Bo’s collar seemed to insulate me from the visions, making me more of an observer than someone present in the scene. I shifted my hand, and this glimpse had fast-forwarded in time.
The house was quiet. The dark-haired woman I had seen before was several decades older, and she looked careworn and sad. Even so, there was a sense of frayed security about the scene, a feeling of comfortable habit, of constancy and familiarity. Still no clocks.
I leaned back, but the cushions, flatted by long use, gave more under my weight. This was one of Chuck’s favorite places to sit. The vision I saw was more recent.
Regret and loss weighed on me. Sadness – and fear, of the empty hours, of the long nights, and of what bleak future lay in store.
And in this vision, I saw the clocks.
“– so I go there and find the gate locked,” I heard Chuck conclude. If Teag had noticed that I spaced out, he didn’t show it, and Chuck seemed so intent on convincing Teag of his position that he wasn’t paying any attention to me.
“I can certainly understand why that would have been upsetting,” Teag replied.
“Is your unit filled with more clocks?” I asked.
Chuck seemed to suddenly remember that I was there, and his eyes narrowed. “Not sure it’s anybody’s business what’s in there,” he snapped.
I gave my best disarming smile. “I’m not trying to pry. It might help us with the insurance people if we could show that whatever you have in storage isn’t harmful in any way.”
Chuck frowned. “Harmful? No. Not of much interest to anybody except me, I suppose. And you’re right, little lady. I’ve got clocks. Lots of them.”
“You have a beautiful collection,” I said, and Chuck seemed to soften a bit at the praise. I was about to say something else, but one of the cuckoo clocks began to strike the hour, fifteen minutes early.
“Mr. Pettis –” I began, only to be silenced by the shrill ring of a large Baby Ben alarm clock. I jumped at the sudden racket. Before I could gather my wits, one clock after another went off, each striking a different hour. To my astonishment, Chuck Pettis jumped to his feet with a wild expression on his face.
He ran to each clock in the order they had struck the hour, and wound them with an urgency as if his life depended on it. For the pendulum clocks, he withdrew a huge ring of winding keys from a clip on his belt and selected just the right one for each to keep them going.
Teag and I exchanged baffled expressions, assaulted by the cacophony of bells and chimes. Suddenly, the house was silent once more. As if nothing unusual had happened, Chuck returned to his worn recliner and settled into his seat.
“You were saying?” He asked.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want this wary man to shut down and kick us out. “That’s quite a performance your clocks put on,” I said.
The ghost of a smile touched the corner of Chuck’s thin lips. “Isn’t it? Like a choir, each one with its own voice.” There was a wistfulness in his voice I hadn’t expected, as if the clocks had become stand-ins for the companions who had deserted him.
I had the sense there was more to the clocks than just a love of punctuality, more than a collector’s fondness for precision mechanisms. “You have so many beautiful clocks, and you say that what is stored at Stor-Your-Own isn’t particularly valuable. So why do you risk going in to get more? It’s in a pretty rough neighborhood.”
Fear glinted in Chuck’s eyes. “Who told you that I’d been in there?”
I leaned forward, hoping my sincerity came through loud and clear. “We have an eyewitness who saw you come through the fence. The last time, you lost your hat, isn’t that right?”
“What are you going to do, turn me in to the police?” Chuck demanded, and I could see that his fear was fueling his sudden anger.
I shook my head. “No. You’re only taking what belongs to you. But we do need your help.”
“Oh yeah?” Chuck asked skeptically. “I knew it. You’re planning to rob the place.” He reached between the arm of the recliner and the seat cushion, and I was pretty sure he had a gun down there.
“No! Nothing like that. We’re trying to stop whatever it is that’s causing all the problems,” I said, speaking in a rush to keep him from drawing a weapon on us. “We know about the shadows, and we also know that they weren’t always there. We want to make them go away so that you and the other tenants can go in safely to get your things. So that people stop dying.”
“Why should I believe you?”
I felt a nudge of intuition and ran with it. “Because we were friends of Jimmy Redshoes.”
That seemed to take the wind out of Chuck. He withdrew his hand from the seat cushion and sat back.
His bravado was gone, and he looked suddenly older. “Ah, that was too bad, what happened to him. I was sorry to hear about it.”
“The police think it was a drug deal gone bad,” Teag said.
Chuck’s eyes flashed. “That’s not true!” He let out a long breath. “I knew Jimmy long ago, before he got into a peck of trouble and kinda lost himself,” he said quietly. “He was a good kid, never hurt anyone.
Life just messed him up and he couldn’t get straightened out. Jimmy didn’t rent a unit at Stor-Your-Own.
Didn’t have the money to pay for that. But it wasn’t the best managed place, even before it closed. Flora did what she could, but she couldn’t keep an eye on everything. Jimmy would sneak in and stash his things in one of the units no one was renting.”
Chuck sighed. “Towards the end, there were a lot of empty units and nobody was keeping track.
Jimmy didn’t have anywhere safe to put his things, like winter clothes when it was summer.” He raised his face and met my gaze as if challenging me to argue. “More than once, I kept Flora distracted so Jimmy could get in or out without anyone noticing.”
“Hell’s bells, I paid a king’s ransom for my unit – overpriced garage, that’s what it was. I figured Jimmy wasn’t hurting anything. When things started to go bad, I tried to warn Jimmy. Told him I’d go in with him to help him move his things so he didn’t have to go there anymore. I even told him he could keep some things in my shed out back.”
Chuck shook his head. “Me, I can take care of myself. I saw combat. I know how to protect myself. But Jimmy… Some men come back from soldiering stronger. Some can’t live with themselves. Others get mean. And guys like Jimmy, it’s like there’s something inside that breaks and won’t get fixed.”
I hadn’t expected a soliloquy like that from Chuck, and it made me re-think my first impression. He was certainly a crusty guy, but something in him had loved the children and the dark-haired women I had glimpsed, even if he wasn’t one to wear his heart on his sleeve. And it was obvious that something had touched him deeply about Jimmy Redshoes, a fellow soldier who never completely came home from war.
“I have a feeling that you know what really killed Jimmy Redshoes,” I said quietly. “And I promise you, we’ll believe you if you’ll tell us what you’ve seen.”
Chuck looked torn, then he swore under his breath and crossed his arms across his chest like he was daring us to break our word. “Ghosts,” he said. “Haints. Spirits. Doesn’t matter what you called them.
Something bad came in when that tall guy with the shriveled face showed up.”
Moran. “What do you mean?” I asked.