Chapter Text
Chapter 1: “The Hours of Folly…”
“Damn it.” Will squinted at the road, searching for his turnoff. The ad in the newspaper said the estate sale was on Cogs Drive, but he’d just passed Cogs Road. Is that what they’d meant? Worse, he was getting another headache. They’d been bad lately; he’d been working too hard and too often without his glasses. It was probably time for another trip to the optometrist to get his prescription adjusted.
Ah. Here was Cogs Drive. Could’ve chosen a more distinctive name. Will grumbled something like that under his breath, but there were more curse words intermingled. He eased the Volvo up the winding gravel drive and pulled in behind a black Bentley of all things. Cars lined the drive on either side leading up to the rambling white Cape Cod with peeling red shutters; a large sign had been posted in the tangled lawn that read ESTATE SALE - EVERYTHING MUST GO!
Will got out and approached the house, letting himself in without knocking. It was, in fact, full of strangers picking through a dead man’s things. Will felt a twinge of guilt, a nerve-catch. He always did, going to sales like this, everyone circling the house like vultures over a carcass, picking it clean of everything of value until only the bones remained. And then those – the house, and it had good bones, Will could tell – would be sold off as well.
A woman in the kitchen was running the payment station. Will grimaced – he could tell just by looking that she was a relative of the deceased. Something about the curve of her mouth and the way she examined every little thing was being bought and sold. Like she was saying goodbye. Will avoided eye contact – it just made the empathy worse. His excess mirror neurons were a hot commodity when he was working homicide in New Orleans. Earned him a ticket to Quantico, even. But those days were over and Will wasn’t sad to see them go. Well, mostly. It was hard to beat the thrill of outsmarting a murderer and getting justice for the victims. But in the end, it wasn’t worth the toll on his mental state. And once he’d figured out how to monetize his hobbies, he didn’t have to work for Jack Crawford anymore.
The house was absolutely full of… stuff. It was everywhere, lined up on tables and shelves, everything trailing a price tag. On the three-season porch, Will found several treasures – antique fishing lures and a fish basket that was probably circa 1935. Will cleaned, curated, and sold items like these online or at specialty auctions to collectors. He had a small but dedicated set of clients and he was always on the lookout for what he knew they’d like to add to their collections. Will also specialized in rare books, and he’d crafted a lucrative business refurbishing and selling antique clocks as well. Almost all of his transactions were online, which suited him just fine. He could communicate through writing, one of his strong suits, instead of face-to-face.
Speaking of, the ad had mentioned clocks specifically, so Will knew he had a few more rooms to search. The thrill of the hunt for rare clocks, parts, and bargains was overshadowed by the disconcerting sight of the old man’s pill bottles still sitting by the side of the bed in the master suite and a ‘90s-era Walkman on the arm of a well-loved recliner. Will picked it up. It had a price tag on it, too – and a Glenn Miller tape still in the deck. The foam-covered headphones smelled strongly like Head and Shoulders shampoo.
Will put it down and moved away quickly, trying not to let his neurons fire. He hadn’t found any clocks yet, but the upstairs guest bedroom had tables full of books, and some of them seemed old. A couple of hippie-looking women browsed, their flowered skirts flowing around their ankles, a sharp contrast to the man in the finely-tailored suit who was thumbing through a stack of vintage crime magazines on the other side of the room.
Will felt himself go into “search mode,” where his mind was attuned to minimize the amount of time it would take to go through the huge collection of books and maximize his chances of finding something he could make a profit with. He considered a couple of vintage Tom Swift novels, and then spotted a goldmine – a first edition copy of Rockbound by Frank Parker Day. The emerald cover was gorgeous; it was in remarkable condition. Will reached for it.
And so did someone else.
Will’s perception of time slowed, a clock slipping into entropy. The hand was fierce and elegant, the fingers limber and artistic. Veins and tendons rose against its surface, but brought the aesthetic pleasure of a topographical map, a birds-eye view of breathtaking terrain. The nails were rounded, buffed, the skin around them smooth and well-cared-for. The appendage looked capable of great violence and violent tenderness.
Will had time to stop, to avoid a collision. But he didn’t.
It was the man in the suit that had come up next to him, he realized, and their hands had just touched, brushing over the shamrock-hued cover of Rockbound .
They turned, a reflective reflex, and locked gazes, hands no longer touching, but still hovering over the book.
As much as Will wanted it – and knew how much it was worth – he was so startled by the man’s appearance that he let his hand fall to his side, acquiescing his claim on the incredible find. The stranger was so distinctive-looking, possessing a rare set of features that were undeniably compelling. Dark eyes, faint brows, brown hair streaked with ash, and a uniquely European line to his cheekbones that could only be eclipsed by the princely shape and hue of his lips. He looked like a painting of a conqueror, Regency royalty in a blue designer-brand suit with a champagne tie.
