The Case of the Buried Clock

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The coupe purred up the winding highway. Adele Blane’s dark eyes, usually so expressive, were now held in a hard focus of intense concentration as she guided the car around the curves. She was twenty-five, but, as her sister Milicent had once said, “Adele never looks her age. She either looks five years younger, or twenty years older.”

At her side, Harley Raymand held the door handle, so that swaying around the curves wouldn’t swing his weight over against his left elbow. The Army surgeons had managed to fix up the joint. “It’ll be stiff for a while,” they had told him, “and it’ll hurt. Try and work that stiffness out. Keep from jarring it as much as you can.”

A few hundred feet below the car, jumping from foam-flecked rocks to dark, cool pools, a mountain stream churned over boulders, laughed back the sunlight in sparkling reflections, filled the canyon with the sound of tumbling water.

The road crossed the mountain torrent on a suspension bridge, started a slanting climb up the other side of the canyon, mounted at length to a pine-clad plateau.

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