The Clock’s Seventh Secret

“This was no treatment program,” Helen Croft had told the reporter. “Vance handled children like books from a library. Someone took one home, then returned her when she stopped being wanted.”

Helen Croft.

I sat in the library parking lot with the engine silent and searched for her on my phone. Property records and old directory listings took nearly twenty minutes to sort through. At last, I found a Helen Croft, seventy-eight, in a modest ranch house across the county line, roughly forty minutes away.

I didn’t telephone first. I put the car in gear and went.

Her house was brick, with ivy sprawling over the walls and a cracked drive that looked ready to crumble. I left the car on the roadside and approached the porch. Wind chimes above me clattered in the chilly afternoon air as I knocked.

A long while passed before the thick front door swung inward. An elderly woman appeared, braced on a cane with four feet. Her cardigan was heavy, but her eyes were keen and searching.

“What is it?” she asked. Her voice rasped.

“Are you Helen Croft?” I said. My mouth felt painfully dry. “I’m Clara. Clara Miller.”

For a moment, my name meant nothing to her. Her gaze traveled over my face and clothes, and she seemed ready to refuse me. Then she looked again, studying my jawline, my nose, my hair. Color ebbed from her cheeks.

“Arthur’s girl,” she murmured. Her fingers clenched around the cane’s handle until the joints stood pale.

“You knew my father?” I asked, moving nearer the screen.

She didn’t ask me inside. Instead, she opened the screen enough to step onto the porch, then let the solid door shut behind her. Her eyes swept the vacant street, as though she expected trouble to emerge from it.

“I knew Arthur,” she said, resting her shoulder against the brick. “And Margaret, too. God help me, I remember Margaret.”

“Tell me what happened to the other girls,” I said. There was no point easing into it. “I found seven birth certificates hidden in the bottom of his clock. I was the last one. What did my mother do to them?”

Helen lowered her gaze to the porch. The silence grew weighty, while the chimes rattled in the wind above us.

“She didn’t hurt them, Clara,” she said at last, her voice sinking into a weary murmur. “She simply stopped wanting them.”

“What does that mean?”

She met my eyes. They shone with tears, yet her expression remained steady. “Margaret Miller was terribly unwell. She believed she wanted a daughter, but she had no grasp of what having a child meant. She couldn’t bear a girl who grew older, questioned her, argued, or became her own person. The child she wanted was a doll.”

Her bent finger gestured toward the street. “Vance found her a little girl in 1974. A gentle child. Later, when the girl grew taller and started making choices for herself, Margaret changed. She kept food from her. She shut her away in the basement.”

My stomach tightened. Helen’s mouth had become a hard line. “Arthur learned what was happening. He went to Vance. He couldn’t let it continue.”

“And Vance agreed to take her?” I asked. The thought turned my stomach.

“For a generous payment, yes.” Helen’s contempt was plain. “Arthur paid him to collect the older girl and send another, younger child. Vance altered the birth papers so no one could see that Margaret had been given a different daughter. It let her keep believing nothing had changed.”

Helen shook her head. “Arthur told himself he was helping. He thought he could protect those girls from Margaret without losing his wife.”

“There were six,” I whispered. The truth seemed to wash over me in a cold rush.

“All six came back to Glenwood,” Helen replied. Her voice softened. “Arthur would bring them in the dark, crying as he apologized. He was weak, Clara. He wouldn’t leave Margaret, but he couldn’t stand by and let her keep hurting those children.”

She drew a breath, then continued. “Vance found other places for them. Some went away, some were re-homed. Arthur saw to it they were safe.”

I clutched the porch rail as my knees threatened to give way. Relief struck so fiercely that, for an instant, I could hardly stay upright.

They had lived.

Margaret had been monstrous, and Arthur had helped her trade children as if they were possessions. But he hadn’t killed the six girls. They had gone on to lives beyond her reach.

I tried to imagine them as grown women, each carrying a different name, each somewhere beyond the boundaries of everything I knew. My chest hurt with the effort.

Then the next question pushed past the relief. I turned back to Helen, my voice breaking before I could steady it.

“What about me?” I asked. “Why didn’t Arthur bring me back?”