Before I start, let me warn you that this is a series and I am still not sure how long it will be or where it is going. The first chapter was inspired by the film The 355.
Twenty-Two Days Ago
“Jonas, I’m begging you. Please talk to me. Call me back,” Hannah said. She was barely holding herself together as she spoke, but she tried anyway. She wanted to make sure he couldn’t say that he couldn’t understand due to her tears. “Or at least let me know if I should call the police because all your stuff is gone and I don’t know if it's been stolen.”
Hannah ended the call. The tears came like waterfalls, following the curves of her face, down her neck, across her exposed cleavage, and soaking the top of her black dress.
She was still in her funeral clothes. She’d come home to see that Jonas had taken all his stuff during the funeral and seemed to be gone for good. She’d searched the house, initially concerned about robbers, but only Jonas’ stuff was gone. He had left no trace of his existence.
Not even a note.
Hannah sobbed into the paper towel she had grabbed to sop up the tears because it had been the closest thing to her. It had pink and red pizza grease polka dots and had been sitting on the coffee table for god-knows how long. Hannah was too distraught to care. She had been crying since this morning. She couldn’t say whether these tears were for Dad or Jonas and she refused to follow that trail of thoughts to its roots. But she knew it was probably some combination of the two.
She blew her nose and tried to pull herself together but she couldn’t. Her legs became like noodles and she melted into the floor like a character in a movie. Her arms joined her legs in their noodleness and they fell to her sides as her head and shoulders slumped down. Her grief was consuming her. The hard exterior she had put on at the funeral for her family’s sake melted off.
She hadn’t heard from Jonas since Dad had been hospitalized. She hadn’t had time to process that he was gone, between work and hospital visits, but all of a sudden it was painfully real that Jonas and Dad were both gone. Hannah was alone.
So is Mom, the thought hit her out of nowhere.
She couldn’t say how it happened, but she had gone from kneeling to lying on the floor. She stared at the legs of the coffee table, noticing for the first time how damaged it was. The black paint had chips in it. The heaviest seemed to be vacuum height.
She mulled that over in her mind. She always moved the coffee table to vacuum. And, to her knowledge, Jonas hadn’t vacuumed in the two years since they bought it because he felt that women should be the homemakers, even if they worked more hours than the man. Something about the damage looked fresh. Why would he vacuum after moving everything?
As the body-wrenching sobs melted away from the puddle on the floor that Hannah had become, she tried to figure out what to do next. For days now, Hannah had been spending her free time trying to reach out to Jonas or planning Dad’s funeral. The day’s events had robbed her of these two things. She stared distantly, digging deep for something to do now.
Hannah considered calling Mom. Or one of her siblings, but convinced herself that it wasn’t her place to bother them. They were dealing with their own problems. Mom was alone now. They had all lost Dad. They were all grieving. Mom had Olive and Bash. And Olive and Bash had their spouses and their little ones to console and help grieve over the loss of their Papa. That was a job and a half without adding their sister’s pain to it.
Hannah didn’t have kids of her own, but had helped two students grieve in her six months as a kindergarten teacher. She knew what it took from her as a teacher. She could only imagine the toll it took on a parent. So, when she called Mom or Olive, it was to let them talk. When she called Bash, it was to talk to his kids and try to get him to open up.
No one called her. They really didn’t want much to do with her. Dad had been her bond with her family. Hannah was a Daddy’s girl through and through. Without him, she feared losing any bond she had with her family.
Today she realized how much Jonas had alienated her from her family. She remembered the shocked look on the faces of her family when she walked into the hospital to wait with her family. They were more stunned to see her than she had been to find out something was wrong with Dad. She didn’t talk to them much at the hospital because they made their feelings about Jonas clear and that had pushed her away further.
But she was good at stepping up when she needed to. That’s how she ended up organizing the funeral. Mom wanted Bash to handle it, but his wife, Sophia, had called Hannah in the middle of the night a few days ago.
“Please,” Sophia begged. “Just plan it. Bash can’t.”
“Yeah, yeah. I can do that,” Hannah replied, absentmindedly. “Can you meet me for lunch tomorrow to give me the details?”
“No, but I’ll email you.”
The email never came, so Hannah started from scratch. She hadn’t thought about Jonas during the planning and the funeral. Today when she got home to see Jonas had cleared out his things, she thought of him.
She barely stopped thinking of him. So, she called him. Begging him to show back up. She needed someone to support her. At the same time, she found herself hating him. Today, she should be grieving Dad. Today should have been about Dad’s funeral. But, as always, Jonas had to make it about him. And since he made it about him, she wanted him here.
But she knew he wouldn’t come. Jonas wasn’t one to show up when things were bad. He was one to show up when things were better than good.
Hannah called Jonas again. She got his voicemail without a single ring.
“You’ve reached Jonas Sterling. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a brief message about what this is concerning and a name and number where I can get back to you. Have a nice day,” his ordered her.
“Look, if I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I’m changing the locks,” Hannah said. Her voice was more steady than she expected. “So get back to me or goodbye for good.”
She pressed the end button and a split second later, “Mom ICE” flashed on the screen. Hannah answered.
“Bash wants all his fishing poles, is that okay with you? Or do you want one?” Mom started.
The Thompsons did not deal with emotions well. They just worked through their problems with literal work. Necessary at the time or created. Hannah got the feeling Mom was creating work and looked forward to joining.
“What?”
“Do you want the fishing poles or not?”
“Mom, I don’t think you should be—”
“Oh, stop. Do you want the fishing poles? Bash wants ‘em.”
“You said that.” Hannah sighed. “Do you want help?”
“I just need to know, do you want the goddamn fishing poles or not?!” Mom screamed.
