After Trent left, Maren sat for a long time by the window, looking out at the tower, and she thought about her father. He had been a clockmaker in a small town much like this one, and he had taught her the trade at his bench, patiently, the way he taught everything: by letting her make the mistake and then showing her, without scolding, how the mistake had happened. He had died when she was twenty-two, of a fever that took him in a week, and the shop had been sold to pay his debts, and she had taken the tool case and gone on the road, because the road did not ask her to stay in rooms where his chair stood empty. That was five years ago. She had repaired clocks in thirty towns since, and she had never once been tempted to stay in any of them, because staying meant answering questions about where she came from and why she traveled alone, and she had never found answers that satisfied anyone, least of all herself.
But Fox Creek was already different, and she could feel the difference the way she could feel a fault in a movement before she could name it. It was not the clock, though the clock was hers to fix. It was the carpenter who kept copies of his warnings, and the council chairman who told her the truth about the division in his town, and the tower itself, standing silent above the square, waiting to be believed in again. A clock, her father used to say, is the only machine that tells a town the truth about itself: whether it keeps its promises, whether it minds its own business, whether it can agree on something as simple as the hour. Fox Creek had stopped agreeing on the hour on the twenty-eighth of May, and Maren had the uncomfortable feeling that the stopped clock was not the cause of the town's trouble, but only the most visible sign of it.
She closed the case, and blew out the lamp, and lay down to sleep with the frozen hands at twenty past four still visible through her window, and she dreamed, as she sometimes did, of gears turning and pendulums swinging, and of a town that knew the time again.
Soren Krogh woke before dawn, as he always did, and lay for a moment listening to the house settle around him, the way a carpenter listens to timber, for the small sounds that tell you whether a thing is sound or only pretending to be. His house was small and plain, at the edge of Fox Creek where the lane bent toward the creek, and he had built most of it himself in the ten years since he had come from Denmark with a set of tools and a belief that a man could make an honest living with his hands if he worked longer than other men and complained less.
He had not always been the caretaker of the clock tower. He had taken the job six years ago, when the previous caretaker died and the council could find no one else willing to climb the stairs and sweep out the pigeons and keep the door locked. Soren had not wanted the job for the pay, which was small. He had wanted it because he liked things built to last, and because he liked the idea of a town that could look up and know the time, the way a man looks at a compass and knows his direction. He had wound the clock faithfully for years, until the twenty-eighth of May, when the tick had faltered and slowed and stopped while he was oiling the hinges of the tower door, and he had stood there with the oil can in his hand and listened to the silence come down over the square like a door closing.
He had written to the council the next day, and twice more after that, about the ladder. He had written plainly, as he wrote everything: the middle rungs were rotten, the damp had got into them, the ladder wanted replacing before someone trusted it and was hurt. The council had thanked him, filed his letters, and done nothing, not out of malice, but because moving takes an effort no one had quite made yet. Soren had bought timber with his own money in April, good pine, straight-grained, and had stacked it in his workshop behind the house, and had waited. He was a patient man. Patience, his father had taught him, is not the same as surrender. Patience is work done in advance, so that when the moment comes, you are ready.