Free Tick,Tock,Trouble (A Seagrove Cozy Mystery Book 5) by Leona Fox Page A

one thing, another thing changes to compensate. But the really big thing about the watches was this: if you owned them all you were supposed to be able to control time. You could travel through time.”
     
    “So this guy Rumlin could travel through time?” Zack asked.
     
    “Well, no,” Sadie said.
     
    “He got all the watches built, imbued them with their special magic or whatever he did, but before he could use them to travel through time people began stealing them. He’d been talking in the local pub, telling his neighbors what he was doing. One of the watches was supposed to bring prosperity. Rumlin exaggerated his wealth and credited it to that one watch. So, of course, it was stolen first.”
     
    “And that was the end of time travel?” Zack asked.
     
    “Yes, but not the end of the story. For the rest of his life, Rumlin chased down the stolen watches, but he’d find one and another would disappear. He began to believe the watches couldn’t co-exist in physical proximity to one another for some reason. It was like the individual watches created a mitigating effect on their magic. Hang on a sec.”
     
    Sadie got up and filled a paper cup with water from the dispenser in the hall. When she got back, Mr. B. was sitting on Zack’s lap having his ears scratched.
     
    “So Rumlin spent the rest of his life searching for missing watches; never spending too much time in the presence of any one watch, and so never reaping the benefits of any of them. Which was probably just as well. Could you imagine coping with the side effects of twelve watches? Even if you could travel through time, you’d be so miserable it wouldn’t be worth it.”
     
    Sadie wondered what she should do with her watch. It was too dangerous to keep. Unless maybe if she took it apart, but it was too beautiful to destroy.
     
    “What do the other watches do?” Zack asked. “Besides bring prosperity?”
     
    “I couldn’t find references to all of them, but supposedly one would keep the sun from setting for a small amount of time, like an hour or something. That could be handy in the time before electricity if you needed to get something done before dark.”
     
    “Or if you were afraid of the things that go bump and needed to build a really big fire,” Zack said.
     
    “Exactly,” Sadie agreed. “If you are trying to keep vampires and werewolves at bay an extra hour could be lifesaving.”
     
    “Do you know any others?” Zack asked.
     
    “Well, they all had an opposite, a balance,” Sadie said.
     
    “There was a slow-time-down watch, so there was a speed-time-up watch. There was a watch to make the sun set faster. There was a watch that could make the sun rise faster. There was one that delays the sunset and one that also can delay sunrise. There was a watch that could briefly stop time, and one that could skip time.”
     
    “Skip time?” Zack asked, “How did that work?”
     
    “I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s like this: It’s eleven forty-five and you want it to be noon so you can go to lunch, so you skip the next fifteen minutes.”
     
    “And does the rest of the world have to skip those fifteen minutes, too?”
     
    “No. They get their fifteen minutes, but you give them up. You’d rather have lunch than your minutes so you sacrifice them. But the best watch is the one that keeps you young forever. It erases the effects of time on your body, so you always look and feel young. That’s the watch I want.”
     
    “Sadie Barnett, you look as young as ever. You don’t need that watch,” Zack said.
     
    “Flatterer,” Sadie said, and smiled widely. She had to love a man who lied so outrageously.
     
    "Sadie," Zack said, leaning across the desk, "I've got vacation time coming up, and I'm wondering if you and Mr. Bradshaw would consider sailing around the Florida Keys with me?"
     
    A warmth spread through Sadie's chest and she smiled widely. "We would love to sail the Florida Keys with you. But I