The Time Collector Page 3

  Stuart didn’t specify the location, but Roan understood. Their first spot was Hueco Tanks, where they’d climbed four years ago. Why Stuart had relayed everything in code was a question Roan was looking forward to getting answered.

  Hopefully Stuart had a good reason for standing him up. He was always traveling in some foreign country, exploring obscure locales with limited cell phone reception. Roan would work on tracking him down when he got back home.

  Since he was at the park, he decided to get in a few climbs before he headed back. Hueco Tanks was the bouldering mecca of Texas. The park covered 860 acres and had over two thousand “problems,” what boulderers called potential climbs.

  Bouldering was climbing with bare hands and without rope, and the climbs were rated by a system of V1 to V17, with 17 being the hardest. Roan had been climbing since he was a teenager, starting with V1s and working his way up until soon he was climbing V9-plus-rated problems, routes only expert boulderers could attempt. Climbing, like the hand mudras, helped him to clear his mind and find balance. It was the only time he could take off his gloves and stay grounded. Today Roan was about to ascend his favorite problem at the park, Terremer—it was also the hardest climb in the park, a V15.

  He stripped off his gloves and jacket, wearing a lightweight T-shirt and black Arc’teryx Gamma climbing pants. The pants were his favorite, a four-way stretch fabric with double-weave knees. He took out his climbing shoes from his backpack and wiped them down before putting them on. Then he grabbed his chalk bag and hung it from the hook at his belt along with a small dusting brush he used to clear leftover chalk marks and debris off the rocks. Before chalking up, he did some deep stretches to prepare.

  When he put his white-chalked hands on the boulder, the rock was cool beneath his fingertips, but not too cold. The weather was on the warmer side, in the high sixties, a perfect day to climb for early December. A lot of climbers visited the park from November through March, but today not too many people were around. Roan could see a group of college kids in the distance trying to climb a V5 problem. At least he would have Terremer all to himself.

  He started his ascent like a graceful spider, the igneous stone solid beneath his grip. His body twisted and turned as he read the rock, finding the hand- and footholds with ease. His climbing shoes forced his weight to the front of his feet and made his toes curl.

  He turned his hips on the next sequence to stay close to the wall and set up for the next move. Soon his muscles were straining with each maneuver, and his breath began to come in shorter bursts. As he ascended he took in all the tick marks, chalk holds, and rubber shoe scuffs from previous climbers written like a story left behind. Roan could feel the fierce determination of everyone who had climbed Terremer before him, and it fueled him to keep going.

  He climbed like a dancer, his body elegant and lean. No energy was wasted. He performed a tricky crossover arm move that ended with a two-finger pocket hold and soon passed the crux of the climb, the hardest point, to finish the ascent.

  At the top of Terremer he stared out over the park and took in the expanse. The climb had invigorated him. He only wished Stuart had made it.

  “That was awesome!” one of the kids at the V5 called over to him.

  Roan acknowledged them with a salute. Then he made the down-climb to the ground he’d spotted earlier. He checked his cell phone again—still no messages. He called his office to touch base with his business partner, Holly.

  “Hey.” Holly’s voice perked up. “On your way back?”

  “In a few hours.”

  “You got a package today from Stuart. I dropped it off at the warehouse for you. But isn’t he with you?”

  Roan tried to swallow his frustration. Why had Stuart sent him a package? “He didn’t show.”

  “Well, that was flaky of him.” Holly didn’t have the highest opinion of Stuart. She was also Roan’s oldest friend. “I have some good news,” she told him. “I located Faye Young. We spoke. She’s in Michigan.”

  A sense of relief filled him. They had been searching for Faye Young for some time now. His nonprofit corporation, the Heirloom Foundation, wanted to present Faye with a lost heirloom that had belonged to her great-grandmother. “Are you scheduling a flight out?” he asked her.

  “This evening.” Holly had been busy making these trips for the foundation, which she’d done without complaint, believing in the mission of the nonprofit as much as he did. Before she hung up, she mentioned an interesting video that she’d come across on the internet. “I thought you’d want to take a look at it. I sent you the link.”

  * * *

  Roan spent a few more hours climbing and then headed back to the airport. For domestic trips he always flew private, and for this trip had chartered a light jet that sat eight. The cost was worth it if it meant he could avoid busy airports and people. Crowds made him uneasy even with his gloves on.

  After the plane took off, he settled in for the two-hour flight back to New Orleans and opened up his laptop to check email. The one from his mother made him grimace.

  From: Dr. Jocelyn Matthis, University of Oxford

  Please come for dinner. I have some questions for you on a Bonaparte matter you might be able to resolve.

  -M

  Roan shook his head. She made it sound like she was next door and not across the Atlantic in Great Britain. He replied with a simple:

  Tied up. Soon.

  He hit send, knowing that would not please the professor. He could imagine her at her computer with her reading glasses perched low on her nose, blinking balefully at the screen like an owl.

  The next email was from Holly with the promised link. He clicked on it to find recent footage from an Antiques Roadshow convention in Los Angeles.

  The subject header read: “Psychometrist finds million-dollar pocket watch with the power of her hands!”

