The Amish Clockmaker (12 page)

“Do you know?” she prodded, stepping toward it to get a closer look.

“Ya,
that's an old coal bin,” I explained as I finished locking away the cash. “Which means this building must have used coal heat at some point in the past.”

Located at about knee level, the bin's metal door was flush to the wall and had been designed to work in tandem with a similar door on the exterior, where the coal would have been dumped into it from the outside. That door was long gone and bricked over, but this one had been made accessible again the other day when we'd broken away some of the wall's plaster. Amanda leaned down to study it now, and then she gripped the handle and gave it a tug.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” I said in warning. “You might end up in a cloud of coal dust.”

But it was too late. She'd pulled it open and was already peering inside.

“No dust,” she said, her voiced echoing against the metal of the bin. “It's perfectly clean, as a matter of fact. But come look, Matthew. There's something else in here.”

Skeptical, I joined her and peered down into the hamper. Sure enough, there was something at the back, wrapped in what looked like blue cloth. I
reached into the hamper and pulled the bundle gently from its tomb-like niche, hoping it wouldn't disintegrate at my touch. But the space felt cool and dry, and I was able to easily lift the item from its hiding place. The cloth was soft to the touch, with hand-stitching around the edges, though whatever it encased seemed heavy and hard. I laid the package on a nearby table. Together, Amanda and I peeled back the corners of the blanket.

Inside was a clock, an intricately carved but very dusty mantel clock. For a moment, we just stared at it. It sat on an equally finely carved pedestal, and even though the cabinet was discolored and covered in dust and cobwebs, and the glass over the face of the clock was cloudy, I could see that it had been beautiful and quite fancy in its day.

It was definitely not an Amish clock, but I had a pretty good idea which Amish man had made it.

For a long moment, Amanda and I stood in silence, taking in this unexpected sight.

“Why in the world was a thing this beautiful shoved into a coal bin?” she asked.

My thoughts exactly. “I don't know. Maybe Clayton or his father used the old bin for storage once the shop converted over to another source of heat.”

Amanda took the clock and studied it more closely, looked in the bin again, and said, “I don't think it was put there for storage. I think someone was using the coal bin as a hiding place, someone who didn't want this clock to be found.”

She handed it back, and I carried the clock over to the desk, set it down, and began to examine it in a better light. I brushed away the dust and webs and turned it over. On the bottom were the initials
CR
and the Scripture reference
Ecc 3:1
.

CR
. I'd recognize that lettering style anywhere.

I turned the clock back over and ran my finger along a delicate carved vine. The craftsmanship was extraordinary.

“You know what this is, don't you?” I whispered, my heart suddenly pounding in my chest. “It's my ticket to convincing Becky Helmuth into letting me talk to Joan. If I show up there with this clock, Becky will have to let me in.”

I looked down at the clock and traced my fingers over the initials
.
How many times had I run my hands over them in my childhood room, wondering about the boy who had dug the letters into the soft wood decades before?
As I studied this work of art in my arms, I felt, once again, connected to its creator—a connection I had known my entire life. Was I sympathetic toward a misunderstood outcast or a cold-blooded murderer?

While that thought chilled me to the bone, it had no bearing on my current situation. I just needed to find Clayton and get his signature, not learn every detail of his life.

Yet now that I stood looking down at this clock, new questions began to flood my mind, ones that, in this moment, felt even more pressing than his whereabouts. Why was it hidden in the bin? Had he really killed his wife? And why did everyone around him seem to think he was guilty?

Most importantly, what
really
happened all those years ago?

PART TWO

Clayton

T
EN

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

1955

T
he two Amish men sat at opposite ends of the long wooden worktable inside Raber and Son Clockmakers shop. Clayton, the son, was busy filing the rough spaces between the teeth on a gearwheel the size of a dinner plate. His father, Simon, silver-bearded and pale, was repairing a sticking pendulum. They were quiet as they worked, each man concentrating on his own task. Occasionally, Clayton's
daed
would ask him to fetch something, so the younger man would rise from his stool without a word to attend to his father's request, limping to the parts bin or the tool rack and back again. It wasn't Simon's way to have others wait on him, especially not his physically impaired son, but after his recent diagnosis of heart failure, the man's activities had been strictly limited.

The doctor in Ridgeview had not minced words about it, saying no more barn chores, no more hitching up the buggy, and no more long hours at the shop. Instead, he'd given Simon two options: either complete bed rest, as was the norm with heart patients, or something called “armchair treatment,” which he explained was a new, more active approach, one that was just catching on in the medical community.

“Lie in a bed or a sit in a chair? Those are my choices?” Simon had asked.

“Well, only if you want your heart to keep beating,” the doctor had responded drily.

He was trying to make difficult news light, but everyone knew Simon would never allow himself to be that inactive—and that it would be only a matter of time even if he did. Limiting his activity would not heal his failing heart, but it might lengthen the span of his life. The doctor had not speculated on how long he could expect to live, and they had not asked. A man's days were numbered by God alone. Still, Simon agreed to follow the doctor's orders—for about three days, when he'd finally had enough of that and insisted on going down the hill to the clock shop.

