The Time Collector

by Gwendolyn Womack

  Parker crossed his arms, looking ready to disagree. He’d never seen this green lamp in his life. She stepped on his foot to keep him quiet.

  “My grandma let me keep it in my room.” Another lie—the one grandmother she knew had died when she was four, well before Parker was born. She never knew her father’s mother—she never knew her father either for that matter.

  “And you had no idea what this was?” The Antiques Roadshow representative looked fascinated and gave her an encouraging nod.

  “No … just Granny’s funny old lamp.” Not only did Melicent know what the lamp was, but also how old it was and who made it. “Is it worth anything?” she asked tentatively.

  “I’ll say!” The Roadshow representative chuckled and launched into his appraisal. “What you have here is one of the first Tiffany table lamps from the early nineteen hundreds.” He pointed out its features with the pen in his hand. “Notice the signature geometric pattern, the alternating bands of monochromatic glass segments, the bronze stand. It’s in excellent condition. The last lamp like this one auctioned for…”

  Melicent held her breath, waiting for the number.

  “Fifty-seven thousand dollars.”

  Melicent was too stunned to respond.

  “Fifty-seven thousand dollars?” Parker squealed. “For a lamp?”

  The appraiser beamed at the pair of them and shook Melicent’s hand. “You have quite a reading lamp there, young lady. Congratulations,” he said, signaling it was time to move along and let the next person in line have a turn.

  The exhibit hall at the Los Angeles Convention Center had accumulated quite a crowd. Lines snaked all over the enormous space with people waiting to show off their heirlooms to see how much they were worth.

  Melicent grabbed Parker’s hand and led him away. Her legs felt weightless, like she could run a marathon.

  She was holding a fifty-seven-thousand-dollar lamp.

  If she could sell it, they wouldn’t have to worry about finances for a long time. It would alleviate so much of the pressure they were facing—and she hadn’t even appraised the pocket watch yet.

  Parker yanked his hand away when they were out of earshot. “Where did you get that thing?”

  “Yesterday at the flea market.”

  “You went to Trading Post again?” he asked in surprise.

  “No.” Melicent hesitated. “A swap meet in Anaheim.”

  “You went to Anaheim without telling me?”

  A twinge of regret filled her. Ever since their mother passed away, Parker worried about everything. They were more than ten years apart in age—he was only sixteen—and right now he was glaring at her like a parent.

  “How much did you pay for that thing?”

  “A hundred dollars.” Melicent grinned, still in disbelief that she might make a $56,900 profit. A hundred dollars had been a lot of money for her to spend.

  She’d gotten the cash last month after finding an antique pen for twenty dollars and selling it for eight hundred on eBay. It’s what had given her the idea to go hunting for more antiques.

  “I still have to get one more thing appraised,” she said, handing Parker the lamp. Antiques Roadshow was visiting L.A. for the weekend, and today was her one chance.

  “We have to stand in line again? Seriously?” He motioned to the swelling crowd of senior citizens holding their treasures. “Look at all this crap.” He gave a nod to the man in front of them holding a bizarre porcelain giraffe.

  “Would you watch your language?” Although Melicent couldn’t help but agree. The porcelain giraffe was hideous. “I’m sharing the money with you. Can you at least try and act like you’re having fun?”

  His eyes lit up. “For real?”

  “Toward your college tuition, yes.” She watched his shoulders droop in disappointment. College was still two years away, but Melicent was already worried about how they could afford it. “Plus the truck you were eyeing.”

  “Get. Out.” His mouth dropped open. The truck he wanted was a fifteen-year-old Dodge Dakota Sport and cost three thousand dollars. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it could get him around town and hold his surfboard.

  “And the phone,” Melicent added wryly. This morning she’d been worried about paying their electricity bill, and here she was agreeing to a car and a cell phone. She let out a laugh. She hadn’t felt this good in a long time.

