did not know who. She would not guess. But she knew this: the fall had not been an accident, and the tower had not failed on its own, and the town deserved to know that before it decided whether to tear the tower down. She would find the rest of the truth the way she found everything else: by looking, by waiting, by letting the evidence show itself. And she would do it with Soren's hands beside her, because her own wrist was still bound, and because, she was beginning to understand, some truths, like some clocks, take more hands than you have.
Soren walked her to the boarding house in the dusk, his hand near her elbow but not touching it, and at the door she turned, and she said, "Mr. Krogh, thank you for keeping the rung. Most men would have burned it."
"Most men do not keep towers," he said. "I keep this one. And I keep what belongs to it, even the broken parts. Especially the broken parts."
She went inside, and he went home through the darkening street, and Maren stood at her window for a long time, looking out at the tower, at the dark shape of it against the evening sky, and she thought about her father, who had taught her that a clock tells the truth whether you like it or not, and she thought about the rung, and the saw, and the hand that had held it, and she thought about the days ahead, and the petition, and the town, and the clock that now moved in Soren's hands. And she made herself a promise, quiet and plain, the way her father had taught her to make promises: she would not accuse without proof, she would not guess, she would not run. She would stay, and she would watch, and she would let the evidence speak. And when it spoke, she would be ready to hear it, whatever it said, and whoever it named.
Outside, the creek ran, and the tower stood, and in the tower room, wrapped in cloth beside the brass, the broken rung waited, patient as wood, for the day it would be shown.
Maren Reed woke to the sound of the tower clock ticking, and for a moment she lay still in the narrow bed in Mrs. Alton's boarding room, listening to it the way a person listens to a heart that has only just learned to beat again. The clock had been silent for a month before she came to Fox Creek. Now it ticked behind the plaster and the timber of the town hall, steady as a pulse, and the sound came through the morning the way light comes through a curtain: not bright, not sudden, but present, and impossible to mistake for anything else.
She sat up slowly and looked at her right wrist. It was still wrapped in the linen bandage she had learned to wind herself, one-handed, in the mornings. The swelling had gone down. The bruise had faded from purple to a dull yellow-green, like an old leaf. But when she tried to close her hand tight around the bedpost, the wrist answered with a deep, warning ache, and she let go at once. It was better. It was not well. She had learned, in the weeks since the fall, to measure her days by what the wrist would allow: she could hold a tool, she could guide a hand, she could point and explain and judge with her eyes. She could not do the fine work alone. The fine work still belonged to Soren's hands, working under her direction, and she had stopped resenting that sometime in the last week without quite noticing when. Resentment took energy, and she needed her energy for the clock.
She dressed, pinned her hair back, and put her father's tool case on the table by the window. The case was old leather, scuffed at the corners, with a brass clasp that clicked shut the way it had clicked shut for her father before her. Inside, in their fitted places, lay the tools of her trade: screwdrivers with handles worn smooth by two generations of hands, tweezers, a loupe, oil in a small stoppered bottle, and the spare pendulum suspension spring she had carried all the way from the last town, wrapped in soft cloth. The new spring was already in the clock, holding the pendulum true. The old spring, cracked through like a thin bone, lay in a separate pocket of the case. Maren had kept it. A clock repairer kept the broken parts. They taught you what had failed, and why, and they kept you honest about what you had fixed.