Chapter 1 When an antique clock breaks, a clock that's been

telling time for 200 or 300 years, fixing it can be a real puzzle. An old clock like that

was handmade by someone. It might take away the time with a pendulum, with a spring, with

a pulley system. It might have bells that are supposed to strike the hour, or a bird that's

meant to pop out and cuckoo at you. There can be hundreds of tiny individual pieces, each

of which needs to interact with the others precisely. To make the job even trickier, you often

can't tell it's been done to a clock over hundreds of years. Maybe there's damage

that was never fixed, or fixed badly. Sometimes entire portions of the original clockwork

are missing, but you can't know for sure because there are rarely diagrams of what the clock

is supposed to look like. A clock that old doesn't come with a manual. So instead,

the few people left in the world who know how to do this kind of thing rely on what are

often called witness marks to guide their way. A witness mark could be a small dent, a

hole that once held a screw. These are actual impressions and outlines and discolorations,

left inside the clock of pieces that might have once been there. They're clues to what

was in the clockmaker's mind when he first created the thing. I'm told fixing an old

clock can be maddening. You're constantly wondering if you've just been hours going

down a path that will likely take you nowhere. And all you've got are these vague witness marks,

which might not even mean what you think they mean. So at every moment along the way,

you have to decide if you're wasting your time or not. Anyway, I only learned about all

this because years ago, an antique clockwork store contacted me, John B. Mechlamur, and

asked me to help them solve a murder.

Something's happened. Something has absolutely happened in this town. There's just too

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