Maren Reed came into Fox Creek on a Tuesday in late June, riding in the back of a freight wagon with her tool case between her knees, dust on her skirt, and the first thing she noticed about the town was the silence where its clock should have been.
It was not a silence anyone else seemed to hear. The wagon driver talked all the way down the main street about the price of oats and the new preacher and the creek running low, and the shopkeepers called out to one another, and a dog barked at the wagon wheels, and children ran shouting past the livery stable. But above it all, on the square, the town-hall tower stood with its hands frozen at twenty minutes past four, and Maren, who had spent her life listening for the small sounds machines make, heard the absence the way other people hear a held breath.
She had been hired by letter. The letter had come to her in Laramie, forwarded twice, written in a careful hand on town-hall paper, signed by a man named Abel Trent, who described himself as chairman of the Fox Creek town council. It said the town clock had stopped a month ago and no one in the territory within a reasonable distance knew how to set it right, and would Miss Reed, whose reputation had reached them by way of the railroad agent at Rawlins, consent to come and look at it? The letter offered a fair price, a room at the boarding house, and as much time as the work required. It did not say why the clock had stopped. Letters never did. People wrote "it stopped" the way they wrote "he died," as if the fact were the whole story and the cause were nobody's business.
Maren had written back yes, because that was what she did. She traveled from town to town with her father's tool case, and she fixed what other people had given up on, and she did not stay anywhere long enough for anyone to ask her why she had no home of her own. The case rode beside her everywhere. It was oak, dark with age and handling, with brass corners worn smooth and her father's initials, E.R., burned into the lid in letters he had cut himself when she was twelve and he had first let her hold a screwdriver. Inside, in fitted compartments lined with green baize gone thin at the edges, lay the tools of the trade: screwdrivers of six sizes, tweezers, a loupe, oil in a stoppered bottle, brushes, and in a flat tin box, a set of pendulum suspension springs, thin as a fingernail and bright as new wire. She had learned, the way her father had taught her, to carry spares for the things that broke most often, because a clock that waited for a part ordered from Chicago was a clock that stayed silent for another month, and silence, in a town, was a kind of wound.
The wagon let her down at the boarding house, a whitewashed two-story building with geraniums in the windows and a sign that said MRS. PETERSEN in painted letters. Mrs. Petersen herself came out, a woman of sixty with flour on her hands and a manner that suggested she had already decided Maren was respectable and would now proceed to prove it by feeding her. She showed Maren to a small clean room at the back, with a window looking out on the square and the tower, and she asked, in the way of women who run boarding houses and therefore know everything, whether Miss Reed had come about the clock.
"I have," Maren said.
Mrs. Petersen nodded as if this confirmed something. "It stopped on the twenty-eighth of May," she said. "Twenty past four in the afternoon. I remember because I was taking bread out of the oven, and I looked up to see the time, and the hands never moved again. People said at first it was the heat. Then they said it was the dust. Then they stopped saying anything, and we all just looked at our own watches, those of us who had them, and guessed the rest of the time."
"It is a month of guessing, then," Maren said.
"A month of guessing," Mrs. Petersen agreed, "and a town does not like to guess. A town likes to know. You will find Mr. Krogh at the tower. He is the caretaker. He has the key."