  Parker hugged her. “Thank you. Thanks, Mel.” He choked up.

  Melicent could feel the knot in her throat and squeezed him back. She should have done this sooner, used her talent. Maybe if she had, she could have helped her mother. Fifty-seven thousand dollars could have gotten her better medical care—maybe they could’ve enrolled her in some kind of experimental drug study. Maybe she would have lived.

  Melicent stopped, pushing that dark thought aside, but still it lingered. The truth was she’d always avoided touching old things, fearful of the vivid ideas and images that came to her when she did. She would drop the object like it burned her and cross her arms protectively. It was something she’d been doing all her life—until her mother, Sadie, got sick last year.

  The cancer had been aggressive and, in the end, untreatable. After her mother died, Melicent found herself in her mother’s house surrounded by all her things, and Melicent wanted to touch everything … her mother’s clothes, her pillow, her jewelry, all the things Sadie collected … the candles, the seashells, the wind chimes.

  When Melicent held the objects in her hands, images of her mother’s life appeared in her mind like a poignant daydream. Her beautiful mother, young and vivacious, the quintessential California surfer girl from Venice Beach, with long blond hair and blue-green eyes, a Beach Boys It-girl who dreamed of becoming a famous actress one day. Like a story unfolding, Melicent could see her mother’s memories and how Sadie almost did achieve her dream. She’d landed the movie role of a lifetime but then gotten pregnant with Melicent and life got in the way—first with Melicent and then with Parker, eleven years apart, both accidental pregnancies with different fathers. No one would be able to tell by looking at them that Parker was Melicent’s half brother. Sadie had married Melicent’s father young and divorced him two years later. Parker’s father had been MIA from the start, the result of a six-month string of dates that had led nowhere. Sadie had never talked about all her almost-never-was moments, the letdowns and the heartaches. And Melicent’s heart broke for her mother when she discovered each one. But when Melicent found the old box of baby clothes in the closet, she’d held the blankets and the onesies and sensed how much her mother had loved them. Sadie wouldn’t have changed a thing.

  Melicent’s journey with her mother’s possessions had woken up the ability burrowed deep inside of her. Suddenly the odd things that happened to her growing up made sense. As a child, she’d always tried to ignore the sensations when she touched something and saw an image in her mind. She’d explain it away and suppress the encounter.

  Now she no longer could. Her ability was growing stronger every day the more she acknowledged it. She found out there was an official name for being able to sense the past in an object through touch: psychometry.

  The final turning point had come last month when she had gone rummaging at Melrose Trading Post on her one Saturday off from work. She’d picked up an old pen, a Conklin Nozac fountain pen. Before she could put it back down, she knew that the pen had belonged to the author Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  In her mind’s eye, Burroughs was writing with the pen and Melicent glimpsed moments of his life, like reading a biography about someone while watching him work. Burroughs had been everything from a solider to a ranch hand to a pencil-sharpener salesman before he became one of America’s most prolific writers. The pen had been his favorite, the one he wrote Tarzan of the Apes with.

  Melicent grew up knowing the story of Tarzan, just like every kid, but she had never read anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, didn’t even know his name, and yet now she knew details about the man’s life.<
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  She turned the pen over to find his initials engraved on the side: ERB. His first wife, Emma, whom he had three children with, had given him the pen as a gift.

  Melicent bought the pen for twenty dollars and went home, afraid to touch it again. It was one thing to see moments from her mother’s life, but this man was a stranger.

  The next evening, she sat at her desk staring at the pile of bills and was struck by the idea of selling the pen. She logged in to her mother’s eBay account, relieved to find it was still active. Her mother had often taken to selling odds and ends around the house on eBay to help bring in extra money. Now more than ever, the urge gripped Melicent to try too. Her mother’s funeral and remaining hospital bills had wiped out their savings. If Melicent didn’t do something soon, she would have to sell the house. The three-bedroom English-style cottage in Venice Beach had been in their family for three generations and was their only asset. It sat on a corner lot and was ringed by giant trees as though it were in a grove. Melicent had spent her childhood climbing those trees. She’d tried to show Parker her secret perches when he was old enough to climb, but Parker was terrified of heights. Melicent hoped one day, if she ever had kids, they could climb her trees too. But that day might never come. Her mother had mortgaged the equity in the house to the point when Melicent could barely make the house payment.