  Roan leaned forward, now engaged. He launched the video to watch an attractive blond woman standing next to an appraiser while a tall teenage boy hovered behind her. The pair had a California beach vibe about them. The teenager was in board shorts and flip-flops and had a thick braided cuff around his wrist. All that was missing was his surfboard.

  The appraiser shook the woman’s hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Melicent Tilpin,” she said, her eyes avoiding the camera.

  “Welcome, Melicent. Is this your brother?” He smiled, glancing to the boy, and she nodded. “So what have you brought us today?”

  The woman held out a gold pocket watch.

  “Well now—” When the appraiser took it, he stopped talking. Seconds passed until he said, “Good heavens.”

  He opened up the dial and peered at her over the rim of his examining glasses. “Where on earth did you get this?”

  “At a flea market,” she said, crossing her arms, looking nervous.

  “A flea market? How extraordinary.” The appraiser leaned down to study it closer. “What we have here is an original pocket watch by Abraham-Louis Breguet from 1790. You can see his engraved signature here on the dial. Do you know who he is?”

  The woman hesitated and then shook her head no.

  Roan could tell she was lying.

  The appraiser chuckled. “Only the best watchmaker of all time. This is one of his first, classic ‘Grande Complication’ pocket watches with a tourbillon, his most precise timepiece. These watches took years to assemble.” The appraiser was talking with his hands in excitement. “Very few are in circulation. Most are in museums. The Breguet company usually buys them back when they enter the market. The last one sold for one point five million dollars.”

  The woman was too stunned to stay anything, then she put her hand to her heart.

  “And you say you found this at a flea market?” the man pressed.

  “Yes,” she whispered. Her eyes welled with tears. Her hands were shaking as she covered her mouth. Her brother put his arm around her.

  Roan watched the video, riveted.

  “H
ow did you find this at a flea market?”

  “Someone was selling a collection of old watches, and I put my hands over them. This one felt special and I knew—” She hesitated. “I feel things with my hands sometimes.”

  The appraiser didn’t know what to make of that. “You’re saying you felt this watch was special with your hands?”

  She nodded, her expression clearly showing she knew it sounded implausible. “Sometimes I pick up stuff and I can sense things, their history.”

  “Well, that is something,” the man said, trying to make things more exciting for the cameras. “You definitely found a winner! Like winning the lottery, I’d say.” He handed the watch back to her. “This might be the biggest discovery we’ve ever had on this show. You’re the one making history.”

  Melicent looked at the camera, as if remembering the crew was recording her.

  The image froze.

  Roan stared at her face, seeing the secrets in her eyes. She had just admitted she was a psychometrist to the world. It didn’t seem like the appraiser understood.

  Roan replayed the video three more times, each time his amazement mounting. He had found someone else like him.

  As he watched the clip again, he understood the woman’s emotional reaction at discovering the Breguet pocket watch. Years ago, when he found his first antique worth more than a million dollars, he’d experienced the same catharsis at finding something so precious to history it was worth a fortune. That was ultimately what the dollar amount signaled: the weight of an object’s worth in time.

  Afterward, his life had changed forever.

  Roan leaned back and watched the video once more. Without second-guessing his actions, he fired off an email to Holly to have their research team gather all the information they could on Melicent Tilpin. Then he picked up the phone and called the pilot in the cockpit to see if he could reroute their flight to Los Angeles instead of New Orleans.

  He had to meet her.

  4. THE SNOW GLOBE

  CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA

  AFTER FINDING BURROUGHS’S PEN LAST MONTH, Melicent began seriously researching psychometry and was currently reading an excellent book on the subject titled Mastering Psychometry, written by Max Woods in the 1990s.

  Psychometry technically meant measuring the soul of things. Psychometrists had the ability to connect with the memory that resided within an object when they held it in their hands, even reexperience it, and a psychometrist could, by training the mind, tap into any point in history. The world was energy in motion, and every moment in time left an imprinted copy of itself, like a hologram or a recording. Just as a shell was rolled by the waves and held the memory of the ocean, all things in the world recorded the moments that surrounded them. Information was never lost but remained perfectly preserved, and every moment of the past lay dormant, waiting to be rediscovered. Woods even went so far as to say that psychometrists were the archaeologists of the future.

  Melicent’s eyebrows rose when she read that. Did a lot of people have this ability? Because she’d never heard of it before or met anyone else who did.

  The book went on to explain how many psychics relied on their hands to sense the unknown, intuit the future, or track down someone who was missing. They often held personal objects belonging to a person to gather information, but the actual mechanics of psychometry was different. A psychometrist could actually revisit the past.

  Impressions or “imprints” could be received as physical reactions, emotions, images, or sound. Usually psychometrists favored one or two sensory channels, and each person had different levels of skill. Some psychometrists had more capability; and the most highly sensitive psychometrists could receive impressions by all four channels to the point where, when they held an object, they became transported to a different time and place in the past altogether. It depended on the talent of the individual.

  Melicent read the book’s baseline questions in the “Uncovering Your Talent” chapter: Do your moods swing in a crowd? Do social events leave you feeling drained? Do you sometimes have trouble determining where a particular feeling is coming from?

