The clock on the Harrow Falls courthouse has had no hands for seventeen years. It still runs. You can hear it from the bench outside the diner, ticking at nothing.
My name is Marjorie Pell. I am sixty-three. For thirty-four years I ran the archive at the Harrow Falls Courier, which newspaper people call the morgue. Normal people call it a room full of boxes.
The Courier closed in 2014. I took the morgue home. It lives in my garage now, in three hundred and six shoeboxes.
Each shoebox has an accession number. So does the garage.
"You numbered the garage," my neighbor Dot said, the first time she saw the label.
"It's a structure. Structures get numbers."
"What's my house?"
"You don't want to know."
She did want to know. It's 1998-044. She has never forgiven me for the 1998.
Here is what everyone in Harrow Falls knows about the clock.
It was built in 1909 by a man named Ambrose Teague, who also built the bandstand and two of the four bridges. The hands were cast iron, painted black, with gold tips shaped like arrows. The minute hand was five feet long. The hour hand was three and a half.
On October 17, 2009, the town held its clock centennial. There was a parade. There was a brass band from the high school and a cake shaped like the tower.
There were two thousand people in the square. That is about four hundred more than live here.
At seven o'clock that morning, the mayor looked up to start the countdown. The clock face was blank.
Someone had taken the hands in the night. Both of them. Eight and a half feet of cast iron, gone from the top of a tower with one locked door.
The countdown happened anyway. People counted down to nothing. Then they ate the cake, because it was already cut.
The Courier had a centennial front page ready that morning. I had laid it out myself. The headline said A CENTURY ON TIME.
It never ran. It's in shoebox 2009-115, which is labeled Never Ran.
The police investigated for eleven months. They interviewed ninety people and found nothing. The reward reached four thousand dollars. A psychic from two counties over said the hands were "near water," which in Harrow Falls describes everything.
Dot Fennimore was the town clerk then. She is seventy-one now and retired, like me. She did not trust the police to finish the job. So she started her own file.
The file is a recipe box full of index cards. Each card is a suspect. There are two hundred and twelve of them.
"You're in there," she told me once.
"I know. I'm card ninety."
"How do you know that?"
"Because you're card ninety-one. You filed yourself right after me."
"For completeness," Dot said. She says that about the card every time. She says it the way other people say grace.
The only person in town who never stopped caring about the clock was Arlo Quist.
Arlo is sixty-six. He has been the clock keeper since 1994. It is a volunteer job with a key and a small brass plaque. Every Sunday at nine he climbs the tower and winds the mechanism with a crank the size of a tire iron.
He has done it every Sunday for seventeen years. For a clock with no hands.
"Why?" I asked him, years ago.
He wiped the crank with a rag. "The mechanism doesn't know," he said.
That was all he ever said about it. Arlo is a man of very few words, and he keeps most of them in reserve.
The news that started everything came on a Tuesday, in two parts.
The first part was the town council meeting. Mayor Gil Haverkamp is fifty-eight and sells insurance. He stood at the podium with a drawing on an easel.
"Folks," he said, "it's time. We've voted to install new hands. Aluminum. Very modern."
He tapped the easel. "We'll unveil them at Founders' Day, a week from Saturday."
The drawing showed two silver hands, thin as rulers. They looked like they belonged on a microwave.
"What about the old hands?" someone asked from the back.
"The old hands are a mystery," Gil said. "And mysteries have to end sometime. Let's let this one end on time."
He waited for a laugh. He got a cough from Arlo, who was in the front row with his arms folded. Arlo left before the vote on the parking meters.
The second part came that evening, in my email.
Subject: Important changes to the clips.com public archive
Dear clips.com member,
On October 31, the clips.com public archive will close permanently. All videos uploaded before 2015 will be deleted.
Thank you for being one of our 38 remaining active users.
— The clips.com team
I had forgotten I had a clips.com account.
clips.com was a video site from the middle of the 2000s. You could upload any video under three minutes. People posted cats, weddings, and skateboarding accidents.
The site was sold twice and renamed once, then renamed back. By 2012 it had mostly been forgotten, like a hat at a funeral.
I had opened the account in 2008 for work. The Courier wanted to post videos of the high school band. Nobody watched them. I kept the login on an index card, numbered, in a shoebox.
"Thirty-eight users," Dot said, reading over my shoulder. She had come over to borrow eggs and stayed to supervise. "Who are the other thirty-seven?"
"People who forgot to cancel."
"So they're like you."
"I didn't forget. I kept it in case."
"In case of what?"
I didn't have an answer. Then, around nine-thirty that night, I had one.
I was building a final clipping file on the clock. I do this for every big local story. The file holds every Courier article, every letter to the editor, every photo. The clock file was already four shoeboxes deep.
When people hear I keep clips, they assume I mean videos.
"Clips?" Gil had said once, at a fundraiser. "Like on clips.com?"
"Like with scissors," I'd said.
That night, for the first time, I wondered what clips.com had about the clock. If the archive was closing, somebody should look. Somebody should save what was there.
I searched "Harrow Falls." There were fourteen results.
Twelve were the high school band. I recognized them, because I had uploaded them myself. Their view counts were in the single digits. One was a dog catching a frisbee in the park.
The last one was titled "test test."
It was forty-one seconds long. It had been uploaded at 3:02 a.m. on October 17, 2009. It had four views.
Dot leaned in. "That's the night."
"That's the night," I said.
I clicked play.
The video was grainy, the way phone videos were in 2009. It looked like it had been filmed through a dirty aquarium. There was rain on the lens.
But I knew the picture. It was the courthouse tower, seen from across the square. You could make out the lit clock face and the dark railing of the catwalk below it.
A figure was on the catwalk.
Dot grabbed my arm. Her grip was surprisingly strong for a woman who files things for a hobby.
The figure reached up to the minute hand. It lifted, slowly, and came away from the face. The figure lowered it out of sight. Then it reached for the hour hand.
"Somebody filmed it," Dot whispered. "Somebody filmed it and put it on clips.com and never said a word."
"Four views," I said. "Nobody watched it."
"Somebody watched it four times."
At thirty-six seconds, the figure turned around. For one moment, it faced the camera. The streetlight caught its back as it bent to the ladder.
It was wearing a windbreaker. Navy blue, with yellow block letters across the shoulders.
The letters said COURIER.
Dot let go of my arm. She looked at me. I looked at the screen.
The Courier had ordered those windbreakers once, in 2001, for the staff. There were exactly nine of them. I know, because I kept the order form.
I was number seven.
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