Maren thought about that on the way down, testing each rung as Soren had taught her, and she thought about it again that evening in her room at the boarding house, with the tower visible from her window and the frozen hands at twenty past four staring back at her through the dusk. She had come to Fox Creek to fix a clock. She had not expected to find a town arguing with itself, or a carpenter who kept copies of his warnings, or a ladder that might have killed her if she had been less careful or more hurried.
She opened her father's case on the small table by the window, and laid out the springs in a row, and measured each against the broken one she had brought down from the tower, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. The third spring matched. She held it up to the lamplight, thin and bright, and thought about her father, who had taught her that a clock is not a machine for counting hours but a promise a town makes to itself: that time will be the same for everyone, rich and poor, early and late, and that no one will have to guess.
Outside, the square was darkening, and the tower stood silent above it, and Maren Reed, who had never stayed anywhere longer than a job required, felt the first small tug of something she did not yet have a name for: the feeling that this job might ask more of her than a new spring and a cleaning, and that Fox Creek, with its stopped clock and its rotten ladder and its carpenter who warned in writing, might be a place where the work mattered in a way it had not mattered for a long time.
Before she closed the case, there was a knock at her door, and Mrs. Petersen showed in a spare, gray-whiskered man in a dark coat who introduced himself as Abel Trent, chairman of the town council, the author of the letter that had brought her to Fox Creek. He apologized for calling so late, and then proceeded to explain the situation at greater length than the letter had.
"The clock is a matter of some feeling in this town," Trent said, sitting carefully on the room's straight chair, his hat on his knees. "It was given to us twenty years ago by the first council, and it has kept our time ever since, through winters and elections and one fire. People are attached to it. They are also, I must tell you plainly, divided about what should be done with the tower itself. The tower wants repair. The ladder wants replacing. The roof wants attention. And there are those in this town who say that a tower which costs money every year is a luxury, and that the lot it stands on would serve the town better in other hands."
"Other hands," Maren repeated.
Trent cleared his throat. "Mr. Fallon, who owns the Gazette, has expressed the view that the tower has outlived its usefulness. He has expressed it several times, in print. He is entitled to his view. The council is not of one mind, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the council did vote to hire you, Miss Reed, and a vote is a vote, and I intend to see it honored."
Maren studied him. He was an honest man, she decided, of the kind who tells you the difficulty before you discover it yourself. "Then I will give you something worth honoring," she said. "I have found the fault. The suspension spring is cracked, and the movement wants a thorough cleaning. I carry a spring that matches. Once the ladder is replaced, the work will take a week, perhaps a little more. I work slowly because clocks punish haste, and I would rather be slow and right than quick and wrong."
Trent nodded, visibly relieved, as if he had expected her to tell him the clock was beyond repair and the tower must come down. "And the ladder? Mr. Krogh has spoken about the ladder."
"Mr. Krogh is right about the ladder," Maren said firmly. "It is rotten in the middle section, and no one should climb it until it is replaced. He tells me he has the timber already, bought with his own money. That is a man the town should listen to more often."
"It is," Trent said, and there was something weary in his voice, the weariness of a man who has listened and been outvoted. "I will put the ladder before the council at the next meeting, and I will tell them that their own clock repairer refuses to climb without it. That may move them where Mr. Krogh's letters did not. A town will ignore its carpenter. It is less comfortable ignoring a stranger it has hired."