Free Time Thieves by Dale Mayer Page A

This person should be on the family tree then. She continued to go through box after box, but outside of a few trinkets, there were no books, journals, pictures, or any other identifying items. There was a beautiful handheld mirror. It appeared to be real silver, and there were tiny jewels or cut glass pieces inlaid in a delicate pattern around the edge and the front of the handle. On the back in a big ornately carved circle were the initials MH .
    Sari sat back on her heels. MH? Offhand, she couldn’t think of any relative with a name starting with that letter. Not that there were many relatives. Her father had been an only child. His mother had also been an only child. His father had a sister though, who’d died as a young woman. Damn, she couldn’t remember her name, but she’d have lived about the right time. Sari stared down at the mirror.
    This was likely to be her belongings.
    Maybe the parents couldn’t bear to part with them. As Sari surveyed the sad pile, she decided there wasn’t much here to remember a child by. As she repacked the various items of clothing, she searched pockets and creases, looking for anything she might have missed. Still nothing. She shrugged and packed it all away again – except for the mirror.
    The mirror was special. She laid it out on her shop desk and studied it. She had no plans to sell it, not when it was from a family member long gone, but it looked old. Very old.
    Sari realized that although she’d barely started in on the piles of stored belongings, she was already tired. Tea time, then. Maybe she’d recoup enough energy to continue. She wandered into the kitchen and filled the teakettle, and as she waited, she checked her emails. There were several responses she’d been looking for, one from the customer she’d emailed about the necklace and another about a small statue. Good…sales.
    There were several business emails that she took a moment to answer before she clicked on the last one. It was from Brodin, her father’s old friend. She’d kept in touch with him over the years. In fact, he’d been a big help to her and her mom back when her father disappeared. He’d been on the fringe, not quite a friend but also not quite a stranger.
    She read the message. Stopped, leaned forward, and read it again. “ Found any interesting watches lately? I hear you came home with a special one from your last trip. Interested, as always.”
    Not possible. How could he have known? Then Sari laughed. The collector’s world was small and if she’d been at the show, chances were good he’d been there too. Maybe not at the same time, but who knew – although she’d like to think he’d have come up and said hi to her.
    She read the short three-sentence message again then started to type out her response. “Not sure how you knew, but I did indeed make an interesting find on my last trip. Too early to tell how interesting,” and she sent it off. He was also one of the few people to have heard her and her mother’s garbled version of events as he’d come by with the second watch in the set soon after her father disappeared. Her father was supposed to wait for his return so they could compare the two watches. Instead, her father had been so interested he’d taken an early look.
    Lucky for Brodin that he hadn’t been there at the time. Maybe they’d both have disappeared.
    Brodin had given her and her mother both long, disbelieving looks at the time, deciding they were hysterical females, and that her father had finally washed his hands of them. He proceeded to come up with a more factual version.
    Then he’d called the police.
    As she’d grown older, she hadn’t been able to forget his watch had supposedly been one of the matched set. She’d asked him about it early on, but his had been stolen a few years after her father’s disappearance. He’d been looking for it ever since.
    So had she. It was likely her closest link to finding out what happened to her father.
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    Four