What the Clocks Know Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  I

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  II

  Interlude

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  III

  Interlude

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  IV

  Interlude

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  V

  Interlude

  Chapter 18

  Postlude

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Rumer Haven

  Title Page

  What the Clocks Know

  ...

  Rumer Haven

  ...

  Copyright Information

  What the Clocks Know, Copyright © 2019 by Rumer Haven

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  ...

  Published by Fallen Monkey Press

  ...

  First published by Crooked Cat Books, March 2016

  Published by Fallen Monkey Press, December 2019

  ...

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ...

  Cover Design by RoseWolf Design

  Book Design by Coreen Montagna

  Dedication

  To London and the Expats

  I

  The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

  Hath had elsewhere its setting,

  And cometh from afar:

  Not in entire forgetfulness.

  from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality in

  Recollections of Early Childhood”

  ~William Wordsworth (1815)

  Prelude

  19th-Century London

  THOUGH I OUGHT not to mourn, I do.

  The weeks shall pass and still shall I wear my bombazine silks. I should hope the dye creeps into the very pigmentation of my skin; oh, that it did count arsenic amongst its ingredients as well! I am already warned to maintain this black grief in privacy, though it is a needless caution; I refuse to quit my apartments after the death of my dear.

  How is it that love can harden the most delicate and purest of hearts even when the vice of the streets does not? Love did harden us, and I, yes, I hated whom I loved.

  Yet such mourning in its persistence shall be perceived as unnatural. Yes, I should have hardened my heart whilst beating it more tenderly for another far earlier than I had actually allowed; if I had done so, my dear might yet breathe.

  Ah! It could have been my hands that closed that fine throat to the air. Algae might well rot beneath my fingernails as blackened green ropes of weed drape from my forearms and drip regret into a hopeless puddle at my feet.

  I still see you, dear, as you were, before the reeds and filth tangled in your curls. I yet feel the course texture of your palm against my cheek. Life had roughened you so on the outside, and yet you had remained so fragile, as soft within as your pale skin in the moonlight. The price we could have paid.

  The price we did pay.

  Chapter 1

  An Old Soul

  21st-Century Chicago

  “YOU WERE BORN OLD.”

  At the familiar words, Margot Moreton snapped into the present. “What?”

  “I mean, hellooo, McFly-y! Maybe travel back in time and use these pennies to buy yourself a clue, huh?” Sylvie held up a pair of penny loafers.

  Derek gave a low chuckle as he sifted through photographs in a shoebox.

  It was one of those sick-humored weeks in April that buried Chicagoland in snow, one last time to kill everyone’s spirits before they dared pack their winter clothes away. For lack of anything better to do outside that weekend, Margot’s fellow single friends sat with her on the floor of her childhood bedroom. Derek Lee had been Margot’s buddy since high school, and Sylvie Duran wore the crown as Last Sorority Friend Standing. Together, they’d been helping to clear out Margot’s old pack-rat closet so she could have some storage space as a soon-to-be unemployed twenty-something moving back in with her parents.

  “She actually put pennies in them,” Sylvie murmured out the side of her mouth. She held the shiny burgundy shoes up for Derek before lifting an identical pair in black. Through narrow slits in the onyx leather, silver coins glinted like waking evil eyes.

  “No,” he said, and Margot winced, knowing he’d seen them, too.

  “Yes,” Sylvie said with brows raised. “Dimes.”

  Margot shrugged. “The silver matched better.”

  “Matched what, your tiara for the Enchantment Under the Sea dance?” A second later, Derek oofed from a well-aimed combat boot to his groin. “Okay, these redeem you. Though I’m not sure how the same person rocked both looks. You’re the most punk preppie I’ve ever met.”

  With a grunt, Margot fished the other boot out from the bottom of a plastic crate and assessed its condition.

  “What I never got about Back to the Future, which don’t get me wrong, is otherwise cinematic perfection,” Sylvie said, flicking her glossy black locks behind her shoulder, “is that Marty McFly only gives himself five extra minutes to rescue Doc from the Libyans. I mean, he could’ve gone hours, days before if he wanted to!”

  “Good point,” Derek said. “The DeLorean can take him back thirty years but not thirty minutes?”

  Margot nodded without humor as she smoothed her thumb over a scuff in the boot’s oiled leather. A few eye floaters glided in front of it, and she zoned out again as her ears crackled like her altitude had changed.

  “If you need to talk about it, Margot,” she heard Sylvie say.

  “Yeah,” Derek said. “We’re better at listening than making any order of all this shit. Sorry, sentimental shit.”

  Margot exhaled and tossed the heavy boot next to her loafers. Brushing brunette strands out of her eyes, she said, “I wasn’t thinking about him. But now that you bring it up…” She faked a quivering lip.

  Sylvie cocked her head at Margot’s little performance. “Really, though. You okay?”