  Trying to sell the pen on eBay was worth a shot. So she took a picture of it and posted the auction details:

  A Rare Find! The pen that wrote Tarzan of the Apes! Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Fountain Pen, engraved with his initials.

  She didn’t know how she could prove the claim to be true, but she decided not to worry about that detail. After mulling over the price, she started the bid at fifty dollars.

  By the end of the week, the bidding had climbed to $500 and sold for $825 to a pen collector in Maine.

  Melicent carefully wrapped Burroughs’s pen in a gift box and included a note about the historical details she knew. Then she mailed it off.

  That night she took Parker out for a steak dinner in Santa Monica and told him about selling the pen. She left out the part about how she knew whose pen it was, and Parker didn’t seem to care. He was more interested in his top sirloin.

  As Melicent watched her brother eat the best meal they’d had in ages, her heart hurt, and she promised herself she would do everything she could to give him a better life.

  She took part of the pen money and waited for her next Saturday off from work to go treasure hunting. Now when she picked up an antique, she had a very good reason to not put it down.

  * * *

  Parker watched Melicent pull a piece of wrapped silk from her purse. “What’s the other one?” he asked, invested in their field trip if it meant getting a car and a phone.

  “An antique pocket watch.” Melicent tried to ignore the wave of nerves hitting her stomach while she waited in a different line. She would have to tell the truth about how she’d found this one. There might be some kind of legal questions or, at the very least, intense scrutiny, which is why she’d had the vendor at the swap meet write on the sales receipt what kind of watch he thought it was.

  She hadn’t told the man he was wrong.

  “Did you get that in Anaheim too?”

  “No.” Melicent shook her head. “Mission Viejo.”

  “You went to Mission Viejo yesterday too?” Parker shook his head in disbelief. “Your car is barely running!”

  Her old Nissan Sentra had two hundred thousand miles on it and was on its last legs. She kept a bottle of brake fluid in her glove compartment for the leak she couldn’t afford to fix. “I went to Anaheim and Mission Viejo, that’s all.” That was all she could fit in one day.

  Depending on how much this watch was worth, she may have more places to go—antiques to find and money to make. She was on a mission now.

  The line moved forward.

  Melicent expelled a deep breath. She was next.

  The appraiser spotted her and gave her a wide smile. The man was somewhere in his forties, two decades younger than the last appraiser, and clearly appreciative of the lovely young woman coming toward him. Melicent was wearing faded jeans and a gypsy-style embroidered blouse, and her long hair was knotted into an artful bun and secured by sandalwood chopsticks. The beaded choker around her neck accentuated the eclectic look.

  “Hello! Please step forward.” The appraiser shook her hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Melicent Tilpin.” Melicent warily eyed the camera crew parked behind him and tried not to panic. How had she ended up in the line with the camera crew?

  “Welcome, Melicent,” he said. “Is this your brother?”

  She nodded. Parker and she shared the same sun-kissed gold hair and hazel eyes, both inherited from their mother. The only difference between the siblings, aside from the age gap, was that Parker towered several inches above her, and she was five nine. He was the one who looked like a giraffe, awkward and not sure of himself.

  “So what have you brought us today?”

  Melicent held out the pocket watch.

  “Well now—” The appraiser suddenly stopped talking as he took it. “Good heavens.”

  Parker shot his sister a questioning glance.

  The man conducted his intense appraisal without a word. When he opened up the case to look at the watch’s face, Melicent’s pulse sped and she tried to remain calm.

