The Inheritance Paradox
Fifteen (My Story)
I STAYED UP WRITING all night, while the story was fresh in my mind. Of course, I edited and added to it as I found out more details before I published it here. Having Dad start to hyperventilate at the dinner table as he held the little pendant Brenda was wearing was a shock. He got himself under control, but we’d all seen how much it affected him.
“What is it, Dad?” Brenda asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing. It reminded me of something I’d seen once before a long time ago. I didn’t realize it was in Lynn’s collection. That must have been where I saw it,” he said.
I glanced at Megan. She raised an eyebrow and shook her head. Dad had said two names. Sasha, whose story I’d written about in the Chicago Fire adventure, and Rachel, who Megan and I had just discovered in the high school yearbooks. In a photo of the new grads on the school steps, Dad had been wearing a pendant on the outside of his graduation gown. And beneath his and Rachel’s Halloween photo, the caption included the motto, “Unicorns forever.”
I let Brenda and Megan read the story the next morning, but I had to get to work, even if I was sleep deprived. The project had been fast-tracked, and the engineers were ready to start coding as soon as I finished review of the specs. It was hard to keep my attention on my work.
More and more, I was convinced that Dad had experienced something when he was younger. I couldn’t accept that it was actually time travel, but I supposed there were some other explanations. Perhaps he had given the pendant to his first wife, Mary. Then, after their divorce, she simply ditched it and Lynn’s mother or grandmother had picked it up at a thrift store. Missing it later, Dad invented the story of giving it to Sasha after the great fire. It made a strange kind of sense to me and didn’t involve my father in any supernatural adventures.
I would like to have talked it all over with Brenda and Megan, but I was so beat after my sleepless night and long day at work that I went to bed right after dinner.
“Of course, the alternative is that Dad’s time travel story was true and he gave the pendant to Sasha—whose last name we never found out—and that Sasha was an ancestor of Mom’s,” Megan said.
“You are supposed to have the scientific mind,” I said. “I’m the one tasked with writing stories that sound almost like they could have happened.”
“Well, you do a good job of it. For my end of things, we’ll have to wait for the DNA results when I get back to the Institute and can run more tests,” Megan agreed, sort of. “The thing is that when the impossible has been eliminated, we have to consider the improbable.”
“But time travel is impossible.”
“We have no concrete evidence of that. There have been numerous scientific papers written that define various parameters for temporal travel. Simply having not yet realized it doesn’t mean it hasn’t or won’t happen in the future.”
“But if someone from the future traveled back to our age, we’d know about it, wouldn’t we? There would be some kind of evidence,” I argued.
“Having not yet discovered something is not proof that it doesn’t exist,” Megan said. “Take this nucleic acid I’m trying to track down. It seems to have never been discovered before. Does that mean it didn’t exist?”
“I see what you mean, I guess. It just seems so far out on the improbability scale that it’s ridiculous.”
“Wait and see. Collect more stories and see how they connect together,” Megan admonished.
“Right. Well, we have another day of packing and cleaning before you go back to the Institute. Maybe he’ll tell another story.”
Megan was not idle in her research. Just because I went to work and she was reporting remotely each day for a little while, didn’t mean she wasn’t continuing to try to chase down details about our father.
“You keep writing down the stories, and when you are able, get up to Grand Rapids and investigate the college there. They really don’t have much in the way of an online presence outside their current catalog and enrollment. It still seems to be a pretty conservative religious school, so brace yourself. The president of the college is a minister who graduated from there, so it’s pretty inbred, too.”
“I’ve got a lot of work to do. Writing up Dad’s stories is going to be about all I can handle until after we get them moved. Too bad you can’t be here for the sale in two weeks. I still question the advisability of holding it over the holiday weekend. Do people go to yard sales the day after Independence Day?” I asked.
“I don’t think there’s been an announcement yet. If you think it should wait another week, you can make that suggestion. But that would get you awfully close to their move date,” Megan said.
“You know, it’s getting so I think I need to go through my own home and start downsizing. Zach has graduated and Lisa is two years away from graduation. Maybe Brenda and I should be ready to move to something smaller and put our focus on travel,” I sighed.
“Let me know if you figure out the secret to retirement at fifty, okay?” she laughed.
“Yeah.”
