“Karen, hand me the ledger,” I said. My daughter reached into her purse and gave me the old green book, worn soft at the corners, and I opened it on my rolltop desk under the lamp while Dr. Feld and Mrs. Stroud watched from the doorway. I turned to the back pages. They were my father hand, small and square. A column of dates from 1946 to 1990. Next to each date, a sum, and a name. Odile Marchand, Bastogne. Every month, forty four years. I put my finger on the first line and could not speak.
Karen sat beside me. “Dad, I found it last week while I was looking for the watch serial number,” she said. “I did not know how to tell you. Tanner saw me with it. I think that is when he decided to say you were confused.” I looked up at my grandson, who stood against the wall with his hands in his pockets, gray in the face. “Is that true, Tanner?” I asked. He nodded once. Mrs. Stroud wrote in her folder and said nothing, which a good court visitor knows how to do better than anyone.
Under the last entry my father had tucked a folded letter, and it was addressed to me. “Hal, if you read this I am gone, and your mother is gone, and it is time. In December 1944, at Bastogne, a Belgian girl named Odile hid me in her cellar for nine days while the German line passed over us. She was seventeen. When I left, she was carrying my child. I came home to your mother, and I told her all of it, and your mother, God bless her, said we would send what we could. You have a half sister, son. Her name is Colette.”
A watchmaker opened his father ledger, a stolen Hamilton surfaced in Seattle, and a war secret turned out to be family.
I read it aloud to the room. When I got to the end, Dr. Feld quietly capped his pen and put the clipboard under his arm. “Mr. Lindqvist,” he said, “I came here to assess your memory. I believe you remember your family history better than most of us.” Mrs. Stroud closed her folder and said she would be recommending that the petition be withdrawn, and that she had never in twenty years seen forty one clocks all keep the same time. Karen began to cry. I took her hand. “Honey, you were afraid for me,” I said. “That is not a crime.”
Tanner was the harder conversation. We had it on the back porch that night, with the clocks chiming nine behind us. He told me he owed eleven thousand dollars to an online betting site, that he took the watch because he saw it in the drawer one afternoon and thought, nobody wears it. He forged the pawn ticket with his own hand, and he pressed his thumb to it without thinking. “Grandpa, I am a thief,” he said. I said he was a young man who had done a thief work. The difference mattered. He wept into his hands, and I let him.
The hearing on Thursday lasted eleven minutes. Judge Alvarez read Mrs. Stroud report standing up, as if it were a poem. Karen withdrew the petition before the clerk could ask her to. Tanner stood in the back of the courtroom with his hands clasped, in a borrowed tie that was too short. Afterward the judge called me to the bench and said that in her experience a man who could keep forty one clocks accurate to two seconds a week could manage his own affairs, his grandson, and, if he wished, the entire Colorado state legislature.
Mr. Okafor in Seattle proved a gentleman. He wrote that he would hold the Hamilton until I could send the pawn price and the shipping, and that he refused any profit on a watch that had crossed Europe in a soldier pocket. The pawnshop on Colfax, once the police called, returned the three hundred eighty dollars and apologized in writing. Tanner paid me back the whole sum from his first job, at a bakery on South Pearl, hauling flour at four in the morning. Mrs. Stroud sent a Christmas card that year. She wrote that she still thought about the bells.
In May, Karen, Tanner and I flew to Brussels and took a train to Bastogne. Colette Marchand was seventy nine, a small woman in a blue cardigan, with my father chin and his stubborn way of looking at a clock. She waited on a stone bench outside her daughter bakery, and when I got down from the taxi she stood without her cane. We did not speak for a long time. Then she took my face in both hands and said, in careful English, “You have his ears.” I laughed until my eyes ran, and she did too, and Tanner took off his cap.
I brought the Hamilton with me, wrapped in my handkerchief. I put it in her hand and closed her fingers over it. “He wore it every day of his life after you,” I said. “I think he meant it for both of us.” She turned it over and read my mother engraving, Come home to us, and she said, “Your mother wrote this for me too, you know. She sent me a letter in 1946.” We agreed on the spot that the watch would live one year in Denver and one year in Bastogne, back and forth, for as long as either of us was living.
That summer I hung a forty second clock on the wall of the bungalow, a plain brass wall piece I built from scratch, regulated to the second. It chimes with the other forty one, every day at noon, and Tanner says the house no longer sounds haunted. It sounds, he says, like a place where people are expected. On the back of the case I scratched two names with a watchmaker needle, hers and mine. Underneath, small, I added a third: Axel Lindqvist. The man who was gone from us all those years, and never really left.