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Victor’s eyes unfocused from his computer and his head slid around, tilting. “What?”
I held up the clock. “Do you love it?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
“If I take it apart, will you be mad?”
He laughed. “Oh. Have at it. You can put it back together again.”
“What if I don’t?”
His eyes blazed with amusement. “I’ll get you to buy me a new one.”
I knew Victor was teasing, but just in case, I wanted a backup plan if I broke it. “It’s like ten dollars or something, isn’t it?” Not that I had ten dollars with me, but I thought I could get Luke to let me work at the diner a little bit.
“Knowing my dad, it’s probably a couple thousand ten dollars.”
My eyes widened and my mouth dropped open. He had a drawer full of them! I gazed down at the desk sets, wondering exactly how much money the drawer contained under the guise of simple desk top knickknacks. What was the pencil cup worth? Or the discarded business card holder? How come they looked like regular desk sets that I’d seen over the years?
Silas boomed with laughter. He plopped a hand on his chest and his broad shoulders shook. “I love her face.”
I placed the clock carefully back on the desk. “So I shouldn’t play with it.”
“Play with it, Sang.” Victor said, turning back to his screen.
“Nu uh.”
“If you don’t do whatever it was you were going to do with it, I’ll let Silas use it for baseball practice.”
Well, in that case ...
???
I had the pieces of the inside of the clock splayed out on Victor’s desk before he took a break and sat back again, stretching. I hunched over the corner of the desk with the opened clock. I used a pair of tweezers to clutch a magnetic pin, trying to stuff it back the opposite way it had been inserted previously. If I was right, when I put the clock together again, the gears would rotate backwards.
Victor watched as I positioned the pin inside where I wanted, having to break part of the interior casing to get it to fit right. He grinned. “You’re breaking it on purpose now.”
“Yup,” I said, partially paying attention as I looked back at the other parts, figuring out which pieces went back inside in reverse order. I picked up one of the larger cogs and inserted it into the clock’s body.
Victor stood up, standing over my arm, looking down on me as I worked. It was distracting. I started second guessing which cog was next.
Victor lowered his nose to the top of my head as he hovered. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Kind of,” I said, finding the piece I was pretty sure I wanted. I slowed myself a little, not wanting to screw up with him watching.
He let out a slow breath against my hair. “What are you doing?”
“Right now I’m being distracted,” I said softly, teasing. I stilled my hand, turning my head slowly so I didn’t bump him. I had my mouth open, ready to say something else silly, but as I faced him, he hadn’t moved away. He gazed down at my eyes, his nose almost touching mine. He remained there, stationary and looking curious.
Those fire eyes stole whatever words I thought I wanted to say. My lips moved but only my breath was released.
The computer monitor flashed. Victor dragged his gaze away from me to check it. It gave me breathing room. I leaned over the side of the chair to see what he was reading.
The screen blinked the name of a telephone company and an address. A small image displayed a map of downtown Charleston.
“I was hoping this wasn’t what we were looking at,” Victor said. He eased himself back into his chair.
“What is it?” I near-whispered.
“Your caller isn’t using a cell phone. He used a pay phone.”
“How did he send that picture to all of you?”
Victor sighed, sitting back. He ruffled his fingers through his hair. “I’ll check, but I’m going to guess he was smart enough not to use a cell phone for that, too.”
“Can’t we figure out which phone booth he used?”
“I’ve got a guess. It might be the one across the street from the school. There’s a shopping center. If he took off from school, it’d be the closest place to get to and make that call. Unless he got into a car and drove elsewhere.”
I got up on my knees in the chair, leaning over the arm to look closer at the screen. “Can we put cameras there? At that payphone?”
“There’s no telling if he’ll use it again. We can’t put cameras on every pay phone in the city. We might get lucky and the shopping center has one focused on the pay phones. It’ll only be helpful if they’re recording. Too many ifs. It’s a long shot.”
I looked back at Victor. He was sitting back, rolling his head against the back of the chair and sighing.
“Do we dust for fingerprints now?” I asked.
He swiveled his head back around until he was gazing at me. “Who do we look like? The Hardy Boys?”
Silas chuckled at us without looking up from the laptop screen.
I exhaled, sliding a fingertip across my brow. “Why not try it out? Put cameras on those phones. We’ll go back tomorrow and see if he tries calling again.”
“Princess, you’re not going back to school until we can figure out who it is.”
“But he hasn’t done anything to me,” I said. “And it’d be the quickest way to figure out who he is if we get him on camera.”
Silas grunted. “We’re not using you as bait.”
“Yeah, but it isn’t like Mr. McCoy. This kid’s been avoiding us. The more I think about it, it just seems like some kid who just wants attention. I bet if we just go in and let him use his beeping messages from the pay phone, we could catch him. He may prove to be harmless.”
“We’ll see,” Victor said. He absently tapped at his keyboard.
I frowned, sitting back. Was he even listening? He seemed distracted. Or he’d already dismissed the idea entirely, he just wanted to amuse me.
I sighed, turned back to the clock, suddenly disinterested in piecing it back together.
But Victor went back to typing at the computer, now trying to focus on the picture and where it came from. Silas went back to reading through the text messages.
I went back to my self-invented puzzle.
???
When my clock was finished, I pushed the battery back inside and snapped the back shut.
“There.” I put the clock down in front of Victor’s keyboard like a kid vying for attention from a parent. “I made it run backwards.”
Victor shifted back on his chair, diverted from his typing. He lifted an eyebrow, picked up the clock, watching the second hand tick counterclockwise. “Huh. Where’d you learn that?”
“I didn’t get a lot of toys when I was growing up. I think there’s an unpacked box filled with broken clocks in the shed at home.”
“I want to see,” Silas said, standing. He stretched, crossing the room to Victor’s desk.
Victor planted the clock on the desk toward him.
Silas picked it up and scanned the face. His eyes made the same quizzical expression Victor’s did. “When were you going to tell us about this trick? What else can you do?”
“I can help scan text messages.”
“I’m already done,” Silas said. He placed the clock back on the desk. “Unless we turn your phone on and get more coming in, so far it’s all from stupid guys mostly trying to hook up. There were a couple of girls texting in.”
Victor harrumphed. “What do the girls want?”
“They wanted to know which one of us she was dating and asking for our phone numbers.”
My eyes widened. “What?”
Victor laughed. He snatched up my hand and squeezed it. “There you go. Now you aren’t the only one getting harassed.”
“Not jealous, are you?” Silas asked, a smirk teasing his mouth.
“Someone already has your ph
one numbers,” I said, not ready to admit that I might have been a tad jealous. “If someone sent that picture to all of you, someone has your phone numbers.”
“But we weren’t getting text messages like that,” Victor said. He smacked the keys on his keyboard and sat back. “And this picture was sent from a throwaway email, from a proxy server IP. I’ll need to do a lot more to track it further, and it might be futile anyway. If he went this far, he probably used a school or library computer, or public Wi-Fi with a stolen laptop, or a number of other things. It’ll take a while to track this down and we might not have that much time.”