“In the meantime, I’ll see what I can uncover online regarding the Holbrook family history. It’s possible one of Dad’s siblings or our cousins have uploaded some genealogical information. I’ll keep you informed. I’ve started posting inquiries on genealogical forums. If it yields any results, though, I’ll send it to you to follow up on.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Friday, I ran down to the mall during my lunch break. I knew there was a watch repair shop there and I wanted to find out more about the old pocket watch Dad had let me take. I’d been carrying it in my pants pocket, and I looked at it often. I thought I’d see if the shop could get it cleaned up and maybe I’d find a chain of some sort to attach to it so I wouldn’t risk losing it.
“Hey, I wondered if you could take a look at an old watch and give me an appraisal and repair estimate,” I said when the watchmaker had asked me how he could help. I handed him the watch. It felt a little strange to let someone else handle it. I wondered if Dad had felt like this when he gave it to me.
“Well, this is pretty. Some nice engravings on the case and cover. It’s kind of a half-hunter case. It isn’t hinged in back. Still a pretty piece,” he mused as he fastened a jeweler’s loupe in his right eye. He examined the case carefully, trying to twist it a little. “Hmm. How old? You know?”
“My dad said it was given to him in 1979,” I said.
“A lot older than that, I’d say.”
He finally got around to opening the cover and looking at the face. He puzzled over it, tilting the watch one way and another. He examined the face through his loupe.
“No watchmaker mark on either the face, or the back, or inside the cover. It’s very unusual. I’d have to say this isn’t actually a watch at all,” he finally said.
“What is it?”
“Hard to say. I don’t recall ever seeing anything quite like this. It’s almost as if it was designed by someone who didn’t really know anything much about watches but had a good eye for jewelry. A piece of artwork, maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Start around the outside of the face,” he said. “It looks like roman numerals, but there are only ten, not twelve. Inside that is a row of zodiac signs. See how they don’t line up with the outer ring? There are twelve signs of the zodiac and on a regular watch, they’d line up with the hours. Then we have moons. There are thirteen lunar months in a year, and I count thirteen moon symbols.”
He pointed each item out to me. Some of them I’d figured out but didn’t really understand. I could count the Roman numerals, but even though he said there were ten, they weren’t I-X. The numerals were C to MM. So, counting by the hundred, but instead of the top number being 1,000, it was 2,000.
“Now, inside that is a compass rose. It’s divided in eight for the four cardinal directions and the four halfway points. Doesn’t quite line up with the twelve or the ten, and certainly not with the thirteen. Hmm.” He paused as he studied the watch face some more. “There’s just no reason for a compass rose on a watch unless there is a needle pointing the direction. And these symbols at the points are not directional. I’m no expert on this area, but I’d have to guess that these might be pagan symbols for the wheel of the year.”
“You’ve identified more things than I could,” I said. He wasn’t finished yet.
I watched in fascination as he seemed to see things I couldn’t comprehend.
“Can you see the dotted star? It’s pretty faint.”
He moved the watch under a lighted magnifying glass and pointed with a probe. I nodded.
“It has fine dots that could symbolize something. Otherwise, there would be no reason not to make it a fine line instead of dots. I’d say they mark the twenty-eight-day cycles of the lunar months the points are aligned with. I’m amazed there is no division of hours on the face, and there is only one hand. It points to a completely different dial that is only faintly visible. Maybe it glows in the dark.”
“It isn’t running, though, right?” I asked.
“No. I’m not even sure it is intended to run.”
“Can you clean it up and get it running?”
I expected the answer to come with a quote in the hundreds of dollars.
“No,” he answered flatly. “If it actually has a works inside, it would be unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. But in order to tell that, I’d have to open it. I can’t. Except for the hinged cover, which may have been added long after the device was built, the entire case is one piece. There isn’t even a bezel to hold the crystal in place, and I wouldn’t bet on the crystal being anything we’d normally find in a watch. I have some guesses, but they are absurd and I wouldn’t want to test them.”
“Well, what is it and how was it made, then?”
“Everything I can tell you is that it isn’t what it appears to be. I’d call it a novelty, but it would be a very expensive one. So, I turn to a piece of jewelry or work of art. It’s beautiful. I believe this is something that was made to be worn or carried by a very wealthy person, strictly for show. It probably had an entire bit of lore associated with it years before your father acquired it. Yes, definitely a collector piece.”
He handed the watch back to me, but as we both had our hands on it, we felt it tick. His head snapped up.
