The Tunnel Watch

Chapter 01 / 8

The Sugar Bowl

ROCHEPORT — WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 9

Hattie Glass keeps her grandfather’s watch in a sugar bowl. Not the good sugar bowl, she told me, the one with the chipped lid, because nobody breaks into a house to steal a chipped sugar bowl.

“That’s the whole security system,” she said, and lifted the lid.

I had come to her kitchen on Third Street on a Wednesday afternoon to write three hundred words for the Rocheport Times about Tunnel Night. That was the Saturday fundraiser at the Linden House for a plaque at the east mouth of the Katy Trail tunnel. The plaque would tell riders what the Park Service already says in drier language: that when the Missouri-Kansas-Texas crews blasted 243 feet through the Manitou bluff in 1892 and 1893, they took with them the rock paintings William Clark had stopped to sketch in 1804. Tickets were twenty dollars and included pie. The draw, the thing that would pull people out on a September Saturday with the Crush Festival coming up and every room in town already booked by cyclists, was Hattie’s watch.

She set it on the oilcloth between us. A silver case gone the soft grey of an old spoon. A plain white dial with fat black numerals, the kind a brakeman could read by lantern light. The hands stood at seventeen minutes past four.

“It stopped the afternoon my grandfather died, in 1951,” Hattie said. “My mother said leave it, so we left it. Nobody’s touched those hands in seventy-five years.”

Hattie is eighty-eight. She tells a story the way the river takes a bend, in no hurry and sure of where it comes out. The family version goes like this. Amos Glass worked on the tunnel crew. On the day the two headings met in the middle of the bluff, the railroad gave him this watch, and he carried it every working day until it quit.

“Turn it over,” she said.

I did. Near the bottom edge of the case back was a dent about the size of a lentil, a neat dimple pressed into the silver.

“He dropped it on a rail inside the tunnel. That’s the story. Now look at the front, in the light.”

I tilted it toward the window over the sink. A hairline crack ran across the crystal: a short stroke down, then a long one up, like the check mark a teacher puts on a right answer.

“Owen offered to put in a new crystal,” Hattie said. “I told him not on your life. That crack is my grandfather’s. The dent is my grandfather’s. You don’t sand the history off a thing.”

Owen is Owen Tallis, who taught history at the high school in Boonville for thirty-one years and now gives the railroad talk at any event in town that will hold still for it. He had organized Tunnel Night. He’d asked Hattie to lend the watch at the Second Saturday market in August, and he had asked to clean it first.

“He’s coming for it tomorrow morning at nine,” she said. “He’ll take it home, oil whatever wants oiling, and carry it straight over to Margo’s on Saturday afternoon, so it doesn’t rattle around in my handbag. He thinks the crown might loosen up. It’s been stiff as a gate hinge as long as I’ve known it. You can’t wind it, can’t set it. I said fine, clean it, but don’t you dare move those hands.”

I tried the crown with my thumbnail. It didn’t give.

I asked who else had handled it lately, because that is the kind of question a reporter asks when she has two hundred words left to fill. Dell Haskins had looked it over in the spring. Dell runs Keel & Kettle Antiques and prices everything in town in his head, including, I suspect, the town. He had turned the watch over twice and asked, not for the first time, whether Hattie would ever consider selling.

“I told him when I’m dead he can ask June,” she said. June is her granddaughter, who lives in St. Louis and was driving up Friday night for the party. “And June will say yes, because June has a car payment and a sense of humor about her ancestors.”

She put the watch back in the sugar bowl and the lid back on it, and we ate a slice of her peach pie apiece, which she said was a practice pie for Saturday and therefore didn’t count.

I walked home the long way, down to the trailhead at the foot of First Street and a little way west along the Katy toward the tunnel. The evening riders were coming in dusty to the knees. Out on the river, a man in a long green canoe was working upstream against the current in the last of the light, the paddle flashing on one side and then the other. That was Cal Ostrander, who guides float trips for visitors on this stretch of river, and who had paddled the MR340 from Kansas City to St. Charles in July, and who would tell you his finishing time if you stood still long enough. Above him, the bluff had gone orange.

