“What could he want badly enough to take the risk he’s been taking?” Teag asked.“Something he thinks he can’t live without.”
Teag dialed the man’s number again, and this time, someone answered.
“I don’t want to answer a survey and I don’t want to donate money,” a gravelly voice said.
“Mr. Pettis! Wait! I need to talk to you about Stor-Your-Own,” Teag said. The line was silent. After a moment, we heard rustling, so we knew he hadn’t hung up on us. “What about it?”
“We’re trying to help tenants who couldn’t remove their items before the facility closed be able to get them out safely.”
“Yeah? What’s it gonna cost me?” Obviously, Mr. Pettis was nobody’s fool. On the other hand, he was desperate enough to go into a dangerously haunted abandoned building to get something he needed.
“We’re not asking you to pay anything,” Teag said in his most soothing, affable voice. “After all, those items belong to you. We’d like to see you get them back.”
“You’re kinda late, aren’t you? Place closed down six months ago.”
In the vision, I hadn’t seen Mr. Pettis’s face because I was experiencing the scene through his eyes. But his voice reminded me of the man in the neighborhood where I had grown up, the one who was always yelling at the kids to stay off his grass and who never gave out Halloween candy. The kids called him a grump and a troll. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I found out the guy worked nights and then spent all day taking care of a bedridden wife. Maybe Mr. Pettis had a similar story.
“We’d like to get a statement from you about your claim to what’s in the storage unit, and our rules say we have to take the statement in person,” Teag said. “May we stop by your house?”
“How do I know you’re not going to rob me?” Obviously Mr. Pettis seemed to believe that a strong offense was a good defense.
“I can validate the information from your storage unit application,” Teag said, grabbing the folder. He read back details like payment dates, check numbers, and Mr. Pettis’s address. “Flora seemed to think you were pretty special,” he added, and I raised an eyebrow. Teag’s magic deals with data, but he’s got strong intuition and sometimes he’ll pull something out of thin air that amazes me.
“Oh she did, did she?” Pettis said, but this time, he chuckled. “Well, I thought Flora was pretty special too. She had time to talk to me. Not many people do.” He was quiet again, and Teag let him think.
“Come on by in the next hour and we can talk. Don’t be late – I don’t stay up past nine and it would be best if you’re gone by dark.”
Teag grinned. “Thank you, Mr. Pettis. We’ll be brief – and we’ll see you in about thirty minutes.” He ended the call and looked at me with a triumphant grin. “We’re in! Let’s go talk to Pettis, and then get something to eat. When I go home, I’ll get on the computer and see what I can find about him. There are databases out there that bail bondsmen and collection agencies use to skip trace. I’ll do some more digging.”
Teag wrote down the address from his notes. We locked up, and headed over to find Mr. Pettis.
The Pettis house was in a modest section of Charleston, far from the mansions South of Broad or on the Battery. The neighborhood might have been new in the 1940s or 1950s, but it looked hard worn.
“His name is Chuck,” Teag said as we pulled up. “Chuck Pettis. Age fifty-five. High school diploma, went into the military, saw action in the Middle East. Married once, widowed about five years ago. Two children, but they live out West.”
The house had a bare-basics look to it. We headed for the front door. I pretended not to notice that Chuck was watching from behind the curtains.
Teag knocked at the door. It opened just far enough for Chuck to look out through the gap of the safety chain. “We’re the ones who called about Stor-Your-Own,” Teag said. He’d combed back his skater boy hair for the appointment and donned a jacket. Chuck looked him over and gave me a critical glance before he grunted and closed the door.
Teag and I exchanged a confused glance, then I heard the chain sliding in the lock and the door opened.
“Don’t just stand there,” Chuck rasped. He stood to the side so we could enter.
I have never seen so many clocks in my life.
Chuck Pettis was obsessed by time. Clocks of every description covered the walls: old wooden school clocks, grandfather clocks, factory time clocks, antique pendulum clocks. Clocks filled the bookshelves, covered the mantle above the fireplace, and sat on the table. Antique Baby Ben alarm clocks in silver and brass, big, little and miniature were tucked in every corner, on windowsills and atop the TV. In the living room alone I counted at least half a dozen cuckoo clocks.
All of them were running. None of them were set to the same time.
The ticking was louder than my heartbeat. The house seemed to vibrate with the swing of each pendulum. And suddenly, I knew what Chuck had been carrying in my vision. Clocks.
Chuck’s graying hair was cut short around a bald pate. He had a hawk-like nose, and his thin lips were set in either a grimace of pain or an expression of perpetual disdain. He was too thin, and his faded shirt seemed to hang on him. There was intelligence in his green eyes, but it was canny, shrewd, more the look of elusive prey than the glint of a predator.
Chuck was afraid of something. Really afraid.
“You’ve got a lovely collection of timepieces,” I said. It was true. The clocks spanned more than a century, from 1800s industrial models to the 1950s. Chuck had the best collection I had seen outside of a museum. None of the clocks were electric. And there were more in the other rooms.
“I like clocks,” Chuck said, but his gaze slid to the side, and I knew he was either lying or not telling the whole truth.
“Thank you for letting us come over,” Teag said.
Chuck motioned stiffly for us to have a seat on the slip covered, swaybacked couch. “What do you want to know?” Chuck was back to being his gruff self. He plopped down in an old recliner like a king on a throne.
“What can you tell us about Stor-Your-Own, Mr. Pettis?” Teag asked.
Chuck eyed us suspiciously. “You two lawyers?”
I shook my head. “No. But we are investigators, trying to get the items back to their rightful owners.” Another half-truth. We were investigating. And we wanted to get any dangerous supernatural items back where they belonged. But as I looked around, I wondered why on earth Chuck would risk the supernatural dangers of the abandoned storage facility – not to mention arrest for trespassing – over more clocks.
“I never got a notice in the mail,” Chuck said suddenly. “About that Stor-Your-Own closing down.
That’s not right. I paid them good money for my rent there. Never caused any problems. Paid on time, too.”
“Did they call you?”
Chuck motioned toward the kitchen, where I saw an old-style black phone on the wall. Anywhere else, I would have thought it was ironically retro. Here, I bet it came with the house. “I don’t just jump up and answer every time the danged thing rings, you know. Damn telemarketers. Call all the time during dinner or when I’m watching one of my shows. Then I get out there, and they hang up.”
“Did they leave a message?” I asked.
Chuck fixed me with a look as if I were daft. “Got no patience for one of them answering machines.
Someone wants to talk with me badly enough, they’ll track me down, eventually.”
I had the feeling that not many people tried.
Using my left hand, the one with Bo’s collar wrapped around my wrist, I let myself touch the worn upholstery on the couch.
The images that came to me were like old Polaroid photos, the colors faded by time. I glimpsed two children, both younger than ten years old, playfully chasing each other with cardboard-tube swords. A dark-haired woman looked on, with a smile of maternal patience. It was the same room and the same furnishings, but with one important difference: there were no clocks.