“Hang on,” he said. He returned from his desk behind a workbench with a stethoscope. I held the watch in my hand as he applied the diaphragm to the watch and listened intently. Then he shook his head. “Must have just shaken something loose. It felt like the watch ticked, but there is no sound of movement in it at all. You might see if your father has any more stories about it. I’m afraid I can’t honestly help you. If you’d like to get rid of it, though, I’ll offer you $2,500 as a work of art.”
Suddenly, a recollection flashed through my mind of Dad saying a person had randomly offered him $1,500 for one of his books. He turned it down because if someone was willing to offer that on the spur of the moment, it was probably worth twice as much.
I thanked him and then glanced around the shop. I pointed at a bell jar made to display watches.
“How much is that?” I asked.
“The best one I have is this one for $45. It has a spindle and arm made to hang a watch from. Good choice,” he said. “If you aren’t going to sell it, protect it.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
That evening, I sat at the dining table and hung the watch from the arm, then sealed the jar.
I took the watch display to Mom and Dad’s on Saturday to show them and Megan what I’d done. I hoped he’d like it. He gave me permission to take it, but I’d give it back if he decided he liked this.
Yeah. I’m supposed to be helping downsize and instead I make a display of something he’s already agreed to give me. This is harder than I thought it would be.
“What did you do that for?” Dad asked, when I presented it to him.
“I took it in to have it cleaned and appraised,” I said. “The watchmaker couldn’t even open it and said it was a novelty created by an artist who knew the concept of a clock but didn’t really know what one looked like.”
“That sounds right. It will still keep going for a while, but I don’t want it back. We’ll call it my legacy to you.”
“Well, the reason I put it in a case and brought it to show you is because the watchmaker offered me $2,500 for it,” I said.
“What? Why didn’t you take it?” Dad scowled at the display.
“I just remembered you telling me about that book by Omar Khayyam. When the guy offered you $1,500 out of the blue for it, you refused it because it’s probably worth twice that. That watchmaker kept saying how it wasn’t a real watch but was pretty jewelry or artwork. I figure by the time Zach inherits it, it will be worth at least twenty grand,” I said.
“Might be right. But it will have to sit on your non-existent mantel. We don’t have one in the cottage,” Dad said.
“Yeah. That’s a problem with newer construction: they don’t have fireplaces. I’ll find someplace for it.”
We all got to work packing things. We were down to the last few books in the library. I was sure Dad had taken every book down and examined it. They sat in piles around his library and he directed me in putting them in boxes. Megan went to help Mom in her sewing room to pack up the last items. Brenda and Lisa started working on putting price tags on the things that had been designated for the yard sale in two weeks.
“Dad, you mentioned you know what the watch says. I can’t make heads or tails out of it. What’s it say?” I asked.
“Eighty-eight,” Dad said.
“What’s that, Dad? Nineteen-eighty-eight?”
“No. Eighty-eight years. I knew the travel would catch up with me eventually. The watch logged twelve years, two months, and seven days. Plus, some minutes. I’ll be seventy-six years old in three months. So, I guess we could make it eighty-seven years.”
“I don’t get it, Dad.”
“Every minute I logged time traveling was a minute I lived in excess of my life. If I was traveling a year, I got back a year older,” he said.
“You traveled twelve years? I thought you said you only traveled that one year,” I said.
“That’s the real sucker punch. During that one year, I added twelve years to the time I’d lived. So now, I’m physically twelve years older than my birth age would say,” Dad said.
He waved me toward the shelf on which the only remaining book was the box of his treasures. He opened it and sorted through things. I knew I was in for another story.
“Here we are. This ribbon is all I have from three years of my life.”
I was shocked. I wanted to write it all down immediately, but by the time Dad finished the story, and I had the last of the boxes packed for the library, we wanted to head out for our farewell dinner with Megan. That went late and I didn’t dare stay up all night or I’d fall asleep when I drove her to the airport Sunday morning.
I’d promised to help Zach with his car on Sunday afternoon, so I couldn’t write the story then and I wasn’t going to try to put in another day of work with no sleep the night before. So, I ended up carrying my fountain pen and journal around and jotting down pieces of the story every time I had a break. It was a little choppy as a result, but later, I was able to rewrite and add information that we dug up from future stories.
He’d started to consider his time travel to be dreams of past lives, like Mom said.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