I wrote my three hundred words that night. I described the crack and the dent and the hands at four-seventeen. I wish I had read them back more carefully. Four days later the watch was gone, and for most of a week the whole town, me included, looked for it in the wrong place.

Chapter 02 / 8

Tunnel Night

ROCHEPORT — SATURDAY, SEPT. 12

I got to the Linden House at four on Saturday, two hours before the doors, because the paper wanted a photograph of the watch before the crowd got its elbows around it.

The Linden House is the tall brick B&B two blocks up from the trailhead, with a linden tree out front that drops sticky flowers on your car in June. Margo Fenn has run it for eleven years. When I came in she was in the front parlor on her knees, plugging a thirty-cup coffee urn into the wall and glaring at the outlet.

“The wiring in this room has opinions,” she said. “If anybody plugs in a hair dryer upstairs tonight, we will all be sitting in the dark eating pie by feel.”

Dell Haskins came in behind me carrying a glass-topped display case from his shop, the kind jewelers use, walnut sides, a little brass lamp clipped inside the lid. He set it on the round table by the front window and plugged the lamp in next to the urn. Margo winced.

“Two keys,” Dell said, and held them up. He put one back on his own ring and handed Margo the other. “Nobody opens it without one of us.”

At ten past four Owen Tallis came up the porch steps in a brown cardigan, with his reading glasses pushed up into his white hair. He took a folded chamois out of his coat’s inside pocket and unwrapped it on his palm like a man showing you a baby bird.

“Straight off my workbench,” he said.

“He phoned me at noon,” Margo told me, “to say he was bringing it straight here from his place and wasn’t letting it out of his sight in between. I said Owen, it’s four blocks.”

Owen didn’t hand it to anybody. He laid it in the case himself, face up on a square of blue velvet, and nudged it a quarter inch to the left so it sat in the middle of the lamplight. The hands were at four-seventeen, as promised. I leaned over the glass. The silver had been rubbed up to a soft shine and the crystal was clear as creek ice. Owen had done a job on it.

I took two pictures with my phone, one wide and one close, and Dell locked the lid.

By six the parlor was full. Hattie came up the walk on June’s arm, June in a green dress with her dark hair pinned up in a tortoiseshell clip. Hattie went straight to the case, bent over it for a long moment with her reading glasses still in her purse, and nodded, the way you nod at a relative across a church.

June was less reverent. “If it were mine,” she told me at the pie table, “I’d sell it to Dell tomorrow and pay off my Subaru. Don’t print that. Grandma would put me in the sugar bowl.”

Cal Ostrander was there in a clean shirt and a sunburn that stopped at the collar, telling a knot of cyclists about the stretch below Jefferson City at three in the morning during the MR340. Dell was working the room with a paper plate, stopping by the case every few minutes. Margo ran between the kitchen and the urn.

At a quarter past seven Owen gave his talk from the parlor doorway: the MKT coming up the north bank, the hand drills, the black powder, the Manitou bluff and what the blasting cost. He is good at it. He made a room of sixty people go quiet about paintings none of us will ever see. Then he collected a round of applause and his coat.

“My sister’s coming in on the River Runner,” he said, “and the train does not wait for historians.” He drove off to meet her at the station in Jefferson City at ten to eight.

At ten past eight, someone upstairs plugged something in.

The lights went out all at once: parlor, hall, the lamp in the case, the red light on the coffee urn. Somebody laughed. Somebody else said a word you do not say at a fundraiser for a plaque. I stood still in the dining room with a fork in my hand and listened to sixty people bump into each other.

From the front parlor, Dell’s voice: “Margo, where’s your breaker box?”

It was dark for maybe a minute and a half. When the lights came back, most of us were still in the dining room, blinking. Dell was in the parlor, alone, standing by the round table with one hand flat on the glass case.

“Just making sure,” he said.

At twenty past eight June said she needed air and went out the front door. Nobody thought anything of it.

