Broken Souls (Broken Realms, #2)

CHAPTER 13-2

By the time Abby and Bruce had returned from lunch, Mara was determined to get something accomplished, so she ordered Abby to return to school or to find someplace else to be truant. Mara turned her attention to Mr. Mickleson’s grandfather clock or, as Mr. Mason liked to refer to it, his longcase clock.

Mara was no expert in antique clocks; she couldn’t tell you who built or designed one from the other, but she did know the basic variations of the mechanisms and how they worked. This particular model was an eight-day clock, meaning it only had to be wound once a week, as opposed to a one-day clock that had to be wound daily.

The clock’s hands had not moved from the 6:58 position since its delivery. And the pendulum—which could be seen through the glass door at the clock’s waist—was not swinging. It either was nonfunctional or it needed to be wound. Mara opened the glass door and looked in the bottom of the casing below the weights, cables and pendulum, where she found the key taped down, apparently so it would not be lost during transport. She carefully pulled it loose and closed the casing. Tiptoeing, she reached up to the ornate bonnet of the clock, opened the crystal covering its face and inserted the key in the holes on each side of the dial, winding until it was too stiff to continue. She then opened the glass door again, gave the pendulum a slight push and stood back.

Nothing.

The pendulum swung back to its prior place but did not pick up any momentum nor respond to the demands of the cable and weight that should have compelled it to swing.

Reopening the glass door, Mara stuck her head inside and felt along the cables and reached up to the pulleys above them. Nothing seemed tangled or out of place. She walked around the counter, bent down behind it, retrieved a flashlight from a shelf. Straightening, she pointed it at the grandfather clock and pressed the On switch.

A bright white light shone out of the flashlight and struck the tall wooden clock at the same instant it chimed, reverberating off the walls of the tiny shop and causing Mara to jump a foot into the air, hitting her head on the Billiards light fixture over the counter and landing with her back against a neon Coca-Cola sign. She looked up, saw the clock face read 7:00, heard the telltale tick-tock and saw the pendulum swinging to and fro effortlessly.

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