The man looked away after a significant moment and picked up the Day book. “A rare find,” he said, and Will’s nerves tingled at the sound of his voice, harmonious and foreign, three words so sleek and refined. “Have you read it?”
“Yeah,” Will said, immediately disliking the adversarial tone of his voice. “It’s, ah… a favorite, for sure.”
“Did you know that the shipwreck featured in the story was inspired by the real-life wreck of the Sylvia Mosher during the 1926 Atlantic hurricane season? It was a particularly deadly year.”
“Lost most of Miami that season, if I, uh, recall .” Will eyed the book, then looked back at the stranger. He chastised himself for not picking it up first. This man didn’t look like he needed the money from the resale.
“I find the book an interesting artifact,” the man continued, gently opening the front cover and looking over the publishing information. “The author spent a summer in Nova Scotia and then based the book on the residents of the small island he visited, many of whom freely told him their family stories. Later, they claimed he’d exploited them for money. It calls into question the author’s positioning and his alleged cultural appropriation.”
Will’s annoyance melted back a bit. This guy knew his shit about Frank Parker Day, that was for sure. “Yeah, they, uh, the residents… they wrote a letter to the-the papers in Halifax and Lundenberg to, ah, accuse him of using them under false pretenses.”
“It begs the question,” the man added, eyes sparkling with a kind of info-dumping admiration, “how much of what Mr. Day wrote was accurate, and if the residents were upset because the truth was unflattering. Or is he guilty of reducing them to caricatures?”
“Little of both, probably,” Will said.
The man’s smile was almost adoring. He beamed it at Will for a drawn-out moment, then handed him the book. The price tag said five dollars. Will knew he could sell it for $300 or more. “Are, ah… you sure…?”
“I already have a first edition in slightly better condition,” the man said. Will had an inkling – his neurons going off – that this was the owner of the Bentley.
Will nodded, turning the book over in his hands. “Uh, thanks. You… seen any clocks yet?”
“Not yet. But I haven’t been through all the rooms. I believe there’s a sunroom at the end of the hallway where more items are on display.” He stepped out into the hallway, and Will followed. “I came because the advertisement mentioned timepieces – I’m in the market for a new mantle clock.”
Will followed him into the sunroom, which was, as suspected, full of clocks – a couple of grandfathers, but the rest were mostly mantlepiece, which was also exactly what Will was looking for. He immediately went for the steeple-shaped 19th century mantle clock he saw sitting on a wicker table with several other more generic varieties. It looked small and dusty, unimpressive compared to some of the others, but Will knew this was an original Seth Thomas and once he had it cleaned up, he might get two hundred for it.
When he turned around, he saw the man in the suit hefting a timepiece, examining its condition. “That’s a reproduction,” he warned. “Feel how light it is? It’s plywood, not oak.”
The man’s pale brows climbed a centimeter or two. “Well, you’ve averted a tragedy,” he said, replacing it on the shelf where it had come from. “You must be an antiques dealer.”
Will had never thought of himself that way, but wasn’t that… sort of what he was now? “Just clocks,” he said. “A-and books. And fishing stuff. Poles ‘n… lures.”
“Perhaps you can help me, then.” The stranger gestured to the dead man’s vast clock collection. “I’m looking to replace a 17th century French piece.”
“Atmos or Torsion?”
The man didn’t answer, just tilted his head a little to the side, which made a few strands of his hair move across his forehead. “You are an expert.”
Will nodded, pressing his lips into a line, crossing his arms, the steeple clock held in the crook of one elbow. “You know which one. You were testing me. That whole time.”
“And you’ve passed.”
“And you’re a good liar.” Will said flatly. “You really have a first edition of Rockbound or was that, ah… bullshit, too?”
“It was the truth, not that you have any reason to believe me.” The man looked down, jaw set, mouth and eyes contrite. “I hope you’ll let me apologize. I’ve been misled before by so-called experts in the past. Plenty of dealers think if they read about antiques on the internet, they’re sufficiently prepared to curate collections or offer advice.”
“For most customers, they probably are,” Will said. “But not you. No pulling… the wool over your eyes.” He paused, letting the hippies in to look at the clocks. They glanced over the expensive timepieces and kept moving. “So, ah… why are you here, then?”
“I am looking for a replacement for my Atmos. It stopped working over a month ago. I’ve had two other alleged experts try to fix it, looked at it myself – I have a message in at the Smithsonian to see if they can recommend anyone, but haven’t heard back. I saw the ad and thought I might find something for the meantime, or to replace it if the Atmos can’t be repaired.”