At nine o’clock, with the pie gone and the donation jar full, Margo asked Hattie to hold the watch for a photograph for the paper, Hattie and the watch and the Linden House parlor. Dell unlocked the case. Hattie lifted the watch out and it sat on her palm, and she frowned at it. She bounced it once, lightly, as if weighing an egg. Then she turned it over.

She looked up, not at Dell or at Margo, but at me, as if I might have an explanation written in my notebook.

“This isn’t mine,” Hattie said.

Chapter 03 / 8

Smooth as a New Spoon

ROCHEPORT — SUNDAY, SEPT. 13

Deputy Ray Okafor of the Boone County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the Linden House at ten on Sunday morning, took off his hat in Margo’s front hall, and accepted a cup of coffee from the urn that had caused all the trouble. He is a patient man with a pocket notebook smaller than mine, which I tried not to take personally.

He laid the watch from the case on a white napkin on Margo’s dining table, and those of us who had stayed late, or come back early, stood around it like a family around a casserole nobody will admit to bringing.

It was a good copy. From across a room, under glass, with lamplight on it, I would have sworn to it, and I had. Up close it was something else. The deputy turned it over and ran his thumb across the back.

“No dent,” he said.

The case back was as smooth as a new spoon. The crystal was whole from edge to edge, no crack anywhere. Okafor pressed the crown with his thumb and turned it, and it spun easily, and the hands swept off four-seventeen and around the dial. Hattie made a small sound. He set them back, carefully, where they had been.

Inside the front lid somebody had engraved M.K.&T. 1893 in crisp, even letters, the kind a machine makes.

“Forty years ago somebody in this family would have engraved it with a nail,” Hattie said. “And spelled it wrong.”

The theory in the room was already set, like Jell-O. Everybody had been at the party; the lights had gone out; the copy had been slipped in under cover of the dark. It was only a question of who had had a key, and a minute and a half.

Dell Haskins had a key. Dell had been alone in the parlor when the lights came back, with his hand on the glass. Dell knew this morning how that sounded, and he sat at the end of the table with his arms folded and his jaw working.

“I was trying to find the lamp plug,” he said, “so the circuit wouldn’t trip again when Margo flipped it. I had my hand on the case because I couldn’t see the case. That’s all.”

Margo had the other key, on a ribbon around her neck all evening. She held it up to show the deputy and then tucked it back inside her collar.

Okafor wrote all of that down. Then he did the thing I should have done, which was to ask where the watch had been before the party.

“Owen came Thursday morning at nine and took it off in his handkerchief,” Hattie said. “I haven’t laid eyes on it since, except under Dell’s glass last night. He was to clean it and carry it to Margo’s. That was the arrangement.”

Owen was there too, gray in the face. He had driven back from Jefferson City at nine-thirty with his sister, heard the news on Margo’s porch, and not slept. “I had it on my bench two days,” he said. “I took it apart, I cleaned it, I put it back together. I brought it here in my own pocket and set it down in that case with my own hands. It was perfect when I set it down.” He looked at Dell and then away.

The deputy asked everyone to stay in touch and went out to his car.

Before he left, a neighbor added one more item to his notebook. Lottie Pruett lives in the white house above the trailhead and has sat on her porch every evening since 1987. On Saturday night, at around half past eight, she saw a light moving inside the tunnel.

“Not a bicycle light,” she said. “Bicycle lights go straight. This one wandered. Went in from our end, stopped a long while in the middle, and came back out.”

June Glass had gone out the front door at twenty past eight. She had come back at a quarter to nine, cheeks pink, saying the air was nice. This morning June was not at the Linden House. Hattie said she had gone for a drive.

In the afternoon I walked down to the trail myself. The tunnel was the temperature it always is, cool as a cellar, and smelled of wet stone. Riders came through in twos and threes, calling “on your left” into the echo. The tool marks from 1892 are still in the walls, drill holes you could lay a finger in. I walked it end to end with my phone’s light on the gravel, not knowing what I was looking for, and at the halfway point, where Lottie said the light had stopped, I found it.

A tortoiseshell hair clip, the big claw kind, lying in the limestone grit against the wall.

