Blue Murder Stories

The Timepiece

Charlie had been wandering the tables of the yard sale for about twenty minutes, half an hour, when she first saw the clock.

Actually, it wasn't a clock. It was a wristwatch that had had its timepiece removed and fixed to a little gilded metal stand to make a sort-of-clock—a thing to catch an eye amid the other knick-knacks and dusty, broken appliances on the tables. She turned it over, smiled at it, and finally held it up to Sarah, who was wandering around on the other side of the table without much interest toward anything. Sarah shrugged back at her, which was good enough. Charlie went to buy the clock, along with a silver cutlery set and a wicker lounge chair that she lugged on her back as she and Sarah walked back across the suburb home.

'See,' Charlie said as they rattled away the cutlery, found the chair a place in their short backyard, 'it's not so bad when you indulge me.'

'I know, I know.' Sarah shook her head. 'It's just you know I never liked antiques as much as you. How they just feel so much like they're...not ours.'

It took a few days to move their things in, and a few weeks longer for the new house to feel homely, but it all settled eventually. Sarah left at nine and came home just before dinner, while Charlie worked on illustration commissions at home. Her days went long and tired cooped up in the house, and she got usual headaches if it was too sunny through the window blinds. Life droned to a standard tedium before too long, nothing out of its place, and Charlie and Sarah living firmly in the banal platitudes of their new marriage.

Except for the watch-clock.

Strange as it was, Charlie began to think about the watch-clock more than she thought she would after giving it its place on her nightstand. It began to seem so out of place, so uncanny. In between the antiques Sarah allowed her to furnish, the watch-clock was the one that she was right about. It seemed like it wasn't theirs.

One hot night as they were eating dinner, Sarah said something to Charlie about her silence the last few days.

'I think I know what it could be, finally—about the clock,' Charlie said. 'It's that I remember reading about that girl from a couple of months ago. That was around here, wasn't it?'

'What was?'

'The dead girl.'

Sarah stopped eating a moment, looked at her. Charlie was leaning forward across the table with her brows lowered, looking somewhere vacant in thought. Then Sarah swallowed her food and cleared her throat.

'You know,' Charlie went on, 'we saw it on TV that morning in the old place. She was the university girl who was found in the creek bed. They said she was wearing a watch that was missing from her body.'

Sarah made a strange face. 'You seriously don't mean...'

'I remember it from the story because it was an old watch, like that one on the clock is.'

'So there's a serial killer in the neighbourhood, and we own a clock from him.' Sarah put her cutlery down, which weren't of the antique set Charlie had bought.

Charlie was still looking away from her, but she smiled. She bit her lip a little. 'Do you remember what house it was? If it was nearby?'

'That was weeks ago, and we were only there twenty minutes. I haven't thought about it at all.'

'I can't remember the address at all. I wish I could remember what brand of watch they said it was, too...'

She thought a moment, then jumped up, went to the bedroom, and took the watch-clock from its place on the nightstand. She picked her flat nails at it, trying to budge the timepiece from its place on the stand, but it wouldn't budge.