  “I think so. Still feel like I’m going through the motions, though, when inside I feel so…like…” She looked off as if she could see a dimension her friends couldn’t. “Erratic.”

  “To this day I can’t believe you threw a drink in his face,” Derek said, flipping through a middle school yearbook. “Classic.”

  It was classic. Something right out of those smoky, late-night film noirs that Margot loved. She’d always wanted to do that to someone. Only when she had, though, did she realize how much it sucked to have an excuse to.

  “I just couldn’t take it anymore. Ever since we graduated, James has been like a puppy chasing after anything shiny.” She chucked a cracked CD case into the designated ‘Discard’ pile. “I mean, Zurich? Why the hell was he all of a sudden interviewing in Switzerland and informing me after the fact? Shouldn’t I be clued in on these decisions if it means packing up my life, too? Or not, but then having to fly ten hours to see him? The two to Boston were already an issue.”

  “It was a lot to ask without more of a commit
ment,” Sylvie said. “At a point when he should’ve been committing. You’re better off.”

  Margot stared at the old sorority T-shirts stacked on Sylvie’s lap. “Knew I never should’ve dated a frat guy.” She deepened her voice to imitate her college sweetheart, giving the douchiest impression she could: “I’ve got to do this while I’m young, you know? We’ve got the rest of our lives to settle down.”

  Sylvie shook her head as she folded the cotton shirts. “Shame how the word settle holds such different ideas of contentment for different people.” She tapped a hand on Margot’s knee. “But it seems like you’re getting to a much better place, lady.”

  “Aw, thanks, love.” With joking sentiment, Margot signed their sorority symbol with her fingers—something that could’ve looked vulgar out of context, which both women vindictively adored. To her further relief, Derek changed the subject.

  “Do you want to store this one with your childhood stuff?” He held up a hardcover copy of Charlotte Sometimes.

  “Oh, that’s actually new. My crap from the condo must be getting mixed in with this mess.”

  “Never read it,” he said. “Anything to do with the Cure song?”

  “Yeah, some lyrics are straight from it.” Much as Margot loved The Cure, though—especially their haunting rendering of “Charlotte Sometimes”—she’d only bought the book the other day because, as she scanned the store shelves, this one had tripped her eyes up cold.

  Charlotte. The name held tip-of-the-tongue recognition for her, something both so obvious and evasive that she’d purchased the novel assuming it was just a matter of time when she’d make the connection. She still hadn’t.

  “I remember reading it for one of my YA lit classes,” Sylvie said. “The two British boarding school girls, right?”

  “Yeah, Charlotte and Clare.” For Derek’s benefit, Margot added, “They’re the same age and attend the same school, but one is there forty years after the other. Somehow they time-travel and swap lives overnight, and keep switching identities back and forth like that.”

  “And they write in a notebook that exists in both times,” Sylvie said, “to keep each other informed on what’s happening in their real lives. Or have you not gotten to that part yet?”

  “I have, but it doesn’t make sense how their messages are basically day-to-day updates. They’re so objective about it, when I’d be more like, ‘What the bloody fuck is happening? I piss my knickers each time I wake up here!’” Her friends laughed. “Because of course my own body of work entitles me to criticize a classic.”

  So far, Margot’s main expertise was writing copy for local business ads. She liked it, but she didn’t love it—yet. Every day, she waited for her career path to turn that corner, believing that if she just put her head down and got through the grind, it would happen to her like good things often did. But even she had to admit her work had nothing to do with not relocating with James; she just resented how he’d always presumed as much. How he’d expected she could, and would, easily pick up and leave, then magically find something better out of state or overseas.

  And maybe she would’ve found something. But quitting her own job had to be on her own terms. Which it had been as of a few weeks ago, as soon as she’d received her acceptance into a London business school program.

  “Speaking of,” Derek said, “how’d they take your news at the office?”

  “Surprisingly well. I gave plenty of notice and am tying up all my current projects, so someone new can easily take over.”

  “Don’t talk like you’re so dispensable,” Sylvie said.

  “It’s not that. I just think they respect my decision.”

  Though she’d never been passionate about her day job at the advertising agency, she still gave it her all to prove herself. At least, she used to. These days she couldn’t muster the concentration. Ever since the breakup a few months ago, she’d been phoning it in, still excusing herself most days from lunch with the group to eat alone in the stairwell. She didn’t feel like herself, no longer grasping what she had to prove or to who. So, Margot couldn’t deny she’d grown complacent, and her team would probably benefit from someone with a fresher outlook.

  “Anyway, my boss is considering it a leave of absence for professional development and giving me my job back afterward if I want it.”

  “No shit, really,” Derek said. “That’s awesome. And rare, you do realize.” An aspiring musician who temped by day and struggled to find gigs by night, Derek couldn’t—and maybe didn’t even try to—mask the resentment in his voice.