Hannah held the phone away from her ear as Mom continued shouting. She tried to shut out the yelling and ignore it because Mom wasn’t herself and hadn’t been in a long time. When Mom seemed to have calmed some, Hannah dared to speak again.
“I don’t want the fishing poles, but I’ll be there in an hour to help you. I know you’ll be overwhelmed by Dad’s shop. I don’t mind taking care of it,” Hannah said. “Love you, Mom.”
Mom was quiet for a long time.
“I love you too, kid,” Mom’s voice cracked. “I’ll see you soon.”
With that, Hannah changed into some grubby clothes and drove to Mom’s house.
“Thank you for taking care of the shop. I just can’t deal with all the papers and the clocks. I figure you used to come over and work with him so you can sort the mess right. I know there are some important documents in there so that needs to be done quickly,” Mom said after greeting Hannah. “Do you mind putting those in one place?”
“Yeah, I can do that.”
Dad was a bit of a hoarder and after his retirement took on clock repair. He had two desks in this home-office-turned-repair-shop. On occasion, Hannah had worked with him at one desk while he worked at the other. She only knew how to take apart and put back together what her dad called ‘simple’ clocks, but it was a cool skill to tell people she had.
The first thing Hannah did was put some music on her phone and plug it into the charger by his workbench. Then, to clean the desks, she began with the clock on top of his workbench. It was a German clock with three trains of gears. He had it mostly complete, but she would need to wind the mainsprings into the barrels and put them back into the clock, and lubricate it. She knew how to do that and figured they could sell a running clock for more than a broken one.
She moved to the table where he had the winder sitting. She used his old piece of t-shirt soaked in oil to lubricate the spring. She put it back in the barrel when she noticed a cardboard box on the floor under the table. It was free of dust unlike most of the boxes in the room and on the label, in Dad’s chicken scratch, it said, “ATTN HANNAH: In Case of Death.”
Hannah finished with the spring so it wouldn’t hurt her hands by flying out of control on the winder. Once the power was fully let down from the spring, she bent over to pull out the box. It was heavy and made a loud noise as it slid along the dirty floor.
She opened it, it was labeled for her after all.
It was a pile of old clock parts.
Hannah wasn’t sure what she expected, but a pile of unusable parts wasn’t it. This room was filled with clock parts, so what was so important about these ones? She looked around to see if more boxes had the same label for comparison, but this was the only one. She decided to dig through the box. She wanted to find out what was so important.
Rusted chime blocks, broken lantern pinions, gears with broken pivots, barrels with broken teeth, and all kinds of other things she had learned to repair but wasn’t good enough to do yet or things that were totally irreparable.
When she reached the bottom of the box, she felt her heartbreak a little and tears welled up in her eyes. Maybe these were all the things he hoped she would accomplish someday and she was going to let him down. Or maybe it was all trash and he just knew she’d be able to discern that. She put the parts back in, making a mental note to throw the whole box out when she was done putting the German clock back together.
She went back to putting the three mainsprings into their barrels. She looked for the tabletop vice when the second barrel cap wasn’t going on properly. Of course, the one with flat plates on it was nowhere to be seen, so she started digging around the piles of clock bits. She found it next to the box under the table where she was working. That’s when she noticed the box was about half an inch deeper than it seemed when she had emptied it originally. She also noticed that the bottom seam faced a different direction from the outside than it had on the inside.
She looked at it curiously but chalked it up to the confusion her grief had brought on. She decided to finish what she was doing with the tabletop vice instead of worrying about the box of trash. She secured the vice onto the desk, got all of the caps on the barrels, and put them back into the clock. Now all she had to do was oil the rest of the clock.
But the box was still bothering her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to it.
She decided to empty the box again before she oiled the clock.
At the bottom of the box, she popped up the flaps. There was a secret compartment. Inside was a manila folder and a note.
“Hannah,
If you are reading this, I’m dead and you got the box.”
Tears welled in her eyes as she continued reading.
“There are three things you need to know:
I wasn’t just an accountant. I worked for an intelligence agency. I was a field operative until I was injured. Then I began to work as an accountant for the agency. During this time I discovered discrepancies which seemed to be connected to an organization that I had heard rumors of.
In this folder, I have included clues that only you can follow along with the cash you need to make arrangements. This is why I had you update your passport in August. You will need it.
Whoever is leading this organization is a dangerous man. I think they have found me. Please protect our family by keeping them in the dark about this.
Remember that I love you.
Love,
Dad
PS Please leave Jonas. All of us hate him and I don’t trust him.”
Hannah rolled her eyes and opened the folder.
“What kind of game are you playing, Dad?” she chuckled, remembering what a prankster Dad had always been.
Inside the folder, there was a pile of hundred dollar bills and almost as many checks ranging in amounts from $5,000 to $8,000, each written from one of three different names, but in Dad’s handwriting. Dad had written something different in each of the Memos and numbered them from one to twenty-five. She leafed through the checks, realizing that there were not twenty-five checks. Some of the numbers were missing and there were only eleven.
Her brain told her this was some weird joke, but something in her heart prodded her to put the money, checks, and note into her pocket before inspecting the box for any more secrets. Once she was sure it was clean, it became a box of trash.
She oiled the German clock and got it running. Right about the time she put the movement and dial into the ornate box-shaped case, Mom entered the room.
“Doesn’t look like you got much cleaned up,” Mom said, looking around.
“I got that running. Figured we could sell some of the clocks to cover expenses. I know his hospital bills were outrageous, even with insurance.”
“Thank you,” Mom choked. “This means a lot to me.”
Hannah was caught off guard by Mom’s vulnerability.
“Let’s order pizza and then you can come help me get Dad’s crap out of the shed,” Mom said.
“Sounds good,” Hannah said. She finally noticed that the ball of sadness which had been sitting on her stomach since before the funeral and felt like constant gnawing hunger was real hunger.
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