Eleven minutes
On her first morning as caretaker of Bellweather House, Mara set the greenhouse clock by her phone. By the next morning, it was eleven minutes late. She corrected it again. On Thursday it was late by exactly the same amount. The old mechanism, recently serviced and polished, ticked with the self-confidence of something that had never made a mistake in its life.
The house was preparing to reopen as a community garden. Mara's instructions were practical: clear the paths, label the tools, and find the planting notebook that the former gardener, Ada Vale, had promised to leave. Ada had moved to live near her daughter and could not return before opening day. Her last letter offered one maddening clue: everything important was still where they used to sit.
Mara tried the obvious places. There was no notebook beneath the potting stool, inside the wicker chair, or behind the low bench near the ferns. When she dragged that bench toward the door to sweep, its foot caught a loose tile. Beneath the tile lay a narrow brass key, clean enough to suggest it had been handled recently.
At that moment the side door opened. Tomas, the retired groundskeeper, paused with a watering can in his hand. His eyes went first to the key, then to the clock. Mara asked whether he had been adjusting the time. He answered too quickly: the clock had always run late. Yet the serviced clock had kept perfect time all afternoon, and Mara had begun to suspect that its mistake belonged to someone else.