Free Reaching Through Time by Lurlene McDaniel Page B

not even for a drink of something cool.
    She dropped her tools and pulled off her gloves, smoothed her skirt.
    “Are you in charge of these gardens?”
    “I keep them up. I love flowers, don’t you?”
    “Sure,” he said, watching her hands flutter like bird wings as she talked.
    “How’s the work going?”
    “Slow. Be better if I had a computer. Don’t you miss having one up here?”
    She smiled politely but looked as if the words didn’t register for her.
    “You do have a computer back home, don’t you?”
    “Father’s not keen on some things.” She glanced away, turned back and changed the conversation with, “Tell me about yourself.”
    “Not much to tell. I moved here at the end of May. Before that, we were in Ohio.”
    “What about your family?”
    “I live with my mother.” He didn’t want to confess that he’d never known a father because his mother had never married. She’d just gone her own way, having her baby and raising him by herself. He’d stopped asking questions about his father years before. “How about you? Where’s your mom?”
    “She died giving birth to me.”
    Gina sounded sad, making him wish he hadn’t asked. “Sorry.”
    She shrugged, smiled. “Father’s done everything in the world to make me happy.”
    Drake got it. He was feeling as if he’d do anything to make her happy too. “I should get back to work,” he said, wadding up his paper bag.
    “And I have piano to practice,” she said.
    “I can’t play anything except my iPod,” he said.
    She again gave him a polite disconnected look.
    “You don’t have an iPod,” he said, as if filling in the blank. “A TV?”
    She shook her head and looked down at her hands, now stilled. “Just a piano.”
    He went back inside the house wondering how anyone lived without computers, iPods or TVs. Strange, he thought. But he guessed it was what people got used to that defined their lives. He was glad he didn’t have to live without such things.
    Drake spent the afternoon cataloging and listening to Gina’s piano music. The notes came down the stairs like strangers because the music she played wasn’t familiar to Drake at all. Classical, he guessed. Some of the music was fast and almost discordant. Some pieces sounded magnificent and bold, others soft and beguiling. He vowed to search iTunes that evening and become better acquainted with her musical tastes. No place for rock or rap or today’s latest bands in Gina’s world.
    She was still playing when the clock in the hall struck four. Drake looked at the short stack of artifacts he’d recorded and wasn’t impressed. He had to work faster. He lingered for a few minutes, hoping Gina would descend the stairs and tell him goodbye. She didn’t. He sighed, gathered his sweatshirt and went into the hall. He started toward the door but turned back and hobbled over to the great clock.
    The clock was much bigger than it had seemed yesterday, and very old, its wood dry and pockmarked. The face was marked with strange symbols and the hands were made of wood, not metal. Below the face was a boxy case fronted with wavy old glass, and inside was a copperpendulum that slid from side to side ever so slowly. Drake wondered if the clock needed winding. The
tick-tock
sound was mesmerizing, hypnotic. It seemed to him that time was leaking out of it.
    He leaned closer, trying to decipher the symbols. He reached into his pocket and drew out his cell, flipped on the camera feature only to see that it wasn’t working either. He shook his head in disgust. It had been working just fine before he got to work.
    “What are you doing?” Dennison’s voice thundered from behind him.
    Drake’s bad leg almost buckled as he spun. “Nothing,” he said. “I—I mean, just looking at your clock.”
    Dennison’s eyes were narrowed and his face looked angry. “Well, get away from it!”
    Drake inched around the professor. “Sorry … it’s unique—”
    “Don’t go near it, you hear?