
“Let me worry about that. It’s only for a few weeks anyway. Besides, with all the weirdness you’ve got going on at home, don’t you think it would be nice to have a friend around?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Your mother just brought home a thirteen-year-old brother you didn’t know about. I’d call that pretty weird.”
“He’s fourteen.”
Abby smirked.
“So you think you’re going to make my life less weird by hanging out here at the shop? I’m not seeing it.”
Abby slouched across the counter. “Look, think about it for a day or two. If you are still uptight, I’ll go do something else. But I do think it would be fun to spend some more time together. I’ve missed hanging out since you finished school.”
“We’ll see.”
“Where is tall, dark and Bruce?”
Mara swung a thumb toward the back of the shop. “He’s in his bike garage. Why don’t you go say hi.”
Abby smiled, wiggled her eyebrows and sauntered off to the bike shop. Mara returned to the sewing machine, turning it on its side to examine what it would take to remove the bottom of the platform when the phone rang.
“Thanks for—”
“Hi, Mara. It’s Ping. Sam told me that you wanted to talk. I can’t seem to get away right now. Can it wait until I close up this evening? It’s a little busy over here.”
“Actually that will work out best. Bohannon is coming by, and I might need some backup while explaining things to him.”
“Bohannon?”
“The detective who was with me at the office park when Suter first attacked, remember?”
“Oh, yes, I recall.”
“He’s going to be here at six. Can you make it then?”
“Yes, I’ll be there. We might want to be circumspect about what we tell him.”
“He saw Suter turn into a fire-breathing monster, saw all the passengers’ bodies in that temporary morgue at the airport and saw me do my metaphysical thing a couple times already. What is it that we need to keep from him?”
“Nothing, I suppose.”
“Okay,” Mara said, glancing at the entrance to the back of the shop. She lowered her voice. “So how are you holding up? I hear you’ve been having some control issues with your own little passenger.”
“My what? Oh! Sam told you about this morning.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so. No more incidents. We can discuss it this evening.”
“Call if you need anything. Bye,” Mara said.
Before she could replace the handset in the cradle of the old black rotary telephone, she heard static and lifted it back up. “Hello?” The static continued, but it wasn’t coming from the phone. She hung it up and swiveled her head, trying to locate the sound. She glanced toward the grandfather clock at the end of the counter. The sound came from that direction. As she took a step, the static stopped. Mara remained still for a second, c****d an ear toward the clock. Nothing.
She continued to where the grandfather clock stood and put her left ear next to its side. After a moment, the static resumed. Yet Mara heard the sound from her right ear. It wasn’t the clock. She glanced up to the nearby shelf. The static emitted from the Philco 90 radio—the one that was a casing with no mechanism inside. The static rose and fell, as if it were trying to tune into a station. Then almost imperceptibly—so woven into the background noise that Mara wasn’t sure if she had imagined it—she heard a voice, high-pitched, like a child’s. It sounded like “Mar-ree, Mar-ree.”
Mara grabbed the radio casing and slid it around so it faced away from her. She quickly removed the backing and looked into the empty wooden frame. No radio inside. Yet the static continued, and, intermixed within the noise, a little voice called, “Mar-ree, Mar-ree. I’m coming!”
- Writer
