Maren left her trunk in the room and took only the tool case, because a clock repairer arriving with a trunk looks like a guest, and a clock repairer arriving with a case looks like a promise. She crossed the square in the late afternoon light, past the general store and the bank and the newspaper office, whose window displayed that week's edition of the Fox Creek Gazette under a headline about the price of wool. The tower rose from the front of the town hall, a square-built structure of timber and stone, three stories high, with a clock face on each of its four sides and a small peaked roof above. It was not grand, as towers go. It was plain and solid and built to be useful, the way her father had always said good things were built. A ladder ran up the inside, she had been told in the letter, to the clock room at the top, where the movement sat behind the faces.
The man waiting at the tower door was not what she had expected, though she could not have said what she had expected. He was tall, broad through the shoulders, with the forearms of a man who works wood for a living and hair the color of wheat left too long in the sun. He wore a carpenter's apron over a plain shirt, and he held the tower key in one hand and a chisel in the other, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of something and had not yet decided whether the interruption was welcome.
"You are Miss Reed," he said. It was not a question. His English was good, with an accent she placed at once as Danish, softening the edges of his consonants.
"I am," she said. "And you are Mr. Krogh."
"Soren Krogh." He unlocked the door and pushed it open, and the smell of old timber and dust and machine oil came out to meet them. "I keep the tower. I wind nothing, because there is nothing to wind since it stopped, but I keep the door locked and the pigeons out, and I sweep the stairs when I remember."
"Mr. Trent's letter said the clock stopped a month ago."
"It did. On the twenty-eighth of May, at twenty past four. I was here. I heard it." He led her inside, into the cool dim base of the tower, where the ladder rose steeply into the dark above. "It did not stop all at once, the way a clock stops when you forget it. It faltered. I was oiling the door hinges that afternoon, and I heard the tick grow uneven, and then slow, and then stop, like a man who has been walking uphill and sits down and does not get up again."
Maren set her case down and opened it, and took out the loupe, and looked up the ladder shaft toward the light falling from the clock room above. "May I climb?"
"You may," Soren said. "But I must tell you something first, and I would rather tell it plainly now than have you find it out halfway up." He put his hand on the ladder's side rail, and she saw then what she had not seen in the dim light: the wood was gray and weathered, and one of the rungs, about two-thirds of the way up, was darker than the rest, with a crack running along its grain like a line drawn by a careless hand.
"This ladder is rotten," he said. "Not all of it. The rails are sound. But the rungs in the middle section have had ten years of damp and pigeons and no one caring, and I have told the council three times, in writing and in person, that it wants replacing before someone trusts their weight to it. They have told me three times that the budget will be considered at the next meeting. The next meeting has not yet considered it."
Maren looked at the ladder, and then at him. "You told them three times."
"I did. I have the letters. I keep copies, because a man who warns and is not heard should at least be able to prove he warned." He said this without bitterness, as a statement of fact, the way a carpenter states the length of a board. "I would not climb it myself without testing every rung, and I weigh more than you do, which is not a comfort, because a rung that holds you may still be a rung that should not be trusted."
"Then we replace the ladder first," Maren said. "Before I touch the clock."