I put it in my pocket and stood there a while with the river showing at the far end like a lit doorway. Then I walked back to town to find out where June Glass had gone for a drive.

Chapter 04 / 8

The Paybook

ROCHEPORT — TUESDAY, SEPT. 15

June Glass did not come back from her drive until Monday night, and when I knocked at Hattie’s door on Tuesday morning with the hair clip in my pocket, June answered, looked at my face, and said, “Not here. Not in front of Grandma. After the talk tonight.”

So I went to the talk.

Owen Tallis had decided that the Tunnel Night lecture would go ahead, watch or no watch, because the plaque still needed paying for and the Half-Moon Café had already moved its tables. The back room of the Half-Moon seats about forty if nobody brings a stroller. On Tuesday it held fifty-two. Nothing fills a room in a small town like a crime at a party most of the room attended.

Owen had brought a projector that hummed and a stack of photographs scanned from his own collection: the grading crews along the river, mules, a steam shovel, a row of men in hats standing in front of the half-cut east portal with their arms folded, looking as if the bluff owed them money. He talked about the hand drills, the black powder, the timbers. He talked about the bluff’s old name, Manitou, and about Clark’s sketch of the paintings, and what the blasting took, and he said it the way he always does, plainly, without making anyone feel scolded for liking the tunnel.

Then he put up a page I had never seen.

It was a sheet from a railroad paybook, brown at the edges, columns of names in a slanted hand, with daily rates in pennies and a date across the top: October 1893.

“This came down in a family,” Owen said. “It lists the men on the tunnel gang the month they broke through.”

He took a pointer, the old wooden kind, and touched two lines. The first read H. Birk — foreman — $2.25. The second, lower down, read A. Glass — water boy, 14 yrs — $0.50.

A little sound went through the room. Hattie was in the second row in her church coat. She did not move, except that her chin came up a quarter of an inch.

“Family stories grow,” Owen said, gently, looking at the screen and not at her. “Every family’s do. The water boy becomes a driller becomes the foreman. It doesn’t make anybody a liar. It only means that history tends to go to whoever keeps the souvenirs.”

Nobody asked him what he meant by that. In a room that size you could hear the milk steamer through the wall.

Cal Ostrander, standing at the back with his arms folded, broke the quiet. “So what’s the thing worth, Owen? The real one?”

“To the right person, anything,” Owen said. “To a dealer, some hundreds. A railroad watch with a story attached is a nice piece, not a rare one.” He clicked the projector forward. “And a copy is worth nothing. You can order a copy of almost any railroad watch out of Chicago for forty dollars now. I’ve seen them at swap meets. Junk. They fool you across a room.”

Dell Haskins, sitting by the door, stood up when his phone buzzed and stepped into the café. The door didn’t quite latch behind him. I was nearest to it, and I will not pretend I didn’t listen.

“No,” Dell said, low. “Tell the Kansas City man it’s not available. Not yet. I’ll call him when it is.”

He came back in and sat down, and saw me looking, and looked at the screen.

Margo Fenn passed the donation jar at the end. It came back heavier than it went out, because nothing opens a wallet like guilt by proximity, and Owen announced that the plaque was two-thirds funded. People clapped for that, and meant it.

Afterward Hattie waited by the door for June to bring the car around. I stood with her. She was quiet for a while, watching Owen wind the projector cord around his elbow.

“My grandfather was fourteen in 1893,” she said at last. “I did the arithmetic once and didn’t like it, so I stopped doing it.” She pulled on her gloves one finger at a time. “He still carried that watch for fifty-eight years. Whoever gave it to him.”

June pulled up in the Subaru. Hattie got in. Before June drove off she rolled down her window and looked at me past her grandmother.

“Thursday,” she said. “Half-Moon, eight o’clock. Bring the clip.”

I walked home down Central Street under the streetlights with my hands in my pockets, one of them around a piece of tortoiseshell plastic. I thought about a Kansas City man who was waiting for something to become available. I thought about a water boy of fourteen. And I thought, not for long enough, about a line Owen had said on Sunday morning, standing gray-faced in Margo’s dining room: that the watch had been perfect when he set it down.