  Margot knew he owned the risks that came from pursuing his dreams and that he hadn’t judged her for taking a more conventional route. But still. Starting in the same place with the same prospects as teens, they tended to side-eye where each other’s tracks led from there, as though gauging who was winning more at the Game of Life. At least Margot did; she did it with everyone to some extent, though mostly to see if they knew the rules of how to play when she felt so clueless. In the meantime, she was great at faking she knew what she was doing and welcomed all she achieved and received whether she felt she deserved it or not.

  “Not that I want to come full circle like that, but, hell yeah, I know,” she said. “Ooh! And I scored another nice safety net in London, actually. An old colleague I worked with for a couple years, until he moved back to the UK. He was senior to me and sort of a mentor. I just emailed him to say I’d be in town, figuring we could grab a drink sometime at his favorite haunt, and he ended up insisting I stay the entire summer at his place for super-cheap. Actually, he offered it up for free, but I don’t want to take advantage.”

  “Oh, now you’re just makin’ this stuff up.”

  “Someone’s hot for Margot,” Sylvie sang.

  “Hey, maybe it’s just some of the good karma I’ve sent into the world finally coming back. Everything happens for a reason, right?”

  When her friends only shrugged in response, she glanced at the next relic to surface in the closet. A smirk slowly spread across her face, and she reached for the old box.

  “Ouija, anyone?”

  “You’re shitting me,” Derek said, though his eyes betrayed a childlike awe.

  “It was George’s. I never played it. But as a kid, I claimed anything Big Brother abandoned as treasure.”

  Sylvie nodded with eyes squinted as though seeing the universe with clarity. “That would explain the nunchucks.” She turned to Derek. “I’ve never used one of these either. Have you?”

  “I might have attempted it…once.” He pinched at the raven tattoo on his bicep. “Remember?” he asked Margot, but she knit her brow. “That one night at Ian’s during the teachers’ strike junior year? No, wait, I think you left once we started getting shitfaced. But do you remember how his subdivision backed up to that cemetery?”

  “The one with the sign, ‘Drive Carefully. We Can Wait’?”

  “Terrible,” Sylvie said despite her wicked smile.

  “Well, we tried playing that night, on one of the graves. Don’t look at me that way! We didn’t even do it. Just left and played Corn Tag in those fields up the road. But we were so paranoid over every sound we heard in Ian’s basement after that. In retrospect, it was probably the weed talkin’.”

  “You smoked pot in high school?”

  He raised his brow. “Uh, derr.”

  Margot slouched. “You never invited me to.”

  “Like you’d have ever said yes, Self-Righteous?” When Margot huffed, Derek looked to Sylvie. “Sandra Dee passed on grass. And a lotta things.”

  “Oh, whatever. Just because I didn’t drink or smoke.”

  “Or…”

  “What? Put out?”

  “How about go out. Like on a single date.”

  “Not true.”

  “Fine. But if the one with Ian’s anything to go by, at the end of that night, you jumped out the door like a stunt double before he could even stop his car in your driveway, let alone walk you to your fro
nt porch.” He choked on a laugh.

  “Yeah, it happened exactly like that.” Margot snapped a pink, penguin-shaped rubber band at him from the rainbow-colored menagerie she’d just dumped from an old backpack. “So, what, everyone thought I was this big prude? I mean, self-righteous? You think I acted like I was better than everyone else?”

  “No, but…”

  Fine ice cracked underfoot, and Margot squared her shoulders a degree.

  “I think I know what he means,” Sylvie hesitantly offered, then cowered when Margot shot her a look. “It’s not that you were ever prude or arrogant or anything, just that you’ve always set high expectations for yourself.” In a slurring flurry, she added, “Whichisagoodthing!”

  Nodding, Derek said, “She aced all our honors classes and talked about getting an MBA before she even had a high school diploma.”

  Margot straightened her spine, suddenly feeling like a microbe flattened between two glass slides. “You were born old.” Her Grandma Grace had always told her that, too. But until now, Margot hadn’t really thought about what it meant, only hoped she hadn’t started life out with one foot already in the grave.

  “Yep, super studious in college, too,” Sylvie said. “Chose books over exchanges every time. And you know you still do that.”

  “Blow off frat parties?” Margot asked flatly.

  “No, but us gals a lot of the time, especially since you moved back here to the ’burbs.”

  Margot dropped her shoulders. “Fine, so I’m antisocial.”

  “Of course you’re not. When we can get you out, you’re out. Maybe the last to arrive but then the last to leave. And you’re one of those people who gets along with anyone. You were always the glue that connected different cliques in the house, keeping the peace.”

  “Shit, you’re like the whole Breakfast Club rolled into one,” Derek said, then turned to Sylvie while he aimed a thumb at Margot. “Which is why her homecoming-court ass ever gave the time o’ day to a band geek like me.”

  Margot pished at the blatant ass-covering, ass-kissing going on, especially when her friends kept speaking in the past tense as if she were dead, and high school and college had been her glory days. It begged the question what she’d achieved since then, what she had going for her now.