Page 4 of The Book of Lost Hours

THERE COULD BE NO mistaking the girl who stood at the edge of the grave.

A forlorn, neglected thing in an oversize cardigan that puffed out from the sleeves of her coat.

She was not yet sixteen, and her freckled face and limp red hair made her seem even younger.

It was the hair, a luminous shade of copper, that gave her away, identifying her as the niece of the man in the casket.

Moira watched the girl through the haze of smoke from her cigarette.

She stood under an umbrella as the casket was carried over the muddy ground.

It was October, late enough in autumn that the leaves had begun to shake off their vibrancy.

Moira tossed her spent cigarette onto the ground and withdrew another from her coat pocket.

The silver lighter she carried gave a shuddering click as she lit it, carrying over the sound of the priest delivering his prayer for the fallen man in the casket.

The girl looked up at the noise. Moira smiled at her, the kind of cold, thin smirk that came most naturally to her.

The girl immediately looked away in discomfort.

They didn’t know each other, Moira and this girl, and it was clear that she wondered who Moira was. Why she was at her uncle’s burial.

It had rained every day since Ernest Duquesne’s death.

The city was waterlogged, sidewalks brimming with mud.

On the day of his funeral, it had rained so much that there had been talks of postponing, but in the end it was decided that they would go forward, leaving the procession to stamp through the muddy grass out to the gravesite.

The service had been sparsely attended. Moira hadn’t gone, but instead had watched from her car as mourners entered the chapel downtown, keeping stock of who was present.

Neighbors. Old schoolmates. The occasional distant cousin.

The moment the prayer was over, and the priest closed his book, they all filed out with great rapidity, not wanting to be seen lingering for reasons of self-preservation. Except for the girl.

In their absence, the girl stood alone at the edge of the grave with her eyes closed, head tipped slightly forward as rain fell on her head.

Her red hair clung to her temples, making her look even more pitiful than she already did.

Moira, who took great pride in her own appearance, had to remind herself that the girl was young, alone, and grieving, and therefore could not be expected to care about such things.

She moved around the edge of the grave silently and stood beside her, raising the umbrella so it covered the child as well.

At the sound of the rain hitting against the vinyl, the girl looked up in alarm.

“Amelia Duquesne?” Moira asked in a smooth, easy tone.

“Y-yes?” Amelia stuttered.

“My name is Moira Donnelly. I used to work with your uncle.”

“You did?”

Moira watched as her gaze dropped down to assess Moira’s outfit.

A knee-length pencil skirt, black turtleneck, cap-toe heels, and an unbuttoned leather trench coat, none of which seemed appropriate for an employee of the State Department where Ernest Duquesne had worked.

Add in the red lipstick, blunt bob cut, and side-swept bangs and Moira looked more like someone apt to be accused of being a beatnik than any sort of government employee.

“You and I met once,” Moira informed her. “When you were about nine. Do you remember?”

“Not really,” Amelia said, hands bunching around the sleeves of her cardigan. Wondering what someone from that part of her uncle’s life was doing here at his funeral after all he had been accused of. She was easy to read, this girl. They would have to fix that.

“Hold this for me, will you?” Moira asked, putting the umbrella in the girl’s hand.

She took it without question. Moira turned toward the grave, reaching into her pocket for a second cigarette.

“Funny how time works,” she lamented. “We always feel as though we’re standing at the precipice of our lives, all our years still stretched before us.

Not realizing that at any moment, something could come along and push us over the edge.

We are all immortal in our own time. Until we aren’t. ”

There was a pause as she lit her cigarette with the silver lighter. The girl stared.

“Ernest used to talk about you a lot,” Moira said offhandedly. “He was always telling us all how bright you were. You must be grieving for him now that he’s gone.”

Amelia’s eyes clouded over and she shook her head at once. “They’re saying he was selling secrets to the Russians,” she said hastily.

Moira smiled faintly. That wasn’t all they were saying.

They were calling him a communist. Ernest Duquesne.

Devoted civil servant. Distinguished war veteran.

Communist. Traitor. Spy. That’s what all the newspapers were writing alongside harrowing details about his death.