Chapter 05 / 8

Trash Day

ROCHEPORT — THURSDAY, SEPT. 17

June was at the corner table of the Half-Moon at eight sharp, with two coffees already poured, which in my experience is what people do when they have decided to tell you most of something.

I put the hair clip on the table. She looked at it and let out a long breath.

“Yes, it’s mine. Yes, I was in the tunnel Saturday night. No, I didn’t go near that case, and no, I did not trade Grandpa Amos’s watch for a forty-dollar fake to pay off a Subaru.” She turned her cup a full circle on the saucer. “I was with somebody. Who I was with isn’t mine to tell yet. Give me till Saturday.”

“The deputy may not give you till Saturday.”

“The deputy,” June said, “has already asked. I told him what I just told you, and he wrote it down in that tiny notebook, and he said Saturday was fine as long as I didn’t leave the county.” She pushed the clip back across the table to me. “Keep it. It’s evidence. I’ve never been evidence before.”

That was all I got. She paid for both coffees, which I also recognized as a technique.

Thursday is trash day in Rocheport. The truck comes up from the trailhead end and works its way through town, and by nine the bins and blue recycling carts stand at the curbs along Second Street like a line of patient cattle. I walked that way because it is the way I walk, not because I was looking. I should say that plainly, since I have been asked.

Owen Tallis lives in a narrow white frame house on Second, with a porch swing and a workshop in the back that used to be a summer kitchen. His recycling cart was at the curb, lid not quite closed, because on top of the flattened cereal boxes and the Sunday paper lay a padded mailer, the flat yellow kind, too stiff to fold. It had been slit neatly along the top. The printed return label said RAILWAY REPRODUCTIONS — CHICAGO, ILL. It was addressed to Owen, and the postmark was August 27.

I had my hand on the lid, thinking about nothing more than pushing it shut, when Owen came out onto the porch in his slippers with a mug of coffee.

“Nora. You’re up early for a reporter.”

“Trash day,” I said, which is not a sentence that means anything.

He laughed and waved me up. He seemed lighter than on Tuesday, and he walked me back through the kitchen to the old summer kitchen to show me his bench. It was the neatest bench I have ever seen: a green felt pad, a row of jeweler’s screwdrivers in a wooden block, a loupe, a brass oil can no bigger than a thimble, a tin of polishing rouge. A railroad lantern with a new red globe stood on the shelf above.

“I order globes from a place in Chicago,” he said, following my eye. “The old ones crack if you look at them sideways. Kids at the school talks like to hold a real lantern.”

On the wall by the window hung a framed photograph of a small, straight-backed woman in a flowered dress, standing on this same porch beside a birthday cake with a great many candles.

“My grandmother,” Owen said. “Ida Birk Tallis, the day she turned ninety. She grew up down on the river, in a railroad family. She lived in this house until she was ninety-four and she never once let me win at gin rummy.”

He talked about her for a while, fondly, and about the town when he was a boy, when the Katy trains still came through the tunnel. At the door he asked, the way you’d ask about the weather, whether the deputy had got anywhere with Dell.

I said I didn’t know. It was true.

At noon I had lunch on the bench outside the post office and ran into Deputy Okafor, who was on his way somewhere else and stopped anyway. He is a fair man and he does not tell me things, but he does sometimes let me know which rocks he has already turned over.

“Here’s one for your notebook,” he said. “Margo Fenn took out a one-night insurance rider on the watch. Five thousand dollars, for Saturday the twelfth.”

“That’s a lot for a watch Owen says is worth some hundreds.”

“It is,” Okafor said. “She says the insurer wouldn’t let her display it for less. I’m checking.”

And on my way home, one more rock. Cal Ostrander keeps his long green canoe on a rack in his side yard, close enough to the river to carry. I had seen it there every day since spring. On Thursday afternoon the rack was empty.

I stood and looked at the empty rack. I thought about a light in the tunnel that stopped in the middle for a long while and came back out. I thought about the river, which takes things downstream to St. Charles and never gives them back.

