The Clock’s Seventh Secret

Helen’s expression softened with a sorrow that seemed to reach past me into the years I had lost. “You were the last one, sweetheart. Margaret brought you home in 1986. Arthur died not long afterward. Without his income, she couldn’t pay Vance to arrange another exchange. And without him, she had no one to drive the car. You were the girl who stayed.”

I shut my eyes. A tear traced my cheek before I could stop it.

At last, the shape of my childhood made sense. The lonely rooms. The hush that seemed to settle over every day. Margaret’s chilly gaze whenever I grew older, less like the small child she had wanted to keep. She had been caught with me, just as surely as I had been caught with her.

“You have seven days to return what you stole.”

The clock’s voice came back to me. I thought of it as Arthur’s remorse, given sound by whatever strange force lingered in that house. He had helped take six girls from their lives and names to satisfy Margaret’s obsession. Yet I hadn’t stolen anything. I was another victim, the last one.

All I needed to do was bring the certificates to the police. Vance’s crimes wouldn’t vanish just because he was gone. The women who had been traded deserved to know what had happened to them. I could put the truth back into their hands.

I thanked Helen and hurried off her porch. By the time I reached my car, I was moving almost at a run.

The trip home felt unlike the drive there. For four days, something heavy and dreadful had pressed against my chest. Now that weight was gone. What waited for me was cruel and heartbreaking, but it belonged to people. It was not a tale of spirits and curses. It was the damage left by human beings who had done terrible things.

I turned into my driveway as evening finally began to dim the sky. The house looked changed, though its walls and windows were the same. It no longer seemed like a waiting monster. It seemed like an abandoned prison, and I had made it outside.

At the front door, I put the key in the lock and stepped into the hall with my shoulders squared. The grandfather clock stood in the shadows. I kept my eyes away from its face and walked past it toward the kitchen.

The seven birth certificates lay stacked on the island, exactly where I had left them. I opened a drawer, found a broad manila envelope, and started feeding the papers inside. Then I would drive to the sheriff’s office.

The last certificate was mine. I held it a moment longer than the others, my fingertip passing over Dr. Vance’s signature.

Name: Clara Anne Miller.

Date of Birth: October 12, 1986.

Helen’s words returned. I had been brought home that year. Arthur had died a few years afterward.

A sad little smile came to me. My memories of my father were hazy, more like pieces of a dream than a life I could reach. I could picture him pushing me on a swing. I could almost hear him reading aloud. And I remembered the shock of losing him to an aneurysm when I was six.

1992. That was what I had always believed. His death had seemed like one more break in a home that had never felt secure.

I wanted to take a photograph of him with me to the police, a way to show the face of the man behind the scheme. I went into the living room and dragged Margaret’s heavy wooden memory box from beneath the lowest bookshelf.

The lid creaked as I opened it. Inside were old tax papers, the house deed, and a handful of photographs. I searched through the contents, pushing papers aside, until my fingers found a thick, stiff card near the bottom.

I drew it out. A funeral program. The paper was weighty, edged in black.

The cover bore a name in dark lettering: In Loving Memory of Arthur Thomas Miller.

I read the dates below it, already expecting to see 1992.

Instead, the gold letters caught the lamplight.

Born: May 4, 1940.

Died: November 12, 1986.

My lungs seemed to forget their work.

The program slid from my hand and drifted onto the rug. I stared at it, my mind refusing to join the date to the man I remembered.

1986.

Arthur had died in November of the year I was born. He had been gone while I was still an infant, not lost to me when I was six.

I thought of the grandfather clock and the first time I had stood before it. I remembered being told it had broken after his funeral. The date on the program pulled that old detail into a new, terrible arrangement.

My father could not have pushed me on a swing or read to me. He could not have stayed in that house until 1992. I had been too young even to walk when he died.

But those memories were there. I could see a man in the yard, feel the swing rise beneath me, hear a voice over the pages of a book. The man I remembered looked like Arthur. His voice was the one that had called from the clock.

If Arthur had died in 1986, then he had never raised me. He had already been in the ground before I was old enough to know him.

And he could not have built the hidden compartment inside the clock while living with us. Not if the dates were true. Not if the man in my memories was Arthur.

The house had held someone else. Someone who looked like him, sounded like him, and stayed there until the year I was six.

Who had lived in our house until 1992?

A sharp sound broke through the stillness from the hallway.

Tick.