  The man glanced at her over the rim of his examining glasses. “Where on earth did you get this?”

  3. THE VIDEO

  EL PASO, TEXAS

  “WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY IT?” the old man asked Roan. He had finished his phone call and turned back around to see Roan holding the bird box.

  Roan set the box down and quickly folded his fingers into a Kashyapa mudra. His hands resembled two tortoises returning to their shells. The finger lock helped him return to the present.

  “I could take five percent off,” the old man offered.

  Roan took a step back from the counter and expelled a short breath. He hesitated, unsure if he could speak yet, and focused all his intention on finding his voice. He had been peering into the past all his life, for as long as he could remember, and over time had developed methods for returning swiftly. It had taken him years to master.

  “I’m afraid I can’t afford it,” Roan answered, his voice hoarse.

  “Ten percent?”

  “Thank you, but I still couldn’t afford it.” Roan nodded to the box. “The last singing bird box of this quality sold for a hundred eighty-two thousand dollars in 2007.”

  The old man’s eyes went round and the pen fell out of his hand.

  “This one”—Roan motioned—“is worth even more. I’m fairly certain there’s an engraving on the inside indicating it was a gift.”

  The man looked down at the box in astonishment.

  “You’ll want to get it into the proper hands and have it auctioned,” Roan said as he put back on his gloves. “Christie’s in New York would probably start the bidding at two hundred thousand.”

  “Two hundred thousand? Dollars?” The shopkeeper swallowed and then swallowed again.

  “Regina Strinasacchi. Remember that name.” Roan took the pen on the counter and wrote Regina Strinasacchi on the blank sales receipt tablet sitting beside the register.

  “Why? Who was she?” the shopkeeper asked in a high voice, looking ready to faint.

  “Joseph II gave this music box to her in 1784, in Vienna. She was also the violinist Mozart composed a sonata for—Sonata no. 32 in B-flat Major.” He wrote that down too. “There might be a record.” He tore off the paper and offered it like a doctor holding out a prescription.

  The old man took the receipt and looked at Roan with wonder, knowing he had been given the gift of a lifetime.

  Before he could ask Roan more questions—or thank him—Roan left.

  It took Roan a good hour, almost the whole drive to Hueco Tanks, for him to disconnect from the stream of Regina
Strinasacchi’s memories coursing through him. The pinwheel of sights, smells, and sounds from eighteenth-century Vienna was still circling him, from the pageantry of the clothes seen on a simple walk down the street to the animated talk and scent of spiced coffee spilling out from the sidewalk cafés to the music that lingered in the city’s air.

  Regina had kept the music box for the rest of her life until her death at seventy-five. Her trip to Vienna and playing with Mozart was a treasured memory, and she took out the bird box during her most sentimental moments of recollection. Her imprint within the object was strong and had offered Roan a clear glimpse of her life.

  The year after Regina left Vienna, she took Mozart’s advice and married a fellow musician, Johann Conrad Schlick, a talented cellist and the director of an orchestra in Gotha. Her music continued to play a large part in her life, and even after having two children, she performed recitals and composed. In the end she achieved her dream.

  * * *

  By the time Roan reached Hueco Tanks State Park, he was able to push the bird box and its trove of memories into the back of his mind. He left his car at the campground and hiked into the park to the place he and Stuart had agreed to meet. He waited for several hours, but Stuart didn’t show.

  Roan called him twice.

  The third time he left a voicemail. “I’m here. Let me know if you aren’t coming.” He hung up and stared at the fantastical rock formations on North Mountain and tried to ease his worry.

  Stuart was from London, and they usually rendezvoused to climb two or three times a year. Their last trip had been to Hatun Machay in Peru, and the two men weren’t scheduled to meet until next month. But Stuart had called this week and left a message saying that he needed to see Roan right away. The voicemail had been cryptic and strange, and he’d been unreachable ever since. Stuart said he wanted to meet Roan at the spot they first climbed together.