That evening Margo phoned me at home. She sounded tired.

“Owen asked me to tell you something,” she said. “He says he wants to set the record straight on Saturday, on my porch, with the deputy there. He says there’s a part of his story he got wrong.”

Chapter 06 / 8

The Light in the Tunnel

ROCHEPORT — SATURDAY, SEPT. 19

We met on Margo’s porch at ten on Saturday morning, a week to the hour since I had come up those steps to photograph a watch. Margo brought out the coffee urn, which by now had the status of a witness. Deputy Okafor sat on the porch rail. The linden tree dropped a yellow leaf into his cup and he fished it out and kept drinking.

June went first. She had brought Cal Ostrander, who stood beside her with his hands in his pockets, sunburn fading, looking like a man about to be introduced to somebody’s grandmother.

“We met in July,” June said. “At the MR340 finish in St. Charles. I was handing out bananas at the boat ramp and he came in at two in the morning and asked me to marry him, and I said you’ve been paddling for fifty hours, you’d propose to a canoe.”

“I did not propose,” Cal said.

“He asked if I had any more bananas in a very romantic voice.” June took his hand. “Saturday night he wanted to show me the tunnel in the dark. He had a headlamp. We walked in from the town end and stopped in the middle, because that’s the part where you can’t see either end, and that’s where I lost my clip. We walked back out. Then I went back to the party and he went home. I didn’t tell anyone because my grandmother has opinions about river guides, and because it was nobody’s business, and because I didn’t know it would be the most famous walk in Boone County.”

Lottie Pruett’s wandering light, which had cost me two nights of sleep, was a man with a headlamp who couldn’t walk straight beside June Glass.

“And the canoe?” I said.

“In Hartsburg,” Cal said. “A buddy’s garage. I put a crack in the hull on a gravel bar in August and he’s patching it with fiberglass. You can call him. He’ll tell you how much I owe him.” Okafor nodded. He had called him.

Then it was Dell’s turn, though Dell hadn’t asked for one. He had come up the walk with a folded paper in his hand and handed it to the deputy without a word, and Okafor read it and passed it to me. It was a printout of an email from a Kansas City collector, dated two weeks before Tunnel Night, asking about an 1880s walnut mantel clock that Dell had in his shop window and would not sell until he’d had its movement repaired.

“The Kansas City man wants a clock,” Dell said. “Not a watch. I told him it wasn’t available yet because it doesn’t run yet.” He looked at Margo. “And when the lights went out, I went to the lamp plug in the parlor because it was my lamp that tripped your circuit, along with your urn. I told you that on the night.”

“He did,” Margo said. “I heard him pulling plugs from the hall. I was in the closet under the stairs with a flashlight, trying to remember which switch was the parlor.”

Okafor added his own piece. The insurer had confirmed that it would not cover any item on public display for less than five thousand dollars, and that the rider Margo bought ran from six in the evening Saturday to six in the morning Sunday and not a minute outside it. Margo, if she had been cooking up a scheme, had picked a poor one.

That left the thing I had been sent a message about, and Owen Tallis, who had been sitting on the porch swing with his hands between his knees, cleared his throat.

“I owe everybody a correction,” he said. “I should have said this a week ago. I was embarrassed, and I didn’t think it mattered, and now I think it might. I didn’t keep the watch at my house the whole time. Friday evening, about seven, I walked it back over to Hattie’s so she could have one last night with it before the party. She was asleep in her chair. I didn’t want to wake her. I let myself in the back and put it in the sugar bowl and went home. Saturday I picked it up again, around three, while she was at the beauty shop, and carried it over here.”

He looked at June, then away.

“June was in the house Friday night,” he said. “I’m not saying anything by it. I’m only saying the watch was there.”

June went white and then red. Cal put his hand on her shoulder. Hattie was not there; she had a standing Saturday appointment to have her hair set, and she had declined to rearrange it for what she called “a porch meeting about my own silverware.”

Okafor wrote in his tiny notebook for a long time. Then he thanked everyone and stepped down off the porch rail and walked out to his car, and the rest of us stood around the urn not looking at each other.

