Chapter 21 - "Below the Floorboards"

The old zoning office smelled like mildew and rotted glue, the air heavy enough to taste. Boxes lined the back walls, their labels faded to ghost-gray, most untouched for over a decade. Brandt sneezed once, twice, muttering something about tetanus and wondering if the dust had teeth.

LeClair crouched beside a file cabinet marked AC-12: Permits, Appeals, Carr. 

“This was her department,” he said. “Amelia Carr processed everything from permit denials to building code appeals during the rezoning years. That factory?” He tapped the cabinet's dented flanks. “Passed through her more than once.”

“Already pulled her public records,” Brandt said, easing the top drawer open with care. “Spotless. Too spotless. Like someone cleaned her life out in reverse.”

The drawer jammed halfway. LeClair gave it a hard tug - metal clanged against metal - and the thing jerked free, spilling a cascade of yellowing folders onto the concrete floor. 

One file landed face-up, stamped Maddox Crane - Disciplinary File.

Brandt picked it up. “Crane. The guy who disappeared in 2012? Maintenance crew?”

LeClair nodded. “Last seen three days after his supervisor OD’d. We've got a half-filed statement he gave about faulty ventilation. Complaint never made it past intake.”

Brandt flipped through the pages. Handwritten notes. A reprimand from someone labeled only M.H. “This wasn’t a reprimand,” Brandt said slowly. “It’s a warning.”

He read aloud:

Time was kept. Step outside the gear again, and you won’t be counted next cycle.

LeClair's jaw tightened. “That’s not zoning language. That’s...clockwork.”

-

They dragged in anyone they could still find - surviving board members, factory clerks, even a janitor who used to clean Carr’s office. Most didn’t remember much. Or claimed not to.

But one name surfaced twice.

Richard Carrow.

Former state Medical Examiner. Quiet. Exact. Retired early. Rumored to lived in New Hampshire now-or maybe Vermont.

“He always wore a wristwatch,” one old board member said. “Wound it by hand every morning. Like it was sacred.”

Another muttered, “Didn’t talk much. When he did, it was about rot. About bodies that decayed too soon.”

Brandt looked at LeClair. “Carrow. That’s our R.C.”

LeClair circled the name twice.

“And his connection to Amelia?”

Brandt scanned a digitized staff roster. “Only once. Cross-departmental task force for public health inspections at state-zoned sites.”

“Let me guess,” LeClair said, dry. “One of those sites? The factory.”

Brandt nodded once.

-

That night, sleep refused him.

He sat in the glow of the case board, eyes tracing from Victim 1 to Victim 6. Their jobs. Their ties. All entangled into decisions made years ago - plans drawn by Amelia Carr and rubber-stamped by names like Martin Hale… and now Richard Carrow.

Carr’s case file had been gutted, but not erased. Someone had stripped away the meat but left the skeleton.

The phrase came back to him: “She’s not a gear. She only filed the plans.”

What the hell did that mean?

He pulled out the manila folder from the zoning office - Carr, A. - Private Residences. 

One permit stuck out: a renovation request for a 1908 colonial on Dyer Street.

Not in Amelia's name. In her father’s. Harold Carr. Deceased.

Approved. Zoning override signed by M.

The floor plan carried a hand-drawn note in red ink:

Subfloor cavity below office. 2.5 ft. deep. Not to be sealed.

Brandt grabbed his keys.

-

The Carr residence was dark, hunched in foreclosure. The notice on the door flapped in the wind like a frayed flag.

LeClair arrived without questions.

They pried open the door and stepped into air that felt... still. As if the house had been wound down years ago.

The office was at the back - narrow, paneled in cracked wainscoting, a defunct wall clock hanging over the desk, its pendulum frozen mid-swing.

They peeled back the carpet. The planks beneath were warped, swollen from humidity, but when Brandt's knuckles tapped across them, the fourth strike rang different - hollow, metallic beneath the wood, like tapping the casing of a clock.

He slid the crowbar into the seam. The nails screamed coming free, like something resisting the pull of time.

The board lifted.

-

Inside the cavity sat a sealed metal box, edges pitted with rust, the air faintly metallic - like breathing in the inside of a stopped watch. Resting on top: a pocket watch, its glass fractured, hands fixed at precisely 12:00.

Brandt lifted the box. The hinges gave a reluctant creak, like a gear turning after years of stillness.

Inside: old photographs, documents torn and singed, a notebook half-burned.

The first page bore a single name in dark, brittle ink:

Martin Hale.

LeClair exhaled. “We just found the missing time.”

Brandt’s gaze caught something tucked between two pages - a medical ID card, edges curled.. 

He turned it over slowly.

Richard Carrow, M.E.
State Forensic Office - Expired

The face staring back was older than the others, but watchful. Patient.

The kind of man who didn't just keep time. He kept what it left behind.