  Melicent kept reading, thinking a definite yes on all counts—yes, she was hypersensitive and sometimes weary after dealing with groups of people. She also did sometimes sense or think random things when she shook someone’s hand or when she sat down on other people’s furniture.

  What if furniture could talk? Well, according to this book, it did.

  Melicent looked down at her hands, feeling as if they belonged to a stranger. She had found an old pen, a Tiffany lamp, and a priceless pocket watch, objects she could identify simply by touch that were worth more money than she knew what to do with.

  The reality was, she had a hard time accepting what had happened—that she had made the discovery by psychic touch or psychometry or whatever she should call it. The appraiser was right. It did feel like winning the lottery, only she hadn’t bought a ticket.

  Now all she had left to do was to sell the two antiques. At the moment the lamp was in her bedroom and the Breguet pocket watch was hidden under a floorboard in her mother’s closet.

  Tomorrow she had an appointment with a representative from Breguet at their store on Rodeo Drive. Maybe she would begin to believe this was all real when the money was in the bank.

  She glanced at the clock on the wall and grimaced. There was still an hour to go. Why she was at work today when she’d found a $1.5 million pocket watch, she didn’t know. Maybe now she could quit her job and try something new. She’d been hovering in an in-between stage forever while she considered the next step in her career. Years ago, when she chose to major in fine arts in college with a focus on sculpture, she hadn’t considered how unemployable she’d be after graduation. It wasn’t like businesses were lining up to hire sculptors fresh out of school.

  For the past four years she’d been working full-time managing The Trove, a high-end gift store in Culver City that sold art, collectibles, and jewelry. She crafted crystal snow globes on the side and sold them at the shop.

  She designed and constructed the globes by hand—and they were not the cheesy holiday-themed kind showcasing spooky pumpkins or Santas on sleds. Her globes were exquisite works of art mounted on chunks of granite that evoked the feeling of capturing a daydream.

  Inside the glass balls were whimsical cityscapes and microforests and tiny lifelike sculptures. She sold on average one, sometimes two, a month for two hundred dollars apiece. There wasn’t a huge market for ornate snow globes, but she loved making them more than anything else. It took her several months to create one, so the profit margin was ridiculously low.

  She debated getting out her latest globe to help pass the time. She’d been creating a tiny miniature of Edgar Rice Burroughs sitting at his desk, pen in hand, dreaming up the story of Tarzan with a forest behind him and a boy swinging from the vines on the trees. She’d started the design the day after she found Burroughs’s pen, feeling compelled to capture the image in her mind.

  She was about to get it out when the door jingled and a customer walked in.

  “Welcome” died on her lips when she saw him. Melicent didn’t know what struck her first: the fact he was dressed all in black or his raven-like hair. Charisma radiated from him.

  When his eyes met hers, they landed on her with such concentrated force she held her breath. He had a look on his face like he knew her and had come to speak with her.

  She said “Good evening” and waited for him to say something in return.

  He only gave her a polite nod and turned away to browse, keeping his hands in his pockets.

  She sat there openly staring at him, more than intrigued. Musician was her first thought. Or an actor. The man was riveting. Maybe he was an athlete. He looked athletic and was somewhere in his early thirties. He had a self-contained air about him that offset his compelling looks, an intensity that dialed him back from the world and made her second-guess his profession altogether. Whatever he was, he loo
ked out of place.

  “Let me know if you’d like to see anything,” she finally offered. She looked down at her closed book, wondering if she should open it again and pretend to read.

  She glanced up at him from the corner of her lashes as he toured the space. He strolled past the iron wind sculptures from Spain, the batik bags from Indonesia, and lingered over a coral dragon from China she had showcased on a stand. The dragon was one of the stars of the shop next to the exquisite Japanese obis that hung on the main wall. The ornate kimono sashes were over fifteen feet long, and Melicent had displayed them near the ceiling like stunning rivers of silk.

  Her mystery customer neared her collection of snow globes, and she waited for him to walk past them too. Instead he stopped and leaned in closer. For several minutes he hovered, looking at each one.

  She watched him take his hands out of his pockets. Her eyebrows rose at his leather gloves. Who wore gloves in L.A. in eighty-degree weather? Granted it was December, but it was warm outside.

  He began to slip off his right glove one finger at a time. Then he reached out and touched one of the globes with his bare hand.

  Melicent watched his fingertips gently trail along the glass before he picked it up. He had beautiful hands, like a pianist. She knew it was rude of her to stare at him so long, but she couldn’t look away.

  The globe he was holding was the one she’d made when she had to move back home to take care of her mother. Inside the orb was a collection of moonstones precariously balanced on each other—though in reality they were glued together—to create the illusion of stone-balancing art within a water-filled sphere.

  “That one’s a Zen garden,” she said, feeling the need to break the silence.

  The man kept holding it while he stared at the rest of her collection. His eyes had a faraway look in them.

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell him she was the artist. Everything about him unnerved her as the minutes passed. She tried to think of something to say, but then he turned and looked at her, and all the thoughts running through her head retreated out of reach.