I did not say anything. I wrote Owen’s words down exactly as he said them, and when I got home I sat at my kitchen table with the notebook and a pot of coffee, and I started again at the first page, in Hattie’s kitchen, on Wednesday the ninth, and read forward, slowly, the way I should have been reading all along.

Chapter 07 / 8

What the Notebook Said

ROCHEPORT — MONDAY, SEPT. 21

A reporter’s notebook is a dull object. Mine is a spiral pad from the drugstore rack with a coffee ring on the cover, and most of what is in it is the spelling of people’s names and the price of things. But it has one virtue. It does not remember what it expected to see. It only remembers what it was told.

On Sunday I read mine from front to back three times. By the third time I had stopped reading it as a story about a party, which is how the whole town had been telling it, and started reading it as a story about a watch, which is what it was.

Here is what the notebook knew.

A watch left Hattie Glass’s sugar bowl on Thursday morning, September tenth, at nine o’clock, in Owen Tallis’s handkerchief. I had written down, the day before, exactly what it looked like. A dent the size of a lentil on the back. A crack across the crystal like a teacher’s check mark. A crown too stiff to turn. Hands at four-seventeen. I had written down, too, that Owen had offered to replace the crystal, and that Hattie had told him not on his life.

A watch went into Dell’s case on Saturday at ten past four. I had written down what that one looked like as well, and I had been pleased with the phrase at the time: clear as creek ice.

A watch came out of Dell’s case at nine that night, and on Sunday morning the deputy turned it over on a napkin. No dent. No crack. A crown that spun under his thumb.

In between, there had been a party, a minute and a half of darkness, a key on Dell’s ring and a key on Margo’s ribbon, a woman in the tunnel with a man and a headlamp, a canoe in a garage in Hartsburg, a clock in a shop window, and an insurance rider that started at six in the evening. Every one of those things had had a week of the town’s attention. Some of them had had mine.

Then there was my phone.

I had taken two pictures on Saturday afternoon, one wide and one close, and I had not looked at them since, because the paper ran the wide one on Wednesday with the story and nobody needs a close-up of a crime scene’s centerpiece. On Sunday night I opened the close one and spread it with two fingers until the dial filled the screen. The lamp inside the lid made a bright spot at the twelve. The hands sat at four-seventeen. The crystal was clean from edge to edge, not a line on it anywhere.

The time stamp at the bottom of the picture said 4:14 p.m.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I turned off the phone and went to bed and did not sleep much.

This morning I walked over to Third Street. Hattie was on the porch in her cardigan, shelling pecans into a colander, with her reading glasses on for once.

“Hattie,” I said, “did Owen bring the watch back here on the Friday before the party?”

She stopped shelling. “Friday? No. I told the deputy. I haven’t seen it since Thursday morning.”

“He says he came by about seven Friday evening. He says you were asleep in your chair and he let himself in the back and put it in the sugar bowl.”

Hattie set the colander down. “I was up in that chair with the radio on until twenty to eleven, waiting on June, because June drives like a teenager and I don’t sleep till she’s in. Nobody came to my door but June. And nobody has let themselves in my back door since July, when the Pruett boy painted the frame and painted it shut. You can go look. I have been meaning to have it planed for two months.”

I went and looked. It was painted shut. The seam along the frame was one smooth white line, unbroken.

When I came back around to the porch Hattie had her hands folded on top of the pecans and was looking down the street at nothing in particular.

“You’ve worked it out,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I think I have.”

“Then I’ll come with you,” Hattie said, “when you go. Not today. Give me a few days. I want to think about what I’m going to say.”

So that is where we are, and that is where you are too. You have seen what I saw, in the order I saw it: the sugar bowl, the chamois, the lamplight, the smooth spoon of a case back, the paybook, the mailer, the porch. Nothing that matters has been kept from you. Some of what you have been shown was only a light in a tunnel.

Now it is your turn. Who took Amos Glass’s watch? And how was it done? Make your guess below before next week’s chapter.

Next week, Hattie Glass puts on her church coat, and the two of us walk across town and knock on a door.