“The doctor told me I could spend the day in an armchair,” he said when challenged by his entire family. “So what difference does it make whether I'm in that chair in the living room, staring at the walls, or in a chair in the clock shop, doing something useful with my hands? I'm going stir-crazy here.”

They had given in, reluctantly, and then set about making it happen. Clayton managed to rig up a sort of ad hoc wheelchair, which allowed him to ferry his dad from the house to the clock shop and back again each day—no easy task with a bad leg and a long, sloping driveway. They lived in Ridgeview, Pennsylvania, on a five-acre parcel of land that held a clock shop out in front at the bottom of the hill and several other structures—house, barn, and chicken coop—farther back, at the top. Thanks to the steep angle of the gravel driveway, Clayton had to struggle to keep the chair from going downhill too fast in the mornings and use all his might to push it back up the hill in the afternoons.

Making matters worse, it was obvious that Simon didn't like having Clayton do all the physical work, especially when it took twice as long to do it. His father didn't say so, but Clayton could see the frustration in the man's eyes every time he needed something from the house and Clayton had to hobble up to the homestead behind the shop, a process that was slow and tedious. That frustration was evident tenfold when it came to the barn chores, as Clayton had to leave the store extra early each day so he could get them all done before dark.

“I don't mind,” he had said the first day he did the chores alone and also ferried his father back and forth to the shop.

“I know
you
don't,”
Daed
had replied. “But I don't like just sitting here watching you—” he hesitated for a moment—“do what I used to do.”

Clayton knew what his father had been about to say, that he didn't like watching him struggle. Both of his parents had always accepted what had happened when Clayton was five and a disastrous buggy accident had left him with a scarred face and a mangled leg. They trusted that God had allowed the accident to happen, and as Clayton grew up, they had taught him to see it that way as well. The maimed little boy aged into a quiet, aloof child who couldn't play the games the other boys could and often chose to be by himself instead. His self-imposed isolation continued once he was grown. He couldn't chase down a loose cow, carry around a sixty-pound bag of feed, or do much at barn raisings besides sit and saw planks. It took him minutes to climb the ladder to the hayloft instead of seconds. So why even try to keep up with the other young men?

Clayton had never attracted much attention from the women, either. Thanks to the impaired leg and the facial scar, he knew he wasn't husband material and that he would likely never marry. He had come to accept that as his fate.

Then again, that was when he'd pictured his future playing out much like his present, living with his parents in the house and working in the shop alongside his father for decades to come. Now that the doctor had diagnosed
Daed
with heart failure, however, Clayton's vision of his own life had been rocked to its core. He couldn't bear the thought of losing his father, but lose him he would, and probably soon. According to the doctor, Simon's heart was slowly winding down, like a clock whose key was lost and no replacement would do.

Raber and Son Clockmakers shop sat at the very end of the row of stores that made up Ridgeview's main shopping district. Housed in a simple white rectangular building, Clayton's father had erected it twenty-seven years earlier, the same year Simon and Lucille, who already had six daughters by then, were finally blessed with a son. Inside the shop was a showroom area for displaying and selling the clocks the two men made—beautifully decorated grandfather, mantel, and wall clocks that the
Englisch
were fond of, not to mention sturdy but far plainer timekeepers for their Amish clientele.

Beyond the sales floor, separated by a tall counter, was a large work area that included the broad table where they spent most of their time. They often used a pair of kerosene lamps to help them see the intricacies of their work, but those lamps sat unlit now thanks to the late afternoon March sun, which poured into the room from the wide windows at the front of the store.
Gas-powered table and scroll saws rested at the rear of the work area, crowded by shelves of clocks in varying stages of completion. A curtained doorway led to a back room with the store's will-call section for repaired clocks that were waiting for pickup, along with a small office area made up of a single desk and file cabinet. That room also held shelves filled with assorted parts and supplies, as well as a small bathroom.

Just as Clayton handed his father the item he'd requested and returned to his place at the table, various clocks surrounding them began to chime three thirty. That meant Clayton would be laying down his tools soon to take care of the horses and other livestock up at the homestead. Clayton and his parents were the only ones living at the house these days, as they had for the past four years, ever since Joan, the youngest of his six sisters, married one of the Glick boys and moved to her husband's family's place closer to Lancaster City. Clayton's other sisters, also married, were scattered about the county, busy keeping house and raising thirty-five children—and counting—among them.

Clayton didn't mind how quiet the house was now with just him and his parents living there. He had grown used to the peacefulness of it. Any need he had for socializing was met by visits with his large, extended family and through fellowship with the Amish community. But his closest childhood friends had long ago wed and were busy with their wives and children. And because Clayton accepted the fact that God's will for him was more than likely not to marry at all, he had learned to nurture his affection for a quiet home life instead.

“All right, then,” his
daed
said, breaking the silence. “This one's now in working order. You want to take it on back?”

“Sure.” Clayton swung his good leg around and rose slowly from his stool. He shuffled over to his father.