Shot through the head with state secrets still poised on his lips , they wrote.

He would have been arrested. Charged with treason and lit up like the Rosenbergs in ’53.

If it weren’t for the fact that he was already dead.

“And? Why should that change what he meant to you?” Moira asked.

Amelia bristled suspiciously. “Were you close? Is that why you came today?”

“I came because there’s something I wanted to ask you,” she said, getting to the point at last. “Your uncle had something very important in his possession when he died. I was hoping you might be able to help me locate it.”

“People have already been to our house. They searched his office… seized everything they could find that was at all tied to his work.”

Moira nodded impatiently. She already knew that. “The thing is, I work for a special department that isn’t affiliated with the agents who searched your house. What I’m looking for isn’t something that they would have taken notice of. They wouldn’t have known to look for it.”

“What is it?”

There was a pause. Rain hitting the umbrella over their heads.

“A watch.”

“A watch?”

“White dial with a gold bezel. By the watchmaker called Glashütte.”

Amelia’s eyes slid to the coffin. “That was the one he always wore.”

Moira glanced at the puffed sleeves of the girl’s sweater, noting the way she’d started tugging at the left one anxiously. “I was hoping you would know of another place where he might keep it. A relative’s house, perhaps. Or a lover’s?”

Amelia gestured to the empty graveyard. “Clearly not,” she said, with more snark than Moira had assumed her capable of. “Maybe he was wearing it when he died.”

Moira eyed Amelia for a moment, wondering how much to disclose but also wondering how much she might already know.

“As you might have surmised, it’s not just a normal timepiece.

It has special functions that most manual watches don’t, making it a very expensive asset.

One we would like to recover now that he’s gone. ”

“We?” Amelia asked.

“The department.” Moira withdrew a card from a different coat pocket. It had her name embossed in red ink the same color as her lipstick, accompanied by a phone number. “If you happen to come across it, give this number a call.”

Amelia pinched the card between two fingers. “Does this watch have something to do with the secrets my uncle was accused of selling to the Russians?”

Moira smiled at her grimly. “Let’s just say that if it were to fall into Russian hands, we might all find ourselves living in a very different world.”

“Does it have the secrets of the atom bomb engraved on the back or something?”

Moira pursed her lips. She knew there was a reason she usually steered clear of teenagers.

“There is more than one way to end a war, Amelia. And there are secrets far more dangerous than weapons of mass destruction.” She took a long drag on the cigarette, shielding it from the falling rain.

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”

To her surprise, Amelia perked up. “T.S. Eliot,” she said.

“You’ve read it?” Moira asked skeptically.

“My uncle gave me a book of his poems last Christmas.”

Moira wasn’t surprised. Ernest had always been a fanatic about poetry, able to quote the most obscure lines from memory. It stood to reason his niece would be the same.

“Then you’ll recognize this line. ‘Between the idea and the reality. Between the motion and the act’…”

“Falls the shadow,” Amelia finished.

Moira studied Amelia for a long moment, cigarette dangling between two fingers. “Don’t give the watch to any of the other agents. They won’t know what it means. When you find it, make sure you bring it to me. And only to me. Understand?”

“ If I find it, you mean,” Amelia said.

“Oh, I’m sure it will turn up.”

She dropped the spent cigarette into the wet grass. It fizzled out immediately, the glowing red extinguished in the muck. She pulled back the sleeve of her coat to reveal a watch of her own, a smaller model on a white gold bracelet.

“You’re going to be late for school, Miss Duquesne,” she warned.

At the mention of school, a look of dread swept across Amelia’s face.

And for good reason. Moira had been watching the girl for over a week, had dug into her records, and therefore knew all about her current situation at Pembroke Academy.

Though bright, her record came with a rather long list of demerits and absent notices.

As it turned out, Amelia Duquesne was quite the rebel beneath that mousy exterior.

Amelia handed back the umbrella and turned to go, casting one last glance at her uncle’s grave.

“Oh, and Amelia,” Moira said, waiting until the girl turned to look at her. “Whatever you do, when you find the watch…” She paused and looked pointedly at Amelia’s sleeve. “… don’t wind it.”