“I can take a look at it,” Will offered before he’d quite thought it through all the way. “Ah, if you want. I mean, I’m not the Smithsonian, but…” he shrugged. “O-or you can let me clean this steeple clock up and I’ll sell it to you. That Ansonia over there isn’t bad either, depending on what you’re looking for.”
“All splendid ideas.” The man picked up the Ansonia and tucked it under his arm. “I like to have options.”
They went back downstairs and prepared to pay for their purchases. Will was glad he had someone with him during checkout. It made it easier, somehow, to face the woman selling the old man’s things. Definitely her father, Will thought, based on her age and the pile of used kleenexes in the nearby trash basket. He avoided eye contact, fumbling through his pockets for his wallet.
The stranger in the suit deftly swept all of their purchases together on the table and withdrew an engraved money clip from his pocket, thick with cash. “What a wonderful collection,” he said pleasantly as the woman punched numbers into an adding machine with a sniffle. “It was such a pleasure to have the opportunity to see it.”
“Y-yeah? My dad, h-he-he just loved those clocks. Before he got sick, he was so careful about keeping them clean, and winding them. When I was a kid and had friends over, they’d all complain about the clocks chiming. It got so I didn’t even hear it, y’know, I was so used to it. But then when I’d have a sleepover at a girlfriend’s I could never sleep. Because there were no chimes and no ticking.” The more the woman spoke, antithetically, the more in control of her emotions she seemed. “Oh, and this book – he just loved old books. I don’t know if he ever read them, but he just loved the covers, and the smell. He’d always talk about how a man’s study should smell like old books.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” the stranger in the suit said gently, thumbing cash out of his clip. “My friend here is a clock expert, and he’s going to give these pieces the same care and attention your father did. And this is one of his favorite novels, so to have a first edition is a special gift indeed. Think of all the people here today that will leave with something they can treasure and enjoy.” He nodded towards a mother who just entered the room with a little girl, seven or eight years old, who was holding the Walkman, the headphones over her ears, bopping and swaying to Glenn Miller with a glowing smile on her face.
“That’s why I wanted to do this instead of just auctioning the house with everything in it,” the woman said as she loaded the book and the antique lures into the fishing basket, handing it to Will without looking at him. The stranger helped her wrap the clocks in newspaper and lower them carefully into boxes.
“This really is the most therapeutic thing you can do for yourself,” the stranger promised. “I know it isn’t easy, but this way you can say goodbye to him one item at a time.”
“You’re right, you’re so right.” The woman wiped her eyes, but she was smiling. “Let me see… I owe you seventeen-fifty back–”
The stranger held up a hand for her to keep the change. The woman was suddenly out of her chair, and opening her arms. The man in the suit hugged her. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, guys, I really appreciate it, and I know Dad would’ve too. You guys have a great day, okay? You take care, now.”
Will followed the stranger outside, holding the fishing basket and one of the boxes. He had a weird feeling in his chest he couldn’t explain. It was wrapped up in the empathy he felt for the woman and the strange sensation that the entire display had been another act in a play. And he was the audience. Or maybe he was being a paranoid asshole, and this guy really did just want to ease the woman’s suffering.
“You’re a therapist,” he blurted, hustling to catch up to the man’s long strides. Sure enough, they were headed for the Bentley.
“I am. A psychiatrist, actually. Where are you parked?”
“Silver Volvo.”
The stranger helped him load the items into the back and secure them so they were in no danger of being damaged during the drive. “You could’ve billed her for a full session,” Will said, closing the back hatch. “That was… a lot.”
“She seemed to have a small breakthrough,” the stranger said, looking a little more smug than Will would have liked. “Are you familiar with therapy yourself?”
“Familiar? Yeah. Had plenty of it. Doesn’t work on me.”
Again, that damned look of amused surprise, like somebody watching a puppy do something new. “Perhaps you’ve been seeing the wrong therapists.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Will growled. “And don’t psychoanalyze me. You wouldn’t like me when I’m… psychoanalyzed.”
“You’re not my client. But I am yours.” The man handed him a business card. It was fancy, embossed, edged with gold. The calligraphy read DR. HANNIBAL LECTER and provided an office address and phone number. “Please let me know when you’ve finished refurbishing the clocks. I’ll have you look at my Atmos. If it can’t be repaired, we can see how the others look on my mantle.”
Will was torn between wanting to tell this Dr. Lecter to fuck off, being completely intrigued by him, and knowing he was a lucrative client. These things waged war in him, fluttering through his guts like birds attacking one another in the sky, wheeling and diving, clawing and pecking, beating their wings of war. “Will do,” was all he could manage to say, and fled to the driver’s seat of the Volvo. Pulling away, he could see Dr. Lecter watching him go until he disappeared around the bend in the gravel drive.